The Bone House (45 page)
T
homas Young (1773–1829), who has a significant role in this story, was one of the world’s great polymaths. Born in the tiny village of Milverton in Somerset, England, he was an infant prodigy, having learned to read by the age of two. The firstborn son of a devout Quaker family, he worked his way through the entire Bible (twice!) at four, and soon topped this achievement by acquiring the basics of Latin grammar. He was able to converse and write letters in Latin to his no-doubt perplexed friends and family when he was six years old.
Young Thomas outgrew teachers faster than his family could find them—a few weeks of study and he would know as much as the master instructing the class. When he landed at Thompson’s School in Dorset at the age of eight, he found a tutor who understood his genius, gave him free reign of the library, and assisted the voracious student in learning whatever he happened to fancy—which, apparently, was
everything
. By fourteen years of age he was fluent in not only ancient Greek and Latin—he amused himself by translating his textbooks into and out of classical languages—but had also acquired French, Italian, Hebrew, German, Chaldean, Syriac, Samaritan, Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and, of course, Amharic.
Medicine inevitably captured his interest, and that took him to London and Edinburgh, briefly, before moving on to Germany to delve into the toddling discipline of physics. His expertise and authority in various and wide-ranging fields were such that in a few short years it was being said of him that he knew everything there was to be known. As a practicing physician he earned his daily crust, and devoted his spare time to experiments, which often led to revolutionary discoveries: it was Young who devised a means to demonstrate in simple and elegant experiments that light did indeed behave as a wave—not only as a particle, as Isaac Newton had theorised. He also established that the different colours we perceive are made by light at different wavelengths that correspond to variations in electromagnetic energy.
Never confined to any singular endeavour, Dr. Young’s insatiable curiosity stretched to other, even more exotic pursuits, including—conveniently for my story—archaeology: especially the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphics. No one at the time could read the ancient pictorial rebus script but, aided by the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799, Young—not the Frenchman Champollion, as most history texts have it—cracked the code and defined the basic rules of translation that others (including Champollion, who grudgingly admitted as much) have followed and built on ever since.
A more recent genius, Albert Einstein (1879–1955), was a great admirer of Dr. Young and ranked him next to Isaac Newton, mentioning Young’s inestimable contributions to science when he was asked to provide a forward for Newton’s
Opticks
, when that seminal work was republished in 1931. Einstein knew a thing or three about physics himself. In addition to creating the powerhouse E = mc
2
equation, Einstein also had a knack for pithy sound bites. His observation that “the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion . . .” speaks directly to one of the central devices of
The Bone House
, as characters struggle with the diverse yet interconnecting realities of a universe unlimited by space or time.
Although the idea of a many-dimensioned universe had been knocking around for some time—the word
multiverse
itself was coined by the philosopher William James around 1895—it was Einstein who laid the theoretical groundwork for the notion—a suggestion later picked up and given more definite shape by physicists and cosmologists such as Hugh Everett, Max Tegmark, and John Wheeler, amongst others. The idea gained momentum in the scientific community through the 1970s and ’80s until it has become such an accepted feature in the landscape of scientific thought that it is now a useful construct for theorising about the apparent anomalies encountered when dealing with the universe in its largest, and very smallest, expressions.
It is also a highly useful construct for a writer of imaginative fiction. For the characters enmeshed in the BRIGHT EMPIRES quest are not time-travelling explorers, à la H.G. Wells’
The Time Machine
or Steven Spielberg’s
Back to the Future
series—merely running backwards and forwards along chronological train tracks, confined to rails permanently fixed in a singular direction. Rather, Kit and company are bouncing around a multidimensional universe in the equivalent of a helicopter that can travel in any of a thousand different directions. And if that hypothetical helicopter is a vehicle that can also zoom off into hidden dimensions and lands in any possible alternate world—with a dose of time slippage thrown in for good measure—then we have the situation I am trying to describe in BRIGHT EMPIRES.
Over thirty years ago, a physicist friend who worked at Fermilab—the massive proton-antiproton collider in the suburbs of Chicago—took me on a tour of the facility. The lab itself was still fairly new at the time, and the physicists there had just identified a range of new subatomic particles: quarks. They were preparing to begin experiments in super-cold conditions with temperatures approaching absolute zero. As I look back, I think that the experience of getting up close and personal with that high-tech laboratory and coming under the spell of my friend’s enthusiasm for high energy physics launched my own interest in a subject that continues to fascinate: which is why my reading table supports a tower of books on physics (both quantum and astro), as well as cosmology, philosophy, anthropology, theology, and to be sure, history.
In the current climate, when new discoveries are announced nearly every day, it is difficult to recall that as the world marched towards the third millennium scientists were beginning to hint—not without a tinge of sadness or regret, I suspect—that science was very close to explaining everything. The sentiment was so widely expressed that by 2000 a
Time
magazine article was wondering, “Will there be anything left to discover?” Science, the louder voices decreed, had conquered the universe; all that was left was to write up the notes and fill in the few remaining blanks. Every major discovery had been made, and there was, sniff, nothing left.
Not only has that eventuality failed to materialise, but in the few short years since
Time
floated the question something very like the reverse has transpired instead. Discovery itself has exploded. Old and established certainties are being swept away by new theories driven by new discoveries.
Just now, scientific eyes are on the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, where physicists are sifting through the results of proton-proton smashups looking for dark matter, whatever undiscovered subatomic particles might exist, and perhaps those elusive extra dimensions of the universe. They are struggling to makes sense of a universe none of them would have imagined even ten or fifteen years ago, a universe that constantly reveals new depths of wonder.
Theories, like eggs and promises, are made to be broken. Even the most perfunctory dabble in the history of science should be enough to remind us all that the closer science gets to describing something, the more it discovers how much there is to describe. Far from explaining everything, each new discovery or theory opens up whole new regions of exploration; each new advance uncovers more data that must in some way be accounted for, requiring the overhaul of old theories or the creation of new ones, and so on. In such a world, it would be useful to have a polymath like Thomas Young on the case.
In their book
Quantum Enigma
, Professors Rosenblum and Kuttner express their intention and hope that readers will be brought to the boundary where the particular expertise of physicists is no longer a sure guide. This is the realm of BRIGHT EMPIRES—a place where all the old ways of thinking about reality break down in the face of a new conception of the universe. “When experts disagree,” they write, “you may choose your own expert. Since the quantum enigma arises in the simplest quantum experiment, its essence can be fully comprehended with little technical background. Non-experts can therefore come to their
own
conclusions.”
That being the case, why shouldn’t a novelist participate in the conversation?
I
n addition to thanks previously given to Wael El-Aidy, Danuta Kluz, Clare Backhouse, Suzannah Lipscomb, Drake Lawhead, and Ross Lawhead, the author now acknowledges the assistance of Michael and Martina Potts (German language). All errors and flights of fancy are my own.
C
OMING
S
EPTEMBER 2012
A B
RIGHT
E
MPIRES
N
OVEL
Quest the Third
THE
SPIRIT WELL
English legend tells of an army of knights
that will remain sleeping until the last days.
The knights are waking up . . .
F
ROM
R
OSS
L
AWHEAD,
SON OF
S
TEPHEN
R. L
AWHEAD, COMES
T
HE
A
NCIENT
E
ARTH
T
RILOGY.
