Vole science
I wanted to share this snippet from Sebastian Faulkes’ Engleby, a novel set in the Cambridge of the 1970s.
Heisenberg and Bohr and Einstein strike me as being like gifted retriever dogs. Off they go, not just for an afternoon, but for ten years; they come back exhausted and triumphant and drop at your feet … A vole. It’s a remarkable thing in its way, a vole – intricate, beautiful really, marvellous. But does it … Does it help? Does it move the matter on?
When you ask a question that you’d actually like to know the answer to – what was there before the Big Bang, for instance, or what lies beyond the expanding universe, why does life have this inbuilt absurdity, this non sequitur of death – they say that your question can’t be answered, because the terms in which you’ve put it are logically unsound. What you must do, you see, is ask vole questions. Vole is – as we have agreed – the answer; so it follows that your questions must therefore all be vole-related.
Powerful stuff, and I suspect many of the people who ask questions after my cosmology talks go away feeling short changed by their helping of vole. I suppose I can only say that we try as hard as possible to get what we can from the Universe; and if it only gives us voles then, to mix metaphors horribly, we have no choice but to make vole-ade and ask voley questions.
