Though he passed his Senior Cambridge Examination with honours at the age of fifteen, he was too young to join any college abroad. So, he enrolled in Elphinstone College. He then attended the Royal Institute of Science in 1927, where he witnessed a public lecture by Arthur Compton, who would win the Nobel Prize in physics the next year for his 1923 discovery of the Compton effect. Bhabha later said that he first heard of cosmic rays, the subject of his future research, at this lecture.