Seven Point Eight (4 page)

It did sound too good to be true. Was it worth quitting his job at the university to chase his research dreams? Max could be offering the chance to pursue something any physics graduate would grovel at his feet for, or he could be leading him astray to follow a pipe dream.

“This is an outstanding opportunity, but I can’t just abandon my students. I could also spend the rest of my life working on this…there may be no results within your timeframe.”

“Your work will be of immense importance,” Max insisted.

He handed Paul a card.

“I’ll be expecting your acceptance by telephone.”

Paul clutched the card and watched Max walk away down the corridor, the potential of that opportunity hanging in the air. Glancing down, he saw a telephone number neatly typed on the card. Should he jump at the challenge, or continue his life as a university lecturer?

2

The Establishment

Writing my memoirs is a bizarre thing to do. I’m not famous, as no one would recognise either my face or my name, yet, I‘ve led a full, enriched, and most peculiar life. I’d hardly believe it myself and these memoirs may read like a work of science fiction, still, I feel compelled to put pen to paper, or finger to typewriter to record the absurdities of my life. Maybe this will help me put things into perspective and understand why events progressed as they did, why I lost everything I cared about, and what the future may hold for me.

I sat in Max’s Daimler, chauffeured by his own personal driver, watching the
Surrey
countryside roll past my window as if on a cinema screen. As we drove through towns and villages, I watched with detachment as paperboys and postmen performed their daily duties, wearing their shirt, tie, and flat peaked caps.

Milkmen made deliveries from a hand pulled cart, while horse drawn drays transported coal to houses, the men with their blackened hands lugging sacks and emptying coal into the cellars. People rode bicycles to work, or walked children to the shops. Bakers and butchers opened up, and housewives waited to secure their daily bread and small ration of meat. Even though the Second World War had concluded five years ago, times were still austere.

The drive gave me chance to reflect, ponder my achievements and tragedies to date, and speculate on the decision I’d made.

Max had been correct in his observations.
 
I was born in
St Albans
on the 21
^st
of February 1921 at 11:30 a.m, Greenwich Mean Time. My father, Peter Eldridge, was headmaster of a local grammar school and eventually died of lung cancer, most likely as a result of excessive pipe tobacco. That forms one of my strongest memories of early childhood, as from beyond the back of his favourite armchair, I used to watch the smoke puffing, twisting and writhing in the air. He loved a cup of Earl Grey to accompany the pipe; those two were like an old married couple in themselves. He was an excellent parent though, and I attained my achievements due to his influence and drive.

My mother, Margaret, was a proud and honourable woman, and a conspicuous red-head. She outlived my father by several years and died from heart failure eventually. I inherited her compassion, humour, and strong constitution. She was a very religious woman and inherently charitable, active in the community and a church regular, so my spiritual curiosities are a direct result of her influence.

We moved to
London
early in my life, because my father accepted the position of headmaster at the Grammar School, where he worked until his retirement. Therefore, this great city provides many of my formative memories. I vaguely recall the
Thames
flooding in 1928 and people wading in dirty water up to their knees in the streets, not a pleasant experience in winter. The water reached the downstairs windowsills, lapped around the wheels of the sparsely parked
Austin
7 family cars, and broke embankment walls in places. The floodwater had an eerie stillness at night, illuminated by gas street lamps in places.

I also clearly remember the excitement of our first rotary dial telephone. Frequently, I got into trouble, accidentally on purpose calling the operator on the manual switchboard, as I played with the dial a little too often. They were a very polite bunch of women, those operators, and my first experience of chatting up the female of the species.

During the twenties and thirties, home comforts were very basic indeed. You slept in your jumpers and big socks, and your bed would be layered with blankets because there was no heating in your room. In the winter, it was so cold you found a layer of ice on the inside of your window. The covers and clothes created such cosiness, you were extremely reluctant to throw the blankets off in the morning and place your feet on the cold lino, which covered the floor.

You did everything in the kitchen: ate, drank, chatted, washed in a tin bath in front of the open fire, and listened to the wireless. Toilets were outside and incredibly draughty places in the winter. No one locked their front doors, children played outside in the street, babies were parked outside in their perambulators, and children were rigorously disciplined at home and school. If you got into trouble with the teacher, your parents would find out and you’d get another dose of discipline at home too. At Christmas, you found an orange, some nuts, and a small piece of chocolate in the stocking at the foot of the bed.

These two decades had a great buzz and vibe though. My mother loved jazz music, which signalled more hopeful times after the conclusion of the First World War, and that was when the dance halls became popular. She was fascinated with the wireless, otherwise known as the radio, and often played in the kitchen, where she attempted to encourage my father to dance with her. I recall him having two left feet, much to her consternation. She loved the movies too and sometimes my big sister, Patricia, looked after my brother and I while my parents caught the latest talkie.

As a child, I had an aptitude for science and mathematics, not jazz music or dance. My father quickly seized upon this, so I was never short of books and scientific toys, however, my mother remained at odds with science. I recall one of my discussions with her, aged seven. I was sitting at the kitchen table with a book while she cooked.

“How did the Earth, planets and stars get made?”

“Well, God made everything, my darling.”

I remember seriously considering her statement.

“But six days is not very long to create the heavens and Earth, with all its animals and people.”

I recall the confusion on her face.

“He’s God, and is all powerful in heaven,” she replied.

It always came back to God, like a cosmic boomerang.

“But, if God is a man, how can he be all powerful in heaven?”

She smiled, but it was forced.

“Your science makes you ask too many questions, sweetheart, sometimes you just need to believe.”

And thus began the conflict. Consequently, I always found it difficult to reconcile my scientific and mathematical knowledge with the concept of God. However, I remained inherently curious about the concept; it was a personal paradox.

At university, I met the love of my life, a classic English rose with long blonde hair and porcelain skin. Madeleine was smart, funny, sensitive, compassionate, and caring. I knew on our first date that we’d marry and only shortly after, we got engaged. However, our plans didn’t come to pass, as she became a casualty of the war.

Air raids began on ‘Black Saturday’, which was the 7
^th
of September 1940, and they continued for around two months. Madeleine died on the 10
^th
of October 1940 on her way to the underground to take shelter. I was already safe in my parents’
Anderson
Shelter, listening to the shrieking roar of the blitz get closer and closer, the thumping of the bombs, with the possibility of being blown to bits at any moment. So far in my life, there’d been a semblance of order, absolute order with everything being so predictable, it was actually unreal. Despite the war, my destiny had been clear. Perhaps it was inevitable that chaos would rear its ugly head, ironic for a scientist who studied the very nature of uncertainty and quantum probabilities.

 
I didn’t know how to grieve, and I just sat quietly with our favourite songs playing in the background. We’d enjoyed Glenn Miller, Duke Ellington, and the songs of Cole Porter, and they sounded so poignant now. Contemplation became my drug. To deal with the emptiness, I immersed myself in the completion of my degree and endeavoured to undertake a PhD scholarship in quantum mechanics. At the time, this seemed heartless and disrespectful to her memory, but the truth of the matter was that I needed a reason to continue with my life. So, as Londoners became more defiant and strengthened their resolve in the war effort, I made intellectual pursuits the purpose of my life, while we aerially bombarded
Germany
.

My research began in 1943, a monumental step for me and the zenith of intellectualism. That same year, there’d been synchronous research of iconic status. In Auschwitz, Josef Mengele tortured twins in grotesque investigations into heredity, Erwin Schrodinger lectured at
Trinity
College
, attempting to understand chromosomes and life, and DNA was identified as the manifestation of heredity. Of course, no one then could conceive of DNA’s structure, remember, it was infantile research as of then. My work focused on electro-magnetic fields. Others had a passion for biological life whereas I was more interested in cosmic life, the building blocks and forces of the universe.

Love didn’t figure in my life. Of course, I dated a number of women, albeit briefly, but they weren’t Madeleine, and I couldn’t bring myself to love again. If anything, I fell in love with my work. Quantum mechanics filled my life with meaning. I felt closer to understanding the universe, and even thought I may find some faint whisper of spiritual life within the cosmos.

During this period in my life, the war in Europe and
Japan
concluded, with much celebration in the land. I became part of the real world again and joined in the singing and dancing, the relief of the finality of the conflict. We grieved for the Jews, who were exterminated in the Nazi death camps, and we witnessed via television the destruction of two Japanese cities by atomic bombs. I sensed that although we tasted victory, our governments were developing fearsome weapons with the capacity to wipe out mankind.

Soon after my doctorate, I fell into lecturing, as teachers often do. I finally started a real job at the ripe old age of twenty seven, and 1948 was also an important year historically. Someone shot Ghandi, the new state of Israel came into existence, the Soviet Union’s blockade of Berlin began, the Kinsey Report into the Sexual Behaviour of the Human Male was published, and London staged the Olympic Games, as no other city wanted to or could afford to act as host. Not surprisingly,
Germany
and
Japan
were banned from competing in this post-war era.

1948 also seemed to signify the path my life would take in the future. The science faculty wished to recruit more students, and asked me to promote new developments in quantum theory as a way of increasing their roll. In one lecture, someone asked if atomic particles formed the basis of the human soul.

I’d never considered searching for the soul. How could it even be observed, or measured? Reality has always been gauged by the things around us that we can see, touch, or observe. Our world consists of matter, which is comprised of atoms, broken down into neutrons and electrons. The soul is none of the above.

I thought very little of this interaction at the time, more concerned with a mysterious woman who’d divulged the details of a top secret experiment. Ironically, I never answered his question and the mysterious woman never re-appeared in my life. For a few months, I became preoccupied with her, but the man who pondered the soul did make a re-appearance.
 
His offer came out of the blue, and may turn out to be something on a par with the Devil’s temptation of Jesus, or the eureka moment every scientist desires. Anyway, by now you’ve realised that I accepted his offer…