Making history

either I didn't love Jane as I should or this was another blown theory. The longings of a creative spirit then? Maybe my soul craved expression in Art? But: can't draw, can't write, can't sing, can't play. Great. Where does that leave me? A kind of Salieri deal perhaps. Cursed with enough of divine fire to recognise it in others, but not enough to create anything myself. Aw, rats ...

So perhaps it was nothing more than the fear of the arrival of a transitional phase in my life. This is when

the void yawns in front of you. When you stand at brinks, on thresholds. The void is the doorway you've always wanted to pass through, but as you near it, you can't help looking back and wondering if you dare.

Self-consciousness, that's what it is. Always my abiding vice. I keep seeing myself. There I am. That's me, walking along the street, what do other people see? That's me, about to be Doctor Young. That's me, with a girl on my arm. That's me, wearing that cap - dork or dude? There I go, books under my arm, cutting the dash of the hip historian, academic cool on two bare legs, what a guy! So it's a Prufrock syndrome. Do I dare to eat a peach? Are they laughing up their sleeves? Or not. Me thinking they're laughing up their sleeves. Me watching myself watching others watch me. How do you lose that? What's the trick? Blushing is the outward sign. Maybe I could train myself not to blush on the outside and the self-consciousness on the inside would go too. Naah ...

Things of and pertaining to a crisis, the dictionary says, are critical. So my life is at a critical stage. A pivot, we have. The hinge of the door to my future is my thesis. So deliberately but unconsciously I don't oil the hinge, I let it groan loudly just in case I want to scamper back and choose another door. Now I have been told to go back and oil the hinge. The door will swing soundlessly open and everything will be fine and smooth. Is that what I want?

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At length, Jamie and Double Eddie finish their wine, collect their things and get up to leave, waving goodbye and treading with overcareful mimsy steps back up the bank, like Edwardian children picking their way over sea-side rock-pools. A tear falls from the end of my chin and joins the river water on its journey to the ocean. Making Waves

A window on the world

Physics is way hip. If you see a couple of literature students in conversation these days, chances are they'll be talking about Schrodinger's Kitten or Chaos and Catastrophe. Twenty-five years ago the coolest cats on campus were E M Forster and F R Leavis; next came the Structuralists, Stephen Heath and his liggers and groupies on the Difference and Deconstruction tour; now American tourists hang around in Niels Bohr T-shirts in the hope of touching the tyres on Stephen Hawking's wheelchair and having the secrets of the universe zapped into them.

The Alpha and Omega of science is numbers. Mean to say, a man don't get nowhere without them.

The above two sentences, for instance, they don't work with numbers. The Alpha and Omega of science are numbers, I'd have to say, and a man doesn't get anywhere without them.

The part of my brain that operates numbers is only slightly larger than the area that concerns itself with the politics of New Zealand or the outcome of the PGA Masters tournament. I have schoolboy French and I have schoolboy arithmetic. Just enough to get by in shops and restaurants. If I pay for a thirty pence newspaper with a one pound coin I am smart enough to expect seventy pence back. If I bet five pounds on a three-to-one Derby winner I will be pissed off not to finish fifteen quid richer. Price the horse at seven-to-two however, and sweat will begin to break out on my brow. Numbers suck.

Dutifully, like most people of my generation, I have read, or tried to read, popularising histories of Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Unified Field Theories, the T.O.E.

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and all the rest of it. It is probably true to say that I have had gently explained to me in print and in person what an electron is more than twenty times, yet to this day I can't quite remember whether it's a minus thing or a plus thing. I've a feeling it's a minus thing, because a proton sounds positive (though not as positive as a positron, whatever one of those little mothers may be) but what this negativity betokens I have less than no idea. All the little particles that make up an atom have to add up and bind together in some way, I'm pretty sure of that. But how a particle can have a minus quality or a negative charge beats the hell out of me. Maybe it only has a negative charge to balance the books of the atom.

I have read books specifically designed, so far as I can tell, to enable non-scientist pseudo-intellectuals like myself to bullshit at dinner parties about particle accelerators, the Strong Force and charmed bosons, written in a clear manner with big diagrams, small words and the minimum of algebra, yet I have been utterly unable, after taking my head out of the pages, to retain a single useful fact, let alone an idea of the principles involved. Tell me once however, in a low voice on a noisy afternoon, that the Battle of Bannockburn was

fought in the year 1314 and I will remember it to my dying day. I mean, what is going on here? 1314 is a number too, isn't it?

I remember reading once about the row that went on between Robert Hooke and Isaac Newton. Hooke thought that Newton had stolen from him the idea that bodies attract each other with a force that varies inversely as the square of their distance. Never forgave him for it. Now, I distinctly recall learning this phrase at school, thinking it would look good in an essay on the seventeenth century (historians like to nod at scientists in passing, Darwin, Newton, those guys, a few remarks about 'mechanistic universes' and 'the upsetting of Victorian certainties' are as safe in a history essay as that old standby 'the newly emergent middle classes'. As everyone knows, there is no

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period in history in which you can't write successfully of a newly emergent, newly confident middle class, just as there is no period in history after the sixteenth century in which you can't write about 'the sweeping away of the old certainties'). So, I learn the Hooke-Newton sentence happily and write it down in my notes. As I write I look at each word. They are so simple. 'Bodies attract each other

...' no problems there. Easy to remember, especially for a schoolboy who, let's face it, is attracted by bodies every waking and sleeping moment of his life. We know that 'bodies' to a scientist usually mean 'objects in space'. 'Bodies attract each other with a force that varies ...' That's more or less okay too, most things vary after all. So the moon is attracted by the sun, but maybe not as much, or maybe more, than it is attracted by the earth. I can handle that. 'Bodies attract each other with a force

that varies inversely ...' Hello. 'Inversely', eh? Problems ahead. Down periscope. Sound the klaxon. 'A force that varies inversely as the square of their distance.' Dive, dive, dive! I mean, okay, I know what a square is. Four is the square of two. Sixteen of four and so on. I just about mastered that. But inversely1? Come on, you have to admit that this is more than a bit of a bugper. What is the inverse of a force? If it comes to that, what is the inverse of a number? Is the inverse of a square the same as saying a square root? Is the inverse of the square of four, minus four? Or is it perhaps two? Or a quarter? Or minus sixteen? You see the problem. Well, not if you're a scientist you don't. All you see is that Michael Young is as thick as a plank.

Bodies attract each other with a force that varies inversely as the square of their distance ... I am fairly certain that I could look at that sentence from now until the crack of doom and never get any further with it. A good populariser, someone as thick as a Planck if you like, might be able to summon me up a good analogy along the lines of 'when you throw a stone into a bucket of water the ripples spread outwards, yes?' Or, 'picture the

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universe as a doughnut, well now ...' and while he was talking, if he was good with words and images, I might just get a handle on the principle he was describing. But it wouldn't help me when I came upon a new phrase. 'Bodies are sometimes attracted with a constant force defined as the reciprocal root of their mass' or whatever. He would then have to begin the whole weary work again with a new model or a new analogy. It's like grabbing a live salmon, the harder I try

to get a grip on it, the further it slips from my grasp. Numbers suck.

Only the anecdotal lingers with me. Einstein liked icecreams, sail-boats and violins. A musician once said to him when they were playing a duet together, 'For God's sake, Albert, can't you count?' Einstein himself said things about God not playing dice with the universe. He said that he didn't know what weapons World War III would be fought with, but that he knew exactly what weapons would be used in World War IV: sticks and stones. Heisenberg was attacked by an SS newspaper for being 'a white Jew' and 'the spirit of Einstein's spirit' and was only saved on account of his mother knowing Hirnrnler's mother. Under the dryer in Berlin one afternoon she said, 'you tell your Heinrich to lay off my Werner,' and Mrs Himmler said, 'but Heinrich thinks the Uncertainty Principle is a Jewish lie.' 'Oh, that's just Werner,' said Mrs Heisenberg. 'He doesn't mean it. Just showing off as usual, trying to get attention.' What else do I know about physics? Oh yes, Max Planck, the Father of Quantum Mechanics, was also the Father of Erwin Planck, who was one of those executed by the Gestapo in 1944 after the failed July bomb plot. Erwin, of course, was also Rommel's Christian name, and Rommel perished after the bomb plot too. Schrodinger's cat was Siamese. The word quark comes from Finnegans Wake. One of the Bohrs once said that if you weren't shocked by quantum mechanics then you hadn't understood it properly. When Crick and Watson built their model of DNA in the shape of

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a pasta twist, they were helped by a woman whom many believe should have shared their Nobel Prize. Nobel, come to that, invented dynamite and Friedrich Flick, a Nazi supporter who made millions out of slave labour in World War II, owned the company Dynamit Nobel. Flick left a billion pounds to his playboy son in 1972, with neither an apology nor a cent for the survivors of his slave factories. Flick's grandson tried to found a chair of 'European Understanding' at Oxford University, but withdrew it when moral philosophers there called his money 'tainted'. See? Everything I know about physics comes down to history. No, let's be honest. Everything I know about physics comes down to gossip.

'Newton's had the most terrible row with Leibniz.' 'No!'

'True as I'm standing here.'

'Says he stole his fluxational method.' 'Get out of here!'

'Mm. Says he can call it calculus or whatever he chooses, but it's just the fluxational method dressed up in a fancy wig and Isaac thought of it first.'

'What is the fluxational method, exactly? Or calculus, come to that?'

'Who cares? The point is they're simply not talking to each other.'

'Fancy!'

'I know ... what's more Wolfgang Pauli and Albert Einstein have had a spat too.'

'What about?'

'Something to do with neutrinos, I hear. Albert doesn't believe in them. Wolfgang's furious.'

'Neutrinos?'

'Some sort of antacid for indigestion, I believe. I

expect now that he's living in America, Albert prefers Rolaids.'

'Sakes!'

And so on ...

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Science, say scientists, is real history. The specific mixing, steaming and boiling on the stove of the cosmos that gave rise to planet Earth x billion years ago is real history; what happened in the hypothalamus and cortex of homo sapiens x million years ago to give us consciousness is real history. So the technopriests would have you believe. Bastards. Numbers suck. They don't exist. There's no such thing as Four. Even worse, there's especially no such thing as Minus Four. I mean, no wonder the world fell apart after Gresham and Descartes. Allowing minus numbers to stalk the globe. A thousand years in which usury was rightly banned and then - Bam! - debit, credit, minus numbers and the positing of 'minus one hundred tons of coffee'. Negative equity. From bonds to bondage, debt to debtor's prison, savings to slavery. Numbers suck.

This rush of bitter thoughts came about as a result of Jane and me hurling ourselves into another row. I had turned up at Newnham looking forward to a warm hug after the shock of the Fraser-Stuart debacle.

'Well for goodness sake,' said Jane. 'What did you expect? You didn't really mean to include all that sentimental puke did you? In an academic thesis?'

Hurt, I explained that I had looked on them as prose poems.

'That's right, Pup. Prose poems. I must try something similar in my next paper. "He bucked and writhed on top of her, his mind racing with the freedom of the

act. Pure! Sterile! Free to love without consequence! Suddenly he was master of all time and space! It was as if..."'

'I got some skinless chicken breasts from Sains-bury's,' I interrupted coldly. 'I'll go through and cube them.'

I sealed the flesh in hot olive oil in a marked manner while she opened a smug bottle of wine in a fashion more irritating than language could ever describe. In itself what we historians like to call a casus belli.

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'It's easy for scientists. You just do the sums. Yes no, right wrong, black white.'

'Horse shit, dear.'

'You told me yourself. All the answers are sealed up in little packets all over the universe. All you have to do is open them. Here's the gene that gives some people music, here's one that makes you a saint. There's a particle that tells you how heavy the universe is, there's another one that explains how it all began.'

'Yes, that's exactly what I said. It's all so simple. If only we soulless nerds were as intelligent as you sensitive historians we would have had it all sorted out centuries ag°\ ,

'I'm not saying that!' I banged the pan down angrily. 'That's not what I meant and you know it. You deliberately have to misunderstand me, don't you?'

I'm going to watch television. Your wine's on the table.' As I mixed the Thai green curry paste and rinsed the rice, the arguments rose, tossed and seethed inside me. The arrogance, I said to myself, the arrogance of these people. I banged down wooden spoons and crashed the wok lid shut in time to each winning point that I played in my head. It's as if scientists exert every effort of will they possess deliberately to find the least significant problems in the world and explain them. Art matters. Happiness matters. Love matters. Good matters. Evil matters. Slam the fridge door. They are the only things that matter and they are of course precisely the things that science goes out of its way to ignore. Another five minutes to soak up the water and stock, I suppose. You people treat art as if it's a disease - fuck, that's hot - or an evolutionary mechanism, pleasure as if it's a - shit, I've broken it - we never hear you say, 'ooh, we've discovered that those electrons are evil and these protons are good,' do we? Everything's morally neutral in your universe, yet a child of two can tell you nothing is morally neutral. Bastards. Suckmothers. Smug, smuggy, smuggery smugger s. 'Ready!'

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'In a sec!'

I wrapped the warm bread in paper napkins and poured myself another glass. And the contempt, the breathtaking, arrogant contempt for those who wade about in the marshy bog of actual, mucky human motives and desires. Because our method is 'unscientific' - well of course our method is unscientific, darling. Real problems aren't number-shaped, they're people-shaped.

'Mm-im! Smells good.'

'I know what you think,' I say, assuming that all the time that she has been sat in front of the television, she too has been rehearsing arguments. 'You think science can only be understood by scientists. Anyone who hasn't been through the initiation ceremony is automatically disqualified from talking about it. Whereas any scientist can rabbit on about Napoleon or Shakespeare with as much authority as anyone else.'

'Haa! Hot!' Jane gives herself time to think about this by going to the sink and pouring herself a cup of water.

'All I'm saying is,' I press home my advantage, 'we live for seventy or eighty years on this planet. Which is more important, that we understand the physical principles behind the atomic bomb, or that we look at human motive so as to stop it from being used?'

'Why not have a crack at both?'

'Yes. Sure. Yeah. In an ideal world, absolutely. But let's face it, you know. To understand something as complex as how a nuclear bomb works involves dedication to a particular discipline that takes time and commitment

'I could explain it to you in less than four minutes. I should be fascinated to hear anyone explain to me the human motives behind war and destruction in so short a time. Pass the bottle over, will you?'

'Ah! Exactly. Exactly1.' I stab the table with a finger. 'The simplicity of science is like a religion. It seems to give you the answers, but

'Pup, you just said that to understand something as complex as a nuclear bomb takes time and commitment.'

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'No I didn't.'

'Oh well, I must be hearing things then. Sorry.'

'Look!' I'm getting fevered now. 'I'm not saying there's anything wrong with science ...'

'Phew!'

'... it's just that it never looks at the things that really matter.'

'It looks at the things that really matter to science, though. I mean, that's why we have different subjects surely?' 'Yeah, but other subjects aren't blindly worshipped as if they have to contain the whole truth.'

'And science is?' 'You know it is!'

'Not by me it isn't. And it doesn't seem to be blindly worshipped by you either.' She starts to mop up the curry with her nan. 'But tell you what, Pup. There are thousands of scientists here in Cambridge. You introduce me to all those who blindly worship science because it contains the whole truth and I'll have them drummed out of the university for insanity and incompetence. How's that?' 'Well obviously you don't admit it! You pretend to be all humble and doubting and awe-struck and "touching the face of God" and all that shit, but let's face it, I mean come on!'

'Ah! Well put. Is there any more of this?'

'On the cooker. What I'm saying, what I'm saying is ...

science doesn't know everything.'

'No. That's certainly true. That doesn't mean that it knows nothing, does it though? You going to have any more?' 'Thanks.'

'I mean, Puppy, the fact that science can't explain why Mozart could do what he did, that doesn't disqualify us from speculating on the composition of liver cells does it? Or does it?'

'It is absolutely impossible to talk to you. You know that, don't you?'

'No, I didn't. I'm very sorry. I don't mean it to be.'

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