The Ghost of Matter Read online

  ‘I don’t even know why we’re celebrating,’ said Ralph. ‘It’s nothing but a farce, that tree. All the food, and the presents. As though it’ll make up for anything.’

  ‘For their sake,’ said Ernest, and the two of them watched the children run around, watched them fall down in the snow.

  ‘They won’t remember,’ said Ralph. ‘They’re so young, still. They won’t remember this Christmas. So what does it matter?’

  ‘It matters,’ said Ernest. ‘And it’s what Eileen would have wanted. You know how she loved parties.’ It was true, too, and made him smile though the smile felt like glass after he’d managed to shatter it over the floor. He remembered the way she had been last Christmas, the way she had greeted him at the door, how flushed her cheeks had been in the cold. She’d been carrying her youngest and wearing a blue dress – bright and fine and celebratory. Mary’s eyebrows had risen at it but all Ernest could think when he saw his daughter was that she was the colour of the Sounds under sunlight. Her dress was the shining blue of coastal water, clear and brilliant, and he had been struck with the sudden desire for home. Not the home he had come to think of as England, as the Cavendish, but the warm waters and summer Christmases of his childhood, with cricket in place of sledding and the red rata flowers against the sunshine, more vivid than fir and mistletoe and fog.

  ‘My dear,’ he had said, ‘you look beautiful. You look like summer.’ She looked like his sisters, he thought, when they had been young. There were lines of them in the shape of her mouth, in her forehead and her face.

  ‘It doesn’t much feel like summer,’ said Eileen. ‘Merry Christmas, Papa.’

  IT IS NOT IN THE NATURE of things for any one man to make a sudden violent discovery; science goes step by step, and every man depends on the work of his predecessors. When you hear of a sudden unexpected discovery – a bolt from the blue, as it were – you can always be sure that it has grown up by the influence of one man on another, and it is this mutual influence which makes the enormous possibility of scientific advance. Scientists are not dependent on the ideas of a single man, but on the combined wisdom of thousands of men, all thinking of the same problem, and each doing his little bit to add to the great structure of knowledge which is gradually being erected. (Ernest Rutherford, on science.)

  MANCHESTER, 1910

  IT WAS SURPRISING HOW much thinking Ernest got done at table. There were the meals with colleagues, of course, when he’d get so caught up in debate he’d start to shovel his food, and Mary would remind him he was dropping it in his lap, or dribbling in his haste to talk. And that was stimulating, the dagger cut and thrust of it, the little scalpel lines between relationships, between theories. The way that they built upon each other, the giants beneath them and the giants to come. Even without company he could think and link things together, the bites a counterpoint to the testing, the tasting of theory and ideas. The sense-memory of his experiments – the clean smell of apparatus, the dry glass and the stench of chemicals, the absent sensation of distilled water. The way the laboratory benches felt under his fingers, so different than the polished dining table, the burst of colour that came from cut flowers, from filled vases with their own scents so much sweeter, so much less vivid than those of his own work.

  Mary’s gift was gardening. The house was always full of flowers, and if she didn’t grow all their fruit, all their vegetables, there were at least none in the house that weren’t worth eating. Ernest would often end his meals with the fruit she provided, a practice grown more and more common since fingerprints had started appearing on the apples, since salt water started pooling in the fruit bowl.

  ‘That’s enough of that,’ he’d hiss, afraid to be heard, afraid that if he were, his wife wouldn’t see what he did: the weeping palm prints on the glasses, the wet salt smudges on the linen. They followed him around a lot now, Charles and Herbert – or what was left of them. What he assumed was left of them, for Ernest had no other explanation and no way of testing. He’d heard of ghosts, of course; more so since coming to a country heavy with history, weighted down with it, but even in New Zealand there’d been talk of spirits from Māori and Europeans both. Ernest had always disdained it, put it down to soft heads and soft science but he was stuck with them now, his own spectres come to life between vacuum chambers and gold leaf and alpha particles. He’d classified them reluctantly, silently, as ghosts and/or hallucinatory images, but if they were hallucinations they were confined to salt and water, brief giggles in tones he could barely remember. It didn’t seem worth going to the doctors for that, making a fuss that could, possibly, get out.

  Still, the possibility that they were a figment of his own brain, disturbing as it might be, was still better than ghosts, than the dead come back to life. The dead come back to haunt the living. Disturbing, yes. That was the word. Ernest talked to them sometimes, testing out loud, as much to work through his own ideas as to concentrate his attention, for silence made it easier to notice small splashes, the lacy leavings of salt.

  ‘Punching through what, though?’ he said. ‘Through plum pudding?’ That model of the atom as an indivisible thing, studded with charges like raisins, like plums sinking in the bake. Ernest had been raised on that model, had learned the physics of it, the basis of the natural world. It didn’t match his observations. It didn’t match his experiments. ‘I don’t know that I’m seeing any of that. You’d think there’d be some pudding chunks come out if particles punched though it, no matter how small.’ The same way that bullets could exit a pigeon with a small shower of blood, of deep and gamey flesh – the same pigeons that Ern had killed, as a young man, as they took flight. As Herbert and Charles had watched and cheered and brought them home with him for cooking. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s as if it hit nothing. Nothing.’

  He sliced through the skin of an apple. Peeled carefully, where once he would have bitten through the skin with relish, but he was afraid to taste salt in his biting now, and it wasn’t like him to avoid experiments – but Ernest’s field was physics, not metaphysics, and some things were beyond him.

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said, the taste of apple on his tongue, ‘perhaps the atom is not a plum pudding after all, a solid little lump shot through with electron raisins. Perhaps there is absence in it, a place where we thought matter would be, and that pudding is the ghost of the matter we expect to see.’

  (‘We have to stick together,’ said his father. ‘Now more than ever. We’re still a family. Some of us might be gone, and there might be gaps and I don’t think we’ll ever stop feeling them Ern, and maybe we shouldn’t. But we’re still a family...’)

  ‘Still a unit,’ said Ern, said Ernest, ‘but a unit made up of parts. Something that can be divided.’

  He could see it then: the structure of it, the atom in pieces around him. It had been near two years since the gold leaf and the cellar and Geiger and Marsden, but no one had ever called Ernest’s mind quick. No, it was powerful they called it. Always powerful, and he felt that power now, in the understanding that would change the field and focus of his life.

  Felt more, too, in the breath against the back of his neck, the quick ghost breaths of one or the other, he couldn’t tell. Charles and Herbert, his brothers – and then the breath had more than cold in it.

  ‘Daddy,’ it said behind him, in his ear, light and eerie and too close to him, too far away, and the apple fell from nerveless fingers.

  SOME VERY FINE STEEL wire was taken, glass-hard, and cut up into lengths of 1cm. Twenty-four of these little needles were then built up into one, each being first dipped in paraffin to prevent eddy-currents passing from one wire to the other. This little collection of needles formed a compound magnet, and offered considerable surface to the action of rapidly-varying magnetizing forces. The detector was fixed in the end of a thin glass tube for convenience of handling.

  This detector only retained about one-third of its magnetism, on account of the demagnetizing influence of its ends. When magnetized and place
d in a solenoid of two or three turns it supplied an extremely sensitive means of detecting and measuring oscillatory currents of high frequency. (Ernest Rutherford, ‘Magnetization of Iron by High Frequency Discharges,’ 1894.)

  CHRISTCHURCH, 1894

  HE’D PUT UP WITH A lot worse than the Den for science. Ern found it hard to refer to the Den, his place of experiment in Christchurch, as a laboratory. It was closer to a cellar – cold and damp and other students stored their hats and gowns there. And the problem of power ... each day he had to spend time cleaning electrodes, making batteries from acid and that was an endless chore in itself, but necessary before he could start on the real work, the work that caught his imagination, opened up the universe.

  (One day I’ll be in a real laboratory, he told himself. One that doesn’t smell of damp cloth, that doesn’t shiver in the Christchurch winter. One with decent light and a floor that isn’t frigid underfoot.)

  But even the Den – even the eternal, blasted batteries – couldn’t dampen his enthusiasm for physics. And when Ern demonstrated his work to the Science Society, with two friends to help, the Den where he prepared and thought and practiced was almost worth it. At least he didn’t have to present there, though the site of his demonstration was not a great deal more elegant. The Den had been swapped for the Old Tin Shed, as Ern had been allowed the use of a professor’s laboratory to demonstrate his work with radio waves. Neither name had been bestowed with a great deal of love behind it.

  ‘One day,’ he said to Page, who was helping him to set up, ‘One day I’ll be demonstrating like this in a great laboratory, one of the finest in the world.’ It was a dream, and an ill-pictured one at that for Ern had never left the country, had never experienced a lab with decent resources and excellent equipment. New Zealand was as far from the centre of physics as it was possible to be. What with Canterbury set as it was in an agricultural colony at the bottom of the world, Ern didn’t know of any university more distant from the great European institutes of science. ‘We don’t have the money, so we have to think,’ he said.

  Ern didn’t know, then, that one day he’d be demonstrating far more difficult experiments to far more prestigious audiences. He suspected it, he hoped for it, but he didn’t know, and the prospect was a spectre before him. Something almost tangible, something he could nearly grip. Christchurch was far from the Royal Society, and he was a student still, journeying north for his holidays and helping with the garden, digging potatoes, taking his brothers shooting and trying to teach his sisters, though they weren’t always that willing to be taught. He had to tie pig-tails together to keep their attention aligned, and he tried hard not to think of that before the demonstration. Ern wasn’t usually nervy; public speaking never bothered him and he knew his subject well, knew it would be of interest ... but once he’d thought of his current audience – men, most of them, with short hair and some bald besides – in braided wigs, latched onto each other with ribbons, he couldn’t picture them otherwise. He had to go out behind the building and laugh until he choked on it before he could quiet his breathing and squash down humour with thoughts of batteries and corrosion and electrodes, of contamination.

  ‘You want to get a hold of yourself,’ said Page when Ern came back in, having wedged his mouth into something resembling respect and concern for his audience and the compliment of their time. ‘They’ll think you’re not taking it seriously. They’ll think that you’re laughing at them.’

  ‘I am,’ said Ern. ‘I can’t help it!’ But he busied himself checking the equipment, keeping his face away until the feel of experimentation in his fingers, in his palms, calmed his mind. He could look at them then, at the sober faces and neat jackets, at the hats and gloves and the bright unexpected blue of a dress that was perhaps too formal for the occasion, and too daring. If his mother had seen one of her daughters in that – the odd style, the too-short skirts – she would have smacked her bottom and confined her to the house. Still, he had bigger things to worry about: the demonstration, the detection of radio waves through walls and buildings, over sixty feet, and then there were the questions, the congratulations; and the girl with the blue dress seemed to fade away, and Ern forgot about her.

  ‘That went well,’ said Page, afterwards. ‘I think you impressed them.’

  ‘I hope so,’ said Ern, for that was his way out, to bigger and brighter labs, less clammy in their cellars; and if he could impress enough to publish papers, to win scholarships and fellowships and chances come from exhibition, then his physics could expand in circles greater than Christchurch, and for more than magnetism.

  CAMBRIDGE, 1929

  IT HAD BEEN A LONG time since Ernest had been to the Den. A long time, and he couldn’t quite understand how it was he was back there.

  He was sure that, just a few moments ago, he’d been at the Cavendish. In Cambridge, in England – half a world away from that damp half-cellar. He’d been in the workroom, where Cockcroft and Walton had set up their new transformer – and he’d been there alone. The whole building was silent, and when Ernest checked his watch he saw that it was past six.

  ‘I should be at home,’ he said, for that was leading by example. It was his firm belief that the Cavendish should shut at six, that experiments should be turned off regardless of their ready state, and regardless of the feelings of the experimenters.

  ‘Can’t I just have another hour?’

  He’d heard it more than once from the students too new to know any better, and he always refused them. ‘I’ll not have anyone burning out in this lab,’ he said. ‘Now go home and think. Think! It’s what you’re here for, isn’t it?’ And he’d watch to see which of them bit their tongues, and which were silly enough to argue. Ernest was no theoretician; his strength was experimentalism, and the young people who came to work with him were experimentalists, mostly – in love with gadgets, with the ability to press science into their fingertips, to explore it in ways that didn’t involve ink. Some would stay all night if they were allowed, puttering about the labs, fiddling with their vacuums and their pumps, the liquid air, the glass and gas and vessels. Ernest couldn’t blame them. He’d done the same himself, when he was young – but he’d learned more than measurements from a different approach, one that had a place for mulling, for imagination.

  And yet there he’d been, after hours, breaking his own rule. It wasn’t acceptable. How could the young men and women at the Cavendish take his strictures seriously if he couldn’t do the same? Ernest couldn’t understand why he’d stayed so long. He supposed he must have wandered off, somehow, into the atom paths and byways of his brain, lost track of time. Yes, that was it.

  His knee had stiffened under him, and he had felt the ache deep within the joint as he moved to the door, felt the handle in his palm. And then it had changed under his palm – that plain, sturdy door handle had changed to something as plain and as sturdy, but different. Ernest had looked down and seen the workroom door, seen the Den door, and when he turned around to see if the changes had come up behind him as well as in front, as well as in flesh – there were imprints in his palm, one layered over the other where he had clenched down out of shock – there were two laboratories in front of him.

  They seemed to occupy the same space, and all the matter was translucent. He could see through a pump to a desk, and through that desk to a wall that shimmered with brick, with plaster. For one heady, horrifying moment Ernest wasn’t sure which of them was the ghost – whether he was waking up from a dream of Cavendish to the reality of a young man, whether he had never left New Zealand, never left the Den.

  There were the same old gowns and cloaks, the same poor light, the same dampness in the air and walls. There, too, were the old batteries that had been the bane of his existence as a student – the same smell of acid, the same irritation. And it was all so real. It wasn’t just the hallucinations, the spectres of old shapes. He could taste the musty atmosphere when he breathed in, and the acid stung his nose.

  And o
verlapping the Den was the Cavendish workroom, the new transformer. Ernest could see the difference in the floor – they’d had to reinforce it so it could take the weight. There was a vacuum pump and an accelerator tube. There were metal shields and large glass bulbs – the rectifier bulbs – and though their glass was smooth and clear, all that Ernest could see behind them was the equipment of another time. Even his watch flickered back and forth, from the cheap plain one he’d had to the newer, more expensive model.

  He was backing away, backing towards that two-handled laboratory door when the Den began to flood. There was no clanking, broken pipe, no susurrus sound of water. Instead it filled in silence – filled rapidly, as the water first spread across the floor to puddle around his shoes and rose with his breath to his ankles, spilling through the cellar.

  Ernest would have lurched forward, even with his bad knee, if the water was affecting the transformer, the electrics of the new workshop, but though the water was rising now to the level of the desk in the Den, his old papers floating up off the rough surface, there was no reflection in the rectifier bulbs, no disturbance in the Cavendish lab – no sparks, and no damage.

  Then, too, was the smell. More than the battery acid of his early years, Ernest recognised the smell of salt. It was salt water rising through the Den now, rising above his waist, ocean-green even in the half-light of early evening. Ernest fumbled with the door then, with the handle wet and slippery in his hand, the drag of wet cloth on his sleeves, and he wrenched the door open and stumbled out of the workroom, stumbled into a hallway where his watch solidified on his wrist and his clothes were dry.

  When he opened the door back to the room, opened it in a small strip to peek through, the workroom was as it should be: stable, absent of swelling and unencumbered with history. Ernest blinked, rubbed at his eyes with the rough material of his jacket, and he had himself almost convinced it was a funny turn, a dream of memory, until he checked the new transformer and found in the odd corners and creases of its carcass the faint, lacy tracings of salt after evaporation.