Printed with the kind permission of her family.
The Icarus Theory curses physics. We spend so much time pursuing truth, trying to understand the essence of reality, we lose touch with it. We reach for knowledge that would have been beyond us in our natural, primitive state, and once exposed to it, some minds are burned. I have known many Icari and some might say I am an Icarus myself, although I would dispute such an assertion. I am eccentric where others are disturbed or depressed. My oddities do not compare with the absence of mind of Heisenberg, or the lack of empathy of Oppenheimer, or the obsessive compulsion of Erdős. I’m positively rational and grounded in comparison, but of all the minds I’ve ever encountered, the one that troubled me the most was Elliot Asha’s.
He was an Icarus, and I believe he had flown higher than any of us, and it had cost him his ambition. He was twenty-one and his mind had already been scorched. Most people didn’t see it, but I knew because I could tell when a person had seen beyond the constraints of life and perceived some new reality.
Michael, Professor Gardner, and I had called Elliot to my room early in Trinity term of his final year. He came in without knocking, which suggested either pathological overconfidence or nihilistic indifference to social convention. I suspected the latter. His nihilism was evident in his work and attitude. He was concerned only with pleasure, not effort. My assessment was underscored by his attire: crumped rowing kit. Pip had been right. Elliot had been wasting his time at the river.
“You wanted to see me,” he said, and Michael and I cut short our conversation about him.
“Have a seat,” I replied, and he chose my favorite armchair, an old Laura Ashley floral pattern I’d inherited from Mother.
Michael and I were at opposite ends of a leather couch, separated from our student by a coffee table that was covered with my papers and notebooks.
No one said anything, and for a moment all I could hear were the voices rising from the front quad, drifting through the open sash windows.
“Professor Gardner and I are concerned,” I began. “We’re worried about the effort you’re putting into your work.”
Elliot gave me a look I cannot easily describe. It wasn’t contempt, nor was it pity. It might have been disinterest, but there was too much emotion for it to have been that.
I dream of a world of robots where circuits are dismantled and motherboards analyzed so we’re all absolutely clear who feels what at any given time. I can describe the orbit of a thousand suns in mathematically perfect formulae, but I still to this day don’t know how that young man felt. I doubt he had much respect for us, though.
He picked up my Mont Blanc Starwalker fountain pen—a most indulgent gift to myself—and a notebook and flicked through it absently as I went on.
“You have a brilliant mind, Elliot, but you’re just not present.”
As if to prove my point, he started doodling.
“Why did you come here? Why pick physics?” Michael chimed in. “Was it your parents?”
Elliot didn’t reply, but the pen froze for a moment, and he concentrated on his doodle intently. He might have been furious. I don’t know. Everything about him was so contained.
We knew about his parents, of course. Few in our world didn’t. They were accomplished scientists and their deaths had been grave tragedies. It was hard to imagine what the loss might do to a child, but perfectly reasonable to believe he might have come here in an attempt to live up to what he imagined their expectations of him might be.
“Are you bored?” I asked. “Is there something that might rekindle your love of the subject?”
“I’m not bored,” Elliot replied without even glancing up from the notepad. “Have you ever wondered why we do it? A dog looks up at the stars and sees beauty or spots or perhaps nothing at all. We look up and we have to dissect and pull apart and explain. Why can’t we just accept things as they are?”
These were the jaded words of a much more experienced scientist. He was too young for this. I’d heard similar from the mouths of gray-haired physicists near the end of their careers.
“It is in our nature to seek truth,” Michael remarked. “That is our beauty.”
Elliot flashed a cynical half smile.
“Truth,” he scoffed. “Someone once made me a promise. It wasn’t kept, but if it had been, it would have made lies of all our truths.”
“Why?” I asked.
He looked away, troubled. He was a cracked soul, damaged by his past, and it was beyond me or Michael to put him back together. I regretted inviting him up. Broken toys should be left by the side of the road.
“If I told you, it wouldn’t come true, but it hasn’t come true, so I can’t tell you,” he replied.
“We didn’t bring you here to talk riddles,” Michael said. “Or muse about the nature of truth. We want you—”
“Am I being sent down?” Elliot interrupted, using Oxford’s genteel term to describe an expulsion.
“Of course not,” I replied.
“Are my grades not satisfactory?” he asked.
“You know they are,” I conceded. “Satisfactory, good, even, but they could be exceptional.”
“Then why am I here?”
“We feel you could be doing so much better,” I replied. “You have a brilliant mind. If you apply it, you could achieve greatness.”
“You want me to be more beautiful? Is that it? You want a more comprehensive deconstruction of the stars?” He shook his head.
“We want you to fulfill your potential,” Michael said.
“There’s only one thing I want, and none of you can give it to me,” Elliot countered. “Can I go?”
He got to his feet but waited until I nodded.
Michael and I were silent as we watched him leave, and when he’d gone we discussed him for a while. After thirty minutes we decided to let time and fate take charge and hope Elliot Asha rediscovered his love of the subject. Michael went to his next tutorial, and I leaned across the coffee table and picked up the discarded notepad to see what Elliot had been doodling.
This journal will only be published posthumously to spare me the embarrassment of the confession I’m about to make.
Three years after this encounter, the members of the Swedish Academy awarded me the Nobel Prize in physics for my work on the Hierarchy Problem. It was the defining work of my career. I explained how particles at the electroweak scale are less impacted by gravity than those at the Planck scale.
My confession is this: the work was not mine. At least not entirely. I found the key equations in my notepad. Elliot Asha had written them while we were imploring him to be a better scientist. The truth is he was above us all, and I have never stopped wondering what else he might have discovered if he’d lived an uninterrupted life. His equations weren’t the whole story, but he’d solved all the principles that I later became so famous for. I felt sick with excitement and the guilt of temptation, and agonized over what to do. I knew that notepad contained riches and glory that weren’t mine, but I’m ashamed to say I listened to temptation.
I resolved to spend a few weeks building out his work into a proper theory, after which I planned to offer him second author on publication if the work proved robust. But that was the day he left, and despite all the rumors surrounding his death, no one ever really found out what happened to Elliot Asha.
So I took his work as my own, and am forever grateful and profoundly ashamed.