To pass the time, I open up the Internet browser on my machine and do a search for the word Troposphere. I don’t expect anything to come up, but then I find out that it does exist. It’s a part of Earth’s atmosphere: the place where most weather takes place. Could Lumas have missed that? I assumed the word was made up. I do the search on the OED instead, and find that the earliest use of the word was in 1914. So Lumas invented it first, but no one took any notice. But then why would they? It’s only a novel, after all. After I’ve read the whole entry I do a search for The End of Mr. Y, just to see if there’s any information online that I haven’t seen before.
When you search for The End of Mr. Y on the Internet, you usually get three links. One is an old abstract of the paper Burlem gave at the Greenwich conference. Another is a thread from a discussion board on a rare-books site, where someone has left a request for the book and no one has replied. The third is a little more mysterious. It’s basically a fan site, with a black background and some Gothic flourishes, and as far as I know it used to have quite a lot of information on the book. There was a page on the curse, and another page speculating about why there are almost no copies left in the world. The author of the website seemed to have concocted a conspiracy theory that the US government had tracked down and destroyed all the known copies, including the one in the German bank vault (which, according to this guy, had once belonged to Hitler). He didn’t say why this would be so, but hinted at some powerful secret that no one knew. I think the real story is simply that there were not very many copies of the book printed in the first place, and when a book has over a hundred years to fall into obscurity, it’s pretty easy for it to simply disappear. Anyway, about six months ago, or maybe a bit more, the website closed down. I check it today and it’s the same as it was last time I looked at it. There’s no error message or anything, but the front page simply says ‘They shut me up and I went away.’
Today I am intrigued to see that there’s a fourth link to a page containing a reference to The End of Mr. Y. It’s a blog called ‘Some Days of My Life’, and when I click on the link I am taken to a pink and white screen with various journal entries. I scan up and down, but can’t see the reference. I use Find instead and then I see it. It’s the entry for last Friday.
Had to work in the bookshop again today (thanks alot, Sam) despite humungous hangover. Spent the day dusting books which was oddly therapeutic. Had no customers apart from this student who came in and paid fifty quid for a book called ‘The End of Mr. Y’, which I’ve never heard of but must be pretty rare. Maybe I’ll go into the second-hand book business. How about it, Sam? We could be partners and give up crappy college and make fortunes out of people who are prepared to pay £££ for old books. How hard can it be?
There’s a knock at the door and I immediately close down the browser.
It’s the technician. ‘Ariel Manto?’ he says, looking at a piece of paper.
‘Yes,’ I say.
‘Come to set a new password,’ he says.
‘Oh, yes. Great,’ I say. ‘It’s this machine over here.’
I try to absorb myself in something else while he tinkers around with the system, thinking that the less fuss I make about it, the less suspicious the whole thing will seem. So I don’t try to explain or justify why I need the new password on the machine; I just let him get on with his job while I make a start typing up my notes on Mr. Y. Ideally, I’d like to write a whole chapter on The End of Mr. Y for my thesis. It would be easy enough to write, considering my obsession with the book, but it would also make a great article or conference paper on its own. The only problem is that I’m not sure in what way I could argue that it is a thought experiment.
Thought experiments or, in German, gedankenexperiments, are experiments that, for whatever reason, cannot be physically carried out, but must instead be conducted internally, via logic and reasoning, in the mind. There have been ethical and philosophical thought experiments for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, but it was when people began using these experiments in a scientific context that they were first given the title ‘thought experiment’, a literal translation of gedankenexperiment, although Lumas had always referred to them as ‘experiments of the mind’. The luminiferous ether is the result of a thought experiment of sorts, which postulated that, if light is a wave, then it has to be a wave in something. You can’t have a wave in water with no water – so where was light’s ‘fluid’? So people invented the luminiferous ether as an answer, only to discard it again when the Michelson–Morley experiment proved that, sadly, there was no ether.
Edgar Allan Poe used the principles of the thought experiment to solve the Olbers Paradox, and, some people believe, to more or less invent Big Bang theory a good hundred years before anyone else. His ‘prose poem’ ‘Eureka’ sets out his various scientific and cosmological thoughts, but Poe was no experimental scientist, and so these theories came in the form of thought experiments, or, perhaps, something close to the way he described infinity, as the ‘thought of a thought’. His Olbers’s Paradox solution is one of the most elegant thought experiments in history. In 1823, Wilhelm Olbers wondered why we see stars the way we do in the night sky. At the time, most people believed the universe to be infinite and eternal. So if the sky was infinite, surely it would contain an infinite number of stars? And if there were an infinite number of stars, then our night sky should be white, not black. Olbers thought it was all down to dust clouds, and wrote, ‘How fortunate that the Earth does not receive starlight from every point of the celestial vault!’ Edgar Allan Poe thought this through and decided that a simpler and more plausible solution for the ‘voids which our telescopes find in innumerable directions’ was that some of the stars were simply so far away that the light hadn’t had time to reach us yet.
Perhaps the most famous thought experiment in history is when Einstein wondered what would happen if he could catch up with a beam of light. Einstein worked out that if he could travel at the speed of light then, logically, he would see the beam of light as if it were motionless, just as if you are in a train going at the same speed as another train moving alongside you, you see the people inside it as if they are not moving. So, what would light look like if it seemed to be at rest? Would it look like a frozen yellow wave? A paint spatter of particles? And what if you could look at yourself in the mirror while travelling at the speed of light? You’d seem invisible. Maybe you’d even be invisible. Einstein realised that there could be no such thing as an electromagnetic field that stood still. Maxwell’s equations, which seemed to imply that you could, in theory, catch up with a beam of light, also showed that light was not something that could be stationary. So one of those points had to be wrong. It would be interesting if it was the other one, and you could catch up to light and see it frozen, but, for various reasons that I need more physics lectures to understand, it isn’t. Einstein’s theory of special relativity states that, no matter how fast you go, light is always travelling relative to you at c, the speed of light. It doesn’t matter if you’re travelling at one mile an hour or a thousand miles an hour. The light you see around you is always going faster than you, and it’s always going at c. If you were travelling at half the speed of light, it wouldn’t seem to you that light going in your direction was therefore travelling half as fast. It would still appear to be going at the speed of light, c, relative to you.
‘Let us suppose our old friend the railway carriage to be travelling along the rails with a constant velocity, v,’ says Einstein in his book, Relativity. He then goes on to explain that if you walked along the carriage in the direction of travel, you’d be going not at the speed of the train, nor at the speed you were walking, but at the sum of the two. If the train was going at one hundred miles an hour, and you were going at one mile an hour, you’d actually be moving forwards at a velocity of one hundred and one miles per hour, relative to the embankment you were passing. Similarly, if I were to drive on the motorway alongside the railway line at, say, eighty-five miles per hour, and this train passed me, it would appear to me to be going at