Alan Goodwin - Gravity's Chain

I think that’s where Mitchell has gone wrong with what he does. It’s too loud, too brash; there’s no ethical substance to what he is saying. It’s just a kind of pop science and that isn’t enough.

How close do you think we are to the kind of scientific society Bacon wrote about?

Closer than people imagine. I look at the world today and I see a real turning point. For the past two hundred years the big debate has been about economics. A country has been defined by whether it’s capitalist or socialist; a person has been defined by whether they’re left or right. It really has been the age of economic man. However, I see that kind of argument ending now. Look at the political parties in most Western countries and you see so little dividing them. The economic argument between the Conservative and Labour parties in England is really minimal in comparison to what it was even twenty years ago and that’s the same in most countries between the old parties of the left and right. There seems to be broad agreement on the way an economy is now run.

I see the real debate in the future about how we use and control science. We’re already seeing argument about genetics and the environment, and the debate surrounding GE is a prototype of debate in the future about how far we’re prepared to proceed along the scientific route. I see a time in the not too distant future when a person will be defined by whether they’re for or against scientific advancement, whether they agree or disagree with the technology stemming from a scientific breakthrough. I see a time when politics will be about science and not economics. And, of course, for people to debate they have to understand.

Do you think your patterns and rules will help the debate?

I think they will actually, because as I tried to set out at the beginning of this interview, what I’m talking about is changing the way science is done so people can more readily understand it. I hope that in fewer than ten years the entire way in which science is taught in schools and universities will have been revolutionised by this kind of thinking. So yes, I think the future debate will be helped enormously by what I’m saying. In fact I think it will be at the heart of the coming argument because it will be the language by which people articulate what they say.

If there’s one thing you would like people to remember about your theory, what would that be?

Remember, rules not maths instead of maths rules.

I let the magazine drop to my lap. ‘What a crock of shit,’ I said to no one in particular.

L as Vegas has to be one of the strangest cities on the planet. It reminds me of a film set—all façade and no substance. Everything is artificial, even the grass. When driving to the city there are no suburbs to signal its approach: you simply round a hill in the desert and there it is, like a huge spaceship dumped from the sky. During the day the place lazes in the burning sun, subdued and half asleep. Come the night, though, and the place erupts in a symphony of light, water and sound. The people come alive as though injected with a serum to tickle their pleasure zones. At night Las Vegas is a modern Pompeii where the threat of being buried by burning decadent lava is very much alive.

Even I had balked at bringing the show to Las Vegas. I might have set out to blur the boundaries between serious science and the real world, but the home of Elvis Presley’s sequinned jumpsuits, chorus girls wearing barely enough to make dresses for dolls, and the legitimised front for mafia money hardly seemed the right place for relativity and quantum—even with a laser show. Perhaps Driesler was right: I was just an entertainer. However, the United States division of Taikon insisted on three Vegas dates where the returns were forecast to be the best throughout the American tour. So money spoke, as always, and here I was in Casino City. Two shows down, one to go and then on to the east coast for shows in New York and Philadelphia before a return to England. Already there were negotiations for more dates in the States and Europe, but nothing was decided. The company was now projecting that the tour might be extended by a further four months, but I was making plans of my own. After the States and during the interlude, I had no intention of returning to England; I was going back to New Zealand, alone. All I had to do was break the news to Bebe and convince him to help.

The executives were right about the money to be made in Vegas. The shows were grossing telephone numbers and those profit share clauses in my royal contract with the company were lighting up like the rows of pokie machines in the casinos. And then there were the women. In Las Vegas there are more women on the make per square metre than anywhere I’ve ever been. The female body adorns every nook and cranny of the city. Sex doesn’t just sell in Vegas, it drips from the walls. This should have been the ultimate for me, a place to rut until I could rut no more, a place to choose my mates as though concocting a pizza (‘I’ll have a blonde with a Hispanic topping, please’) and exhaust myself on their silicon bodies and moulded faces. So why wasn’t I happy? Why wasn’t I out there gambling, drinking, snorting and fucking like every other sad bastard in the city? Jo was dead, that’s why.

The news reached us on our arrival in Vegas. Detective Ryan, true to his word, had kept Bebe informed: the life support machine had been turned off that morning. I wonder in what tone he had passed on the information. I couldn’t help but feel that the man was out to get me and now he really had something to get me for.

In absence of sampling the women of Las Vegas I’d taken heavily to the booze, especially whisky—I nursed the bottle from before breakfast until bed. In my hotel room, fit for a Roman emperor, I sprawled on silk pillows drinking and talking to Bebe. The Driesler interview and subsequent articles were the main sources of our conversation. The man had become an irritant for which I could find no cure. Bebe had warmed to the Driesler sermon about morals with some zeal. I think he saw an opportunity to save me and took my temporary abstinence from the flesh as a sign that perhaps, at last, I wanted to change. However, he was careful enough to arrange the parties as of old in case I slipped from what he assumed was some new moral high ground. Stubbornly choosing to ignore my drastically increased alcohol intake, he lectured me about the historical fall of elites, first the priesthood and then the politicians—once admired, they were now lampooned and despised. He insisted Driesler was right to foresee the importance of the scientists and to warn about their downfall. Neither Bebe nor Driesler quite came out and said it, but the implication was that there was more to the warnings about my morals than my creation of a pop show for science. Bebe thought it time for the moral leadership to come from science. ‘Let the writers booze and copulate,’ he said at one point before falling silent. His message was loud and clear, but was the company listening? Surely their squeaky clean, Mr Nice Guy image would fit with this just swell.

On the afternoon before the last show a shrill blast interrupted us. Bebe nodded into his mobile phone without speaking, then replaced it on the table between us. ‘George is on his way up.’

I hadn’t spoken to George Mason since the Dorchester party when I’d thankfully spurned the young woman on his arm. Now, despite the fact I was due back in England in less than two weeks, he’d flown to me for a meeting. Since learning of the visit the day before, I had chosen to ignore its implications. I sat in my hotel room, whisky in hand, unusually calm and quite drunk.