Lecture excerpt: Introduction
“Thank you, thank you, and welcome to the first of this series of science lectures. As you know, I am embarking upon an ambitious tour of the country, hoping to educate and entertain all and sundry with some serious (and some not-so-serious) tales of the latest in scientific thinking. Obviously, not everybody is a scientist, so I hope to keep things as simple and as interesting as I possibly can, and yes, before you question that, science can be both simple and interesting. I can see some of you are skeptical - all I can say to you is please give me the benefit of the doubt before judging. You may be surprised.
“So what will I be discussing? A good question I ask myself. At first I struggled to define clearly the content of these lectures. I considered discussing over the course of them the nature of life, and of death, and of time. Why is it that we are alive now? Why weren’t we alive back in the past? Or in the future? Is being dead the same thing as not yet being born? The nature of time is a great mystery, and its relationship with the span of our lifetimes and our consciousness is a profound mystery. However, ultimately, I decided that such matters are really the reserve of philosophy, and I prefer to deal with the real, the observable, so I shall stick to discussing my chosen professional field, that of physics and the natural sciences.
“And so, having formulated these talks, I present them to you under the umbrella title of Physics, Cosmology and Why There Is No Cat. If you are curious about the cat, you can either come along to my final lecture or you can search for it on the internet.”
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The morning after the great metallurgy department calamity, the students of the University of Birmingham awoke to a blissfully clear, warm blue sky. Well, those who needed to wake up in the morning anyway, which was really not a very large percentage. And of those that needed to wake up, only a small percentage of those actually managed to. Such is the way of student life.
Of this small percentage of a small percentage who had convinced themselves it was worth emerging from their slumber, two were heading from the student accomodation in the Vale to the main uni campus. One wore a mismatching outfit of bright happy colours, the other wore black matched carefully with black.
‘Did you get caught in that storm last night?’ asked the brightly dressed one.
‘Nope,’ replied the monochromatic one. ‘I was out at Exocide all night.’
‘Ah, your rock club. Was it good?’
‘It was alright. They had some glam band on, all spandex and poodle hair. Not really my cup of tea.’
‘Fair enough. Maybe I should come along with you some time?’
‘Yeah, because they play a lot of Spandau Ballet there actually.’
‘No need for sarcasm Jo. I was just saying perhaps I might enjoy it. You never know.’
Jo smiled. ‘Eradani, you will not enjoy it. I can tell you that now. You really really won’t enjoy it.’
‘But I don’t enjoy anything I’m supposed to. I hate those techno-dancey-rave places that everyone else insists on going to. There’s got to be something I like to do.’
Jo didn’t respond. They kept walking. They had both been students at the University of Birmingham for some seven months now. They were roommates but studied different subjects - Eradani had randomly chosen to read astrophysics because it sounded like an impressive subject and had lots of exotic-sounding courses like Cosmology, the Big Bang, Black Holes & Singularities, Quantum Physics and so on. Jo, for inexplicable reasons, was studying Japanese.
Over the course of the previous semester-and-a-bit they had become firm buddies. They didn’t do everything together - Jo had a habit of disappearing off at all hours of the day and night to various rock clubs and live gigs without any warning while Eradani tended to hover around the library and disappear into peculiar novels written by commercially unsuccessful authors.
They differed greatly, yet they complemented each other. And that made for a great friendship.
The walk from the halls of residence to the main campus took about twenty minutes. Rather than follow Edgbaston Park Road road down the side of the Vale and enter the university by its side entrance, the students would cut sideways along a path that ran behind the northernmost buildings of the campus and then turn by the side of the School of Metallurgy and Materials Science towards Chancellor’s Court, the focal point and historical hub of the university.
This particular morning, however, their progress was unexpectedly hampered.
‘What’s going on here then?’ said Eradani. The path was cordoned off ahead of them and a large group of people were milling around.
‘Dunno,’ said Jo. ‘Looks exciting though.’ She powered ahead leaving Eradani playing catchup.
As she neared the cordon, Eradani reached the point where she should have been able to see the metallurgy department. Only it wasn’t there. Where there had once been a state-of-the-art materials facility there was now a large, smoking crater filled with bits of charred girder, brick and concrete. The sight was surreal and Eradani could barely believe what she was seeing. She grabbed Jo’s shoulder.
‘My God - do you think anybody was hurt?’
‘Nah,’ said Jo. ‘This must have happened overnight. Nobody would have been around.’
Eradani hoped she was right. Looking at the scene around her she couldn’t imagine anybody in or near the building surviving. Yet the damage, although severe, was remarkably confined - surrounding buildings and trees were barely touched. It didn’t seem to make any sense. How could an entire building have been so precisely and thoroughly destroyed? Was it an explosion? A meteorite hit? Was it an accident or was it deliberate?
As if to answer none of these questions, an astrophysics lecturer of Eradani’s chose that moment to arrive on the scene and interfere.
‘My God - do you think anybody was hurt?’
Eradani sighed. ‘Hello, Dr. Richter. No, we don’t think anybody was hurt.’
‘Well, let’s hope not.’ He brushed his open, full-length coat backwards and put his hands into his trouser pockets. ‘Do we think it was a meteorite strike?’ he asked, attempting to appear knowledgeable in such matters. ‘Maybe twenty, thirty metres across? I reckon a rock about that size could have done this. Good job it didn’t hit the physics department.’
‘Nobody seems to know what happened,’ said Eradani. ‘We only just got here ourselves.’
‘We?’
‘Me and Jo... oh, well, she was here a second ago.’ Eradani looked around, but Jo had vanished. ‘Honestly, she needs to be on a leash that one.’
‘Maybe she went to lectures?’
Eradani snorted. ‘Not likely. She’ll be up to no good, she always is. I’d better mount a rescue mission - she’s bound to have gotten herself into some sort of predicament.’
‘Well, I’m not sure you should...’
Ignoring her lecturer, Eradani set off towards the crater, pretty sure that Jo would be found nosing around where she shouldn’t be. She ‘excuse-me’d her way through the bemused masses and arrived at the cordon. The full scale of the devastation knocked her senseless for a moment, but she kept her head and scanned the vicinity. As expected, Jo was clambering down the sides of the crater. Eradani grimaced, then ducked under the cordon and set off in pursuit of her roommate.
The going wasn’t easy. The ground was crumbly and ashen and bits of twisted metal and masonry were determinedly trying to turn her ankle. She slipped and skidded the last few feet to the bottom of the crater, coughing and spluttering with the dust. She rubbed her eyes and surveyed the scene - there was little that was recognisable amongst the debris. Whatever had happened, it had happened thoroughly. This was no half-hearted disaster, this was the real thing.
‘Eradani, over here!’
She saw Jo waving animatedly beyond a large pile of fused brickwork and clambered over to her. She tried to dust herself down but only smudged more blackness into her dress and her hands.
‘Help me clear this,’ said Jo, her choice of black clothing suddenly seeming entirely prudent. ‘There’s something under here.’
‘Shouldn’t we head back? We might get into trouble.’
Jo ignored her and continued removing rubble from whatever she was hoping to unearth. Eradani looked around, sighed, then joined in with the excavation.
‘There’s definitely something here. Part of the roof I think. Looks like there’s some sort of marking or diagram on it.’
They continued removing rubble until, exhausted and grubby, they had finally uncovered their discovery. Eradani stepped back to get a wider view. What she saw was rather disturbing.
‘It’s a... it’s a pentagram,’ she said. ‘Why is there a pentagram here?’
‘That’s not the worst of it,’ said Jo, ‘look at that.’ She pointed to the centre of the pentagram. Burnt into the design was the unmistakable outline of a human being.
‘Oh no,’ said Eradani. ‘You don’t think...’
Jo remained silent. She simply shook her head.
At that moment, Dr. Richter chose to turn up again, this time announcing himself by tripping over some debris and landing in a heap in the centre of the pentagram.
‘Ouch. Hurt my elbow.’
Eradani helped him up. He dusted himself down, with much the same level of success as his student, then he took a deep breath and grabbed her firmly by the shoulders.
‘Eradani,’ he said. ‘I just spoke to a couple of eyewitnesses. They said it was a lightning strike. Quite how it destroyed the entire building I have no idea, but they were pretty adamant.’
Eradani nodded. Seemed unlikely, but there had been a big storm the previous night, so at least it fitted the available facts.
‘And there’s something else,’ he added gravely. ‘Professor Hughes, he is your tutor, correct? It appears he was seen entering the building yesterday evening. A few hours before this... catastrophe. It seems there has been no sign of him since.’
Eradani just about suppressed a squeal of horror. With her hand over her mouth she sank to the ground.
‘Look, it may be that he left the building before the event and just hasn’t come into work yet. There’s no evidence that he was caught up in this at all, so don’t lose hope just yet.’
Eradani sobbed and pointed at the pentagram. Dr. Richter frowned, then turned to look. He saw the scorched professor-shaped shadow and he froze.
Jo jumped up, moved across to Eradani and gave her a hug. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘But it’ll be alright. I promise. It’ll be alright.’