For creating such possibilities, for changing our world and conjuring a map for the next, Time has chosen ‘The Magician’, Jack Mitchell, as the Person of the Year. Next year may be his again. The Nobel Prize seems a certainty and greater fame inevitable.
We have been waiting for the return home of Jack Mitchell ever since he first published the Superforce Theory. There have been many promises of visits, but there have always been reasons given for cancellation. Now, however, he is bringing his world tour to Auckland and Wellington. The show, a multimedia explanation of his theory, has been well reviewed throughout the world, turning Mitchell from scientist to entertainer.
He will, of course, be welcomed with open arms. There are few more famous people on the planet. He is bound to receive a hero’s welcome, especially in his home town of Auckland.
However, the return may be a time of mixed emotions for Mitchell. This will be his first return to New Zealand since the tragic suicide of his wife, Caroline, four years ago. The well-oiled publicity machine around Mitchell, which toils endlessly to maintain a wholesome image, is unlikely to expose their man to any difficult and compromising public appearances.
The visit also comes at an uncomfortable time professionally. Until last week, Mitchell’s Superforce Theory had been universally accepted and lauded by the world’s scientific community. Now, for the first time there is a voice of opposition: someone is saying that Mitchell is wrong.
Frank Driesler is a scientific maverick. The son of a Californian minister, he was the youngest physics professor in Caltech history, a position he left to set up a successful computer games company called Efde. He has neither talked nor published any physics for seven years, but suddenly he has broken his silence to condemn spiral field maths and Superforce Theory in an article published last week in Scientific American.
There are more than reputations at stake. The technology giant Taikon, which stands to benefit hugely from its association with Mitchell’s winning formula, bankrolls his tour and publicity. Then there is the Nobel Prize, which Mitchell has publicly stated is so important to him. Both Taikon and the Nobel Prize committee are controversy shy but a controversy is exactly what Mitchell appears to be heading into.
TWO
The fame thing has been very, very weird. One minute I’m a Kiwi bloke by the beach and the next I’ve landed on planet fame. How could it leave anyone unaffected, untouched? What a blast, though. Don’t get me wrong, I’m flattered but there’s something surreal about it. All those people who wear the T-shirt or buy the magazines have absolutely no idea what I’ve done. Everyone’s told how important I am and I become important. The really weird part is that as science gets more fundamental, the average person understands it less, but the scientist becomes a greater object of admiration and all the more famous. No one except a handful of physicists understands Superforce, but everyone thinks I’m great. The real people who do real things that make a difference to lives, no one wants to know them. Image is all that’s important. But then, who am I to argue?
Bebe and I had argued after the show. This was usuaclass="underline" we argued four or five times a day. It was unusual, though, for him to sulk. He sat in the car, his back half turned and his fingers lightly drumming his leg. Bebe was like a Gandhi in Armani. He was Indian, early fifties, and bald apart from small patches of cropped grey hair above and behind each ear. And he was delicate. I often thought a good breeze might knock him over and a slap with a wet towel could snap him in two. His expensive black suit hardly appeared to touch his limbs. At times when walking he looked like a billowing sail. Bebe’s father, a successful shipping manager, moved his family from Madras to England in the late sixties and so Bebe was raised and educated as a middle-class Englishman. With a first class degree in electronic engineering he’d been employed by the fledgling Taikon Corporation of the seventies and had grown with the firm as it powered through its subsequent boom years. As with many of the whiz kids of the early years he’d been retained but moved into areas away from its current cutting edge technology. He never voiced any resentment against this move, but then Taikon wasn’t known for allowing published criticism of its products or management style.
Our chauffeur-driven Mercedes pulled away from the Albert Hall. Finally Bebe broke his pose of indifference and fiddled with an electronic organiser, its beep the only noise in the car’s lush interior as we queued in traffic.
‘That was a good show,’ I offered.
He hummed a minimal response and raised an eyebrow, but kept his attention on the organiser, prodding its padded black buttons with a spindly finger.
The just completed show was the last of four at the Albert Hall and the last of twenty in England. I stretched my legs, flexing tired and stressed muscles. There might still be another ten countries to go, but as each segment of the tour finished I was closer to an end. I call my appearances shows because they’re so much more than a mere talk or lecture. Bebe had helped to develop the multimedia presentation of Superforce once Taikon had secured my signature on their considerably detailed and restrictive contract. ‘More rock than science’, ‘Physics explained in a new and stunning way’—that was how Taikon’s relentless and consummate publicity promoted the show. I lived the project in the beginning; I had to, the contract demanded that of me. (That bloody contract: that all-encompassing and imprisoning source of more money than I’d ever dreamed of.)
Now Bebe and I were sidestepped as the tech boys and spin-doctors set about their own meticulously choreographed responsibilities, leaving the two of us unconnected from our creation. What had once been fun was now a job like any other: I turned up when and where I was told, performed the show and then did my own thing. Bebe was there to clean up the shit that threatened to seep out, because my own thing had become wild and very unscientific. In that sense he was no more than a glorified minder. There was still the money, though. Endorsements and commitments might have me caught in an ever-tightening web, but they were producing more money than several thousand careers in science. According to Bebe, resentment in the scientific community was rising and those who had once fawned over my achievements were now slow to say such nice things. It didn’t bother me. There was a time when criticism would have driven me to a darkened room with enough booze for a month. I guess success and money has vanquished those insecurities. And now I’ve defeated fears of my peers, I don’t give a shit about them or their views any more. Bebe warns against such feelings of infallibility, but I tell him that the sad bastards are just jealous.
I stared out of the car window as we inched our way through crowded London streets back to the Dorchester Hotel in Park Lane. It had rained all day, turning the streets and pavements to black glass. Pedestrians, hunched against the rain and wielding umbrellas like shields, jostled each other in an endless search for space. Some bravely competed on the roads; others stayed in the relative sanctuary of the footpaths.
‘My God, this place is crazy,’ I said to Bebe, but still with no response. With an exaggerated movement I pulled a hip flask from my pocket and took a swig. Bebe disliked my drinking even though he participated in its cover-up, yet even this provocation brought no reaction. ‘Oh, come on, Bebe, I said I was sorry. Come on, snap out of it.’ I had resorted to whining.