Bullets fly, bones break and mankind’s future hangs in the balance, all due to some powerful pondering that echoes from the past. The scientific world turns topsy-turvy and careens badly out of control in Mark Alpert’s clever debut novel, Final Theory (coming in June 2008, a Touchstone book, published by Simon and Schuster, 384 pages).
The world’s most famous theoretical physicist, Albert Einstein (1879-1955), died more than a half-century ago. But his thoughts and equations still loom large. What if he'd also discovered ultimate answers, a Theory of Everything? “It’s a theory that would explain all the forces of nature. Everything from gravity to electricity to the nuclear forces. It’s the Holy Grail of physics.”
What if that theory held such destructive potential that Einstein kept it secret and such intellectual beauty that he refused to destroy it? What if the details emerged now and fell into the wrong hands? Suddenly, the world looks “all so fragile” and “could be gone in an instant”.
Embracing this scenario, Alpert leaps straight into the action. He starts fast and then accelerates. The opening lines find a prominent physicist who once worked with Einstein being tortured, held underwater in his bathtub.
Then the book’s hero, Columbia University professor David Swift, visits a hospital where the fatally injured scientist mutters perplexing words to him. So begins a desperate race for personal and global survival.
“Breathing hard, David leaned against a lamp-post and closed his eyes for a moment. Christ, he whispered. Christ Almighty. This can’t be happening. He’d spent five minutes listening to the dying words of a physics professor and now he was running for his life.”
David and several unlikely allies, including his love interest, a fellow intellectual named Monique Reynolds, compete with the FBI, the US military and a ruthless Russian mercenary to rediscover the long-concealed theory. Their pursuit raises plumes of dust and more questions than answers. Should the Theory of Everything be destroyed or cherished? Does the pursuit of ultimate knowledge justify death and destruction?
Alpert’s talent for realistic writing has his readers jogging at the hero’s heels, clinging to the backseats of cars, ducking from gunshots and trawling their brains for solutions. When David emerges from a brief captivity and smells “the sweetly polluted New York air”, the readers will lift their nostrils and sniff. When a villain stays in a Waldorf-Astoria hotel suite, “a stuffy parlor facing Park Avenue and a bedroom decorated like a czarist bordello”, readers will nearly notice the gaudy cushions nudging their bottoms. Amid frenzied chases, they’ll feel wind in their hair. “The needle on the speedometer rose toward ninety. Monique floored the gas pedal and the Corvette rocketed down the highway.”
Realistic details multiply as the plot splashes into the White House. The US president’s “a boob, a brainless figurehead who had a talent for winning elections but little else”. His vice-president has heart problems and an inflated sense of self-importance.
Never mind that Alpert’s main characters take incredible abuse from fists, car crashes, blunt objects, blades, even bullets, and keep on battling. That’s the power of fiction.
In some respects, Final Theory’s merely an action thriller like hundreds of others. But it’s a good one towering on its firm foundation of science and history. Everything needs a scientific explanation – even a Super Soaker water-gun wielded by David’s seven-year-old son.
“David had explained the process twice before, but he didn’t mind repeating it. He loved having this kind of conversation with his son. ‘When you move that red thing, the pump handle? That pushes the water from the big reservoir to the smaller one…. The smaller reservoir has some air in it, and when you pump water into the tank there’s less room for the air. The air molecules get squeezed together and start pushing on the water.’ ”
Admittedly, the Theory of Everything’s more complex. There’s talk of closed timelike curves, wormhole structures, gravitational electromagnetic entities, violent warping of the local spacetime and more.
Overseas readers will see this book too. Numerous publishers have scooped up the translation rights. For example, Chinese, Japanese and Korean editions should appear next year.
Alpert, a “science geek”, lives in New York. At Princeton University, he studied physics and wrote an undergraduate thesis about applying Einstein’s theory of relativity. As an editor at Scientific American magazine, he tries to simplify complex science for the public.
In Final Theory, he makes the science mainly understandable. Whether it’s realistic too looks tougher for most readers to gauge.
Approval rating: 77 per cent.
For more information: www.MarkAlpert.com or www.simonsays.com
(March 16, 2008)
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