The Gate of Angels. Penelope Fitzgerald

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СКАЧАТЬ in the Cavendish, where Professor Flowerdew, who did not like parties (still less when they were called gatherings) had been all the time. He was just retreating from the physics laboratory, and with one melancholy sideways movement of his head he invited Fred upstairs to his office. This (like most of the rooms, after all) was dark, and reached by a dingy corridor. The walls were covered with photographs, and more photographs were pinned onto the desks. Fred sniffed the air. It was his ambition to have, one of these days, an office in the Cavendish.

      Flowerdew sat down at the desk, leaving the stool near the microscope, and said to Fred, ‘What do you know about me?’

      ‘I’ve only just finished my first degree,’ Fred replied. ‘Truly, I don’t know anything.’

      ‘Well, I know something about you. Yes, something. I know you’re a bright fellow. I know you come from a rectory family. They say that at the Cavendish we have to make do with apparatus knocked up out of cardboard and string. But if you come from a rectory you’ll be used to economies.’

      ‘It’s a great thing you’ve even heard of me at all,’ said Fred.

      ‘And what next?’

      ‘I had thought of asking Professor Wilson whether I could work with him. I mean in some capacity. I could help with the photographic plates, perhaps. He was my tutor for advanced practical physics.’

      ‘C.T.R. Wilson. A very good, very patient Scotsman. Could you read what he wrote on the blackboard?’

      ‘Usually not. He used to write it with one hand and wipe it off at the same time with the other. But if I had the chance to study his methods –’

      ‘You want to assist him with the construction of his third cloud chamber. You want to photograph the alleged tracks of ionising particles.’

      Fred turned red. ‘These are wonderful years in Cambridge.’

      ‘You are attracted towards atomic research?’

      ‘I’ve seen Ernest Rutherford walking into the Cavendish,’ Fred cried. ‘I heard his lectures. It all hangs together. If it works it must be true.’

      ‘Well, well,’ said Professor Flowerdew. ‘I expect it will hang together for a considerable time, perhaps sixty or seventy years. The belief that Nature, or an invisible god, created the world and assigned everything for a purpose, lasted very much longer than that and worked reasonably well. But we’ve given all that up, because we’ve got no evidence that God or Nature exists.’

      ‘None at all,’ said Fred. ‘That has to be left to faith. After all, you can only reason from what you can observe.’

      ‘Quite so,’ said Professor Flowerdew. ‘But atoms are unobservables.’ He pointed to one of the photographs on the wall.

      ‘Who is that?’ he asked.

      Fred floundered, looking at the bearded, enigmatic faces, one of which had been circled in red ink. There were distant men in frock coats and top-hats, standing outside a building he did not recognise.

      ‘That is Ernst Mach, a photograph taken in Vienna on the occasion of his retirement from the University Chair of physics. I used to be in correspondence with him, now I no longer am. It was from his lectures and his Science of Mechanics that I came to understand the folly of basing any kind of scientific research on unobservables. Mach, don’t forget, is a very deeply respected physicist. He has established, among many other things, the relationship between the speed of objects and the local speed of sound. But in respect of the atom, Mach said to the world, don’t commit yourself to it! An atom is not a reality, it is just a provisional idea, so how can we say that it is situated in space? We ought to feel suspicious of it when we find that it has been given characteristics which absolutely contradict those which have been observed in any other body. There is a continuity of scientific thought, you know. The continuity is now being thrown out of the window. Let us hope we shall remember where it is when, at long last, we find that we can’t do without it.’

      He looked compassionately at Fred. ‘You’re hungry. But it’s of no use going down now, the Science Faculty will have eaten everything. The organic chemists will have cleared the sandwiches. Let me tell you what is going to happen, over the coming centuries, to atomic research.

      ‘There will be many apparent results, some useful, some spectacular, some, very possibly, unpleasant. But since the whole basis of the present research is unsound, cracks will appear in the structure one by one. The physicists will begin by constructing models of the atom, in fact there are some very nice ones in the Cavendish at the moment. Then they’ll find that the models won’t do, because they would only work if atoms really existed, so they’ll replace them by mathematical terms which can be stretched to fit. As a result, they’ll find that since they’re dealing with what they can’t observe, they can’t measure it, and so we shall hear that all that can be said is that the position is probably this and the energy is probably that. The energy will be beyond their comprehension, so they’ll be driven to the theory that it comes and goes more or less at random. Now their hypotheses will be at the beginning of collapse and they will have to pull out more and more bright notions to paper over the cracks and to cram into unsightly corners. There will be elementary particles which are too strange to have anything but curious names, and anti-matter which ought to be there, but isn’t. By the end of the century they will have to admit that the laws they are supposed to have discovered seem to act in a profoundly disorderly way. What is a disorderly law, Fairly?’

      ‘It sounds like chaos,’ said Fred.

      ‘The chaos will be in their minds only. It, too, will not be observable.’

      ‘What do you think is to be done?’

      ‘Admit the wrong direction, and go back to what can be known through the senses. If they don’t depend on true evidence, scientists are no better than gossips.’

      Professor Flowerdew had, he said, been fortunate. The university during the last ten years or so had been surprisingly ready to create – by Grace, to use their own terms – posts, and even professorships, which would last only for as long as was thought necessary. There were, for instance, travelling bachelorships ‘for the encouragement of investigation into foreign countries’, established by the Special Board for Military Studies – scholarships in other words for spies. As a kind of counterweight some of the appointments had no apparent practical use whatsoever. Herbert Flowerdew had been offered a temporary Professorship in Observable Experimental Physics.

      Fred was shocked by the word ‘fortunate’. He felt that luck and chance should have no place in science, and above all at the Cavendish.

      ‘The Cavendish is becoming very crowded,’ said Flowerdew. ‘There is a pot-house atmosphere. I have arranged to have a small laboratory of my own in the Department of Mechanical Philosophy.’ His own experiments were in the principles of equivalence and reciprocity. He couldn’t, then, be altogether cracked.

      But was it, Fred broke out in distress, that he had no interest in the work of Wilson, and Rutherford, and Planck, and Niels Bohr, whose almost inaudible lectures Fred had also heard that year?

      ‘Not at all. I follow all that they printed with great interest, both through the German and the English journals. I am impressed with their results. I admire their great talents. But when I think of their future I hear the sadness of old men and those whom the gods have deserted.’

      Flowerdew needed an assistant at £100 a year, which he would СКАЧАТЬ