‘And so that’s how you calculate the constant ‘k’ for a material, but remember it must be infinitely long, have only two dimensions and have zero mass, otherwise the equations don’t apply. Now, has anybody got any questions?’
The majority of the students were asleep. Dr. Richter’s lectures were notoriously boring, but when combined with such unbelievably dull subject matter, even the most enthusiastic physicist-to-be began to suffer from fatigue.
The lecture was about a form of materials physics that was of some minor benefit to some small manufacturer somewhere in the world - possibly. However, unless you were fully versed in deity-level differential calculus, the real-world mathematics was just too advanced to be understood, hence the need to model the phenomenon in materials that, while easier on the mathematics, simply did not, and could not, exist.
‘Sir,’ sang a voice from the back of the theatre. ‘Sir, why are we using materials that don’t exist? Why can’t we apply it to everyday things. Like formica?’
‘Because, Frank, the equations involved are too complex for an undergraduate course. And in some cases they have even been shown to have no solution at all.’
‘Well, how do you know how they work, then?’
‘Data from experimental determination, Frank,’ responded Dr. Richter.
‘So where did you get an infinitely long, two dimensional, massless object from then?’
‘I didn’t. But the results on real materials agree very well with the predictions of the theory.’
‘I don’t get it.’
‘Nobody can describe simply how real materials behave in these situations because the maths gets too complicated. There are just too many variables, so we simplify the whole thing and use non-physical systems instead.’
‘Oh, right,’ said Frank. ‘So what use is it then?’
Dr. Richter looked at Frank for a second. ‘See you all tomorrow,’ he said, and turned to the blackboard. He started to rub it vigorously with the duster. He could hear the class filing out of the room behind him, laughing and chatting happily in the knowledge that they’d somehow managed to survive the past hour. A sixth sense told him that there was somebody waiting to see him, but he deliberately continued to clear the boards. He wanted to put off explaining to Frank that most of the physics he was being taught was not definitive, not an infinitely precise description of the world, but instead just an approximation, good-enough certainly, but an approximation nevertheless. He hoped that if he took long enough with the blackboards, Frank would just get fed up and walk off.
He kept wiping until, by the time he was on the very last board, he knew that Frank was going to wait him out. He rubbed off the last word, put the duster in its proper place (on the floor just to the side of the blackboard) and turned to face his enemy.
‘Have you finished?’ said Eradani impatiently. Dr. Richter looked around the room. Frank wasn’t there at all.
‘Oh, Eradani, I’m so glad it’s you,’ he said, leaning on the table. ‘I thought it was going to be Frank.’
‘Oh, yes? Looking forward to explaining the properties of non-existent materials, were you?’ she said smugly.
‘It’s not funny, Eradani. I have to teach these kids that physics can’t always give precise answers and that sometimes we just have to make approximations. And some of them can’t accept that. It’s not much fun being a lecturer sometimes, you know.’
‘I never said it was,’ she replied.
‘Well, what do you want, then?’ he asked, opening his eyes wide as he spoke, indicating to Eradani that he wanted her to hurry up.
‘It’s about Cofomaristics,’ she said.
‘I thought as much.’ He hoisted himself up onto the table, something he would never have let Eradani do. ‘Go on, then.’
‘Well, the way I see it, is that we’ve tested a Cofomaristic prediction and shown it to hold true. And if one prediction is true, then there is no reason to think the rest shouldn’t be as well. So the question on my mind is... do you think we should go public with it?’
Dr. Richter snapped his head up. He looked her straight in the eyes. ‘Are you mad?’ he said. ‘Where on Earth did you get an idea like that?’
‘I thought that perhaps it would make us famous. We’d get into all the magazines and everything.’
‘Is that what this is about? You want your picture in Vogue? Typical.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘You haven’t thought about the consequences, have you? Nobody is going to want to believe it, even with all the proof in the world. It’s one of those things that is so obscenely controversial that nobody would dare to support it. I mean, talk about flying in the face of established convention. This thing’s contentious to the point of anarchy. It’s best left alone and forgotten.’
‘Yes, I see what you’re saying. I just think that this is too big to keep all to ourselves. I mean, we’ve actually got proof that Cofomaristics works in the real world. Don’t you think this is truly momentous?’
‘Yes, of course I do,’ said Dr. Richter. He’d thought this all through very carefully the night before. He knew it would be all to easy to rush ahead and publish their results before they’d considered them thoroughly. The last thing he wanted was to get involved in another scandal of the ‘cold fusion’ magnitude. ‘But we can’t go public with it,’ he explained. ‘And even if we did, we’d need to have absolute, totally unquestionable evidence, and we haven’t got that. We’ve got one highly unsophisticated error-strewn little experiment that we performed in a dusty old optics laboratory with no witnesses and no proper documentation. We release what we found, it’d be torn to shreds within minutes. It wouldn’t stand a chance out there on its own. And even with plenty of evidence to back us up, we’d still probably struggle to get heard. This stuff - it’s just too mad, too crazy, too different.’
Eradani had half expected this, though, so she wasn’t too upset. Deep in her heart, she knew that they could never release their discovery to the world, simply because the rest of the world would never accept something that disagreed so brazenly with hundreds of years of experimental evidence. It did seem rather a waste though. ‘I think I’ll just go back to my room, then,’ she said. She turned slowly and headed to the door. She put her right hand out and grabbed the handle. She didn’t push. Instead, she turned back to her lecturer. ‘I thought there may have been a chance that... that it would have made our lives better somehow,’ she said.
‘I know,’ said Dr. Richter sympathetically. ‘But the opposite is true.’