‘So,’ Burlem said, raising his voice over the music, ‘you work full-time at this magazine, then?’
‘No. I just write my column every month.’
‘Is that all you do?’
‘For the moment, yes.’
‘Can you live on that?’
‘Just about. The magazine’s doing pretty well. I can afford my rent and a few bags of lentils every month. And some books, too, of course.’
The magazine started as a small thing, edited by this woman I met at university. Now there’s a distribution deal and it’s given away in every big record shop in the country. It has proper advertising now, and a designer who doesn’t use glue to put the layouts together.
‘What did you do at university? Not science, I take it.’
‘No. English lit and philosophy. But I am seriously thinking of going back to do science. I think I’m probably going to apply to do theoretical physics.’ I explained that I wanted to be able to actually understand things like relativity, and Schrödinger’s cat, and that I wanted to try to revive the dear old ether. I think I was feeling a bit drunk, so I wittered on about the luminiferous ether for some time. Burlem was familiar with it – it turned out that he ran the nineteenth-century Literature and Science MA at the university – but I still went on at length about how fascinating it was that for ages people couldn’t work out how light could travel in a vacuum, considering that sound couldn’t (you can see a bell in a vacuum, but you can’t hear it go ding). In the nineteenth century people believed that light travelled through something invisible – the luminiferous ether. In 1887 Albert Michelson and Edward Morley set out to prove that the ether existed, but in the end they had to conclude that it didn’t. While talking to Burlem I couldn’t, of course, remember the date of this experiment, or the names of the scientists, but I did remember the way Michelson referred to the lost object of his experiment as the ‘beloved old ether, which is now abandoned, though I personally still cling a little to it’. I got a bit excited about how much poetry there was in theoretical physics, and then I went on for a bit about how much I like institutions: especially ones with big libraries.
And then Burlem interrupted and said: ‘Don’t do that. Fuck theoretical physics. Come and do a PhD with me. I’m assuming you don’t already have one?’
It was the way he said it. Fuck theoretical physics.
‘What would I do it on?’ I said.
‘What are you interested in?’
I laughed. ‘Everything?’ I shrugged. ‘I think that’s my problem. I want to know everything.’ I must have been drunk to admit that. At least I didn’t go further and say that I want to know everything because of the high probability that if you know everything, there’ll be something to actually believe in.
‘Come on,’ Burlem said. ‘What’s your thing?’
‘My thing?’
He took a gulp of wine. ‘Yeah.’
‘I don’t think I know what my thing is yet. That’s the whole point of the magazine column. It’s about free association. I’m good at that.’
‘So you start at the Big Bang and work your way through science until you end up at Lumas. There must be a connection between all the things you’ve written about.’
I sipped some more wine. ‘Lumas’s ideas about the fourth dimension are particularly interesting. I mean, he didn’t exactly pre-empt string theory, but …’
‘What’s string theory?’
I shrugged. ‘Don’t ask me. That’s why I want to do theoretical physics. At least, I think I do.’
Burlem laughed. ‘For fuck’s sake. Come on. Find the connection.’
I thought for a moment. ‘I suppose almost everything I’ve written about has had some connection with thought experiments, or “experiments of the mind”, as Lumas called them.’
‘Good. And?’
‘Um. I don’t know. But I quite like the way you can talk about science without necessarily using mathematics, but using metaphors instead. That’s how I’ve been approaching all my columns. For each of these ideas and theories, you find there’s a little story that goes with it.’
‘Interesting. Give me an example.’
‘Well, there’s Schrödinger’s cat, of course. Everyone can understand that a cat in a box can’t be alive and dead at the same time – but hardly anyone can understand the same principle expressed mathematically. Then there are Einstein’s trains. All of his thoughts about special relativity seem to have been expressed in terms of trains. I love that. And whenever people want to understand the fourth dimension nowadays, they still go back to Flatland, which was written in 1880-whatever. I suppose you can look at Butler that way, too. Erewhon is basically a thought experiment intended to work out ideas about society and machines.’
‘So write a proposal. Do a PhD on these experiments of the mind: I’d be very interested in supervising that. Work in some more novels and poetry. I’d recommend looking at Thomas Hardy and Tennyson, as well. Make sure you don’t get too carried away. Set a time frame, or some other sort of limit. Don’t do a history of thought experiments from the beginning of time. Do, say, 1859 to 1939 or something. Start with Darwin and end with, I don’t know, the atom bomb.’
‘Or Schrödinger’s cat. I think that was in the thirties. The bomb is too real; I mean, it’s where the thought experiment becomes reality, really.’
‘Maybe.’ Burlem ran his hand over the stubble on his face. ‘So, anyway, what do you think? I reckon we could sign you up pretty easily. You have an MA?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Superb. So let’s do it. I can get you some teaching as well, if you want.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Seriously.’ Burlem gave me his card. At the top it had his name in bold and then: Professor of English Literature.
So I wrote the proposal and fell in love with my idea. But then … I don’t know. When I went to start working with Burlem, he seemed to have gone cold on the idea of Lumas. My proposal had been accepted, of course – I was planning to look at the language and form of thought experiments, from Zoonomia to Schrödinger’s cat – and everything was fine with Burlem until I mentioned Lumas. When I did, he stopped making eye contact with me. He looked out of the window, now my window, and said nothing. I made some joke relating to our conversation at the conference, something like ‘So, has the curse claimed any more victims, then?’, and he looked at me and said, ‘Forget that paper, OK? Leave Lumas until later.’ He recommended that I start by focusing on the actual thought experiments: Schrödinger’s cat, Einstein’s Relativity and Edwin A. Abbot’s book Flatland. He also persuaded me to leave out Zoonomia, Charles Darwin’s grandfather’s book about evolution, and begin later, in 1859, when The Origin of Species was published. He also reminded me to look at some more poetry. I had no idea what was wrong with him, but I went along with it all. And then, a week later, he was gone.
So now here I am, unsupervised, like an experiment with no observer – Fleming’s plate of mould, perhaps, or an uncollapsed wavefunction – and what am I doing? I’m reading Lumas. I’m reading The End of Mr. Y, for God’s sake. Fuck you, Burlem.
THREE THE END OF MR. Y BY THOMAS E. LUMAS