The second email was an invitation to address a meeting of foreign ministers at COP 15, the grand climate-change conference in Copenhagen in December. He would be at one with its spirit and he was, he supposed, the perfect choice. He would be there. His starter arrived, orange-coloured cheese, dipped in batter, rolled in breadcrumbs and salt and deep-fried, with a creamy dip of pale green. Perfection, and in such quantity. As soon as the area around his booth was clear of waiting staff, he poured the remains of the Genever. He ate rapidly and was down to his last three lozenges, and beginning to wonder if some of them were filled with mushroom, not cheese, when the palmtop vibrated by his plate.
‘Toby.’
‘Listen. I’ve got all kinds of bad news for you, but the worst has just happened, minutes ago.’
Beard noted the strained tone of controlled hostility in his friend’s voice.
‘Go on.’
‘Someone’s taken a sledgehammer to the panels. They’ve gone down the rows and taken them all out. Shattered. We’ve lost all the catalysts. Electronics. Everything.’
There was no taking this in properly. Beard pushed his plate away. Builder’s work. What would Barnard have needed to pay him? Two hundred dollars? Less?
‘What else?’
‘We won’t be meeting again. I don’t think I could bear the sight of you, Michael. But you might as well know. I’m talking to a lawyer in Oregon. I’ll be taking action to protect myself against what are rightfully your debts. We, you, already owe three and a half million. Tomorrow’s going to cost another half million. You can go down there yourself and explain to all the good people. Also, Braby is going to take you for everything you have and will ever have. And in the UK that dead boy’s father has persuaded the authorities to move against you on criminal charges, basically theft and fraud. I hate you, Michael. You lied to me and you’re a thief. But I don’t want to see you in prison. So stay out of England. Go somewhere that doesn’t have an extradition treaty.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Only this. You deserve almost everything that’s coming to you. So go fuck yourself.’ The line went dead.
This time he did not conceal the flask as he shook it over his glass. Two drops fell out. His waitress was standing by his elbow with a heaped plate. She was a solemn teenager with hair in a prim ponytail and on her teeth were braces studded with colourful glass beads. It cost her a lot to say what she had to.
‘Sir? We have a no-alcohol poss . . . policy on these premises?’
‘I didn’t know. I’m terribly sorry.’
She took away the bowl with the three cold lozenges and set the main course down before him. Four wedges of skinless chicken breast, interleaved with three minute steaks, the whole wrapped in bacon, with a honey and cheese topping, and served with twice-roasted jacket potatoes already impregnated with butter and cream cheese.
He stared at it a good while. The destination of choice, as the cliché ran, to avoid extradition was Brazil. Was he to buy a ticket to São Paulo and stay with Sylvia? She was a lovely woman, and interesting too. It might not be so bad. But impossible. To soothe himself he took up his knife and fork and was immediately distracted by the sight of the lesion, the melanoma on the back of his hand. It was larger, he thought, since he last looked, and was an angry purplish-brown under the Blooberry’s fluorescent lights. Was he really going to deal with this now, along with everything else? He thought it unlikely. It would take care of itself. Nor would he go to the site tomorrow to speak to the angry crowds. Nor would he be saving the world.
He set the cutlery down unused. What he wanted most was to go alone to a bar and sit at the counter with a scotch. It was a short walk down to 4th Street. But he would take the car. He was about to call his waitress over for the check when he heard a commotion on the far side of the restaurant. He turned and saw Melissa with high colour in her cheeks and wearing one of her vibrant Caribbean dresses of big green flowers against a red and black ground. She was striding past the ‘Please Wait To Be Seated’ sign, and right behind her, surprisingly, was Darlene, and both women looked stormy, furious and rumpled, as if they had just had a fight outside. Now they were looking for him. Ahead of them by several feet was Catriona, carrying a little girl’s backpack designed to give the impression that a koala bear was clinging to her shoulders for a free ride. She saw her father before the women did and was running towards him, coming to claim him, calling out something indistinct, skipping between the crowded tables. As Beard rose to greet her, he felt in his heart an unfamiliar, swelling sensation, but he doubted as he opened his arms to her that anyone would ever believe him now if he tried to pass it off as love.
Appendix
Presentation Speech by Professor Nils Palsternacka of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
(Translation from the Swedish text)
Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen,
That you see me standing before you is a tribute to the photopigments in your eyes that capture light. That we are all feeling pleasantly warm, despite the chilly weather outside in the streets of Stockholm, is by grace of leaves in Carboniferous forests that captured sunlight with their photo-synthetic pigments and left us a residue of coal and oil. These are simple examples of how the interaction of radiation and matter underpins life on earth. In the late nineteen forties, a deep physical understanding of this interaction was achieved by Feynman and Schwinger, and by 1970 it seemed to most physicists that this was a finished chapter and that exploration of fundamentals had moved on either to a more cosmic scale or to events deeper within atoms. Yet there was a surprise in store.
The Solvay Conference is an event of great importance in the physics calendar. At the 1972 gathering, well into an afternoon session, a cry was heard from the back of the hall. Heads turned to see Richard Feynman holding a bundle of papers aloft in his hand. ‘Magic!’ he cried, and advanced to the front, and, apologising to the speaker, seized the stage. In five minutes of intense, gesticulating argument he explained how a problem that had long baffled him had been solved by a young researcher named Michael Beard.
The Solvay ‘magic moment’ has of course gone down in history, and it is not hard to see why the ideas in Beard’s paper appealed so strongly to Feynman. They showed how certain diagrams that described the interaction of light with matter obey a new kind of subtle symmetry that greatly simplifies calculations. In popular perception, quantum mechanics describes the very small; and indeed it is true that only very small systems can easily maintain coherence, in the sense that they preserve their isolation from the environment. Yet Beard’s theory revealed that the events that take place when radiation interacts with matter propagate coherently over a large scale compared to the size of atoms; furthermore, the manner of their propagation resembles the flow diagram for a complicated system, the sort of picture an engineer might give of the workings of an oil refinery, say, or of the logical steps in a computer program. This has transformed our understanding of the photoelectric effect to such an extent that we now speak of the Beard–Einstein Conflation, a spine-tingling hyphenation for any physicist, placing Beard’s work proudly in a lineage originating from Einstein’s revolutionary 1905 paper.
With his genius for popularisation, Feynman contrived a party trick to demonstrate the principles behind the Conflation. This requires six belts or straps that are interwoven in an attractive pattern. Six people then take two free ends each and hold the knot out for inspection. Anyone may verify that a very intractable knot has been created and there is no hope of untying it unless the participants release their ends. Next the participants perform a sort of country-dance pirouette with a neighbour, an operation that seems to increase the intractability of the knot. But then, at a signal, all the participants pull, and to the amazement of the gathering the belts fall apart. Feynman’s Plaid has become a favourite with all physics lecturers, and there is probably no physics undergraduate who has not participated in it, and in some cases met his or her future
spouse in the happy melee.
Here we see the topological essence of Michael Beard’s conception: the action of the group (the exceptional Lie group E8, one of the bulkier residents of the Platonic realm) that disentangles and choreographs the complicated interactions between light and matter, unfolding them into a succession of logical steps. It is the interplay of these operations that constitutes the essential magic, the wave of the enchanter’s wand, and it brings to mind Einstein’s description of Bohr’s atomic theory as the highest form of musicality in the sphere of thought. In the words of the philosopher Francis Bacon:
The sweetest and best Harmony is, when every Part or Instrument, is not heard by it selfe, but a Conflation of them all.
Professor Michael Beard, you have been awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics for your profound contribution to our understanding of the interaction of matter and electromagnetic radiation. It is an honour for me to convey the warmest congratulations of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. I now ask you to step forward to receive your Nobel Prize from the hands of His Majesty the King.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to David Buckland and Cape Farewell for inviting me on a trip to Spitsbergen in February 2005 – this novel had its beginnings on a frozen fjord. Dr Graeme Mitchison of the Centre for Quantum Computation in Cambridge gave generous guidance on mathematics and physics. Any remaining errors are mine. He also kindly unearthed the citation for Michael Beard’s Nobel Prize. I owe thanks to Professor John Schellnhuber, Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, and Stefan Rahmstorf of the same institute, to Dr Doug Arent, James Bosch and Professor John A. Turner of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, Malcolm McCulloch of the Department of Engineering Science, Oxford, Professor Mike Duff of Imperial College, Philip Diamond of the Institute of Physics, Tim Garton Ash and, as always, Annalena McAfee. Thanks to Dan Boekman for lending me a house in New Mexico, and to Greg Carr for his house in Sun Valley, Idaho. I am indebted to innumerable books and papers on climate science and related matters, and to an exchange between Steven Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke on Edge.com. Above all, I owe a debt to Walter Isaacson’s fine biography Einstein.
Table of Contents
Cover
Title
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
By the Same Author
Part One: 2000
Part Two: 2005
Part Three: 2009
Appendix
Acknowledgements
Ian Mcewan, Solar
(Series: # )
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