The Call-Girls by Arthur Koestler Read Free Book Online Page A

sleep. He did not make plans concerning the future and was unaware that it had already been decided.
    He did not abandon his piano, but found less time to spare for it. His private Pantheon now contained two sets of heroes, amiably facing each other: in one row Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, Schubert, Haydn, stopping at Schönberg; in the other row, Archimedes, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Planck and Einstein, Rutherford and Bohr. Thissecond row was open-ended, and new figures were from time to time added to it: Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Dirac, Pauli. His parents were bitterly disappointed when, after passing his
baccalauréat,
he decided to study theoretical physics in Göttingen, instead of entering the
Conservatoire.
But they realized that it was a mature decision, and he had a way of having his way.
    He now believed, with almost religious fervour, that the mystery of the universe was contained in the equations which governed the ballet of the tiny particles inside the atom, and in the Wagnerian grand opera performed by comets, stars and galaxies. Ironically, his student years in Göttingen and at the Cavendish in Cambridge fell into a period when leading physicists everywhere were abandoning that dream. A decade earlier it had indeed seemed that the universe was yielding up its ultimate secrets – that physics was close to reaching the rock-bottom of reality. But the rock turned into a bottomless mud-bank. Earlier on, each atom was thought to be a miniature solar system, consisting of a nucleus of protons surrounded by orbiting electrons, replicating the harmony of the spheres on a microscopic scale. The infinitely large and the infinitely small were dancing to the same tune. By the time Nikolai graduated, this beguiling vision had disintegrated into a mad Wonderland, where an electron could be in two places at once or in no place at all. All traditional, human notions of space, time and matter had gone overboard, followed by the sacred principles of logic which linked cause and effect; all certainties had vanished from the universe, to be replaced by statistical probabilities; space itself became curved, wrinkled, pockmarked with holes filled with anti-matter of negative mass; the harmony of the spheres had turned into a cacophony.
    Nikolai found this situation both distressing and exhilarating. He belonged to that unorthodox minority of physicists who, like Einstein himself, refused to believe ‘that God plays dice with the universe’. He continued to believe that the harmony was there, hidden in the cacophony – the heavenly tune which ‘none can hear with gross unpurged ear’. Hiscolleagues, who believed in ‘the world-a-game-of-craps’ philosophy, called him an incurable romantic (his first piano teacher had used the same expression); but they could not deny his brilliance. This was the time when the so-called elementary particles of matter began to multiply like mushrooms. Originally, there had been only two: the negative electron and the positive proton. Now every year more elementary particles were discovered in the laboratories, each with weirder attributes than the last, until there were almost a hundred different kinds of building-blocks of matter – neutrons, mesons, positrons, leptons, and what-have-you. The one discovered by Nikolai Solovief, which brought him the Nobel Prize while still in his thirties, was the weirdest particle of all – even weirder than the neutrino which travelled at the speed of light, had zero mass, and could penetrate the thickest armour like a bullet going through an omelette soufflée. Solovief’s particle had negative mass, was repelled by gravity, travelled faster than light, and thus, according to the Relativity Theory, backward in time. Fortunately, its life-time was so short – a fraction of a trillionth of a second – that it did not really matter. It was a ghostly particle, yet its track could be clearly seen in