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Authors: José Carlos Somoza
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topology.
DAVID Blanes
was forty-three years old, tall, and appeared to be in good shape.
His gray hair was receding and thinning on top, but it just made him
look interesting. Elisa had also noticed some things that weren't as
obvious in the many photos she'd seen of him: the way he half closed
his eyes when he was concentrating; his pockmarked cheeks, no doubt
the result of teenage acne; his nose, which was so bulbous in profile
it was almost comical. In his own way, Blanes was sort of attractive,
but only "in his own way," like so many men who are not
famous for their looks. He was dressed in an absurd explorer getup,
with camouflage vest, baggy pants, and boots. His voice was hoarse
and quiet, and didn't seem to fit his constitution, but he gave off a
certain air of authority, a certain desire to rattle people. Maybe,
she thought, it was a defense mechanism.
Everything
Elisa told Maldonado the day before was 100 percent true, and now
that was becoming obvious. Blanes's disposition was "special,"
more so than the other big names in the field. But it was also true
that he'd had to take a lot more flak and faced a lot more prejudice
than the others. First, he was Spanish, which meant that for an
ambitious physicist (as she and her classmates were all perfectly
aware) he was already a fish out of water and at a serious
disadvantage. Not because of any discrimination, but because of the
pathetic state of physics in Spain. The few achievements made by
Spanish physicists had all taken place abroad.
Then,
Blanes had made it. And that was even more unforgivable than his
nationality.
His
success was the result of a few hurried equations that fit on one
side of a piece of paper. That's what science comes down to: a
collection of short, timeless strokes of genius. He'd written them in
1987, while he was working in Zurich with his mentor, Albert
Grossmann, and his colleague Sergio Marini. They were published in
1988 in the prestigious Annalen
der Physik (the
same journal that, more than eighty years earlier, had published
Einstein's article on relativity) and shot him to an almost
ridiculous level of fame. The kind of bizarre celebrity that only
very rarely do scientists achieve. And that in spite of the fact that
the article, which proved the existence of time strings, was so
complex that few specialists, even, understood all of it. Despite its
mathematical perfection, it would take decades to obtain any
significant experimental proof.
Be
that as it may, European and North American physicists reacted to his
findings with awe, and that awe filtered through to the press. The
Spanish papers didn't get too excited at first (Spanish
Physicist Discovers Why Time Only Moves Forward and Time Like a
Sequoia, Says Spanish Physicist were
the most common headlines), but Blanes's popularity in Spain derived
more from the spin put on the news by less-respected publications,
which had no qualms about making declarations like "Spain takes
lead in twentieth-century physics with Blanes's theory,"
"Professor
Blanes affirms that time travel is scientifically possible,"
"Spain
could be the first country to build a time machine," and so on.
None of it was true, but it worked. The public ate it up. Magazines
began to put his name on the cover next to naked women, associating
him with the mysteries of time. One esoteric publication sold
hundreds of thousands of copies of their Christmas edition with the
headline Was
Jesus a Time Traveler ?
and then, in smaller type below, " David
Blanes's Theory Disconcerts the Vatican."
Blanes
was no longer in Europe to gloat (or take offense). He'd practically
been beamed over to the United States. He gave lectures and worked at
Caltech, and, as if he were following in Einstein's footsteps, at the
Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where great minds strolled
through silent gardens with plenty of time to think and plenty of
paper to write on. But in 1993, when Congress voted to terminate the
Superconducting
DAVID Blanes
was forty-three years old, tall, and appeared to be in good shape.
His gray hair was receding and thinning on top, but it just made him
look interesting. Elisa had also noticed some things that weren't as
obvious in the many photos she'd seen of him: the way he half closed
his eyes when he was concentrating; his pockmarked cheeks, no doubt
the result of teenage acne; his nose, which was so bulbous in profile
it was almost comical. In his own way, Blanes was sort of attractive,
but only "in his own way," like so many men who are not
famous for their looks. He was dressed in an absurd explorer getup,
with camouflage vest, baggy pants, and boots. His voice was hoarse
and quiet, and didn't seem to fit his constitution, but he gave off a
certain air of authority, a certain desire to rattle people. Maybe,
she thought, it was a defense mechanism.
Everything
Elisa told Maldonado the day before was 100 percent true, and now
that was becoming obvious. Blanes's disposition was "special,"
more so than the other big names in the field. But it was also true
that he'd had to take a lot more flak and faced a lot more prejudice
than the others. First, he was Spanish, which meant that for an
ambitious physicist (as she and her classmates were all perfectly
aware) he was already a fish out of water and at a serious
disadvantage. Not because of any discrimination, but because of the
pathetic state of physics in Spain. The few achievements made by
Spanish physicists had all taken place abroad.
Then,
Blanes had made it. And that was even more unforgivable than his
nationality.
His
success was the result of a few hurried equations that fit on one
side of a piece of paper. That's what science comes down to: a
collection of short, timeless strokes of genius. He'd written them in
1987, while he was working in Zurich with his mentor, Albert
Grossmann, and his colleague Sergio Marini. They were published in
1988 in the prestigious Annalen
der Physik (the
same journal that, more than eighty years earlier, had published
Einstein's article on relativity) and shot him to an almost
ridiculous level of fame. The kind of bizarre celebrity that only
very rarely do scientists achieve. And that in spite of the fact that
the article, which proved the existence of time strings, was so
complex that few specialists, even, understood all of it. Despite its
mathematical perfection, it would take decades to obtain any
significant experimental proof.
Be
that as it may, European and North American physicists reacted to his
findings with awe, and that awe filtered through to the press. The
Spanish papers didn't get too excited at first (Spanish
Physicist Discovers Why Time Only Moves Forward and Time Like a
Sequoia, Says Spanish Physicist were
the most common headlines), but Blanes's popularity in Spain derived
more from the spin put on the news by less-respected publications,
which had no qualms about making declarations like "Spain takes
lead in twentieth-century physics with Blanes's theory,"
"Professor
Blanes affirms that time travel is scientifically possible,"
"Spain
could be the first country to build a time machine," and so on.
None of it was true, but it worked. The public ate it up. Magazines
began to put his name on the cover next to naked women, associating
him with the mysteries of time. One esoteric publication sold
hundreds of thousands of copies of their Christmas edition with the
headline Was
Jesus a Time Traveler ?
and then, in smaller type below, " David
Blanes's Theory Disconcerts the Vatican."
Blanes
was no longer in Europe to gloat (or take offense). He'd practically
been beamed over to the United States. He gave lectures and worked at
Caltech, and, as if he were following in Einstein's footsteps, at the
Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where great minds strolled
through silent gardens with plenty of time to think and plenty of
paper to write on. But in 1993, when Congress voted to terminate the
Superconducting
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