That we have no idea what great minds were snuffed out between 1914 and 1918 at a time when physics and mathematics were flourishing as never before, has long troubled me. What kind of world might this be had that young German physicist or that Italian chemist not been picked off by a bored sniper one afternoon?
It would, of course, have taken only the odd stray bullet to have robbed the world of Ernest Rutherford, Ralph Vaughan-Williams, Jean Cocteau, Winston Churchill, Otto Dix, Max Ernst, E.M. Forster, Robert Graves and, of course, JRR Tolkien. I’m sure there are many more.
The Circling Song started life as a meditation on the lost potential of the generation of young men who fought on both sides in the Great War. It began with me wandering around a battlefield site (as I do every year in early summer) and thinking that only a small alteration in his circumstances could have found Albert Einstein on the killing fields of that conflict and that had he been killed, the world may never have encountered general relativity. In addition, Arthur Eddington was a Quaker and therefore a pacifist. Had Eddington not been around in 1919 to provide measurable proof of general relativity it is entirely possible that even a living Einstein would have remained in obscurity for all but a few abstract mathematicians.
I came up with my own extraordinary savant, Henry Lawrence, a Private in the British Army, who by chance finds himself in possession of extraordinary knowledge concerning the nature of matter. He realises that the entire universe consists of nothing but equations and moreover, he is beginning to learn how to solve them.
The story is told through the letters and journals of those who knew him and is, I think, really rather good.
Which is why I’m promoting it in this appalling manner. Give it a go. Click on the image.
It would, of course, have taken only the odd stray bullet to have robbed the world of Ernest Rutherford, Ralph Vaughan-Williams, Jean Cocteau, Winston Churchill, Otto Dix, Max Ernst, E.M. Forster, Robert Graves and, of course, JRR Tolkien. I’m sure there are many more.
The Circling Song started life as a meditation on the lost potential of the generation of young men who fought on both sides in the Great War. It began with me wandering around a battlefield site (as I do every year in early summer) and thinking that only a small alteration in his circumstances could have found Albert Einstein on the killing fields of that conflict and that had he been killed, the world may never have encountered general relativity. In addition, Arthur Eddington was a Quaker and therefore a pacifist. Had Eddington not been around in 1919 to provide measurable proof of general relativity it is entirely possible that even a living Einstein would have remained in obscurity for all but a few abstract mathematicians.
I came up with my own extraordinary savant, Henry Lawrence, a Private in the British Army, who by chance finds himself in possession of extraordinary knowledge concerning the nature of matter. He realises that the entire universe consists of nothing but equations and moreover, he is beginning to learn how to solve them.
The story is told through the letters and journals of those who knew him and is, I think, really rather good.
Which is why I’m promoting it in this appalling manner. Give it a go. Click on the image.
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