Ian McEwan - Solar

Beard noticed that he was losing the room's attention. Phrases like 'standard deviation' generally had this effect on journalists. A few people at the back were talking among themselves. In the front row, a gentlemanly reporter of a certain age had closed his eyes. Beard pressed on towards his conclusion. There was surely much to be done to get more women into physics and to make them feel welcome there. But in one possible future, it might be a waste of effort to strive for parity when there were other branches of study that women preferred.

The journalist who had asked the question was nodding numbly. Behind her, someone else was starting to ask an unrelated question. The morning would have passed into oblivion like any other had not at that moment the professor of science studies suddenly stood, blushing pink, squared her papers against the table with a loud rap and announced to the room, 'Before I go outside to be sick, and I mean violently sick because of what I've just heard, I wish to announce my resignation from Professor Beard's committee.'

She strode away towards the door, amid a din of voices and of chairs pushed back across the parquet as the journalists leaped to their feet. Professionally engaged at last, delighted, desperate, competitive, they hurried after her.

As the room emptied, Professor Jack Pollard, the quantum-gravity specialist from Newcastle, who had given the Reith Lectures not so long ago and seemed to know everything, said in Beard's ear, 'You've put your foot in it now. She's postmodern, you see, a blank-slater, a strong social constructivist. They all are, you know. Shall we have a coffee?'

At the time, these terms meant little to Beard. He had one thought. This was not the way to tender a resignation. Then an even simpler second thought. He should leave as quickly as possible, even though he knew that Pollard wanted to gossip. In different circumstances, Beard would happily have sat with him in a caf̩ for an hour. There was a community, a shifting international group who knew each other jealously, affectionately, possessively, and had, with notable defections and deaths, travelled together since the heroic old days of classical string theory in pursuit of its grail, the unification of the fundamental forces with gravity. They had eventually seen the limitations of strings and embraced superstrings and heterotic string theory to arrive by these threads in the cavernous maternal shelter of M-theory. Each breakthrough had generated a new set of problems, inconsistencies, physical implausibilities. Ten dimensions, then, with a backward glance at the super-gravity men, eleven! Dimensions tightly wrapped on six circles, the rediscovery of Kaluza and Klein from the nineteen twenties, the delightful intricacies of Calabi-Yau manifolds and orbifolds! And the singular drama of the universe in its first one hundreth of a second! Beard had played no creative part, and did not quite have the mathematical reach, but he knew the gossip. And the jokes Рthe string theorist caught in bed with another woman who exclaimed to his wife, 'Darling, I can explain everything!' What a long hard road it had been, and so it remained Рthe outer edge of human intellectual grasp interwoven with all-too-human stories. The theorist who neglected his dying wife, and still failed to restate the problem. The obscure post-doc who resolved a set of contradictions in a liberating insight that wrecked his health. The famous convention that shamefully neglected an old eminence. The brown-nosing mediocrity who got the super-grant. The bust-up between two giants who once shared a lab.

Yes, he would have loved a chat, but he sensed a contraction around him, something like gathering darkness or its emotional equivalent. He was in trouble, and he should fade away before he made things worse. He apologised quickly to Pollard and the rest, took his briefcase and walked from the room, across the hall and left by the main entrance. Outside, sunlight and the city's background hum appeared to shrink his concerns. A mountain range might have had the same effect. Perhaps this was a fuss about nothing. As he passed he caught snatches of Nancy Temple's pavement press conference, delivered with lilting reasonableness: '…resurgent eugenics…sinister claims about human nature…neo-liberal attack on collectivity…' Nice punchy lines for the tabloids. Some of the journalists crowding around her were using the roof of a parked car as a writing desk, others were already phoning the story in. Perhaps she did not know that the excitement was in part about the government. One of its committees was in trouble. Another Blair failure.

Beard ignored the voices calling out his first name as he crossed the road. Never help feed a press story about yourself. But the next day he wondered if he should have turned back when he read of himself 'scuttling away in shame' under the headline 'Nobel Prof Says No To Lab Chicks'.

At first it seemed that this particular story had no staying power, no legs. After a minor eruption of morning headlines, there was silence for two days. He thought he had come through. But during that time one tabloid was busy with its research. On Saturday, Beard's 'love life' was revealed and artfully braided with the 'no to girls in white coats' story. On Sunday the other papers picked it up and piled in and he was reinvented as 'the bonking boffin', a 'Nobel love-rat', and a kind of learned satyr – 'the prof-goat'. There were references to the Aldous murder case, but Beard's earlier incarnation as the harmless, dreamy cuckold, the innocent fool, the dupe of a flighty wife, was conveniently forgotten. Now he was a loathed figure, seducing women even as he drove them out of science. In the more serious press, he was described as a physicist turned 'genetic determinist', a fanatical sociobiologist whose ideas about gender difference were shown to be indirectly derived from social Darwinism, which in turn had spawned Third Reich race theories. Then, daringly building on this, a journalist, more in the spirit of playful diary-page spite than genuine conviction, suggested that Beard was a neo-Nazi. No one took the charge seriously for a moment, but it became possible for other papers to take up the term even as they dismissed it, carefully bracketing and legalising the insult with quotation marks. Beard became the 'neo-Nazi' Professor.

An article in one left-of-centre paper argued that most important differences between men and women were cultural constructs. In response, Beard wrote a feebly sarcastic letter, a mere six lines, four hours and a score of drafts in the making, protesting that these days men could not get pregnant and that it was all society's fault. It was published, but no one seemed to notice.

A week later, the same paper hosted a debate between Beard and Temple and others on 'Women and Physics' at the ICA. By now he was determined to put the world right about his views. He shared the platform with various academics from the humanities, mostly men, all hostile. For reasons that were not explained, Professor Temple was not there and had sent along a colleague in her place. And where were all the scientists? he kept asking the organisers before the event. No one seemed to know.

The main theatre was sold out. In another room a second crowd watched on monitors. Press coverage had done its trick of creating a hunger. People wanted to see for themselves a modern monster in the flesh and be horrified. There were even gasps when he got to his feet. To a rising swell of scornful moaning, Beard covered the same ground, the same cognitive studies again, but in greater detail. When he mentioned the metastudies reporting that girls' language skills were greater on average than boys', there was a roar of derision and a speaker on the platform rose fearsomely to denounce him for the 'crude objectivism by which he seeks to maintain and advance the social dominance of the white male elite'. The moment the fellow sat down he was rewarded by the kind of cheers that might presage a revolution. Bewildered, Beard did not get the connection. He was completely lost. When, later, he irritably demanded of the meeting if it thought that gravity too was a social construct, he was booed, and a woman in the audience stood to propose in stern, headmistressly tones that he reflect on the 'hegemonic arrogance' of his question. What gave him the right? By what invisible dispensation of power in the current social arrangement did he think that he was entitled to set the question in these terms? He was baffled, he had no answer. 'Hegemonic' was a frequent term of abuse. Another was 'reductionist'. In exasperation, Beard said that without reductionism there could be no science. There was prolonged laughter when someone from the floor shouted, 'Exactly!'