Читать книгу Maxwell's Demon онлайн

70 страница из 77

o

Maybe I wasn’t ready to be back inside our empty little flat so soon, maybe I wanted to be out in the world of things a little while longer, or maybe I’d been half planning it all along. Whatever the reason, I got off the bus a couple of stops early that night and struck out on my own to walk the rest of the way home.

My route took me along the edge of Victoria Park, where the wind whipped up great shoals of fallen leaves and sent them tumbling and hissing in racing waves, swirling past my legs as I walked, then spiralling up in tornado spouts, up and up, under the streetlamps. On such a quiet and empty street, the noise was incredible.

As I pushed forward through the leaf storm, head down and blinking, I found myself thinking of a story that Sophie had told me a few months earlier. Almost every time I saw her, Sophie’s little black book would make an appearance, its pages holding the specifics of some new story, a new set of names, dates and technical terms that she’d keep referring back to while telling me something remarkable. Once, she told me about Johann Fust, the shady business partner of Johannes Gutenberg, inventor of the printing press. Apparently, Fust betrayed Gutenberg, got himself arrested for witchcraft, and became – according to some historians – the inspiration for Doctor Faustus. Another time, she told me how a man named Thomas Harvey stole Albert Einstein’s brain, kept it in a beer cooler for thirty years, and studied it by cutting bits off in his spare time. Harvey became drinking buddies with William Burroughs, and Burroughs liked to brag to friends that he could get hold of bits of Einstein’s brain any time he wanted to. There were lots of others too, from how duelling algorithms led to a book about fly DNA going up for sale for $23,698,655.93 on Amazon, to the origin of the word ‘ampersand’ and the brief period where ‘&’ appeared in the alphabet after ‘z’. The story that came back to me on that particular night though, the one I remembered as I made my way home through the swirling, whirling leaves, was about a mathematician named Barbara Shipman.