Masaru Katsu stared at his computer screen and frowned. Here was an incredible controversy on the Internet on String Theory. How did that happen? How did he miss what was going on in South Africa? He knew about Greene’s discovery of the error in his equations before his appearance at PBS and all the late shows in New-York but he thought that it would not take more than a day or two to clarify the matter. And he had completely missed the chance to take the lead on the story! He should have never trusted Richard Greene. The man believed himself to belong among the few possessors of the truth in theoretical physics.
Katsu, a Japanese American physicist, Professor of Theoretical Physics in the City College of Los Angeles was another media star in the category of science popularizer. Theoretical Physics was creating stars overnight. Books on theories or speculations about the universe and its laws have always fascinated readers. From Aristotle’s Physics, On the Heavens, On the Universe to Plato’s Timaeus, to Lucretius’s On The Nature Of Things, to Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, to Copernicus’s On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres, to Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, these books and treatises have always been widely read and their authors widely acclaimed. The trend has been continued ever since. It was only recently that authors of modern popular science books had been elevated to the status of stars.
It had all started with Nigel Sterling’s phenomenal success of his small book, A Brief Talk On The Universe, notwithstanding the claim made in the book that when the universe will start contracting again, time will reverse itself and human will become younger and younger. That claim was, of course, later retracted by its author but by that time, Nigel Sterling, had already become the face of Physics throughout the world. A slew of other physicists and scientists had followed suit with varied degrees of success. Since then, Sterling had written books after books on the same theme, making more and more extravagant speculations presented as true statements just to remain in the limelight. A famous case among others was about black holes. Sterling had made a bet of $ 1.99 that according to his theory, black holes should destroy everything that falls inside. When works from other renowned scientists and observations seemed to disagree with his theory, Sterling had made a complete U-Turn and announced to the world that he had changed his mind after having solved a long-standing difficulty in physics and did not understand why he has not been given a Nobel Prize for his work yet.
Then came Richard Greene’s The Universe Of Strings, a book that purported to explain string theory to the layman and also presented the speculative hypotheses as factual certainties. The fact that string theory could not make—not to say could never make—one single verifiable prediction did not bother Greene a bit. Whenever he needed to defend his scientifically unfalsifiable claims, Greene would resort to an attitude known as the Bertrand Russell’s Teapot analogy. Russell wrote:
‘If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes.’
Greene’s book had made him the theoretical physicist of the century.
Katsu had gone them one better. He was a natural ‘communicator’ in the sense that his best subject was himself. The topics of his books alone should have been enough to scare off any publishers, even those who were specialized in extreme science-fiction novels. But Katsu, being a string theorist, had profited from the powerful hold of the string community on publishers. All of his books, without exceptions, would start with the first chapters—some would say, half the book—about himself and recounted over and over anecdotes that tell readers how smart he was when he was a kid. Once his books hit the market, like Sterling and Greene before him, Katsu was endowed with a ‘star’ status overnight and was invited again and again to appear or give talks in scientific shows and journals.
Katsu was interrupted in his thoughts when his desk phone went off.
He straightened himself up and picked up the receiver. “Katsu.”
His secretary’s voice announced, “A call from Johannesburg for you, Dr. Katsu.”
– “Patch him through.”
Katsu listened to the report. “So, Hoskins checked with LIGO and Arecibo?… Good, that’s what I thought… Come again?… A series of inexplicable events? Okay, what else?… They said what?… A South African woman physicist found the error?… He contacted the director of CERN? About what?… The black holes experiment?… Wait, slow down, what’s a black township?… What? Well, say slum then… The man broke a boxer’s fist with his chin?… Someone who can hurt them just by looking at them? You’re sure?… Are you certain?… And those guys were there that Friday night?… No, no. Stay there, I might need you.”
Katsu replaced the receiver and pressed on a button.
– “Brigitte, book me a flight to Johannesburg and a room at the Michelangelo Tower. Yes, tonight or tomorrow.”
He was right. They were not false positive signals. They were really gravitational waves and from what he had just learned, Katsu cursed himself for not having followed his instincts. He knew he had more clouts that Greene in South Africa. He was revered over there. After all, wasn’t Japan the only major business partner of South Africa before, during and after the apartheid-era? And the director of CERN was a personal friend.
Katsu laughed out loud thinking about the expression ‘throw enough mud at the wall and some of it will stick’. Among all the fabrications he’d piled in his books, maybe, just maybe, the parallel universe’s one will stick. String Theory might be the real deal after all, unbelievable, he thought. Maybe all the monkeys hitting randomly at the typewriters have finally ended up writing a grammatically correct sentence.
