Then again, ask an astronomer (but not a French one) and you’ll learn that
John Couch Adams was the man who deduced the existence of the planet Neptune and
predicted where to find it in the sky. A physicist will say that John Adams was
a builder of particle accelerators, who was twice director general of CERN, the
European Laboratory for Particle Physics near Geneva. A criminologist would tell
you the most interesting tale, a salacious story of selfishness: John Bodkin
Adams was a doctor in Eastbourne who, in 1957, was acquitted of befriending and
murdering as many as 10 elderly women so as to inherit their worldly goods.

It shouldn’t really surprise us that there are so many famous people called
John Adams. John has historically been among the most common of Christian names,
and according to Judaeo-Christian tradition, every man is a son of Adam. And
fame does occasionally run in the family, as in the case of the aforementioned
American presidents. Based on frequency of names, only John Smith might be
expected to surpass John Adams for quantity and variety of scientific, political
and sociological achievements. There is also the third variation, Adam
Smith—the most famous bearer of this name, who founded the modern theory
of free-market economics when he published The Wealth of Nations in
1776. What is not so well known is that the same Adam Smith also wrote about
astronomy and physics.

Despite their numbers, there have been surprisingly few famous John Smiths,
although the late leader who laid the ground for the success of Britain’s New
Labour was so named. He, and certainly not Adam Smith, must have some credit for
the wind of change that, over the past two years, seems to have been blowing
extra financial resources in the direction of British science.

Examples such as John Adams are unusual—the same name is seldom
associated with so many different achievements. In science it is more common for
a single achievement to be associated with two or more names, often because of
unseemly disputes about who got there first. In the French version of the
discovery of Neptune the credit is given to their man, Urbain Leverrier, who
predicted the position of the planet a few years after John Adams. Probably the
most infamous example of such a dispute is the long and bitter argument that
took place between the supporters of Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibnitz over
the credit for the invention of calculus.

But calculus is by no means the only bone of contention in the list of
familiar high-school science topics. The French also had their own name for
Boyle’s law (which says that the pressure of a gas varies inversely with its
volume at a fixed temperature): Mariotte’s law, after the man who wrote it down
in 1676, 14 years later than Boyle. There are other examples of the dubious
association of names with inventions and discoveries. Justus Liebig did not
invent the famous Liebig condenser, the standard water-cooled condenser in
chemistry laboratories, he merely made it popular by virtue of being a great
chemist who used it a lot—a sort of 19th-century sponsorship deal.

Avogadro’s number is often called the Loschmidt number, after Joseph
Loschmidt, because the latter was the first to introduce the concept that there
are a constant number of particles in a unit volume of an ideal gas at standard
temperature and pressure. And the gravestone of Ludwig Boltzmann has an
inscription of his famous equation relating entropy to quantum mechanics
“S = klog &Ogr;”. But Boltzmann never actually wrote this equation down— the
person responsible was the originator of quantum theory, Max Planck. And Planck’s constant? Well it has
to be admitted that this does belong to Planck.

I WAS browsing in a biographical encyclopaedia recently and discovered that
the brilliant Confederate general of the American Civil War, Robert E. Lee, had
come second in his graduating class at West Point Military Academy. I have yet
to identify the man who pushed Lee into second place. Quickly flicking to
Ulysses S. Grant, his principal adversary and ultimate conqueror, I found that
the saviour, and later President, of the Union, had had an altogether
unremarkable start to his military career. After coming 21st in his class at
West Point, Grant took 10 years to reach the rank of captain.

Winston Churchill, Britain’s incomparable war-time leader, Nobel laureate in
literature and no mean artist, got into Sandhurst military academy, at his third
attempt. Churchill’s primary schoolteacher once reported that the boy lacked
imagination. His archenemy, Adolf Hitler, completely failed his high-school
leaving certificate. There is a suspicion that the devious young Hitler did this
on purpose because he wanted to be an artist, while his father wanted him to
become a civil servant.

This pattern of early failure extends to political leaders of today: John
Major suffers from acute amnesia when the subject of his O levels is raised.

The skills required for soldiering and politics may be expected to mature
later in life, and are rarely those needed by a scientist. Nevertheless, there
are also famous scientists whose early academic achievements were lamentable.
Among them were Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein, probably the two most
influential scientists of the past 200 years.

Charles Darwin’s high-school performance reputedly prompted his father to
tell him: “You care for nothing but shooting, dogs and rat-catching and you will
be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.” Darwin later spent a fruitless
year studying medicine at the University of Edinburgh, where he seemingly found
it difficult to cope with the blood and guts of the practical classes. His
presence in “Auld Reekie” coincided with that of William Burke and William Hare,
renowned Irish murderers who sold the corpses of their victims, and bodies from
graves they had robbed, for anatomical study. Later, Darwin had more success at
the University of Cambridge, studying for the quiet life of a nature-loving
country vicar. But it was not until he had the good fortune to be selected as
naturalist for the voyage of HMS Beagle that his genius really began to
evolve.

Einstein, the other great mould-breaking scientist of relatively recent
times, was also very much in the “could-do-better” category at high school,
where he had little chance to show his true abilities. In a word he failed, and
he did not enter university until three years after leaving school. As with
Darwin, Einstein’s genius came to the fore much later when he had time to
reflect on the nature of the Universe. He wrote his first paper on the theory of
relativity when he was working as a patent examiner in Bern.

Many aspiring mathematicians and physicists in the 18th and 19th centuries
went to Cambridge, where students graduating with first-class honours in maths
were known as wranglers; the top student was accorded the romantic title of
“senior wrangler”. Among the second (not senior) wranglers were J. J. Thomson,
discoverer of the electron (100 years ago this year), and James Clerk Maxwell,
the founder of electromagnetic theory. The young Maxwell was apparently
nicknamed Dafty, not because he was perceived to be daft, but because of his
physical appearance. Another wrangler was Thomas Malthus, whose works on
population dynamics were later to be a profound influence on
Darwin—Malthus came out ninth in his class. One wonders what became of the
people who out-wrangled these famous thinkers. In Thomson’s case, the top spot
went to another physicist, Joseph Larmor, certainly no mean achiever, but
ultimately not nearly as successful as the man whom he whipped into second
place.

The early failures, Darwin and Churchill, have something else in common,
aside from having been born with mouths full of silverware. Their achievements
have been deemed so important that the letters “ian” may be appended to their
names, as is also the case with Malthus and Maxwell. And Einstein has an “ium”
in element 99. Major, like Thatcher before him (second-class honours in
chemistry) is given an “ite”.

But almost any politician gets an “ite” nowadays—it is associated more
with infamy than with fame. The satirist Jonathan Swift, master debunker of
bombastic politicians, wrote: “It is a maxim, that those to whom everybody
allows the second place, have an undoubted title to the first”. Swift ought to
have known: he obtained his university degree, speciali grati—in
other words, his examiners decided that his academic record was not quite what
it should have been.

Being successful in science is not all fun. Darwin had to face bitter attacks
when his theories first appeared, and posthumous attacks on him are still
common. Galileo is another who suffered greatly for his scientific success. And
the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, who together with Maxwell made great
advances in the atomic theory of gases, committed suicide in a fit of depression
caused partly by what he perceived to be rejection of his work.

Although nobody enjoys coming second, failure to shine at school or college
is clearly no bar to future brilliance, even in science. There is therefore no
reason for despondency when you don’t make top of the class, and even if you do,
don’t celebrate too soon. To quote from Matthew in the New Testament
(chapter 19, verse 30): “But many that are first shall be last; and the last
shall be first.”

One might imagine that “road rage” is a 20th century phenomenon, inflicted on humanity by the arrival of the internal combustion engine and exacerbated by the shortsightedness of planners who fail to anticipate the sclerosis of the nation’s lorry-saturated roads. Overpopulation shares the blame – too many people with too many wheels chasing too little tarmac.

But civilised human behaviour and transport have never been good companions. For example, Jerome K. Jerome’s humorous account of a boating trip of the 1880s, Three Men in a Boat (to say nothing of the Dog), shows clearly that taking a boat up the Thames in the late 19th century was just as stressful as is taking a car along the M4 in the late 20th century. The symptoms were uncannily similar to our modern, motoring-linked psychoses. Here are a few excerpts. With a little poetic licence – letting boat become car, and river become road – the story becomes the familiar one of colourful language and homicidal mania: “Of course we got in the way of a good many other boats, and they in ours, and, of course, as a consequence of that, a good deal of bad language occurred … everybody is so exceptionally irritable on the river. Little mishaps, that you would hardly notice on dry land, drive you nearly frantic with rage, when they occur on the river … when another boat gets in my way, I feel I want to kill all the people in it.”

Even young Victorian ladies, who would normally have out-shrunk the most determined violet, showed psychopathic symptoms while travelling. One who “was naturally of the sweetest and gentlest disposition imaginable” swore like a trooper when on the river, and would succumb to violent fits when faced with the recalcitrance of sails which she was attempting to hoist, in the same way a driver might kick and curse the radiator when the car won’t start.

In the 19th century, the role of the lorry driver was played by the bargeman. According to Jerome, these gentlemen were influenced by the air of the river to such an extent that they “were sometimes rude to one another, and used language which, no doubt, in their calmer moments they regretted”. So our HGV drivers have a historical precedent to justify their occasional lapses into the vernacular.

One would think that, with fewer people around, the situation a century ago would have been more conducive to leisurely travel than today. In fact, population pressure was very much in evidence, even then. Jerome reports a notice in St Helen’s Church in Abingdon, describing a certain Mr W. Lee, who died in 1637, as having 197 children. He hopes that there are not many of his kind around “in this overcrowded nineteenth century”. In Bleak House, Dickens describes one of the aims of Mrs Jellyby’s African project at Borrioboola-Gha as “the happy settlement, on the banks of African rivers, of our superabundant home population”.

Perhaps every new canal and river improvement was planned in the confident expectation that its existence would solve contemporary congestion, that the population would remain stable, that there would be no economic growth and that no new boats would be attracted by the mere existence of the new facilities.

One might imagine that car crime, too, is a modern phenomenon, the natural product of the decadence of late 20th century society. But this sort of offence has always attracted mischievous youths and the criminally inclined. In a later book, Three Men on the Bummel, Jerome recounts how he had fun in his youth stealing a horse-drawn hansom cab. This, he says, was “the acme of modern Tom and Jerryism”. (Tom and Jerry, incidentally, were not a cat and a mouse, nor a British and a German soldier, but a pair of 19th-century fictional characters famed for their high-spirited exploits.)

Jerome goes on: “I stole it late one night from outside a public-house in Dean Street, and the first thing that happened to me was that I was hailed in Gordon Street by an old lady surrounded by three children.” The horse stopped and the old lady stuffed the children into the cab. The hapless author was forced to take them many miles to a London suburb – justice in the form of instant community service.

Other “modern” forms of delinquency were already well known to Jerome. Only a few years after the birth of Association Football, he counsels: “To any young Englishman yearning to get himself into a scrape, and finding himself hampered in his own country, I would advise a single ticket to Germany; a return, lasting as it does only a month, might prove a waste.”

So as far as human behaviour is concerned, it may well be true that “there is no new thing under the sun”. These biblical words of wisdom, from Ecclesiastes, were written around 250 BC when wagoners, charioteers and horsemen no doubt jostled for space, and robbed and cursed one another as they journeyed on the congested road from Jericho to Jerusalem.

Alice in Quantum Land Robert Gilmore, Sigma Science, pp 207, ÂŁ9.95
pbk

Richard Feynman once remarked that he could safely say that nobody understands
quantum mechanics. This does not, and should not – and in Feynman’s case,
did not – prevent physicists from trying to explain quantum mechanics to
others. In many ways it is the fact that no one really understands quantum
physics that makes it so fascinating.

Of course, it is the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of quantum physics which provide
the mystery; the actual rules have been around for a long time and work
incredibly well. No experiment has found any evidence that quantum mechanics
is either wrong or incomplete. But no one has yet come up with a universally
accepted explanation of how the rules come about.

Both Uncle Albert and the Quantum Quest and Alice in Quantum Land set
out to explain the rules and mysteries of quantum physics in an entertaining
and humorous manner, each borrowing and adapting characters and ideas from
Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. In the first, the narrative starts with Albert’s
niece, Gedanken, lounging before the television and not particularly enjoying
what she is watching. Curiouser and curiouser, the second book also begins
with the eponymous heroine idling away her time in front of the box. Perhaps
both authors are trying to make a point about the influence of television
on imaginative young minds: switch it off and get down to reading these
books.

Uncle Albert and the Quantum Quest is the third in Russell Stannard’s
series of Uncle Albert books, and those who have read the first two will
not need to be told how good they are nor will they be disappointed with
this one. In the story, Gedanken is commissioned by her uncle to find out
about the structure of matter, by entering a fantasyland through one of
his thought bubbles. At the end there is a set of simple multiple-choice
questions, with answers, to help the reader to learn as well as be amused.
The narrative is entertaining and well written, and is clearly aimed at
children, perhaps aged ten and upwards. But here I have to come clean –
I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I’m over twenty-one.

Alice in Quantum Land, as may be inferred from the presence of an index,
is a much more weighty affair. It attempts to teach some rather abstruse
aspects of quantum physics. Robert Gilmore has interspersed formal physics
comments throughout the text, together with more detailed end-of-chapter
notes. Although the story can be read without reference to the notes, only
a knowledgeable reader would fully appreciate the allegory and the well
constructed and amusing analogies between Quantum Land and the real world.
Those unfamiliar with quantum physics would do better, I feel, to start
with a straight account (and several excellent ones are suggested at the
end of Gilmore’s book) before reading about Alice.

I have one minor complaint. When Alice takes it upon herself to comment
on the spelling at the Phun Phair, she is rebuffed with the remark: ‘Well,
what do you expect? They are all scientists here you know.’ A good joke
certainly. But although this reviewer is a scientist, he did not expect
to find so many typographical errors.

Among Uncle Albert’s speculations is one that perhaps human brains are
inherently incapable of ever understanding the quantum world. If this is
so, then let us hope that the same brains are also incapable of ever proving
that they have such a limitation. Physicists will then have no motivation
for giving up the Quantum Quest, and good books such as these will continue
to be written, for our education and our entertainment.

George Lafferty is a senior lecturer in the department of physics and
astronomy, University of Manchester.

Lewis Carroll’s works have always been fair game for mathematical and
scientific interpretation. While there is little doubt that he had just
this fate in mind for much of his writing, one can’t help feeling that he
would have had a wry smile at some of the absurd nonsense written about
his nonsense. The nonsense which follows is to be construed as an entertaining,
but not serious, re-interpretation of The Hunting of the Snark – which rhymes
with ‘quark’, the name for one of the two families of the basic building
blocks of all matter .

There are many parallels between The Hunting of the Snark and the quest
for the twin holy grails of particle physics, the top quark and the Higgs
boson – so-said the source of all particulate mass.

Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice: What I tell you three
times is true . . .

Martin Gardner in The Annotated Snark (Penguin Books) refers to this
as the Bellman’s rule of three – the thesis is that anything repeated three
times is thereby proved. The last of the six proposed quarks that remains
to be identified, the top quark and the Higgs boson, were to have been found
at the Positron-Electron Tandem Ring Accelerator (PETRA) in Hamburg in the
1980s; then they were to have been found at the Large Electron-Positron
machine (LEP) in Geneva in the early 1990s . . .

We have sailed many months, we have sailed many weeks But nver as yet
(’tis your Captain who speaks) Hve we caught the least flimpse of a snark!
. . . and now they are to be found in the early years of the next century
at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. By the Bellman’s rule of three,
the top quark and the Higgs boson have clearly been proved to exist. The
multinational approach to large experiments, together with the overthrow
of German by AmerEnglish as the lingua franca of science, was clearly anticipated
by Carroll:

I said it in Hebrew – I said it in Dutch – I said it in German and Greek:
But I wholly forgot (and it vexes me much) That English is what you speak
!

Carroll also displays his prescience on the subject of the Superconducting
Super-collider (SSC), the ill-fated American venture to ensnare the top
quark and the Higgs boson:

Then the Banker endorsed a blank cheque (which he crossed) Notice that
the Banker was already cross even as he put up the first tranche of money;
and in what follows:

. . . the Butcher contrived an ingenious plan For making a separate
sally; And had fixed on a spot unfrequented by man, A dismal and desolate
valley. It is no coincidence that Carroll has the Butcher as the author
of the plan to seek out a remote location in which to build the Snark Snaring
Contraption. The whole project was later to be butchered, and this literary
device saved on extraneous characterisation.

One stanza appears time and again:

They threatened its life with a railway-share; They charmed it with
smiles and soap. The ‘charm’, the smiles and even the soap ultimately depend
on public support for the hunt. In the heyday of the railways, threatening
the life of a Snark with a railway share was presumably nothing other than
nonsense for nonsense’s sake. In Britain now most pundits would point to
the forthcoming issue of railway shares as a large threat to the stability
of the government, its finances and its funding policies. Is this Lewis
Carroll’s final prophecy on the fate of British particle physics?

A more sinister end is suggested by what became of the Baker. Early
on, his uncle warns him:

But oh, beamish nephew, beware of the day, If your Snark be a Boojum!
for then You will softly and suddenly vanish away, And never be met with
again! . . . and later as the story ends, it transpires that:

The Snark was a Booju, you see.

Lewis Carroll’s nonsense word ‘beamish’ can now be seen as a most cleverly
contrived epithet to describe particle physicists. Is this what awaits all
physicists who glimpse the top quark and the Higgs boson? Are these particles
Boojums? And if they were present after all at PETRA and LEP, how many physicists
have already ‘softly and suddenly vanished away’? I personally know of several
– but that, like Dr Watson’s tantalising mystery of Sherlock Holmes and
the Giant Rat of Sumatra, ‘is a story for which the world is not yet prepared’.

George Lafferty is a member of the high energy particle physics group
in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester.