Revelation

19 Foucault's Pendulum

Findhorn trudged shivering along a track lightly dusted with snow and the prints of a small, clawed animal. A thin, red-nosed zombie was lurching into the men's toilets, carrying a towel and toilet bag. In Babbitt's, a couple of sleepy campers, all skip caps and quilted body warmers, were drifting along the meat aisle. Through bleary eyes Findhorn found milk and picked up a cereal called Morning Zing.

A tall, round-faced girl at the counter was stacking newspapers. 'You the yellow RV?'

'Uhuh.' Findhorn struggled with unfamiliar coins.

'This was faxed through for you.'

Back outside the store, Findhorn read the message:

Findhorn shouted 'Yes! Yes!' and did a brief war dance on the sidewalk. A fifteen-year-old girl scuttled off in alarm, clutching milk. He skipped to the end:

Findhorn did a subtraction and found that it was nearly four o'clock in the afternoon in Glasgow. Even Archie would be up and about by now. He went smartly back into Babbitt's, fed a heap of nickels into the call box and dialled through. He had almost given up when there was a sort of moan from the other end of the line.

'Archie?'

A moment, and then, loud and clear, 'Fred, lad.'

'I've woken you up.'

'Not tae worry.'

'Look, the time has come to pick that giant brain of yours.'

'About?'

'What's the connection between Foucault's pendulum and the Casimir effect?'

Another long silence. When he spoke, Archie's voice was serious. 'You're into some heavy stuff here, Fred.'

'A pendulum is heavy stuff?'

'It's awesome. You want ten years' worth of frontier science in a five-minute call?'

Findhorn stayed silent. There was the sound of running water in the background, what sounded like a female voice, another long silence, two nickels' worth, and finally Archie was saying, 'This is desperate, you appreciate. Let's go back to Foucault's pendulum. You probably know about it. This was an experiment carried out in 1851 inside the Pantheon in Paris. This guy Foucault suspends a heavy iron ball from the dome by a wire two hundred feet long and sets it swinging. A pin at the bottom of the ball scrapes the surface of a tray of sand, so that the direction of swing gets traced out in the sand.'

'A straight line.'

'Except that over the hours the direction of this straight line shifts. It moves clockwise, at a rate that would have it back to its original direction in thirty-two hours… Leave the shower running, sweetie.'

'I know the experiment.'

'Then you also know the shift is just a human perspective because we're a lot of self-centered bloody apes and we have to bend our minds to see the real picture which is that the pendulum isn't shifting, we are. The tray of sand was doing the turning. The Pantheon, the sand tray, the watching Parisians, they were all spinning, carried round on a rotating Earth. The swing of the pendulum was fixed in space. It's constant in relation to distant galaxies.'

'Why is this awesome?'

'Och, use the stuff between your ears, Freddie.'

'I'm trying.'

'Don't you see, Fred? The pendulum's telling us that somehow its inertia is fixed by intergalactic space. What's a child's swing, or the sway of a ship, but glorified pendulums? It means all of local dynamics, say like the damage done when you walk into a lamp post, is under the control of distant galaxies. You either see that as slightly strange or you're brain dead… Of course I know your name, it's Heather.'

'Okay, so our frame of reference for dynamics is the whole Universe.'

'Aye, laddie even down to the dance of atoms.'

Findhorn counted five nickels. 'Keep going.'

'Now, out of the blue, Findhorn of the Arctic is asking me also about the Casimir effect, which by some strange coincidence is also telling us something about the energy of the Universe. In this experiment you take two flat plates and hold them very close together. You have to do this in a vacuum to get rid of air pressure, and you have to make the plates microscopically flat. When you do that, when you put the surfaces of these flat plates very close together but not touching, a force acts to push them together… Cut that out, will you, Helen?'

'You mean a force like gravity?'

'I do not. Gravity comes from matter. This force comes from empty space. It's caused by energy contained in empty space, which we call zero point energy because it's irreducible. There's no way you can get rid of it. Some enthusiasts will tell you this ZPE is the bedrock of the Universe and that everything you see, including us, is just low-energy froth floating on the surface of a deep ocean of vacuum energy.'

'That seems a bit fantastic'

There was a chuckle at the other end of the line. 'Mother Nature is not required to pander to your limited imagination, Fred. Paradox or not, the Casimir effect proves that empty space is a vast store of energy. And since I'm not as dumb as I look, my guess is you're asking me these questions because Petrosian thought he could link the two. Maybe he saw this zero point energy as the common factor, the magic door between the local and the cosmic' There was a brief, curious crackle on the line. 'Now there's a sorcerer's trick for you. To find the key to the magic door. To pull down energy from galaxies. Awesome…'

'Archie, I think I want to speak to Aristotle.'

'He's dead.'

'Aristotle Papagianopoulos, at the University of Patras.'

There was a long silence, and then: 'Papa the Greek. I wouldn't.'

Something negative in Archie's voice. Findhorn was suddenly alert. 'What's the problem? I understand he's a world authority on fundamental physics.'

'Oh aye, he makes Hawking look like the school dunce.'

'So?'

'For a start it's easier to get an audience with the Pope. I've never been close enough to touch his robe.'

'But suppose I do get an audience?'

'He'd have no time for you, Fred. He's the most arrogant pillock since Louis XIV.'

'I'd be wasting my time?'

'Absolutely.'

'I'm going anyway. I have to try.'

'Don't be daft —'

The last coin ran out.

Findhorn put the receiver down. A feeling of unease had suddenly enveloped him. It took him some seconds to identify the cause.

It might have been an altruistic wish to steer him away from an embarrassing encounter, or even a touch of academic jealousy.

But whatever, Archie had been trying to control him.

There was a note for him on the RV steering wheel: Stuff this camping lark. I'm having breakfast at the Bright Angel Lodge and I think I've found something.