Chapter 11

Aldo was born on 25 May 1543. There were no evil omens. ‘A fine child,’ Jerome said, ‘with no disfigurement or fault attending him, or any trouble to my wife.’ Perhaps that should have taught Jerome the fallibility of his ‘signs and portents’ approach to predicting the future. Just over three years later, Lucia, Jerome’s wife, was dead and the boy was being raised by a nursemaid.

In 1546, Lucia had slipped into sickness. Jerome mentions a ‘decline’, a ‘paleness’ and ‘lassitude’, but little else. Towards the end of that year, she died, aged thirty-three. Lucia’s passing seemed to happen in the background. Jerome writes more about the syphilis-ridden genitals of his friend Ottaviano Scoto than he did about the illness that robbed him of the love of his life.

Perhaps some things are too painful to dwell upon. ‘She was brave, indomitable in spirit, gentle, affectionate, fine to look upon,’ he wrote. And that was it — as if he could bear to write no more. She had captured his affection for sixteen years, suffered poverty and loss, seen her jewels gambled away, enjoyed a few years of prosperity, and then, aged thirty-three, she was gone. Jerome was left alone with his children.

Aldo grew up in the care of a servant and he did not grow up well. He was brutal and cruel to the household animals, of whom there were plenty — Jerome is fond of creatures. In his early teens, Aldo developed a habit with the dice, but had none of his father’s skill with numbers. When the addiction raged, it turned him towards the life of a criminal. First he stole from his father’s household and then, when possessions began to be more securely locked away at home, he robbed others. His father despaired at the money he spent bribing the authorities to let Aldo out of jail: ‘thousands of crowns to release him from just punishment’.

Yet if Jerome found things missing from the house, it can’t have given him any less grief to find the things Aldo occasionally left strewn about the place. They were receipts for work carried out, but not the kind of work to warm a father’s heart. ‘Messr Aldo Cardano, public executioner, for torturing by rack and vice, Valentino Zuccaro, 3 scudi. And to the same for having in due course burnt Zuccaro and thrown the cinders of his flesh into the river, a further 7 scudi.’

Aldo is now a freelance torturer, working — when the opportunity arose — for the Inquisition.

ψ

Jerome is to hurry back to Milan, the rector writes. Jerome must put every effort into supporting his sons’ exoneration, ‘that their innocence may be defended with that of the name of this learned College, lest it fall into disrepute by association’. The letter is blatantly self-serving and the irony is not lost on Jerome. He had barely been elected to the College because of the shame of his bastardy. Suddenly, when the growth of his fame has brought the College a reflected glory, he is the one called to defend its reputation; ‘Now, bastard or no, I was commanded to still the fluttering in the dovecotes of respectability,’ he later recalled. There is no wry smile here, for Jerome is utterly wretched at the woeful predicament of his children. ‘I cared no more for my credit in Milan or the world,’ he wrote later. ‘I cared only to throw all my influence at the feet of my sons.’ And so he sets out, determined to defend them. ‘A man sixty years old, greyheaded and bent, is no less able to plead with judges,’ he says.

The crime, as laid out by the prosecution, is the poisoning of Brandonia Seroni by arsenic that was baked into a cake. But no fewer than five doctors from the self-serving Milanese College of Physicians are on hand to testify that Brandonia had not died by arsenic poisoning; the appearance of the corpse is all wrong, if these fine upstanding members of society are to be believed. Arsenic poisoning blackens the tongue, they say; it lifts the fingernails and corrodes the internal organs. None of this is true of Brandonia’s body, they report. In their learned conclusion, Brandonia had been suffering from lipyria, a wasting disease. This, they insist, is the true cause of death.

The Seroni family are having none of it. With a flourish, their lawyers bring out the servant who baked the cake. He overheard Aldo and Giovanni plotting, he says. He was handed a vial of liquid to put in the cake mixture, he had baked the cake and served it to his mistress; she vomited immediately.

The doctors counter that Giovanni, being a qualified doctor, must have intended the mixture as a treatment for some malady his wife was suffering and that such treatments do occasionally cause accidental harm. White arsenic, they point out, is a treatment for lipyria. Perhaps Giovanni had simply erred in the dosage?

A stalemate ensues. Then, several days into the trial — out of the blue — Giovanni confesses to premeditated murder. This, he announces, was his third attempt to kill his wife; the first two times he tried, the poison failed to do its job.

Until this point, Jerome has not been allowed to speak in his son’s defence because the law does not permit relatives to offer evidence. Now, with the court debating only motive, Jerome is permitted to address the assembly. What a shame, then, that oratory was not his gift and that, aged twelve, he had abandoned the study of persuasion.

As a young boy, Jerome had decided to follow a path of medicine and mathematics, rather than the law. ‘I had had enough and enough of law; its books, by my experience, were heavy and its conclusions unsatisfactory … numbers I thought greatly of for what they could prove.’ At this juncture in the trial, the old man, now in his fifty-ninth year, must have suffered a twinge of regret about that decision because he turned out to be a poor advocate for his son.

Even by the standards of the day, Jerome’s two hour speech is odd. He argues that poisoning is barely murder — at least the boy hadn’t stabbed his wife, which would have been far worse. Then he addresses the character of the victim. Brandonia was no saint, as everybody knew. Jerome rakes through the dead woman’s list of crimes without mercy or respect for the deceased. She was an unfit mother who had let her first child die through neglect. She had given birth to two more children during the marriage whom Jerome, worried for their safety, was now raising. What’s more, she had openly told Giovanni during the course of a heated row that neither child was his. Her mother, who was in the room at the time, backed up Brandonia and went so far as to name the fathers who had cuckolded Jerome’s son. Such provocation, he argues, almost justifies his son’s crime. His speech was a character assassination that must have stirred venom in the hearts of her family.

And then comes the condemnation of Aldo. Giovanni, Jerome tells the court, is just too simple-minded to have hatched such a plot. He must have been under the influence of his wicked younger brother, who probably persuaded him to confess, too. ‘Surely my son is worthy of excuse and pardon,’ Jerome cries to the court in his impassioned summation. ‘A youth as simple of wit as any in the state … He is so simple that I take no more thought in the buying of my shoes than he took in the marrying of his wife … Was he not foolish, if he meant murder, in choosing as his confidants a mischievous brother and a servant boy who would break any silence for reward … Would you sacred senators inflict death on a lunatic who in a lucid interval killed a man?’

To be fair to Jerome, his sons had, up to that point, served as each other’s accomplices. They had worked together to strip their father’s house of saleable assets and no doubt had split the proceeds. Aldo had to pay off his gambling debts to avoid being murdered by his benefactors. Giovanni, if he could not take his in-laws into the house, would take the house — or at least its contents — to his in-laws. Brandonia had even handed her father her wedding ring, a gift that Jerome had made to his son, so that her father could sell it.

It is worth noting that, by the time Jerome accuses Aldo, the old man is altogether wrung out. He has spent all his money on Giovanni’s defence. He has argued for two hours in his elder son’s favour. He is tired and emotional.

Somewhat oddly — and possibly self-defeatingly — Jerome then switches to lauding Giovanni’s academic achievements: ‘Is he not a baccalaureat, a man honoured by Academy and College … He is a learned man in his profession. Is the head matured and educated by so many nights of toil to be cut off like the head of a man as ignorant of yesterday as of tomorrow?’

His closing words, tears running down his face, are a straightforward plea for his son’s life. ‘O Sacred senators, you cannot condemn a son to the galleys without condemning to a worse fate the father, who is innocent; and to kill him would be a fate worse than death to me. I beseech you therefore, that if you prove him guilty you sentence him to perpetual exile, and spare him his life and dignity. For in that way you will also spare mine.’

The pleas fall on deaf ears. The Senate sentences Giovanni to death. The only way out, the court says, is if the Seronis could be satisfied with financial compensation — and they are to name their price. ‘They demanded,’ Jerome recalls, ‘more gold and treasure than could be found in the coffers of a king.’ They know he can’t meet their demands — for once, money came second. They are far more interested in humiliating Jerome and witnessing the execution of his worthless son.

As it turned out, there were no public witnesses. Jerome’s twenty-six-year-old son was executed within the prison walls that same night. On 8 April 1560, Jerome takes delivery of his son’s decapitated body. Brandonia’s daughter dies in the same week, quickly followed by the nurse whom Jerome had hired to look after his daughter-in-law’s children.

In the space of seven days, the broken old man has arranged and funded three funerals.

‘It must have been appalling. I can’t imagine how that feels.’

I am sat on one end of Jerome’s straw mattress; he is lying, curled up in a ball, at the other. He doesn’t respond straight away; he has told me the story of his son’s demise. Even though those events unfolded a full decade ago, the revisiting of it has exhausted him. I sit in silence. After ten minutes, he pulls himself upright and, hands holding the green jewel to his lips, turns his head towards me.

‘Do you have children?’ he says.

‘Two,’ I reply. ‘A girl and a boy.’

‘How would you feel to lose one?’

‘I think it would crush me,’ I say. ‘I don’t think I would ever recover.’

‘I am certain I will not,’ he says.

ψ

Certainty is always misguided. It is something we use to comfort ourselves, a delusion we often indulge in the wake of disaster. We become certain ‘some good will come of this’, or — as in Jerome’s case — that recovery is impossible. Perhaps it says something about humans that we never feel certain about anything when life is going well. A state of happiness is rarely taken for granted. That, perhaps, is when we are at our most perceptive because the appalling truth is that uncertainty is inherent to the cosmos.

There is a chapter in Jerome’s autobiography called ‘The Disasters of My Sons’. Within its few short pages, Jerome describes Giovanni’s calamitous marriage and eventual execution, and ‘the folly, the ignominious conduct, and violent actions’ of his younger son, Aldo. He is not seeking pity — Jerome writes that he is ‘by no means unaware that these afflictions may seem meaningless to future generations, and more especially to strangers’ — but wants to make a point. There is, he says, nothing in this mortal life ‘except inanity, emptiness, and dream-shadows’. The only basis on which mortals can find a firm foundation for their lives is to extract wisdom from significant events. Within the great adversities of life, Jerome argues, ‘mortal things may find, now here, now there, new meaning and testify that they are destined for a purpose and a use not to be despised’.

It seems like a reasonable attitude. But quantum theory tells us it is utterly mistaken. So far, we have stated that God does play dice, that there is no pattern or purpose behind the cosmic drama of existence. Now we are about to delve deeper into the mathematics behind the Schrödinger equation and discover why. The fundamental rules of the universe — rules that Jerome helped to formulate, let’s remember — tell us that the universe only exists because of a random event. Even the formation of galaxies, stars, planets, and people is dependent on random chance. If quantum theory is to be believed, there is no purpose except that which we deluded beings construct for ourselves.

I am talking about quantum theory’s ‘uncertainty principle’. We skirted this earlier, when we talked about entanglement, but this seems a good moment to face it head on.

The uncertainty principle may be the least understood concept in physics, which is somewhat ironic. It is nothing to do with practical problems, such as error-prone measurements. It starts from the mathematics behind the Schrödinger equation, which says that multiplying a by b is not the same as multiplying b by a. That sounds ridiculous when we are used to a world in which three times five gives the same answer as five times three. But this quantum world, as we are discovering, is very different from our own.

In the Schrödinger setup, the things we seek to multiply together are not straightforward numbers, but pairs of quantities such as a particle’s position (we’ll call it p) and its momentum (which we’ll call q, so as not to confuse it with the shorthand for mass). In this notation, multiplication is denoted by putting two things next to each other. So position times momentum is pq. And that is not the same as qp. Why? Because the mathematical rules that govern operations with the Schrödinger equation are not the same as standard multiplication.

The difference between pq and qp is given by a simple quantity. It involves Planck’s constant (h), Jerome’s imaginary square root of -1 (i) and π. In mathematical notation, that is: pq – qp = h/2πi.

There are other forms of the Schrödinger equation where different pairings follow the same rule. Energy and time, for example, make another such couple. The upshot of all of them is that it is impossible to calculate a precise value for both parts of a pair. If I am applying the equation to an atom and I want to know its position precisely, I have to sacrifice accurate knowledge of its momentum — and vice versa. The more accurately I know one of these quantities, the less accurately I know the other.

This unavoidable gap in our knowledge is not a consequence of some inability to make accurate measurements. It is written into the theory. And it means that you can’t ever predict the future state of a quantum system. That’s because you can’t plug exact values for all its properties into an equation that will let you work out how its state will evolve. There will always be some uncertainty in the sum of the starting conditions, so you will always be uncertain about its future.

That said, there is a link to the practicalities of measuring these not-exactly-wave, not-exactly-particle objects. If we want to find an object’s position, for instance, we have to bounce something off it — a photon of light, say. But the very act of bouncing a photon off the object will give it a kick, altering its momentum. So we have gained information about position at the cost of obscuring information about its momentum at that moment. Similarly, finding its momentum involves measurements at two different times in two different places, which means the associated position is rather vague — by the time our momentum measurement is in, the position has changed. Another source of uncertainty.

Finally, it is worth noting that the principle seems to be linked to the phenomenon of entanglement. You can use quantum mathematics to show that two entangled objects — that is, two objects that have distributed the information about themselves between the two of them — are less subject to the uncertainty principle than two objects that have no connection. Experiments have shown that the uncertainty principle applies to the first measurement on one photon of an entangled pair. But when a subsequent measurement is done on the second photon of the pair, the information gained about the state of the first one is more precise than came in the first measurement. Repeat that process, and you can know the state of the first photon to arbitrary precision.

Given that entanglement defeats our understanding of space and time, there is little point trying to make full sense of the uncertainty principle. But it does seem to be fundamental and related to issues of the amount of information carried by quantum objects and their entanglement partners.

Uncertainty and entanglement are also somehow related to the second law of thermodynamics, which says that every process in the universe tends towards producing disorder. It seems to be a fundamental, defining principle behind the way the universe operates — classically and quantumly. Imagine the position and momentum of an electron as two intertwined streams of information, each one encoded so that the more you read of one, the less you can read of the other. Essentially, it’s another formulation of the uncertainty principle. However, working from the Schrödinger equation and our knowledge of thermodynamics, researchers have shown that the energy of the electron is related to the information needed to describe it, and the information uncertainty prevents you from extracting more energy than the system contains. In other words, without the uncertainty principle, we would break the second law of thermodynamics.

Nothing has ever broken the second law. The physicist Arthur Eddington once said you should never back an idea that opposes it. ‘If your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope,’ he said, ‘there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.’ Quantum theory, though, is safe.

What is this telling us? Somehow, the Schrödinger equation and its answer to de Broglie’s challenge about everything having both wave-like and particle-like properties, has tapped into something that is utterly fundamental to the universe, more fundamental even than space and time. This fundamental uncertainty is more than an abstract notion or an impediment to our experiments. Its application to the energy and time associated with quantum objects affects their very existence. It means there is no such thing as completely empty space, for instance, because that would imply that the universe had precisely zero energy and nothing can have a precise value of anything. A consequence of this is that, for a short enough time, the universe will lend energy to a particle so that it can come into being. And so the emptiness is filled with a constantly appearing and disappearing set of ‘virtual’ particles.

These virtual particles have real, physical effects. One is known as the Casimir effect. To see this, put a pair of metal sheets next to each other in a vacuum. They will move towards each other because the virtual particles appearing in the empty space will create tiny electric fields that interact with the electrons in the metal. The geometry of those fields differs depending on whether the particles are confined between the plates or in the empty space on either side of them. The difference between those geometries means the plates feel a force that pulls them together. And so they move. The movement was first measured in 1948: it is real and so, therefore, is the fundamental uncertainty in the universe that was revealed by the Schrödinger equation.

But this fundamental uncertainty doesn’t just apply to events within our universe. It applies to the universe itself. The physicist’s explanation for the cosmos’s existence is that it came into being because of an uncertainty in something outside the physical space of the universe. Maybe a type of Hilbert space, or Jerome’s aevum — we don’t really know. But, as in the Casimir effect, that uncertainty led to a moment of spontaneous creation. We call it the Big Bang. When we look at the evidence for the Big Bang — a sea of primordial photons known as the cosmic microwave background radiation — we see that there are occasional random fluctuations in the photons’ energy. These fluctuations were the seeds for the stars and galaxies that led, ultimately, to our existence. Life, like the cosmos it inhabits, is born of randomness, and there can be no such thing as being ‘destined for a purpose’.

There is no comfort to be found, Jerome.