Gravity's Chain by Alan Goodwin Read Free Book Online Page A

incomprehensible to the average person, a dangerous divide as we engage in debates about GE, stem cell research and cloning. Mitchell’s own Superforce theory is built on maths that no one with anything less than a university degree can hope to understand. This carries many dangers, given the importance of the theory and the new technologies it may produce. How important, then, that, with his current show, Mitchell should try to explain not only his theory, but also science generally, in a way we can understand. As science continues to shape our world it is essential we grasp its fundamental concepts. What a shame that Mitchell has let himself and his great enterprise of popularising science down. The kind of gutter-sniping he has engaged in with Frank Driesler is really beneath him. We hope that this is an isolated incident and that as he returns to New Zealand with his tour he concentrates on what he does best.

THREE
    F rom the moment the automatic doors of the airport open to suck me inside, I’m directed by computer chips. They ensure I sit in the correct seat on the correct plane, send my bags to the correct baggage train and guide me to the correct gate. Throughout my stay in the airport, machines and electronics control my every move. The airport is technology in critical mass. And wherever there’s technology there’s rampant consumerism.
    Once upon a time you could only buy a paperback and a bottle of whisky, but now airports mimic malls with their dominating brand names and Hollywood faces selling beauty to the ugly by image and sex appeal alone. When baggage allowances restrict my luggage space, I’m presented with an unlimited choice of items for which I have no room.
    I also dislike airport architecture. Actually, I loathe airport architecture. It’s just plastic and steel merged into award-winning designs, temples to modern technologies the way railway stations were to a bygone age. Give me the solid protection of those bricks any day; there’s something about modern buildings that give the impression of imminent collapse.
    You’d think I’d be happy to leave the airport, but it only meansentering an even worse place, the plane. Flying freaks me out. I often ask myself why I’m afraid of something so wondrous. Often I’ve watched birds and imagined the exhilaration of swooping and banking, of the wind against my face and my stomach in my throat with the bare-arsed excitement of it all. But we aren’t designed to fly. My only thrill in a plane is relief at avoiding a seat next to the fat sod I’ve suspiciously eyed in the lounge or the screaming kid who’s wheeled a toy between my feet.
    And it amazes me how much a plane can shake on take-off without actually falling apart. Far from feeling as though I’m sitting in a state-of-the-art machine, I might as well be on the number 58 bus on its way to town. Perhaps this is why I really hate flying: it’s the overwhelming fear of, well, of dying. When I’m about to spend the next twenty-four hours in a machine half the size of a rugby field, suspended ten thousand metres above the ground, I don’t want to feel the thing creaking and groaning before it’s gone anywhere. And then when the shaking gives way to something approaching smooth flight, there’s that moment when the plane feels as though it’s about to drop out of the sky. I spend the entire flight thinking I’m never more than two seconds from extinction.
    I made the mistake of sharing these thoughts with Bebe. He was unsympathetic, probably because he’d heard it all before. All he could offer me was the suggestion that I do some work. Now that was a novel thought, an original concept. What work is there left for me to do? I mean, come on, what do I do as an encore to the Theory of Everything? Really, I’ve done myself out of a job, done away with any further interest in physics. All that’s left is bits and