Symmetry

He smiles nervously, looking down the lens of the camera and seeing the darkness winking back. It reminds him of the event horizons he’s never seen.
‘Of all your work, what is it you’re most proud of?’
He’d have thought that was obvious. That camera is still focused on him, pinning him against the chair with its eyeless stare. Not for the first time, he considers how it works. The information gleaned from a billion photons bombarding the lens converted into digital information, which could then be used to make a crude reproduction of the light the camera had detected. The symmetry of it was pleasing – very much in line with the prevailing order of the universe.
[private]‘I enjoyed my work on symmetry very much.’
‘And do you think you could explain to the viewers what that means?’
The interviewer looks at him expectantly, her young eyes wide with something between awe and frustration. She’s very pretty, very elegant. She has a symmetrical face. An almost symmetrical face.
‘… No. I don’t think I could.’
That elegant face creases briefly, rankled by his uncooperative nature. Some kind of professionalism pulls it back into place in the blink of an eye, but he sees it. Of course he sees it; he has spent his life looking for events that take place on a scale so small and fast that they can barely be said to have happened at all. In comparison, the scowl gracing her face may as well have been painted on the Sistine Chapel. He could have taken pictures and made a slideshow.
‘Well, I suppose it wouldn’t have been worth a Nobel Prize if you could explain it so easily!’
They both force a laugh. He considers Einstein and the photoelectric effect. It was a simple idea, easily explained, that had won the Nobel Prize too.
‘Modern physics is necessarily complex. Breaking down the universe gets harder every year. I’d imagine that soon a single lifetime won’t be long enough to make discoveries in.’
He means that part. Really. A lifetime spent researching things younger men have proved to be wrong. His legacy reduced to nothing but a handful of papers – brilliant papers, papers that reshaped the paradigm of physics, but that represent only a tiny fraction of his work. The rest of it was wrong. All wrong.
‘It’s often been said that you’re the greatest physicist of the twenty first century. What’s it like working under such enormous expectations, and what do you think it is that makes a person great?’

*
What Makes a Person Great?

His name is Alexander Maynard, and the question is one that has robbed him of more sleep than any other. He knows his life is exceptional, but is ignorant of the reason why. On dark and lonely nights, he consoles his ego with the idea that success was inevitable, that he has always possessed a mighty intellect that cannot be stopped.
He knows this is a lie. Alexander’s life is the consequence of circumstance and chance, the sum of all his experiences. Some of it he chose, most was decided before he was even born.
Alexander was the only son of Joseph Maynard, a man crippled by his work and ambition. Before the birth of his only child, Joseph had been trained as a mechanical engineer, finding work designing the fiddly bits in European cars. It had been well paid, and Joseph was the kind of man who could become truly enthusiastic about the minutiae of design. He was a man more proud of the details in his work than of its function. Days could be spent experimenting with the best shape for a wing mirror to reduce drag, or the precise folding mechanism for a windscreen wiper. If it wasn’t work, Joseph would be content scrutinising any object he could lay his hands on, to the extent that his garage was often nothing more than a carpet of screws and sheets of metal – hundreds of items in various states of disassembly that Joseph would begin and soon forget about.
Ultimately, it would be Joseph’s relentless desire to tinker that put Alexander on the path to greatness. Shortly before Alexander was born, his father was given the job of examining and tuning a prototype car before it was tested. Going above and beyond the call of duty, Joseph often worked late, always eager to find some fault to correct, and though he was enthusiastic he was not the most cautious man in the world. The car manufacturer would call the incident a “tragic accident” and Joseph was compensated generously, but nothing could change the facts. A malfunctioning car jack had left Joseph with two tonnes of German steel lying on his midsection, paralysing him completely.
Alexander was born just days after his father’s accident, with the mother leaving them shortly after that. Whoever she had been, Alexander’s mother did not want to deal with two invalids at once. Joseph was left staring at a hospital ceiling for almost a month before he first saw his only son. It had been an auspicious day – 29th February 2012.
Alexander had often wondered what his life would be like if his father had been killed beneath that car, instead of paralysed. It probably wouldn’t have made life any easier, but it might have made it a little more normal. After the accident, the young Alexander was all Joseph had left in the world. The shock of his wife’s departure nearly broke the man completely, and the nurse did not help by constantly putting some warm lump of infant near his face. His newborn son never smelt of anything but stale vomit. It wasn’t a good start to their relationship, and with little else to think about, Joseph began to wonder how he could make his future life bearable. The trouble was that his son was like any other baby, and unless he did something, would likely end up being just like any other child.
Joseph had always assumed the mother would take care of the boy until he was old enough to learn differential equations, but that wasn’t going to happen anymore. So for the first year of Alexander’s life, Joseph watched the child from his bed, as he was changed and fed by the nurse. For almost a year, Joseph did not leave the hospital bed as operation after operation attempted to replace his shattered vertebrae. By the time father and son were ready to return home, the seeds of a plan had been sown in the engineer’s mind. His son was a complex, albeit useless machine. It was different, because it could not be worked on with a hammer or a twelve thousand-pound laser-cutter, but he felt confident that his son could be improved nevertheless. When Joseph was lowered into his wheelchair for the first time, and his son placed on his lap, he smiled for the first time since the accident. He had found something new to tinker with.
‘Tell us about your father – you’ve always said he was your single biggest influence.’
‘Mmh. I think you could blame him for my success. He was a very… complex man.’
‘Complex? How so?’
‘Actually, complex is the wrong word. Insane might be more accurate. He was a man obsessed by the truth, and obsessed with making me capable of finding it.’
‘And that’s why you became a physicist?’
‘In a way, my father turned me into a scientist long before I got a salary for it. He thought every question deserved nothing less than a rigorous answer. It never occurred to him that when a four year-old asks why the sky is blue, he doesn’t want a lecture on electromagnetic radiation and quantised energy levels in the atom. … I suppose it’s why I never asked him what made grass green.’
It wasn’t until Alexander was eleven that he realised what a strange life he had led. All he had known were the teachings of his father, and he had embraced them. There had been no storytime for him, only foundations of mathematics. Instead of building blocks, Alex had been given a two-stroke engine and four years to build his own. What was stranger than Joseph’s complete ignorance towards child rearing was how well Alex coped with it. It was almost frightening how accomplished the quiet and attentive Alexander had become in the last ten years. It made the father wonder whether his son was exceptional, or if all children were capable of the extraordinary perception Alex possessed. It hardly mattered though – Joseph had discovered a great joy in shaping and changing something with nothing but words. The satisfaction of imparting some lesson on the nature of the universe and watching as his son’s behaviour change before his eyes. It was a beautiful thing to nourish Alex with nothing but facts, and to watch as the boy cultivated the same principles – the same prejudices – that his father held so dear. Crippled but happy, it was not long before Joseph took real pride in his son.
Joseph had never bothered to send his son to a primary school, believing that his young prodigy would only be “contaminated and dulled” by the experience. In fact, Alex’s contact with the outside world had been minimal until Joseph announced that he would send his son to secondary school. It wasn’t so that Alex could learn anything – Joseph was sure he had already taught the boy anything worth knowing – but so that he could experience what he described as “the harsh reality of modern society”.
‘He had a real chip on his shoulder. He hated, hated what society had done to science. He only sent me to school so I could “see how stupid people are”. It shocked me, but I never hated it like he did. He loathed alternative medicines, had nothing but disdain for the media and despised the cult of celebrity. …It’s funny, but it seems the latter half of my life has become a study in irony because of it.’
‘Some would say you’ve inherited these strong views. Do you think science still suffers from misrepresentation?’
‘First of all, my opinions are not that of my father. He was never happier than when some global disaster threatened civilisation. He always thought they happened because politicians had failed to listen to the experts. I can’t imagine how happy he’d have been if he lived to see the thirties. That actually leads me back to your question – after that decade of everything going wrong, no one was quite so apathetic anymore. So yeah, I think people are definitely better informed now, because they know growth and stability depends upon scientific advancement. I think it can only be a good thing that the world at large was made aware of the cost that maintaining our lifestyle incurs. Having said that, most of my work has absolutely zero benefit to the public – at least until some bright spark finds a practical use for it.’
‘And is that likely to happen? How does theoretical physics help the public?’
‘In lots of ways. For example, the technologies that have relieved our uranium dependence started life in the Shanghai LPPA. In a very real sense, particle physics stopped the war in Niger.’
‘That’s a bold claim to make: “theoretical physics ends wars”.’
‘…You should use that as your headline.’
There were always complications. His father’s funeral was the first time that Alex felt there might exist things that could not be reduced into formulae and distilled into logic. He had never felt so conflicted as when the coffin disappeared from sight beneath the earth. It suddenly occurred to him that he’d never see his father again, never hear the whirr of his wheelchair motor. That low hum that had always warned of Joseph’s advance… It had been comforting to Alex as a child, but by his teens he’d come to hate that sound, recognising it as a herald of bitter arguments. As a thirteen year-old Alex had thought stairs were the greatest invention on the planet.
And all that was behind him now. His father had been his biggest – his only – link to his past, and now he was dead. Alex found himself wishing he’d argued less with his father in the last few years, and wondered why it should even matter. His father didn’t care; he was dead, that was the point. That was definitely one of Joseph’s lessons – dead people don’t care what you say because they are dead. He seemed to go out of his way to offend the religiously minded whenever the opportunity arose. Alex smiled at the thought, considering what an ignominious end his father had come to. He shouldn’t have died, but for the spine. He’d been complaining about the pain for years, and six months ago he’d finally come to the top of the waiting list for another operation on his back.
There had been complications, some kind of infection because the operating theatre hadn’t been sterilised properly. Ordinarily it would have been treatable, but it was able to rapidly progress up and down Joseph’s useless spine. Useless for everything but killing him it seemed. Because the infection had started in the spine, by the time doctors noticed it had already knocked out most of his central nervous system. A stupid, slow death for a man who had spent over eighteen years trapped in his own body. When Joseph could no longer swallow, he was fed intravenously. When he couldn’t breathe, he was put on life support. It had taken almost half a year for the end to come and Alex had ignored the whole ordeal. The doctors had tried calling, but they’d been ignored right up until the letter containing his father’s death certificate arrived.
A stupid death. The thought reverberated around the young man’s head as each shovel of dirt clattered against the coffin. It wouldn’t have happened if the theatre had been properly sterilised. That would have been done if the work experience boy didn’t have a habit of picking his nose, but even so none of it would have mattered if his father hadn’t needed the operation. If a single car jack had done its job almost two decades ago, none of this would have happened.
For the first time Alex wondered what his life would have been like if his father had chosen to leave work on time and on his feet eighteen years ago.

‘That was the first time I ever really felt how perilous my existence – everyone’s existence – really is. I’m still a little ashamed it took so long for me to realise.’
‘Was it difficult to cope without your father?’
‘I wish I could say it was, but by the time he died I was two terms into my first year of university, and before that we hadn’t had a proper conversation in years. He always thought I was “wasting my ability”.’
‘So how did you feel when you heard the news that he was dead?’
‘Annoyed, more than anything else. We’d lived at the opposite end of the country to where I was studying and I knew I was going to have a nightmare getting down in time for the funeral, an expensive nightmare. I still remember that it was the week after BP declared bankruptcy and the whole transport system was in chaos. I had to wait two days for a train in Manchester. All I could think was how many lectures I was missing and how much this trip was costing me. Until I actually got to the graveyard, I was convinced I wasting my time.’
‘Why? What happened when you arrived?’
‘I had that revelation all kids fail to have until their parents are dead – too late to change anything, of course. You never have that sort of problem in physics. The time you discover something should be irrelevant, because the universe should be time symmetric – that it doesn’t matter when you do something, the outcome should be the same. An apple that falls in winter should fall in the same way the next summer. It doesn’t work like that for people though, and as it turns out, it doesn’t work like that in physics either.’[/private]

Gerard McCaul is eighteen and hopes to go to university in September… to study physics, natch. He likes to read, play Age of Empires and spin fire poi.