The Theory of (Not Quite) Everything, page 1
Dedication
For Jamie, Tom, and Freya
with love
Epigraph
Rationalists, wearing square hats
Think, in square rooms.
Wallace Stevens
It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover.
Henri Poincaré
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
1. Recurring
2. Planning Fallacy
3. Vibrations
4. Reformulation
5. Single Digit
6. Matrix
7. P Versus NP
8. Vector
9. Mathematician
10. Sinuosity
11. Thirteen Percent
12. Infinity
13. Resistance
14. Proportionality
15. Epsilon
16. Spin
17. Intersection
18. Game Theory
19. Simultaneous Equations
20. Game Theory
21. Envy Free
22. Venn Diagram
23. Facts
24. Squares
25. Divided in Two
26. Return
27. Empty Set
28. The Butterfly Effect
29. Repetition
30. Disequilibrium
31. Omissions
32. Heuristics
33. The Halting Problem
34. Proof
35. Reflection
36. Planning
37. Sensitivity
38. Tipping Point
39. Logic
40. Chaos
41. Non-Verbal Reasoning
42. Scales
43. The Brother Problem
44. Cul-De-Sac
45. Silver
46. Best Route Home
47. Incremental
48. True or False
49. Recurring
50. Breaking
51. Rule of Thumb
52. Remainder
53. Unpredictability
53. Evidence
54. Infinity
55. Return
56. Chaos
57. Time
58. To the Power of
59. Plural
60. Evidence
61. Heuristics
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
Recurring
2012
Time (t) = 0
When Mimi stands at her door, she knows that the news is not good. Her body is familiar with the rules.
“Miss Brotherton? Naomi?”
She points inside to invite the police officers in. Her words won’t come.
It’s a man and a woman. They brush non-existent fluff from their sleeves as they step across the threshold. They have the appearance of suicide bombers, packaged with padding and badges and belts and clips, a walkie-talkie each, many pockets. But it’s terrible information—not a device—that they’re about to detonate.
They take up so much space in her hallway she has to inch around them to lead the way down the hallway to the kitchen, where she can ask the question she thinks she knows the answer to. Is he dead? She pushes the mail on the floor with her foot as if to tidy up. She sees his name on an envelope. She pulls her sweater down to straighten herself out and smudges imagined mascara residue from beneath her eyes, attending to some abstract decorum required for these moments, just before everything falls apart.
It’s impossible to prepare someone for the news of a loved one’s death. But there are rules for such moments, and Mimi has seen them in action before.
She’d tell you: don’t procrastinate. The person will already know something is wrong from your demeanour, from the fact that you’re calling or visiting at all. We send countless signals without knowing. Their body will be preparing for an emergency.
Use plain and simple language. Start by saying the person has died. This leaves no room for doubt. Don’t use euphemisms—like “passed on,” or “they’re in a better place now.” “Lost” is particularly unhelpful—just imagine.
The truth is essential.
You may need to repeat yourself.
And don’t make promises that you can’t keep.
Mimi’s always been grateful that she’d been told by professionals. Dead straight.
She remembers last time—sitting on the corner of the coffee table, staring at a dry-cleaning tag that her mother had left on the rug. Her brother Art was talking. The police officers had gone.
“We need to break this down into parts,” Art had said, in a voice stunned into the rhythm of a metronome. He’d looked around, as if for a ruler with which to measure the parts of the shattered whole. “And”—he said, his voice faltering—“plan for our future together.”
“Yes,” said Mimi.
And, just like that, he took her hand.
This time, standing in her hallway, she’s barefoot and alone. The police follow in their boots, and she feels like a prisoner with an army walking behind her, past the mirror where her reflection is of a different person to the one who walked this hall a minute ago, checked herself in the glass, and plumped her lips.
The officers step into the kitchen, still holding their hats out in front of them.
“Can I offer you something?” she asks. Tea would forestall them, but they never accept anything.
“We’re all right, thank you,” says the man.
“Perhaps you’d like to sit down,” says the woman.
There’s no going back now.
Mimi lowers herself onto the sofa, her arms wanting to reach for her brother. For him to be there with her while she does this, but already, she knows that will not be possible.
“Is it Art?” she says. “My brother?”
“Miss Brotherton—”
“Is he dead?” she hears herself say. “My brother. He’s dead, right?” The room dissolves into strips that are floating away, nothing has substance, light swallows matter.
“Your brother’s had an accident. He’s in hospital and he—”
“Hospital? He’s okay?” She snatches up her jacket in one movement.
“Perhaps take a moment.” The officer points back to the sofa. “There are a few things you might wish to know.”
Art’s been hit by a car.
A small car.
“Smallish,” corrects PC Payne. “He’s badly hurt.” The driver of the car stopped, Mimi learns, and is very shaken up. Art’s unconscious—he caught the side or the wing mirror, they’re not sure which, and hit his head. He leaped out in front of the car, apparently, with no warning.
“N-n-no,” she says, her old stammer appearing, on cue. “Why would he do that?”
The driver called an ambulance and spoke to police at the scene. “I’m so sorry, Miss Brotherton, I know this is difficult. Is there anyone you’d like us to call?”
“N-n-no. Thank you.”
“Who would you normally call?”
Nothing feels normal right now.
Despite her initial demurral, she tries her friend Rey, but Rey doesn’t answer.
“And my boyfriend, I can try him too.”
She only gets his voicemail. “I thought you were him at the door.” Her voice catches.
They offer to drive Mimi to the hospital. “Thank you,” she says, “thank you so much.” She pulls on her shoes and puts her coat back on. PC Payne helps with the arms.
The police vehicle, an unmarked car, has no flashing blue light. It surprises Mimi that her feet can lift to step into it, but next thing she’s staring at a black headrest in front of her. She can see PC Robert’s sombre profile, his fleshy ear. She finds herself wondering if they’d be cracking jokes if she wasn’t in the car, like they do on TV.
She listens to other incidents intrude. “No further injuries, Grosvenor Park,” calls the in-car radio. “Apparently vehicle was stolen.”
“11-19, via the hospital,” says PC Payne, then turns down the volume, though a crackle remains constant. “You warm enough?” she asks. Kind. They do a U-turn at the dead end in the road and head off past the familiar doors of the neighbourhood—but as if transported in a spacecraft, so alien does it feel. Mimi grips the handle, and notices the door is locked.
There’s a small Dell computer keyboard between the seats and a squashed paper cup wedged into the pocket behind PC Roberts.
The sliding unnamed beast that lurks beneath their conversation, that the police have not said out loud, but Mimi feels is everywhere, is the suggestion that Art has tried to die.
I didn’t mean what I said, she telegraphs, trying to reach her brother from the car. I didn’t mean it.
Though of course, she had.
“Our stop ’n search numbers are trash,” says Roberts to Payne. “It’s going to be brutal in there tomorrow morning.”
She needs to get to Art’s bedside. Tell him she’s there. That she’ll never leave.
She’d told him she was going. But now, she makes a deal.
Please, she prays, to a higher power that she doesn’t believe in. Let him be okay and I promise I won’t go.
They drive towards Art.
It’s not the first deal she’s made.
The deal of her life has always been: she is ordinary so that Art could be special.
“Don’t bother him
Art never understood how boring his math could be for everyone else. “It’s not magic, you know,” said Mimi. “It’s just math.”
“Ah, but it is, you see.” A light would come on in his eyes, stars lit up inside him. “Take fractals.” He showed her the seahorse-tail patterns generated by mathematical equations. “These are reproduced again and again into exquisitely small, infinitely small, identical details, all over nature. Pineapples and ice crystals, forests and river deltas, the veins in your body.” He took her wrist and turned it over to reveal the blue threads under her pale skin. “Look how they fan out, fan out, fan out; it’s all numbers. Next time you eat Romanesco broccoli, see the pattern within the pattern within the pattern.” His hands feathered up and his fingers pleated over themselves, making brackets, balancing equations on both sides, raising things to the power of ten as he tried to explain, breathless. Mimi could not hold onto the tail of the comet. She was always left standing, her feet firmly on earth.
She’d had her brief time out there, orbiting the universe, trying to find love—a life of her own—and it hadn’t worked. She’d have to stay home, reduced back to a data point in the great grand story of her genius brother and his all-important math.
The lift doors open on the third floor of the hospital. Aluminium trollies park along the green walls like taxis waiting in a rank.
Mimi follows PC Payne. “Brotherton? Came in this evening?”
“Naomi Brotherton,” says Mimi. “I’m his sister.”
“ICU. Farthing Ward. Down the hallway to the seating area.”
They walk down the hospital tunnel. All the resolutions Mimi had made about her life while she was away are being swallowed behind her with every step.
“Oh my god.”
Art is flat on his back—coffin flat—his neck held rigid in a brace.
The sight stuns Mimi. Fluorescent lights intensify the daze. She feels her middle lift, as though she’s watching a diorama of the scene from above.
He lies on the bed, breath shallow and even, tubes rising and falling in sync with his chest. Tubes, liquids, toxins. Electrics, needles. Beds on wheels. He wouldn’t like it. The wheels make her feel queasy too—they look ready to move out at a moment’s notice. Mimi stands at the foot of his bed. “Can I touch him?” she asks a nurse.
“You should. We need him to hold on.”
Still feeling as if she’s floating, she holds onto her brother’s feet as though they are pedals. As if by some transfer of energy, she might get him going again.
The Aircel blanket falls between Art’s legs, there’s a cavity right up to his groin; she can make out his kneecaps. He’s got even thinner in the week she’s been gone. His forehead looks waxy and cool. It’s slightly tipped back and makes his nose look bigger on his face, haughty somehow.
“Artie,” she says. She wills his body for a sign. But his arms lie flaccid; no hand signals, no blinks. He isn’t going to flash his eyes open or tap out a hello with his index finger.
His index finger, on the arm that she broke. When it happened—the whole, terrible, godawful thing—her friend Rey had promised that Art would be fine.
2
Planning Fallacy
t = the previous year
Art’s sister believed in truth and—most of the time—in telling it. Art believed in facts.
He stood in front of a full-length mirror while a tailor pinched a measuring tape from his underarm to his hip, determining the facts of his body. A muscle in Art’s side twitched, a wince reflex as the man’s hair, drenched in glossy pomade, came within an inch of his clean shirt.
The tailors had been there since 1689. They told you that in green and gold above their door, on their letterhead and stitched into their label. Art had been there for eleven minutes. Metaphorically speaking, it felt as if he had been there since 1689. The fact was—Mimi was late.
And now it had started to rain. To distract himself, Art played his favourite game. What would change, right there in the shop, if the math question he had dedicated his life to, the famous Millennium problem, p versus Np, was solved? He usually relished the possibilities, even the chaos and disruption. But in the bespoke soft-carpeted interior of the tailor’s, a place where invoices were still handwritten, it was hard to imagine. He supposed an equation could govern the most efficient order in which to measure a man: head to sole, neck, back, waist, wrist. He settled on that—the tailor’s best route around his body. It wasn’t exactly Armageddon, or Peace on Earth, but still. The tailor’s breath fluttered on his neck. Being so close to another human being made Art’s skin prickle. He wished he did not find it so hard.
With a pencil between his teeth, the tailor pulled on his tape with a flourish. Art imagined telling Mimi. He brandished it about like a conductor at the Opera House, he would say. He knew she would laugh.
He finally saw her passing the headless black academic gowns that floated in the window, ducking out of the downpour and into the porticoed entrance. Rain-splattered and flushed, she unwound her scarf from her neck, but succeeded only in throttling herself. The old-fashioned bell rang as she opened the door. On a sunny day, Mimi’s hair had a copper-pan glow. Today, it looked like paint primer. It was too fine to bounce or curl and now, wet, it stuck to her face.
When she told him that she hadn’t meant to be late, she was probably telling the truth.
“Sorry,” she said. “Tubes.”
“You did not plan sufficiently well for the variables of your journey.” Art meant distance in miles, time of day, density of traffic. He acknowledged that weather in general, and Transport for London in particular, provided perennial mathematical challenges. “And the five minutes extra to find your keys.”
Late or not, he was glad she was there.
Mimi stuffed her scarf into her bag so that she wouldn’t forget it later and pushed her hair off her face with the back of her hand. Her brother was standing with his arms out to the sides like a marionette while a man ran a tape measure down his inner thigh. His fitting had started.
“Yes, yes,” she said, in response to his admonishment.
“You succumb to the planning fallacy, Mimi,” he said, “always thinking you need less time than you do.”
“Planning life at all embodies an inbuilt fallacy, frankly.”
“Oh, ha ha.”
These conversations were good-natured, and part of a daily ping-pong that Mimi liked. She even made them up in her head when Art wasn’t around, his opinions serving as guardrails to her bouncing thoughts.
She didn’t tell her brother, however, that before she’d left, she’d spent at least ten minutes on the loo reading a seven-year-old horoscope that Rey had once given her, trying to decide if it had come true. It said she had a tendency to be hard on herself, that there was conflict between her moon and her Mars, and she should consider a “design-adjacent” career.
She had joined Art at the robe-makers at his insistence.
“Ergh,” she’d said, when he’d suggested it at breakfast. “Do I have to?”
“I thought you might like it. Vivienne Westwood designed them.”
“I don’t care if they were designed by Pythagoras himself.” She’d passed the milk.
Art laughed.
“It just makes me sad,” she said, “going there.” At every high point of Art’s academic career, even the tiny hillocks like having his gown refitted, she felt the absence of their parents more keenly.
“Sir?” said the tailor to her brother. “Might you choose something in coral silk—the mathematics department colour? A tie, perhaps?” He reached for a box from under the glass cabinet at the till. “Some gentlemen like cufflinks.”
“I have enough cufflinks,” said Art, sticking out his sleeve to reveal his wrist. He only ever wore their father’s.
“How about some coral socks, Professor?” suggested Mimi.
After a quick figure-eight to the socks and back, the man presented a selection in orange and pink.
Colour is not an absolute thing, not a fact. It’s a cocktail of surface and light, eye and brain. All those years ago, witnesses to what happened to her parents described their car as red. They’d been telling the truth—the car they’d seen was red. Mimi saw her parents’ car as purple. She’d thought for a moment that the witnesses had the wrong car, the wrong people. But, as with beauty, colour depends on the beholder. Truth is the same. Mimi’s purple was just someone else’s red.
Just as Mimi sensed Art might be reaching his threshold of cooperation as a live sartorial dummy, the doorbell rang. She saw him flinch. He wouldn’t like a spectator. “Doctorate gown measurements?” said the customer, a young woman. “Law?” Mimi did that horrible calculation that told her where she would be on the academic ladder if she hadn’t left university in her very first year.
