Читать книгу The Humans - Matt Haig - Страница 27

Most mathematicians would trade their soul with Mephistopheles for a proof of the Riemann hypothesis.

– Marcus du Sautoy

The woman on the television had told me there would be no rain so I rode Professor Andrew Martin’s bicycle to Fitzwilliam College. It was evening now. Isobel would be at the supermarket already, so I knew I didn’t have long.

It was a Sunday. Apparently this meant the college would be quiet, but I knew I had to be careful. I knew where to go, and although riding a bicycle was a relatively easy thing to do, I was still a bit confused by the laws of the roads and narrowly escaped accidents a couple of times.

Eventually, I made it to a long, quiet tree-lined street called Storey’s Way, and the college itself. I leant my bike against a wall and walked towards the main entrance of this, the largest of the three buildings. This was a wide, relatively modern example of Earth’s architecture, three storeys high. As I was entering the building I passed a woman with a bucket and a mop, cleaning the wooden floor.

‘Hello,’ she said. She seemed to recognise me, though it wasn’t a recognition that made her happy.

I smiled. (I had discovered, at the hospital, that smiling was the appropriate first response on greeting someone. Saliva had little to do with it.) ‘Hello. I’m a professor here. Professor Andrew Martin. I know this sounds terribly strange but I have suffered a little accident – nothing major, but enough to cause me some short-term memory loss. Anyway, the point is I am off work for a little while but I really need something in the office. My office. Something of purely personal value. Is there any chance you know where my office is?’

She studied me for a couple of seconds. ‘I hope it wasn’t anything serious,’ she said, though it didn’t sound like the sincerest of hopes.

‘No. No, it wasn’t. I fell off my bike. Anyway, I’m sorry, but I am a little bit pressed for time.’

‘Upstairs, along the corridor. Second door on the left.’

‘Thank you.’

I passed someone on the stairs. A grey-haired woman, astute-looking by human standards, with glasses hanging around her neck.

‘Andrew!’ she said. ‘My goodness. How are you? And what are you doing? I heard you were unwell.’

I studied her closely. I wondered how much she knew.

‘Yes, I had a little bump on the head. But I am all right now. Honestly. Don’t worry. I’ve been checked out, and I should be fine. As right as the rain.’

‘Oh,’ she said, unconvinced. ‘I see, I see, I see.’

And then I asked, with a slight and inexplicable dread, an essential question: ‘When did you last see me?’

‘I haven’t seen you all week. Must have been a week ago Thursday.’

‘And we’ve had no other contact since then? Phone calls? Emails? Any other?’

‘No. No, why would there have been? You’ve got me intrigued.’

‘Oh, it’s nothing. It’s just, this bump on my head. I am all over the place.’

‘Dear, that’s terrible. Are you sure you should be here? Shouldn’t you be at home in bed?’

‘Yes, probably I should. After this, I am going home.’

‘Good. Well, I hope you feel better soon.’

‘Oh. Thank you.’

‘Bye.’

She continued downstairs, not realising she had just saved her own life.

I had a key, so I used it. There was no point in doing anything overtly suspicious in case anyone else should have seen me.

And then I was inside his – my – office. I didn’t know what I had been expecting. That was a problem, now: expectation. There were no reference points; everything was new; the immediate archetype of how things were, at least here.

So: an office.

A static chair behind a static desk. A window with the blinds down. Books filling nearly three of the walls. There was a brown-leaved pot plant on the windowsill, smaller and thirstier than the one I had seen at the hospital. On the desk there were photos in frames amidst a chaos of papers and unfathomable stationery, and there in the centre of it all was the computer.

I didn’t have long, so I sat down and switched it on. This one seemed only fractionally more advanced than the one I had used back at the house. Earth computers were still very much at the pre-sentient phase of their evolution, just sitting there and letting you reach in and grab whatever you wanted without even the slightest complaint.

I quickly found what I was looking for. A document called ‘Zeta’.

I opened it up and saw it was twenty-six pages of mathematical symbols. Or most of it was. At the beginning there was a little introduction written in words, which said:

PROOF OF THE RIEMANN HYPOTHESIS

As you will know the proof of the Riemann hypothesis is the most important unsolved problem in mathematics. To solve it would revolutionise applications of mathematical analysis in a myriad of unknowable ways that would transform our lives and those of future generations. Indeed, it is mathematics itself which is the bedrock of civilisation, at first evidenced by architectural achievements such as the Egyptian pyramids, and by astronomical observations essential to architecture. Since then our mathematical understanding has advanced, but never at a constant rate.

Like evolution itself, there have been rapid advances and crippling setbacks along the way. If the Library of Alexandria had never been burned to the ground it is possible to imagine that we would have built upon the achievements of the ancient Greeks to greater and earlier effect, and therefore it could have been in the time of a Cardano or a Newton or a Pascal that we first put a man on the moon. And we can only wonder where we would be. And at the planets we would have terraformed and colonised by the twenty-first century. Which medical advances we would have made. Maybe if there had been no dark ages, no switching off of the light, we would have found a way never to grow old, to never die.

People joke, in our field, about Pythagoras and his religious cult based on perfect geometry and other abstract mathematical forms, but if we are going to have religion at all then a religion of mathematics seems ideal, because if God exists then what is He but a mathematician?

And so today we may be able to say, we have risen a little closer towards our deity. Indeed, potentially we have a chance to turn back the clock and rebuild that ancient library so we can stand on the shoulders of giants that never were.