Making History

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. 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 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 inversely? Come on, you have to admit that this is more than a bit of a bummer. 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 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 ice-creams, 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 Himmler’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 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…

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 Sainsbury’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.

‘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 ago.’

‘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!’

‘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. Exactly!.’ 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.’

‘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.’

There you have Jane in a nutshell. There you have scientists in a nutshell. Wriggle, wriggle, wriggle. They suck.

She was reading some South American novelist when I put my bedside light out. ‘Ner-night,’ she mumbled.

I stared at the ceiling. ‘That man Hamilton,’ I said. ‘Remember him? In Dunblane. He walks into a primary school gymnasium with four handguns. In three minutes, fifteen five-year-olds and a teacher are dead. A human being points a gun at a child and watches the bullet explode in its skull. Picture the screams, the blood, the complete incomprehension in those children’s eyes. Yet he does it again and again and again. Aiming and pulling the trigger.’

I She put the book down. ‘What are you trying to say?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know. But isn’t that what we should be trying to understand?’

‘I hope you aren’t bringing up that dreadful case as proof that your heart is bigger than mine, or your subject more important.’

‘No, I don’t mean that. I don’t. Really I don’t.’

‘Pup, you’re crying!’

‘It’s nothing.’

Pumping along Queens’ Road the next morning I explained the whole deal to myself. Humiliation. It was that simple. Fraser-Stuart had hurt me more than I had been prepared to admit. It was all a big, angry blush. I had behaved like a spoilt child because I was scared at the prospect of my passage out of studenthood and into the land of grown-ups. That was cool. It was no more than a natural little tantrum. Like I said about doors, about hovering on thresholds. Saying farewell to the long, happy process of being a good, clever little boy who writes essays and earns praise and writes more essays and earns more praise. At seven I was smarter than most ten-year-olds, at fourteen smarter than a seventeen-year-old, at seventeen smarter than a twenty-year-old. Twenty-four now, I was no smarter than any other twenty-four-year-old around the place and anyway, it was no longer a race and there were no more prizes for being a prodigy. Everyone had caught up with me and I knew, I understood with a sharp gutstab of horror, that the danger now was that I would stand still while they raced past. One self-righteous, puritanical little outburst was permissible, surely, before I began the long uphill slog to discipline and diligence, integrity and industry, caution and care? I was allowed to kick and scream just once as I watched the dazzle and brilliance of youth cloud over.

Like I say, I don’t half think some crap sometimes.

Along the Madingley Road I skimmed, bent low over the handlebars. The Cavendish Laboratories loomed ahead, not a cathedral to the antichrist, just a building, an assembly of edge-of-town sheds. The people who laboured there had good hearts and bad hearts like anyone else. They didn’t regard themselves as holding the only key to human understanding. They just hunted their particles, their genes, their forces and their wave forms, like historians hunting for documents or twitchers scanning the skies for red kites. Jane must think I’m mad. On the verge of a breakdown. No, she understands, bless her buns. She knows exactly what’s what and she loves it. Mummy’s little handful.

The original Cavendish laboratories, where Rutherford sharpened the axe that split his first atom, are in the centre of Cambridge, but the new building is out past Churchill College and towards the American Cemetery and Madingley.

Is sunset still a golden sea

From Haslingfield to Madingley?

No, Rupert dear, it isn’t. More of a carbon monoxide fog, I’m afraid. Nor does the church clock stand at ten to three. As for there being honey still for tea, you’ll have to ask Jeffrey Archer, since he owns the Old Vicarage now. Perhaps someone should write a new Grantchester.

Say, stand the bollards yet in rows

Mute guardians of the contraflows?

Are there stabbings after dark

And is it still a cunt to park?

God bless our century. The main lab too, like an office-block: all glass, swing-doors and ‘Reception! May I help you at all?’ Privatised peak caps, sign-in books, laminated visitor badges, the whole vindaloo.

If there is a word to describe our age, it must be Security, or to put it another way, Insecurity. From the neurotic insecurity of Freud, by way of the insecurities of the Kaiser, the Führer, Eisenhower and Stalin, right up to the terrors of the citizens of the modern world—

THEY ARE OUT THERE!

The enemy. They will break into your car, burgle your house, molest your children, consign you to hellfire, murder you for drug money, force you to face Mecca, infect your blood, outlaw your sexual preferences, erode your pension, pollute your beaches, censor your thoughts, steal your ideas, poison your air, threaten your values, use foul language on your television, destroy your security. Keep them away! Lock them out! Hide them from sight! Bury them!

Half my friends from school have — in sharp contradistinction to my own previously explained failure in this regard — successfully rechristened themselves Speeder, Bozzle, Volo, Turtle, Grip and Janga, pierced any spare folds of flesh they can and pinned them with gold, silver and brass and hit the road. They march down the high streets of southern towns in anti-pollution masks, hoisting skull and crossbone banners: they’ll fight against the car, the Criminal Justice Act, highways, the felling of trees, the raising of powerplants…anything. They want to be the ones locked out; they like to be thought of as dangerous; they enjoy their exile.

And they think I’m a dick.

I went to visit Janga last year, in Brighton, one of the places where she and her Traveller friends congregate, and I could tell, oh yes, I could tell, that these free souls thought me quite the little dick. Were I a real dick, mind, and a nasty dick at that, I would say to you at this point that they had no objection at all to me buying them drink after drink after drink in the pubs, that it posed no moral problem for them whatsoever to send me out to the mini-market at eight in the morning to buy their milk and bread and newspapers. I would say too that it is possible to be a waycool eco-warrior without smelling of dead bag-lady. I could add that anyone can be a hero on the dole. But that kind of argument is beneath me, so I say nothing.

In the lobby, I stand now in a shaft of sunlight and bear with good grace the frownings of those who flap past me. So I’m not wearing a lab coat. So have me killed. Teh! These people…

‘Michael, Michael, Michael! So sorry to keep you waiting,’ Leo’s white coat is appropriately stained and a comical three sizes too small for his long arms. ‘Come, come come.’

Obedient puppy, I follow along the corridors, rising to my toes on the stride to catch glimpses of labs through the high glazing of the corridor walls.

We come to a door. ‘NC 1.54 (D) Professor L Zuckermann.’ Leo swipes down a card: a green light glows, a small beep beeps, a lock clunks and the door swings open. I pause at the threshold and mutter unhappily, like Michael Hordern in Where Eagles Dare, ‘Security? That word has become a joke round here.’ Leo turns in alarm, so I whisper hammily into my lapel, ‘We’re in! Give us thirty seconds and then start the diversion.’

Leo twigs and I am rewarded with’ a prim giggle as the overhead strips spank themselves alight. I realise that my childish desire to say something frivolous arises from a watchful tension in Leo, a fear almost, that I find uncomfortable. It comes and goes with him, I decide. In his rooms it was there when he talked to me of my thesis, then it disappeared to be replaced by a joshing geniality. Finally the hunted look returned to his eyes when he ended the interview by inviting me here, to this place.

I am not sure what I expected. Something. I expected something. After all, why would a man want to give a tour of his laboratory if that laboratory were nothing more than an office?

A shiny white-board without a single formula or string of upside-down Greek characters scrawled upon it. No oscilloscopes, no Van de Graaff generators, no long glass tubes pulsing with purple blooms of ionising plasma, no deep sinks stained with horrible compounds, no glass-walled containment areas with robotic arms for the transferral of small nuggets of highly radioactive materials from one canister to another, no poster of Einstein poking his tongue out, no warm computer voice to welcome us with an eccentrically programmed personality: ‘Good morning, Leo. Another shitty day, huh?’ Nothing, in short, that could not be found in the sales office of your local Toyota dealer. Less in fact, for your local Toyota dealer would at least have a desk-top calculator, a computer, a pot-plant, an electronic diary, a fax-machine, an executive stress-reliever and a year-planner. No, wait up. There is at least a computer here. A little lap-top, with a mouse trailing from the side. There are too, I concede, shelves of books and magazines and, in place of the year-planner, a periodic table.

Leo marks my disappointment. ‘This is not a place for what we call the wet sciences, I am afraid.’

I go up to the periodic table and examine it intelligently, to show some interest.

‘That was left by my predecessor,’ Leo says. Well there you go.

I look about me. The remark ‘So this is where it all goes on then’ while honoured by convention, would sound rather foolish, so I just nod vigorously as if I approve the smell and tone of the place.

‘If I need equipment there are other rooms where I may book time on the big machines.’

‘Ah. Right. Really then, you’re more a theoretical physicist?’

‘Is there any other kind?’ But said sweetly, without impatience.

He moves to his lap-top and opens it up. I see now that this is like no lap-top I’ve ever known and I can tell from the trembling of his long ringers that this is an important moment for him. The top section of the device is conventional enough, a rectangular screen. It is the keyboard which takes the eye. There runs a row of square buttons along the top, where function keys might be, but they have no attributes printed on them. Numbers, letters and ciphers are hand-scrawled in yellow Chinagraph under each key. The main body of the casing where the qwerty keys and trackball or pad should be is taken up with small black squares of glass which reflect back the strip-lighting on the ceiling above. Underneath the section of bench where this homemade box stands — I suppose it right to use the word bench, since this is, despite all appearances, a laboratory — there is a cupboard. Leo opens the doors to this cupboard and at last I see some proper machinery. Two stately steel cabinets equipped with heavy power switches and, writhing all around, as bewildering a tagliatelli of cabling as one could hope for. I note for the first time that there are two wide multicoloured connecting ribbons, like old Centronix parallel printing cable, spewing from the back of the lap-top and down into this cupboard.

Leo throws the power switch on each cabinet. There is a deep satisfying hum as cooling fans begin to play. The black panes of glass on the keyboard now reveal themselves to be LED displays, for a line of green eights lights up and flashes, as on a video recorder whose clock has not been set. Leo bends back his fingers to crack his knuckles as his hands hover above the keyboard. He darts a swift glance towards me and presses a sequence of his function keys, a little guiltily, like a shopper who cannot resist playing Chopsticks on a department store synthesiser. One by one, in a sweeping line, the flashing eights compose themselves into stable digits and the screen flowers into life.

What was I hoping to see? An animated model of the birth of the Universe perhaps. Revolving DNA. Fractal geometry. Secret UN files on the spread of a new and horrible disease. Scrolling numbers. Satellite spy pictures. Ten Hatcher naked. President Clinton’s personal e-mail files. The design for a new weapon of destruction. Tight close-up of a Cardassian warlord announcing the invasion of Earth.

What did I see? I saw the screen filled with clouds. Not meteorological clouds, but coloured clouds, as of a gas. Yet not gaseous clouds. If I looked further into them they were perhaps more like air currents as seen from a thermal camera. Inside these rolling currents shifted areas of purer colour, edged with iridescent coronas which swirled and fizzed, cycling through the spectrum as they moved. Hypnotic. Beautiful too, quite radiantly beautiful. There were, however, screen-savers on most PCs which were no less easy on the eye.

‘What do you think, Michael?’ Leo is staring at the screen. The coloured masses are reflected on the lenses of his spectacles. On his face I see the haunted, hungry look that puzzled me before. Obsession. Not by Calvin Klein, but Obsession by Thomas Mann or Vladimir Nabokov. The pained need, anger and despair of a guilty old pervert burning young beauty with a stare. Or so I think at the time. By now I should be used to getting things wrong.

‘It’s beautiful,’ I breathe, as if afraid that my voice might burst the soft loveliness of colours. Yes, burst, for that is what they are like, these shapes, I now realise. They are like filmy bubbles of soap. The softly rotating membranes of oiled rainbow soothe the eye and float down deep into the soul.

‘Beautiful?’ Leo’s eyes never leave the screen. His right hand is on the mouse and the shapes move. As the scene shifts, the screen reminds me of the cinemas of my childhood. I would sit alone in the dark with twenty minutes to wait before the Benson and Hedges and Bacardi commercials. To beguile the time the Odeon management offered music and a light-show of psychedelic pinks and greens and oranges writhing in liquid on the screen. I would watch with a sagging mouth into which Raisin Poppets would be dumbly pushed one by one as the colours changed and the bubbles of air suspended in the liquid worked their way across the screen like jerking amoebas.

‘Yes, beautiful,’ I repeat. ‘Don’t you think so?’

‘What do you imagine you are looking at?’

‘I’m not sure.’ My voice does not rise above its reverent whisper. ‘Gas of some kind?’

Now Leo looks at me for the first time. ‘Gas?’ He smiles a joyless smile. ‘Gas, he says!’ Shaking his head, he turns back to the screen.

‘What then?’

‘And yet it might be gas,’ he says, more to himself than to me. ‘What a horrible joke. Yes, it might be gas.’ I notice that he is gnawing his lower lip with the insistent speed of a rodent. He has torn the skin and blood is seeping but he does not seem to notice. ‘I tell you what you are looking at, Michael. You won’t believe me, but I tell you all the same.’

‘Yes?’

He jabs a finger at the screen and says, ‘Behold! Anus mundi! Das Arschloch der Welt!’ My puzzlement and shock amuse him and he nods his head vigorously. ‘You are looking,’ he says, pointing his chin to the screen, ‘at Auschwitz.’

I look from Leo to the screen and back again. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘Auschwitz. You must have heard of it. A place in Poland. Very famous. The asshole of the world.’

‘But what do you mean exactly? A photograph? Infra-red, thermal imaging, something like that?’

‘Not thermal imaging. Temporal imaging one might call it. Yes, that would do.’

‘I’m still not with you.’

‘You are looking,’ says Leo pointing at the screen, ‘at Auschwitz Concentration Camp on the 9th of October, 1942.’

I frown in puzzlement. So slow. I am so slow.

‘How do you mean?’

‘I mean how I mean. This is Auschwitz on October 9th. Three o’clock in the afternoon. You are looking at that day.’

I stare again at the lovely billowing shapes in their sweet rippling colours.

‘You mean…a film?

‘Still you ask what I mean and still I mean what I mean and still you do not grasp what I mean. I mean that you are looking at both a place and a time.’

I stare at him.

‘If this laboratory had a window,’ says Leo, ‘and you looked out of it, you would see Cambridge on the 5th of June, 1996, yes?’

I nod.

‘When you look into this screen, it is the same, a window. All these shapes, these motions, they are the movements of men and women in Auschwitz, Poland, October 9th, 1942. You could call them energy signatures. Particular traces.’

‘You mean…that is, are you saying that this machine is looking back in time?’

‘One of these shapes,’ Leo continues as if I have not spoken, his eyes darting back and forth across the screen, ‘one of these colours,’ his hand nudges the mouse, ‘one of these. Any one of them, it could be any one of them.’

‘What could be any one of them?’

He turns to me for a second. ‘Somewhere in here is my father.’

I watch as he works the mouse savagely in his search. It seems to behave like a TV, camera handle, allowing him to pan, tilt and zoom around his world of coloured forms. He rolls the mouse hard to the left: the whole scene revolves clockwise.

‘My father arrived at Auschwitz on October 8th. That much I know. There! Do you think this is him?’ Leo stabs a ringer at a low shape whose feathery outer sheath oscillates with a delicate mauve. ‘Perhaps that is him. Maybe it is a dog, or a horse. Or just a tree. A corpse. Most likely a corpse.’

There are tears in Leo’s angry eyes, tears which run down his face to mingle with the blood that still oozes from his chewed lip. ‘I will never know,’ he says, bending below the desk to thump the power switches. ‘Never ever will I know.’

With a singing prickle of static the screen is emptied. The LED digits vanish. The quiet hum of the fan is stilled with a whoomp. I stare at the blank screen, silent.

‘There now, Michael Young,’ Leo absorbs a tear elegantly with the sharp edge of the shirt cuff that protrudes from his lab coat sleeve. ‘You have seen Auschwitz. Congratulations.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘Quite serious.’ Leo’s anger and intensity have disappeared and he is a calm Uncle Smurf once more.

He closes up the machine and strokes the mouse with gentle affection.

‘We really were looking back in time?’

‘Every time you look into the night sky you are looking back in time. It’s no big deal.’

‘But you were focusing on a single day.’

‘It is a different kind of telescope for sure. Unfortunately it is also quite useless. Just a light show, is all. An artificial quantum singularity of no more use than an electric pencil-sharpener. Less.’

‘You can’t translate all those coloured swirls into recognisable forms?’

‘I cannot.’

‘But one day?’

‘When I’m dead and gone perhaps. Yes. It is possible. Anything is possible.’

‘What else have you looked at? Any battles or earthquakes? You know, Hiroshima, anything like that?’

‘I have watched Hiroshima. I have looked too at the Western Front in the Great War. Many times and places. Always, I’m afraid, I return to Auschwitz. The answer, by the way, is Jehovah’s Witnesses.’

‘Er…you’ve lost me there. The answer to what is Jehovah’s Witnesses?’

‘The purple triangle? You remember, you couldn’t guess who had to wear it? It was the Jehovah’s Witnesses.’

‘Oh.’ I couldn’t really find much to say to that. ‘And you always return to Auschwitz, on that date?’

‘Always that same day.’

‘And you can’t do anything about it, you can’t…interact?’

‘No. It is…how can I best describe? It is like a radio. You tune in, you listen, you cannot broadcast.’

‘And you don’t know what you’re looking at? I mean you can’t interpret it?’

‘The colours have a relation to elements. Oxygen is blue, hydrogen red, nitrogen green and so on. But that tells me nothing.’

‘Who else have you shown this to?’

‘What is this, Twenty Questions? You are the first person to see the device.’

‘Why me?’

He looks at me. ‘A feeling,’ he says.