| Botnst |
07-26-2005 09:56 PM |
Cat got your moment?
Is the particle there?
Hilary Mantel
A Game with Sharpened Knives by Neil Belton [*Buy from the London Review Bookshop*] · Weidenfeld, 328 pp, £12.99
There is whiskey but no cocoa, Guinness but no tea; or only a sort of bitter dust which, when brewed, does nothing to pep up the mornings. Fog enshrouds bicycles in Merrion Square, a squally rain drives along the promenade at Clontarf; by night, bombs drop ‘by mistake’ on Dublin. It is the time of the Emergency, as Ireland calls what others call World War Two. Neutrality is precarious. England casts an envious eye on Irish ports. Civil servants – scowling old IRA men, who once counted rifles and now count paperclips – draw up plans for when the Germans walk in and become the de facto power. Who is dropping the bombs? Is it the Germans, or is it the English, aiming to discredit the Germans? Half-hidden in the murk engendered by censorship, turf smoke and the fog which is the habitual climate of the novel, mysterious parcels of rumour are passed from hand to hand, faint carbon copies of government memos seep information into the air, armed men loom out of a sea mist, blackmarketeers scurry and wheedle, dissident journalists cry into their beer, smuggled condoms spring leaks. Erwin Schrödinger, the renowned physicist, rubs his sore eyes, sight deteriorating day by day, and contemplates the boggy hinterland of his private life, while the mathematical breakthrough he seeks swims further away from his tentative reach.
By the outbreak of war, Schrödinger had been a peripatetic scholar for much of his career. Offspring of a polymath father, a factory owner, he had an English grandparent, spoke both English and German at home. As a Gymnasium student in Vienna, he was devoted to mathematics, to poetry and to nature. It seems characteristic of his generation of scientists that they were not afraid to admit that an aesthetic impulse moved them, that they were chasing a glimpse, however fleeting, of some confirming, self-ratifying idea of beauty, an equation to transcend all equations: some sense of perfect rightness, a feeling of the universe clicking into place. We can clearly see the romantic impulse at work, but when it is expressed through mathematics, most of us are not qualified to see where the search is leading, or how it is sidetracked and thwarted. It is Neil Belton’s great achievement in this novel to create a convincing facsimile, in the imprecise and duplicitous words that are all we have for our use, of the inner world of a man who thinks in symbols and translates them into precise formulae. He has to re-create Schrödinger’s consciousness, as someone for whom macroscopic realities have been undermined, without baffling or misleading the reader; and because within that consciousness there are areas of shadow, the need for authorial sharpness is all the greater. It is a truism that science does not teach us how to live, and Schrödinger does not know how to live; he knows how to prevaricate, how to compromise, how to defer and how to conceal. This is testing ground for any maker of fictions; as Schrödinger himself said, ‘there is a difference between a shaky or out-of-focus photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog-banks.’
A brief chronology, inserted before the first chapter, might have been useful; it helps to have some names and dates to hand. Schrödinger received his doctorate in 1910, after completing his military service, but was called up again in the Great War, in which he served with distinction as an artillery officer. He fell in love with a young secretary called Anny Berthal, could not afford to marry, and after the war moved from one university to another, seeking more lucrative posts and a nurturing climate for his research. In 1921, a married man, he settled in Zurich for six years. These were years of miraculous discovery in his branch of science. In 1926 he published his wave equation, for which he would share the 1933 Nobel Prize with Paul Dirac.
What were the waves in question? They were waves of probability, as it would turn out. In 1927, Heisenberg formulated his Uncertainty Principle; and while the uncertainty – or indeterminacy – related to precise measurements at the quantum level, and not at all to spheres of human action or behaviour, both Einstein and Schrödinger would shrink away from the implications. In 1935, when Schrödinger propounded the famous thought experiment concerning the paradoxical dead and alive cat, it was an attempt not to reinforce the notion of indeterminacy but to challenge it by presenting an obvious absurdity. In this narrative, Belton keeps his cat safely in a box till he can find an occasion to offer it to us with seeming simplicity; though we will soon deduce that the character who presents it – and who licks his lips at the thought of the gas entering the captive animal’s lungs – is anything but simple. Schrödinger’s science is doomed to be misunderstood, miscast, misinterpreted by the characters in the story, but the author has dealt with him scrupulously. Since most of us cannot hope to understand quantum physics, we are susceptible to artists who use it as a source for slack analogy and easy extrapolation. Belton is not one of them; he is as fastidious, though not so succinct, as Michael Frayn in his play Copenhagen. Heisenberg said in his memoirs that ‘science is rooted in conversations.’ He seemed to open the door, in the friendliest fashion, for the novelist and the playwright. Schrödinger’s formulation was darker: ‘Science is a game – but a game with reality, a game with sharpened knives.’
(MORE)
|
