At the time the Nobel was announced, few people had heard of him – he emerged from the obscurity of the closed unit where the PAF was being developed, flew to Oslo, made a short, gracious speech of acceptance in Dutch, then returned to Strasbourg, the location of the laboratory. It was only then that the public became aware of the PAF in the most general of terms – the popular press, guessing and simplifying, immediately described it as an infallible weapon of passive defence. It was soon known as The Weapon That Will End War. Within a year, though, the wider scientific community had been informed of the result of the PAF research, and not long afterwards it was universally understood in those circles. Rietveld modestly shared the credit for the development with the other scientists, but because he was a Nobel laureate he was assumed to be the team leader. It was in fact his theoretical work that led to the development of a practical application.
The PAF was for a while known as the adjacency defence. As originally conceived it had no aggressive function, being in every respect a passive reactant. Using what quantum physicists sometimes call annihilation operators, an adjacency field could be created to divert physical matter into a different, or adjacent, realm. An incoming missile, to use the famous example described by Professor Rietveld, need not be intercepted or diverted or destroyed – it could be moved to an adjacent quantum dimension, so that to all intents and purposes it would cease to exist. In its early working models, adjacency consumed a huge amount of energy, but it was in its nature that it could be minimized, maximized, deployed again and again. Subsequent development of the technique concentrated on reducing the energy load, of making the defence system a more practical device. Professor Rietveld once optimistically described the potential for an ideative future world in which every city, every scientific installation, every home, perhaps even every individual person, might one day be permanently protected from physical assault by a localized field of adjacency.
Drawing on the lessons of history, in particular the experiences of their forebears who had worked on the Manhattan Project, the theoretical work which led directly to the first nuclear weapons, Rietveld and his colleagues produced an extensive and formal rationale in defence of their theoretical work. The Perturbative Adjacent Field had no possible application as an aggressive weapon, they explained in their apologia. Its function was wholly peaceful. It could not destabilize the world, or in any way affect the balance of power between east and west, south and north. Ideologies, economic systems, religious beliefs, political movements, would remain intact because they were immune from its effect. Adjacency could not kill, could not poison, would not pollute, did not spill radioactive waste, could not become corrupted by falling into the wrong hands.
It was what followed that sent Professor Rietveld into his self-imposed exile from the world. Within two years the first test of an adjacency weapon took place in the Gobi Desert – naturally, it was ‘under the strictest of scientific and moral controls’. The use of the word annihilation was picked up by a journalist from a scientific paper, and thence into popular understanding. Proliferation followed, as was inevitable, as Rietveld and the others had feared and tried to prevent, and soon every major or expansionist power had one form or another of the device. No one threatened to use it – it was simply enough to possess the capability. There was no talk any more of its role as a passively reactant defence.
I had heard that Professor Rietveld was not well, that he had been diagnosed with some unspecified but degenerative condition, and that he was now eighty-two. I tried a long shot, made contact, asked for my interview, and that was how it began.
2
In the event I never wrote or published the interview based on our meeting. I had proposed it for my own reasons: I was working on the Society page for the newspaper, and felt I was in a journalistic dead end. My editor agreed that I could try writing serious profiles of famous or celebrated personalities in the arts or sciences.
Professor Rietveld was my first project: I heard a mention of his work on adjacency defence on a late-night television programme, and I made contact with him the next day after a lead from a friendly official at the Foreign Office. I knew little about Rietveld, I had no background in physics, certainly had no grasp at all of quantum field theory, and was as ill-prepared for a serious interview as ever I had been. I spent the weekend browsing through the newspaper’s database, but without learning much about him in any depth, or anything closely relevant to his work.
His early life was in the Netherlands, then latterly in Germany, the USA and the UK – all this was adequately covered but it had little directly to do with the discoveries of his later career. There was extensive reporting of his Nobel prize and his speech, and the Science & Technology page of the newspaper ran a long and detailed essay by an outside contributor, an academic at Cambridge University. This was an account of the theoretical basis of parity-symmetry, weak interactions and particles with significant masses. After his outburst against the President of the USA at a White House dinner in his honour, and his subsequent disappearance from public life, Professor Rietveld became a different kind of celebrity: an exile from a body of thought, a political protester, a scientist who was trying to repudiate his own discoveries, someone who shunned not only publicity but contact with other researchers in his field. As often happens with people in public life, after intense initial media curiosity, interest about his possible whereabouts or activities was almost non-existent.
I don’t know what I expected to find on arrival: maybe a physically handicapped old man struggling against cancer. Or an embittered reject from the body scientific. Or perhaps even a senile, shrunken figure, lost in disconcerting mental fragments of despair, anger and misremembered details.
In person he looked many years younger than his actual age. He walked with a slight limp, blaming osteoarthritis. He spoke excellent, almost unaccented English, but many of the books on his shelves were in Dutch or German. He spoke in a wry, serious voice, and made no jokes or self-effacing remarks. He told me he had a housekeeper, whom I did not meet as it was her day off. A nurse visited him once a week and collected his prescription medication for him. He showed me his garden, which he said he felt obliged to keep tidy, and he showed me round his house, which he said he loved and felt no such obligation to tidiness – it was in fact not at all a cluttered or unclean house, but had the cosy feel of a place well lived in. He said he knew none of his neighbours by name, but always greeted them in a friendly way. He told me his wife was dead and that they had had one daughter, but she too had died a few years before.
He was neither sad, bitter, secretive nor particularly outgoing. He answered my questions with apparent truth and sincerity, but because the questions I was asking were general in nature, so too were his replies.
Eventually he asked me if I understood quantum theory, or quantified field theory. I told him I did not and he looked relieved. He said he was tired of trying to explain it to non-physicists. Then he asked me why I had approached him for the interview. By this time I felt there was nothing to lose by honesty, so I told him I was looking for a better position on the newspaper I worked for. He told me that if in fact I had turned up at his house armed with detailed questions about bosons, gravitons or superstrings, he would not have had much to say because he was now many years behind and would not have wanted to risk being quoted in the scientific press, revealing how out of date he had become on quantum theory.
We were interrupted by the arrival of the photographer, who had driven down from London. He was exactly on time, which surprised me, as photographers normally turned up either late or early at interviews like this. He was someone I had not worked with before, a young man who spoke with an American accent, apparently on his first freelance commission for the newspaper. He proved to be a careful and imaginative worker. With the professor’s permission he went through the various rooms in the house on his own, then walked slowly around the garden, seeking angles or positions from which to take his pictures.
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When he was ready he led Professor Rietveld into his garden. The professor paused only to pick up a pink-and-amber coloured conch shell I had noticed earlier, sitting on a shelf near the window. He nodded to me with a faint smile as he followed the photographer into the garden, but gave no hint about what was amusing him. I was left alone in the large kitchen-diner. This was where the professor told me he took all his meals: the sink was piled up with unwashed dishes, but otherwise it was a clean, comfortable room with a view down the garden.
I watched the young man working with his subject, asking him to stand in the shade beneath a large tree, to walk past the beds of roses, to sit in the rustic seat on the side of the slightly overgrown lawn. It was high summer: flowers were everywhere, and honey bees were hovering around the dog roses and buddleia that were growing beside the small patio.
The professor looked relaxed and cooperative, and as I watched him chatting to the photographer I began to think that I might after all be able to write an intriguing or interesting portrait of the man, even if I understood little about his work. It was a human story, perhaps: one of the world’s great scientists, living out his years in the green Sussex countryside, feeling behind the times he had help explicate, beyond all ambition or regret or pride.
The two men were speaking intently to each other, but from where I was standing at the window I could not hear a word. The professor pointed up towards the sky – the American guy looked where he was indicating. Then the professor walked to the side of the garden, where he had laid the conch shell on the edge of the lawn. He moved to the centre of the grass, holding the large shell in one hand. He posed like that: both hands extended, the left empty, the right balancing the beautiful shell with its subtle colours and the fascinating spiral construction.
The photographer took many shots of him: from different angles, close up, and from as far across the garden as he could back away to. He finished with a series of shots from middle range, presumably capturing full-length images.
Finally, the young American appeared to be satisfied he had enough shots. Both men shook hands amiably. They walked back towards the house, the professor carrying his shell in one hand. The photographer halted and raised his camera to take a picture of something above his head. The professor immediately restrained him, swiftly pulling down the other man’s arms to prevent any pictures being taken.
They entered the kitchen together, apparently still cordial, and the professor put the conch shell back on the shelf.
I said to the photographer, ‘Do you have everything you need?’
‘Yes.’ He fished into an inner pocket then handed me his card. I glanced at it, because I liked the way he worked and I wanted to remember his name if future work opportunities arose. He was called Tibor Tarent, a freelance with membership of a couple of professional organizations, an address and contact details in London. ‘I’ll see you at the newspaper office tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I’ll bring some prints in, and we can have a look at them.’
All this was the sort of practical conversation I usually had with photographers sent to work with me on an assignment. The next day’s meeting would probably include the pictures editor as well as my boss.
But then Tibor Tarent said, ‘Would you help me get my stuff back in the car?’ He led me outside – his car was parked opposite the house. As soon as we were away from the house he said, ‘That is one of the most amazing men I have ever met. I’ll never forget what happened. Did you see what he was doing while I was taking pictures of him?’
‘I was in the kitchen – I couldn’t see too well.’
‘It’s impossible to describe. I’ll show you the photos tomorrow. He was like a magician – he could make that big shell appear and disappear. I couldn’t see how he was doing it.’
‘I was watching from the window, but there was a trellis in the way. He didn’t seem to be moving about.’
‘That was it. He didn’t move a muscle, but something weird was happening. I took pictures of it all. You’ll see tomorrow.’
While we were speaking he had opened the car and placed his camera equipment carefully inside. Then we shook hands, he climbed into the car and drove away.
I returned to the house.
The professor was sitting at his scrubbed pine table in the kitchen-diner, resting his head on his hands. He looked up, and his eyes looked redder than they had been before, his complexion more sallow.
He said, ‘I’m afraid that young man has tired me out. That’s not a criticism of him – he has a job to do, but sometimes it is a real effort to keep up an appearance of normality.’
‘Professor Rietveld, just before the photographer arrived you were talking about physics.’
‘Was I really? I didn’t think you would be interested.’
‘I said I didn’t understand quantum physics, but that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in what your work meant to you.’
‘My work was my life.’
‘That’s what I thought.’
‘And in some ways my life ended after I was given that prize, because after that it was impossible to keep Perturbative Adjacency secret. Of course the media was interested in what I was doing, but so too were my colleagues and rivals. We were forced to declare our hand long before we were ready. What we had discovered was more shocking, more devastating in theory than splitting the atom. What we wanted to do before we announced our findings was either to find some way of controlling it, putting it to passive use only, or, much more difficult, we wanted to try and close the Pandora’s box.’
‘I always thought adjacency could only be used passively.’
‘That is what we said then. Of course, we should have known, and we did know, that once our papers were open to review it was only a matter of time before some other group discovered the whole truth.’
‘I understood that the balance of power had not destabilized.’
‘The major powers, yes. How we trust them! Look, I must show you what I tried to show that young man with the camera. Please, come into the garden with me.’
I helped him out of his chair. He picked up a small scrap of card that was lying next to some books on a shelf, then gave me his arm so I could support him. We walked together into the sun-drenched garden.
‘You obviously now realize what happened to me a few years ago when I was in Strasbourg. We were naïve, all of us but especially me – we thought we were making a breakthrough into something that would neutralize weapons. It would always be safe to use, non-aggressive in nature, harmless because it would remove harm. But what we all feared soon came to pass: minds other than ours worked out how to make quantum adjacency into a weapon of war. It’s now too late to regret that. We can’t change history. What we most dreaded, though, was that sooner or later the process would become devolved, if you see what I mean. Small groups, terrorists, insurgents, private militias, might be able to get hold of smaller, more portable forms of adjacency generator. With people like that, even the false responsibility of the major powers would be gone.’
‘I understand,’ I said.
‘I want you to look at what I have had built above this garden.’
He pointed upwards. I saw now that a small metal contrivance, not in any way streamlined or given the sheen of professional manufacture, hung directly above the lawn. It was held up by three strong wires, which ran from narrow metal poles, two placed in the far corners of the garden, and the third close to the house. The object suspended at the centre had various metal and plastic components, but the centrepiece was a dull grey sphere, rather like the side of an old aluminium kettle. It was about half a metre in diameter.
‘Now let me ask you if you know what a tetrahedron is?’
I said, ‘It’s a geometric form of some kind, isn’t it?’
He brandished the piece of card he had picked up. It was in the shape of a parallelogram, and had three creases scored though it. It had obviously been folded and unfolded many times.
‘This is called a
net,’ he said, meaning the card. He quickly folded it to form a solid triangle. ‘You see, a tetrahedron is a triangular shape with four sides and four vertices. It is physically very stable, very strong – it always takes the same form, no matter which side is down. This is similar to what some physicists call an interaction, in this case a strong interaction. We can only break it down by a process of theoretical annihilation, using what we call a bosonic field annihilation operator. Am I explaining too much?’
I was scribbling as much as I could into my notebook, from which I am now transcribing what the professor told me that summer’s day, but in fact he was, as he said, explaining too much and too quickly.
‘This card model is just a symbol, a way to explain,’ he said. He unfolded it and slipped it into his pocket. ‘The quantum adjacency we created can be considered as a tetrahedron of particles.’ He pointed up to the globe above our heads. ‘Think of that as the apex, the strong constant point. Beneath it is a virtual tetrahedron, so where we are standing is in the centre of a triangle imprinted on the ground.’
I could not help glancing down. Beneath me was a lawn in need of mowing.
Professor Rietveld said, ‘I need you to understand what I say, because I want you to write about it in your article. What you see here is not a weapon. This is an experimental piece, one I adjust and calibrate for scientific purposes. But a portable adjacency weapon, much cruder than anything ever worked on in laboratory conditions, operates from above, just as this experimental model does. It has to be directly above whatever the target is. In practice, in anger, it may be dropped from a plane, fired from a mortar or a large gun, fired in a missile. It may even be thrown from a high building. In fact, one already has been used in that way: the disaster in Godhra two years ago – you will remember that?’