A Brief History of Time

‘Space,’ according to the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, ‘is Big.  Really Big.’

These were probably some of the earliest words I remember from my childhood.  My father used to be a publisher, and growing up the sound of Douglas Adams’s work would drift round the house along with the smell of bacon and the sound of frying in the morning.  Sometimes the man himself would come round for dinner, since he shared not only the same sense of humour as my father, but also the same shirt and shoe size which led for a brotherhood known only to large men – and I’d hide and cower at the end of the room, too intimidated to say anything to this man who’s mind was clearly big enough to almost begin to grasp the bigness of the universe, blow it up and then boil it right back down to a slice of angel cake.

The truth of the matter is, physics has always been a little scary.  I love it, and studied it at school in my own slightly-incompetent way.  (I was a history student taking physics A-Level with a cry of ‘hell, it’ll shake things up at a bit!’)  The first rather depressing thing about physics is that the more you study it, the more you realise everything you know is lies.  Gravity on the earth’s surface, when you’re fifteen years old, is a good old ten newtons of attractive force.  By the time you’re seventeen, it’s 9.81 metres per second squared of acceleration on a kilo of mass, and about three days after your eighteenth birthday, as if you’re suddenly being let into a big secret, your teacher turns round and whispers that actually, damned if anyone really knows what the hell gravity even is.  Good, old-fashioned protons and neutrons suddenly begin to acquire not merely magnetic charge and a bit of a mass, but also elusive qualities such as flavour and strangeness as you break them down into smaller and smaller parts and before you know it, electrons are photons and photons are both waves and particles and the gold leaf went down instead of up and all things considered, it’s probably time for a bit of a lie-down.

Which brings us back to the beginning.  Space, you see, really is big.  And not just big in boring four dimensional terms, but big all the way down to the bottom of the cake.  It’s while reading – or rather attempting to read, as I have to pause every other page just to make sure I’ve digested it right – A Brief History of Time from my local library that the sheer mind-boggling, brain-aching complexity of it all began to come back to me.  And make no mistake, scientifically speaking the complexity of the universe is brilliant – fascinating, challenging, exciting – frankly, when galaxies are clashing into each other and suns are exploding and new ones are being born from inside the churning bowels of strange nebulae, who needs god?  Our ignorance is not a source of shame, but an exciting reflection of how far we’ve come, and a glorious reminder of how much more there is to know – sort of the cosmological equivalent of a ‘kick me’ sign stuck to the metaphorical back of the human race.

On a rather more fictional level, our ignorance is also a wonderfully useful playbox for the science fiction writers of this world.  I think we’ve all been there.  You pick up the latest space epic novel from the bookshelf and on the front there’s a giant spaceship and on the back there’s a jacket quote – ‘epic in quality, infinite in scope!’ and you just know that in this world, as in so many others, it’s necessary, my god but it is so narratively necessary for the story to travel faster than the speed of light.  And you flick through and yeap, someone is travelling faster than light because otherwise you’d be waiting a few thousand years for the next chapter, but not only are they doing it, they’re doing it scientifically.  Particles are clashing somewhere in the unseen void, quantum uncertainty is causing multiple ships to shimmer into existence at all points in the universe all at once, until some idiot bothers to perceive one point alone.  There may – my personal favourite – even be a black hole involved, we live in hope.

Science – or quite possibly the advent of serious uncertainty in science which really kicked off in the twentieth century – has been a source of inspiration and, perhaps more interestingly, flexibility for generations of writers.  Science fiction, at its very best, posits a ‘what if’ universe.  ‘What if’ faster than light travel or perhaps the opposite – ‘what if’ near-light travel and relativistic effects?  ‘What if’ anti-matter, ‘what if’ gravity is a particle, or maybe a wave, or maybe neither.  In recent years it’s become about more than the gizmos to enhance a plot – gravity on space ships and beam me down cap’n stuff – but the science itself has become the source of the narrative as the complexity of the universe itself inspires stories.

Which is not to say that I’ll be swapping the works of Stephen Hawking for a fictional account of quantum mechanics and how it affects furry aliens any time soon… but I might just use start using science fiction as my reference when the ideas get too big…