Stranger Than We Can Imagine

by John Higgs

  But while the target of the bombing may have made little sense to Conrad, that does not mean that it was equally meaningless to Bourdin. As the American cyberpunk author William Gibson would note, ‘The future is already here. It is just not very evenly distributed.’ Ideas spread unevenly and travel at unpredictable speeds. Perhaps Bourdin glimpsed something remotely resembling an idea that was otherwise invisible to Conrad. As the twentieth century began, the logic behind his target slowly came into focus.

  The earth hurtled through the heavens. On its surface, gentlemen checked their pocket watches.

  It was 31 December 1900. The earth swung around the sun and minute hands moved around clock faces. When both hands pointed up to twelve it meant that the earth, after travelling thousands of miles, had reached the required position on its yearly circuit. At that moment the twentieth century would begin.

  In ancient history there is a concept called an omphalos. An omphalos is the centre of the world or, more accurately, what was culturally thought to be the centre of the world. Seen in a religious context, the omphalos was also the link between heaven and earth. It was sometimes called the navel of the world or the axis mundi, the world pillar, and it was represented physically by an object such as a pillar or a stone.

  An omphalos is a universal symbol common to almost all cultures, but with different locations. To the ancient Japanese, it was Mount Fuji. To the Sioux, it was the Black Hills. In Greek myth, Zeus released two eagles in order to find the centre of the world. They collided above Delphi, so this became the Greek omphalos. Rome itself was the Roman omphalos, for all roads led there, and later still Christian maps became centred on Jerusalem.

  On New Year’s Eve 1900, the global omphalos was the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, South London.

  The Royal Observatory is an elegant building, founded by Charles II in 1675 and initially designed by Sir Christopher Wren. In 1900 the world was measured from a line that ran north–south through this building. This international standard had been agreed at a conference in Washington DC sixteen years earlier, when delegates from twenty-five countries voted to accept Greenwich as the prime meridian. San Domingo voted against and France and Brazil abstained, but the meeting was largely a formality; 72 per cent of the world’s shipping used sea charts that listed Greenwich as zero degrees latitude, and the USA had already based its time zones on Greenwich.

  Here, then, was the centre of the world, a seat of science bestowed by royal patronage. It overlooked the Thames in London, the capital city of the largest empire in history. The twentieth century only began when the clocks in this building declared that it had begun, because the calibrations of those clocks were based on the positions of the stars directly above. This modern, scientific omphalos had not lost the link between heaven and earth.

  When you visit the observatory today, at dusk or night, you will see the prime meridian represented by a green laser beam, straight and steady, cutting across the sky. It begins at the observatory and is perfectly aligned to zero degrees latitude. The laser did not exist in 1900, of course. The line then was an idea, a mental projection applied to the real world. From here, a net of similar longitude lines stretched outwards to the west and east, reaching further and further around the curve of the globe until they met at the other side. They crossed a similar set of latitude lines, based at the equator, which stretched out to the north and the south. Together this mental web created a universal time zone and positioning system which could synchronise everyone and everywhere on the planet.

  On New Year’s Eve 1900, people took to the streets in different cities and nations around the world and welcomed in the new century. Nearly a hundred years later, the celebrations that marked the next millennium took place on New Year’s Eve 1999 rather than 2000. This was a year early and technically wrong, but few people cared. When the staff at the Greenwich Observatory explained that the twenty-first century didn’t actually start until 1 January 2001, they were dismissed as pedants. Yet at the start of the twentieth century the observatory had authority, and the world celebrated as they dictated. Greenwich was the place that mattered. So it was with some satisfaction that the members of Victorian society present checked their watches, awaited the correct time, and witnessed the birth of a new era.

  It appeared, on the surface, to be an ordered, structured era. The Victorian worldview was supported by four pillars: Monarchy, Church, Empire and Newton.

  The pillars seemed solid. The British Empire would, in a few years, cover a quarter of the globe. Despite the humiliation of the Boer War, not many realised how badly the Empire had been wounded and fewer still recognised how soon it would collapse. The position of the Church looked similarly secure, despite the advances of science. The authority of the Bible may have been contradicted by Darwin and advances in geology, but society did not deem it polite to dwell too heavily on such matters. The laws of Newton had been thoroughly tested and the ordered, clockwork universe they described seemed incontrovertible. True, there were a few oddities that science puzzled over. The orbit of Mercury, for instance, was proving to be slightly different to what was expected. And then there was also the issue of the aether.

  The aether was a theoretical substance that could be described as the fabric of the universe. It was widely accepted that it must exist. Experiments had shown time and time again that light travelled in a wave. A light wave needs something to travel through, just as an ocean wave needs water and a sound wave needs air. The light waves that travel through space from the sun to the earth must pass through something, and that something would be the aether. The problem was that experiments designed to reveal the aether kept failing to find it. Still, this was not considered a serious setback. What was needed was further work and cleverer experiments. The expectation of the discovery of the aether was similar to that surrounding the Higgs boson in the days before the CERN Large Hadron Collider. Scientific wisdom insisted that it must exist, so it was worth creating more and more expensive experiments to locate it.

  Scientists had an air of confidence as the new century began. They had a solid framework of knowledge which would withstand further additions and embellishments. As Lord Kelvin was reputed to have remarked in a 1900 lecture, ‘there is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.’ Such views were reasonably common. ‘The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered,’ wrote the German-American physicist Albert Michelson in 1903, ‘and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote.’ The astronomer Simon Newcomb is said to have claimed in 1888 that we were ‘probably nearing the limit of all we can know about astronomy’.

  The great German physicist Max Planck had been advised by his lecturer, the marvellously named Philipp von Jolly, not to pursue the study of physics because ‘almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few unimportant holes.’ Planck replied that he had no wish to discover new things, only to understand the known fundamentals of the field better. Perhaps unaware of the old maxim that if you want to make God laugh you tell him your plans, he went on to become a founding father of quantum physics.

  Scientists did expect some new discoveries. Maxwell’s work on the electromagnetic spectrum suggested that there were new forms of energy to be found at either end of his scale, but these new energies were still expected to obey his equations. Mendeleev’s periodic table hinted that there were new forms of matter out there somewhere, just waiting to be found and named, but it also promised that these new substances would fit neatly into the periodic table and obey its patterns. Both Pasteur’s germ theories and Darwin’s theory of evolution pointed to the existence of unknown forms of life, but also offered to categorise them when they were found. The scientific discoveries to come, in other words, would be wonderful but not surprising. The body of knowledge of the twentieth century would be like t
hat of the nineteenth, but padded out further.

  Between 1895 and 1901 H.G. Wells wrote a string of books including The Time Machine, War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man and The First Men in the Moon. In doing so he laid down the blueprints for science fiction, a new genre of ideas and technological speculation which the twentieth century would take to its heart. In 1901 he wrote Anticipations: An Experiment in Prophecy, a series of articles which attempted to predict the coming years and which served to cement his reputation as the leading futurist of the age. Looking at these essays with the benefit of hindsight, and awkwardly skipping past the extreme racism of certain sections, we see that he was successful in an impressive number of predictions. Wells predicted flying machines, and wars fought in the air. He foresaw trains and cars resulting in populations shifting from the cities to the suburbs. He predicted fascist dictatorships, a world war around 1940, and the European Union. He even predicted greater sexual freedom for men and women, a prophecy that he did his best to confirm by embarking on a great number of extramarital affairs.

  But there was a lot that Wells wasn’t able to predict: relativity, nuclear weapons, quantum mechanics, microchips, black holes, postmodernism and so forth. These weren’t so much unforeseen, as unforeseeable. His predictions had much in common with the expectations of the scientific world, in that he extrapolated from what was then known. In the words commonly assigned to the English astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington, the universe would prove to be not just stranger than we imagine but, ‘stranger than we can imagine’.

  These unforeseeable new discoveries would not happen in Greenwich or Britain, where the assembled dignitaries were comfortable with the structure of the world. Nor would they appear in the United States, or at least not initially, even though the opening up of the Texas oilfields around this time would have a massive impact on the world to come. At the beginning of the twentieth century it was in the cafés, universities and journals of Germany and the German-speaking people of Switzerland and Austria that the real interest in testing and debating radical ideas lay.

  If we had to choose one town as the birthplace of the twentieth century then our prime contender must be Zurich, an ancient city which straddles the River Limmat just north of the Swiss Alps. In the year 1900 it was a thriving town of tree-lined streets and buildings which managed to be both imposing and pretty at the same time. It was here, at the Zurich Polytechnic, that twenty-one-year-old Albert Einstein and his girlfriend Mileva Marić were about to come bottom in their class.

  Einstein’s career did not then appear promising. He was a rebellious and free-spirited young man who had already renounced both his Jewish religion and his German citizenship. Six months earlier, in July 1899, he clumsily caused an explosion in the physics lab which damaged his right hand and temporarily stopped him from playing his beloved violin. His Bohemian personality caused him to clash with the academic authorities and prevented him from gaining a job as a physicist when he finally graduated. There was little sign that the world of science would take any notice of this stubborn, belligerent young man.

  There’s been some debate about the role of Marić, whom he married in 1903, in Einstein’s early achievements. Marić was not the sort of woman that early twentieth-century society approved of. She was one of the first women in Europe to study mathematics and physics. There was a good deal of prejudice about her Slavic background, and the fact that she suffered from a limp. Einstein, however, had no interest in the dull prejudices of his time. There was an intensity about her that entranced him. She was, as his many love letters make clear, his ‘little witch’ and his ‘wild street urchin’ and, for a few years at least, they were everything to each other.

  Marić believed in Einstein. A muse can bring out the genius inside a scientist just as with an artist. It took a rare and youthful arrogance to even consider attempting what Einstein was about to do. With the love of Marić validating his belief in himself, and the intellectual freedom he never would have had if he’d found an academic position, Albert Einstein rewrote our understanding of the universe.

  ‘So what are you up to,’ Einstein wrote to his friend Conrad Habicht in May 1905, ‘you frozen whale, you smoked, dried piece of soul? Such a solemn air of silence has descended between us that I almost feel as if I am committing a sacrilege with some inconsequential babble …’

  During the ‘inconsequential babble’ of the letter that followed Einstein casually described four papers that he was working on. Any one of them would have been a career-making achievement. That he produced all four in such a short space of time is almost unbelievable. Science historians have taken to referring to 1905 as Einstein’s ‘miracle year’. It is not often that historians of science reach for the word ‘miracle’.

  Einstein’s work in 1905 recalls the achievements of Isaac Newton in 1666, when the plague closed Cambridge University and Newton returned to his mother’s home in rural Lincolnshire. He used the time to develop calculus, a theory of colour and the laws of gravity, immortalising himself as Britain’s greatest scientific genius as he did so. Einstein’s achievement is more impressive when you consider that he wasn’t idling about under apple trees but holding down a full-time job. He was then employed at the patent office in Bern, having failed to gain employment as a physicist. Incredibly, he wrote these four papers in his spare time.

  ‘The first [of his proposed papers] deals with radiation and the energy properties of light and is very revolutionary,’ he wrote. This is no overstatement. In it he argued that light consists of discrete units, or what we now call photons, and that the aether doesn’t exist. As we shall see later, this paper inadvertently laid the groundwork for quantum physics and a model of the universe so strange and counterintuitive that Einstein himself would spend most of his life trying to deny the implications.

  ‘The second paper is a determination of the true sizes of atoms.’ This was the least controversial of the papers, being useful physics that did not overturn any established ideas. It gained Einstein his doctorate. His third paper used statistical analysis of the movement of visible particles in water to prove beyond doubt the existence of atoms, something that had been widely suspected but never conclusively proved.

  Einstein’s most significant discovery came from pondering a seeming contradiction between two different laws of physics. ‘The fourth paper is only a rough draft at this point, and is an electrodynamics of moving bodies which employs a modification of the theory of space and time,’ he wrote. This would become the Special Theory of Relativity. Together with the broader General Theory of Relativity he produced ten years later, it overturned the graceful, clockwork universe described by Newton.

  Relativity showed that we lived in a stranger, more complex universe where space and time were no longer fixed, but could be stretched by mass and motion. This was a universe of black holes and warped space-time that seemed to have little in common with the everyday world in which we live. Relativity is often presented in ways that make it appear incomprehensible, but the core idea at its heart can be grasped surprisingly easily.

  Imagine the deepest, darkest, emptiest chunk of space possible, far removed from stars, planets or any other influence. In this deep void imagine that you are floating, snug and warm in a space suit. Importantly, imagine that you are not moving.

  Then imagine that a cup of tea comes slowly floating past, and eventually disappears into the distance.

  At first glance, this scenario sounds reasonable. Newton’s First Law says that an object will continue to remain at rest, or will move in a straight line at a constant velocity, unless some external force acts on it. Clearly, this is a perfect description of the behaviour of both you and the cup of tea.

  But how could we say that you were at rest? Einstein would ask. How do we know that it’s not the cup of tea that’s at rest, and you that are moving past it? Both situations would appear identical from your point of view. And also, from the point of view of the cup of tea.

  Galileo w
as told in the 1630s that it wasn’t possible the earth was going around the sun, because we on earth do not feel like we are moving. But Galileo knew that if you were moving smoothly, without accelerating or decelerating, and if there were no visible or audible clues to movement, then you would not be aware of your motion. He argued that you cannot claim to be ‘at rest’, because it is impossible to tell the difference between a moving object and a stationary one without some form of external reference to compare it against.

  This may sound like a dubious, pedantic point. Surely, you might think, you are either moving or not moving, even if there’s nothing else around. How could anyone claim that the statement ‘you are at rest’ is absurd or meaningless?

  Schoolchildren are taught to plot the position of objects by drawing diagrams that show their distance from a fixed point in terms of height, length and depth. These are called the x, y and z axis, and the fixed point is usually called O or the origin. This is an omphalos, from which all the other distances are measured. The territory marked out by these x, y and z axes is called Cartesian space. In this framework, it would be simple to tell whether the astronaut and the cup of tea were static or moving by noting whether their coordinates in Cartesian space changed over time.

  But if you had shown that illustration to Einstein he would have leant over with an eraser and removed the origin, and then rubbed out the x, y and z axis while he was at it.

  He wouldn’t be deleting ‘space’ itself. He would be removing the frame of reference that we were using to define space. He would do this because it was not a feature of the real world. That framework of Cartesian space is a product of our minds, like the longitude lines stretching away from Greenwich, which we project onto the cosmos in order to get a grip on it. It does not really exist. Also, it is arbitrary. That framework could have been centred anywhere.