Skippy Dies: A Novel

Ever since the Hop, Ruprecht has been acting strangely. According to Mario, who also stayed in school over mid-term, he spent most of the break in his laboratory, and since term resumed he has scarcely been seen. In the morning and at lunch break he skips the Ref and heads directly for the basement, huffing down the corridor with papers spilling from his pockets and a distrait air; meanwhile in class he keeps putting up his hand to ask convoluted questions no one can follow – haranguing Lurch about Riemannian space, pestering Mr Farley about Planck energy, in religion, most startlingly, asking Brother Jonas whether God was God in all universes, or ‘just in this universe’.

Loss of appetite, sleeplessness, erratic behaviour – if you didn’t know better, you’d almost think Ruprecht, like his room-mate, was in love. You do know better, though, so you conclude it’s far more likely to be something to do with this new theory he’s been going on about.

Actually, Ruprecht has discovered, the term “M-theory” is something of a misnomer. Theory suggests a hypothesis of some sort, a line of inquiry, a set of principles, at the very least a vague idea of what it is, itself, about. M-theory offers none of these things. It is pure enigma: a nebulous, shadowy, multi-faceted entity infinitely bigger than what it was originally intended to explain. Confronted with it, the best scientists in the world are as schoolboys – less than schoolboys, cavemen, primitives who, foraging with their stone axes in the jungle, stumble upon a spaceship squatting huge and opaque amid the ferns. It swallows entire fields of mathematics like they were nothing at all. The most complicated equations devised by the most brilliant minds operating at the very limit of human capability represent only the most childish gestures at description of its outermost edges, weak flames that reveal the barest inkling of the vastness retiring back into the darkness. For all their labours, the reality of the theory – what it actually means, what it says, what it is a theory of – remains hidden behind the inscrutable M, and while each of them dreams of being the one who will crack it, bring the theory, like King Kong wrapped in chains, into the light, they are prone, late at night, to the chilly thought that rather than illuminating, their efforts are merely feeding it, gorging it with knowledge, which it devours with no sign of satiety.

‘So what’s the point of it?’ Dennis takes a dim view both of the theory and of Ruprecht’s obsession, which he suspects to be just another layer of self-mystification.

‘Well, I suppose the “point” would be a total explanation of reality,’ Ruprecht harrumphs. ‘I imagine that’s what the basic “point” would be.’

‘But it’s just a load of maths. How’s that going to help anybody?’

‘There is already too many maths,’ Mario chimes in. ‘More beaver, less maths, that’s what I say.’

‘Yes, well, if Newton had said that, we wouldn’t have the law of gravity,’ Ruprecht says. ‘If James Clerk Maxwell had said, “More beaver, less maths,” we wouldn’t have electricity. Maths and the universe go hand in hand. Formulae worked out in a single copybook with a single pencil can transform the entire world. Look at Einstein. E=mc².’

‘So what?’ says Dennis.

‘So, if it weren’t for “a load of maths”, we’d all be living in shacks in fields, tending sheep.’

‘Good,’ says Dennis.

‘Oh, you’d like living in a world without phones or DVDs, would you?’

‘Yes, I would.’

‘You’d like going to hospital and being operated on without an anaesthetic, in candlelight, by doctors who had no clue what was wrong with you because there were no X-ray machines?’

‘Yes, I would.’

‘You would?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Well, good.’

‘Good.’

‘Good.’

The theory is not without its doubters, to be sure, and not all of them are as ill-informed as Dennis.

‘Mathematically, yes, it does have a lot of explanatory potential,’ Mr Farley says, after yet another Science class has been diverted into a discussion of the possible physics of other universes. ‘But that doesn’t actually make it true. A lot of people have very compelling theories about what happened to Atlantis. There’s even a theory that Ireland is the remnant of Atlantis. But unless they could verify it somehow, show you some sort of proof, you wouldn’t believe them, would you?’

‘No,’ Ruprecht admits.

‘The fact is that it would take a trillion trillion times more power than our most powerful energy source to find any evidence for M-theory. On those grounds alone, many scientists would say that it simply isn’t commensurate with twenty-first-century science. That is, even if it’s true, there’s not a lot we can actually do with it, any more than Galileo could have used, for instance, computer operating code if he’d stumbled across it back in the seventeenth century. So while it’s undoubtedly interesting, we shouldn’t let it obscure the less glamorous but just as important scientific work there is to do here on planet Earth. Does that sound fair?’

‘Yes,’ Ruprecht concedes.

No! The more arguments he hears against it, the deeper his adoration grows for this esoteric, unreadable scripture that the crude unthinking world will not take time to understand – the longer he spends in his basement lost in topologies, mapping out the imaginary surfaces that undulate beneath its hyperspatial penumbra, shunning human company except for other faceless devotees in sleepless Internet chatrooms, reciting back and forth those golden shibboleths, string, multiverse, supersymmetry, gravitino, the theory’s hundred names…

In fact, maybe it is love after all. Why can’t we fall in love with a theory? Is it a person we fall in love with, or the idea of a person? So yes, Ruprecht has fallen in love. It was love at first sight, occurring the moment he saw Professor Tamashi present that initial diagram, and it has unfolded exponentially ever since. The question of reason, then, the question of evidence, these are wasted on him. Since when has love ever looked for reasons, or evidence? Why would love bow to the reality of things, when it creates a reality of its own, so much more vivid, wherein everything resonates to the key of the heart?