John Evelyn walks through London's ruins, seeing bodies parched by flames and a city reduced to a dismal desert.
The story is waiting to be reborn. Before the war and another post-fire story return, the host spends time with Christopher Wren's mind, habits, and practical brilliance. Wren is no cardboard genius. By 1657 he has the chair of astronomy at Gresham College, apparently with help from Oliver Cromwell. Pascal then arrives with a mathematical challenge. Wren answers it brilliantly, but without the numerical workings Pascal wants, so the prizes stay out of reach. The host clearly enjoys the snag. It lets him bring up maths O level, then immediately deny any comparison with Sir Chris. Wren comes across as drawn to elegance. Kerry Downs presents him as bored by heaps of data and more interested in the clean answer than the worked proof. Once Wren had the truth, the proof could feel almost beside the point. Gresham matters too. In his inaugural lecture, Wren praises Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and William Gilbert instead of leaning on Francis Bacon. Gilbert gets the surprise crown as father of the new philosophy. The host admits he had not heard of him, then explains Gilbert's work on magnetism and scientific method. Bacon still sits nearby as a Royal Society guiding light. Wren likes experiment, but mathematics and geometry still leave room for intuition. By 1666, he is only thirty-three, yet his reputation is big enough for the Great Fire story to start bending his way. He has moved toward architecture, made the Sheldonian Theatre, advised on St Paul's, and impressed contemporaries. The ending owns the digression. War waits, Robert Hook, glassmaking, and windows are dangled for next time, and Horace Walpole's serendipity gives the detour a tidy wink.
