The Gates

[1] Scientists call it the “singularity.” People who are religious might call it the mote in God’s eye. Some scientists will say you can’t believe in the singularity and the idea of a god, or gods. Some religious people will try to tell you the same thing. Still, you can believe in the singularity and a god, if you like. It’s entirely up to you. One requires evidence, the other faith. They’re not the same thing, but as long as you don’t get the two mixed up, then everything should be fine.

[2] In fact, about 1 percent of the static that sometimes appears on your television set is a relic of the Big Bang and, if your eyes were sensitive to microwave light instead of just visible light, then the sky at night would appear white instead of black, because it continues to glow from the heat of the Big Bang. Oh, and because atoms are so small, and are constantly recycled, every breath you take contains atoms that were once breathed by Julius Caesar and Elvis Presley. So a little bit of you formerly ruled Rome, and sang “Blue Suede Shoes.”

[3] And even all that stuff added together still amounts to much less than 1 percent of not very much at all, since more than 99 percent of the volume of ordinary matter is empty space. If we could get rid of all the empty space in the atoms of our bodies, the whole of humanity could be squeezed into a matchbox, with room left over for most of the animal kingdom too. Mind you, there would be nobody left to look after the matchbox.

[4] Anyway, the scientists figured, if the end of the world did happen, there wouldn’t be anybody left to blame them. There would probably be just enough time for someone to say, “Hey, you said it wouldn’t cause the end of-” before there was a bit of a bang, and then silence. Scientists, while very intelligent, don’t always think things through. Take, for example, the first caveman who found a nice rock, tied it to a stick with a piece of vine, and thought, “Hmm, I’ve just invented a Thing for Banging Other Things into Things With. I feel certain that nobody will use this to hit someone over the head with instead.” Which someone promptly did. In fact, they probably hit him with it so that they could steal it. This is how we end up with nuclear weapons, and scientists claiming that they’d only set out to invent something that steamed radishes.

[5] Whenever someone uses the word “glitch,” which means a fault of some kind in a system, you should immediately be suspicious, because it means that they don’t know what it is. A technician who uses the term “glitch” is like a doctor who tells you you’re sufferering from a “thingy,” except the doctor won’t tell you to go home and try turning yourself on and off again.

[6] Malevolence, for those of you who were off “sick” from school that day, means hatred, but hatred of a very vicious, evil kind. Incidentally, when you put inverted commas around a word in this way, as I just did around the word “sick,” it means that you don’t really believe that the word in question is true. In this case, I know that you weren’t really sick that day; you just felt like having a morning off to watch children’s television in your pajamas. Hence “sick,” instead of, well, sick. If you really want to annoy someone, you can make little inverted commas by holding up two fingers of each hand and twitching them gently, as though you’re tickling an invisible elf under the armpits. For example, when your mother calls you for dinner, and dinner turns out to be boiled fish and broccoli, you can say to her, “Well, I’ll just eat my ‘dinner,’ then,” and do the little fingers sign. She’ll love it. Seriously. I can hear her laughing already.

[7] This is similar to the old problem about whether or not a tree falling in a forest makes any noise if there is nobody there to hear it. This, of course, assumes that the only creatures worth being concerned about when it comes to falling trees are human beings, and ignores the plight of small birds, assorted rodents, and rabbits who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and find a tree landing on their heads.

In the eighteenth century, a man named Bishop Berkeley claimed that objects only exist because people are there to see them. This led a lot of scientists to laugh at Bishop Berkeley and his ideas, because they found them silly. But according to quantum theory, which is the very advanced branch of physics involving atoms, parallel universes, and other such matters, Bishop Berkeley may have had a point. Quantum theory suggests that the tree exists in all possible states at the same time: burned, sawdust, fallen, or in the shape of a small wooden duck that quacks as it’s pulled along. You don’t know what state it’s in until you observe it. In other words, you can’t separate the observer from the thing being observed.

[8] It was St. Thomas Aquinas, a most learned man who died in 1274, who was supposed to have suggested that an infinite number of angels could dance on the head of a pin. In fact he didn’t, although he spent a lot of time thinking about whether or not angels had bodies (he seemed to think that they didn’t), and how many of them there might be up in heaven (quite a lot, he concluded). The problem with St. Thomas Aquinas was that he liked arguing with himself, and it’s very hard to nail down exactly what he thought about anything at all. Still, the question of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin is probably of interest mainly to philosophers and, one presumes, dancing angels, since the last thing an angel doing the foxtrot wants to worry about is how crowded the pin is getting, and the possibility of falling off the edge and doing himself an injury.

[9] Actually, this is not entirely true. It may well be the case that one cannot prove the existence of a nine-eyed, multitentacled pink monster named Herbert, but that does not mean that, somewhere in the universe, there is not a nine-eyed multitentacled pink monster named Herbert wondering why nobody writes to him. Just because he hasn’t been seen doesn’t mean that he isn’t out there. This is known as an inductive argument. But the argument is probable, not definite. If there’s actually a pretty good chance he exists, there’s at least as good a chance that he doesn’t exist. So you can prove a negative, at least as much as you can prove anything at all.

In addition, again according to quantum theory, there is a probability that all possible events, no matter how strange, may occur, so there is a probability, however small, that Herbert may exist after all.

Still, it’s a good argument with which to confuse schoolteachers and parents, and on that basis alone Samuel is to be applauded.

[10] A deity, pronounced “day-it-tee” is a kind of god. There are good deities, and bad deities. Nurd was a bad deity, but in general none of them are to be trusted. The playwright William Shakespeare wrote, in King Lear, that “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.” Nasty lot, deities. Don’t say that you haven’t learned something new by reading this page.

[11] There was a demon for that feeling too: Ulp, the Demon of Things That Go Round for Slightly Too Long, with additional responsibility for the Smell of Cotton Candy When you’re Not Feeling Yourself, and the Lingering Odor of Small Children Being Unwell.

[12] It is a curious fact that small boys are more terrified of their babysitters than small girls are. In part, this is because small girls and babysitters, who are usually slightly larger girls, belong to the same species, and therefore understand each other. Small boys, on the other hand, do not understand girls, and therefore being looked after by one is a little like a hamster being looked after by a shark. If you are a small boy, it may be some consolation to you to know that even large boys do not understand girls, and girls, by and large, do not understand boys. This makes adult life very interesting.

[13] It is not possible to flush someone to China. Or Australia. Well, not unless they’re already there. It is not a good idea, though, to point this out to someone who is threatening to flush you to China or Australia, as there is a good chance that they will try it anyway just to prove you wrong.

[14] As you can see from his picture, Einstein didn’t take himself too seriously, at least not all of the time. In general, it’s a good idea to avoid people who take themselves too seriously. As individuals, we have only so much seriousness to go round, and people who take themselves very seriously don’t have enough seriousness left over to take other people seriously. Instead they tend to look down on them, and are secretly pleased when they get stuff wrong, because they just prove to the too-serious types that they were right not to take them seriously to begin with.

[15] In Alice Through the Looking Glass, the book by Lewis Carroll, the looking glass is, in effect, a wormhole. Carroll, whose real name was Charles Dodgson, was a mathematician, and was aware of the theory of wormholes. He liked injecting puzzles into his math classes. One of his most famous goes as follows: A cup contains 50 spoonfuls of brandy, and another contains 50 spoonfuls of water. A spoonful of brandy is taken from the first cup and added to the second cup. Then a spoonful of that mixture is taken from the second cup and mixed into the first. Is there more or less brandy in the second cup than there is water in the first cup? If you’d like to know the answer-and, I warn you, it will make your head ache more than drinking all of the brandy would-it’s at the end of this chapter…

Okay, back to Lewis Carroll’s brandy and water problem. Mathematically speaking, the answer is that there will be just as much brandy in the water as there is water in the brandy, so both mixtures will be the same. But-and this is where your head may start to ache-when equal quantities of water and alcohol are mixed, the sum of them is more compact than their parts because the brandy penetrates the spaces between the water molecules, and the water penetrates the spaces between the brandy molecules, a bit like the way two matching pieces of a jigsaw puzzle fit together so that they occupy less space than if you just laid the same pieces side by side. In other words, the mixture becomes more concentrated, so if you add 50 spoonfuls of water and 50 spoonfuls of brandy, you actually end up with about 98 spoonfuls of the mixture in total. Adding a spoonful of brandy to 50 spoonfuls of water will give you less than 51 spoonfuls of the mixture, because, like we said earlier, it’s more concentrated. If you take a spoonful from that mixture, it will leave less than 50 spoonfuls in the cup. Then, if you add that spoonful from the concentrated mixture to the cup of brandy, it means that there’s more brandy in the brandy cup than there is more water in the water cup. I warned you…

[16] The artist Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome between 1508 and 1512. He had to use scaffolding to do it, but because the ceiling was so high he couldn’t build the scaffolding from the floor up, so instead he made a special flat wooden platform that hung from bolts beside the windows. Painting the ceiling was a very uncomfortable business, as you can probably imagine, but it’s a myth that Michelangelo had to lie flat on his back to do it. Instead he stood upright, with his head bent back, for four years. By the end of it, he was so sore that he wrote a poem about the experience:

I’VE grown a goiter by dwelling in this den-

As cats from stagnant streams in Lombardy,

Or in what other land they hap to be-

Which drives the belly close beneath the chin:

My beard turns up to heaven; my nape falls in

Fixed on my spine: my breastbone visibly

Grows like a harp: a rich embroidery

Bedews my face from brush drips, thick and thin…

And so it goes on for a few more verses, which can be summarized basically as “Owww…”

[17] The Divine Comedy is not funny, but it’s not supposed to be, despite its name. In Dante’s time, a comedy meant a work that reflected a belief in an ordered universe. Also, serious books were written in Latin, and Dante wrote in a new language: Italian. Some of Shakespeare’s comedies are funny, though, but not if you’re being forced to study them in school. In school, everything Shakespeare wrote starts to seem like a tragedy, even the ones that aren’t tragedies, which is a bit unfortunate, but that’s just because of the way they’re taught. Stick with them. In later life, people will be impressed that you can quote Shakespeare, and you will sound very intelligent. It’s harder to quote trigonometry, or quadratic equations, and not half as romantic.

[18] Adults say lots of things that they don’t quite mean, usually just to be polite, which is no bad thing. They also say things that are exactly the opposite of what they appear to mean, such as:

1. “To be perfectly honest…,” which means, “I am lying through my teeth.”

2. “I hear what you’re saying…,” which means, “I hear it, but I’m not really listening, and I don’t agree with you anyway.”

and

3. “I don’t mean to be rude…,” which means, “I mean to be rude.”

There are some people who use phrases like this more often than anyone else, and who become very good at using them to avoid answering questions or telling the entire truth. These people are known as “politicians.”

[19] “Nefarious” means very wicked indeed, in a cunning way. If you plan on being nefarious, it pays to look the part: dress in black; wear a hat, preferably one with a wide brim and no flowers; and perhaps grow a mustache that you can twirl. It also helps to have a deep and sinister laugh, to indicate when you’re being nefarious. You know the kind: “BWAH-HA-HA-HA-HA!” That kind.

[20] If that sounds confusing, it isn’t really. The equivalent effect can be found on Earth, such as when you haven’t studied for a test in school and, the more you want that test to be put off, the faster the time for the test seems to arrive. The same is true for painful dental appointments, visiting that aunt you don’t like at Christmas, and waiting for your mum to come home while you try to stick back together her favorite vase that you’ve just broken. The opposite occurs for events to which you’re rather looking forward, like Christmas, your birthday, or the first snows of winter. Someday, a very bright child will create an equation for all this in order to explain it, and other, even brighter, children will look at him in a funny way and wonder why he bothered, since everyone instinctively understood it anyway.

[21] There are lots of people throughout history with the word “the” somewhere in their names. Some of these people were rather pleasant, such as Richard the Lionheart (1157-1199 A.D.), the English king (even if he didn’t speak much English, oddly enough, although he was very good at French) who commanded an army by the age of sixteen, fought in the Crusades, and forgave the young boy who shot the arrow that fatally wounded him; and Alfred the Great (849-899 A.D.) who defended his Saxon kingdom of Wessex against the Danish invaders and was, well, great.

On the other hand, there were some people with “the” in their names who were very unpleasant indeed. Vlad the Impaler (1431-1476 A.D.) of Wallachia, who was also known as Dracula and inspired the name of the famous vampire, liked to stick his enemies on big spikes. Ivan the Terrible of Russia (1530-1584 A.D.) was a tyrant and a bully who died while playing chess. It wasn’t the excitement of the game, though: he was probably poisoned with mercury. Finally, certain historial figures with “the” in their names were just a bit lame. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you: Heneage the Dismal (1621-1682 A.D.); Hugh the Dull (1294-1342 A.D.); Charles the Silly (died 755 A.D.); and Wenceslas the Worthless (1361-1419 A.D.), who once cooked a chef alive for serving a bad ragout.

[22] It is generally agreed that there are three orders of demons. A book named Le Dragon Rouge (The Red Dragon), possibly written in the sixteenth century classified the demons of hell in three tiers, from officers to generals. Books like Le Dragon Rouge are known as “grimoires,” and to have power they must be written in red ink and, some say, bound in human skin, which means that they probably won’t be stocked by your local bookstore.

[23] Mrs. Abernathy did not like the smell of Earth. Her demonic senses made her acutely sensitive to all pleasant scents, so that she was even aware that the Milky Way itself smelled bad to her. Actually, astronomers who were recently sifting through thousands of signals from Sagittarius B2, a big dust cloud at the center of our galaxy, found a substance there called ethyl formate, which is the chemical responsible for the flavor of raspberries, and the smell of rum, the drink popular with pirates. Therefore, our galaxy tastes a bit of raspberries and smells of rum, which is nice.

[24] Be wary of anything that is offered to you for nothing, especially if it is a new product that the makers are anxious to test. Usually, they will have discovered that the bunny rabbits, dogs, or iron-stomached employees who have already tried it have not died or gone blind as a result, and therefore it’s about time to try it on people who might, at some point, be expected to pay for it. Unless you’ve always wanted to be a human guinea pig, it might be wise to think twice before saying yes to something that a stranger hands to you with a smile, free of charge, especially if there is a doctor or a lawyer hovering nervously nearby.

[25] This is unlike the small towns in television detective shows, where so many people die that it’s a wonder there’s anyone left in the town to kill by the end of the first series. you’d imagine that some of the residents might wonder about this and think, “hmmm, our town appears to be populated entirely by murderers, or people who are about to be murdered, and since we’re not murderers then we must be potential victims. Marjorie, grab the kids and the dog. We’re going to live in new Zealand…”

[26] Actually, teleportation is not nearly as far-fetched as you might think. Scientists at the Joint Quantum Institute in Maryland recently managed to teleport the quantum identity of one atom to another a few feet away. However, teleportation of humans is a long way off, as the experiment only works once in every one hundred million attempts. Therefore the chances of you being teleported and arriving as interesting goo at the other end, if you arrive at all, are very high indeed. you don’t want to be the subject of the following conversation:

“Is he there yet?”

“Well, bits of him are…”