Final Theory: A Novel

  • Mark Alpert
Simon & Schuster: 2008. 368 pp. £12.99, $24 9781416572879 9781847372406 | ISBN: 978-1-4165-7287-9

Most conspiracy theorists focus on political cover-ups. But science is an excellent catalyst for this sort of paranoia too: so entrenched is the stereotype of the mad researcher that it is not surprising people might suspect that someone, somewhere, is hiding something for nefarious gain. Physics in particular lends itself to these sorts of fears. Whereas most people can conceptualize tangible sciences such as biology, the quantum world is, by its very nature, largely ungraspable and seems to simmer with deadlier force. The Manhattan Project, which still casts a long and sinister shadow in the popular imagination, certainly didn't improve its reputation.

Mark Alpert's debut novel Final Theory is classic conspiracy fodder. It posits that Albert Einstein, who in real life spent his last decades failing to unify quantum mechanics with relativity, instead succeeded. Realizing the military implications, yet incapable of destroying the beautiful mathematical proofs outright, Alpert's fictionalized Einstein decides to bury the information until mankind has outgrown its warlike ways. He duly entrusts various pieces of the puzzle to a select group of young protégés. Many years later word leaks out, and soon the US government and a rogue terrorist are hot on the trail. One by one, the protégés — now old men — are tortured and killed.

David Swift, the protagonist, is a failed physicist-turned-science historian who witnesses the dying words of one of these men, his former PhD supervisor. Before long, Swift has been taken prisoner by the FBI and, after escaping, goes on the run with Monique Reynolds, an up-and-coming string theorist, in a desperate attempt to find the secret information before it falls into the wrong hands.

The book is reminiscent of Dan Brown's Angels and Demons, about the exploitation of antimatter. But this is no ordinary thriller. First, Alpert can actually write. Like many 'lab lit' authors, he is clever with scientific metaphors: Monique is at one point described as “unyielding and unstoppable, bending the whole fabric of spacetime around her”. Moreover, Alpert has made an effort to integrate serious physics into the plot. As a former grad student turned Einstein biographer, Swift knows the great man's work intimately and can explain the basics on behalf of the reader. In the author's note, we learn that Alpert has a lot in common with his protagonist. Both share a physics education, a defection to a peripheral career (Alpert currently writes for Scientific American) and, like Swift in the novel, Alpert is author of a seminal research paper that is enjoying a re-examination.

Alpert manages to avoid some of the usual fictional-scientist stereotypes. His coup is Reynolds, a black female physicist who drives a Corvette with the number plate 'STRINGS'. Her geek chic is as far from the boffin cliché as you can get; indeed it is a reasonable representation of what modern scientists can be like. Alpert does occasionally slip: grad students are described as pale, gangly, poorly dressed and bespectacled, and the last Einstein protégé left standing goes mad while seeking to exploit the theory for his own ends. Yet right up until the point he starts waving around an Uzi, the protégé's 'madness' is relatively harmless, fixated on unlimited energy and new medicines.

It is disappointing when these wild but admirable dreams degenerate into frank evil. It would have been more elegant had Alpert explored scientists' obsessive nature without actually crossing that line. Nevertheless, even this character is not half as mad as the rogue terrorist nor as evil as the FBI. The flip-side of yearning for plausible scientific characters in fiction is to recognize that, as human beings, scientists should be allowed to be as prone to crazy or bad behaviour as any other member of society.

The more disturbing stereotypical trait in the book, however, is that scientists shouldn't meddle with things they aren't meant to know. Swift “thought he could get a glimpse of the Theory of Everything without suffering any consequences, and now he was being punished for this sin of pride, this rash attempt to read the mind of God”. This could be a sentiment straight from The Clouds, Aristophanes' cautionary comedy about the hubris of the sophist school, or the myth of Icarus, who flew too close to the Sun. Haven't we moved on a bit since then?