Nobelpristagare, riktigt humorlösa och fiktivt gamla

And\nnone of these young men appeared as much in awe of Michael Beard, Nobel\nlaureate, as he thought they should. Clearly, they knew of his work,\nbut in meetings they referred to it in passing, parenthetically, in a\ndismissive mumble, as though it had long been superseded, when in fact\nthe opposite was true, the Beard-Einstein Conflation was in all the\ntextbooks, unassailable, experimentally robust. As undergraduates the\nponytails would surely have witnessed a demonstration of the 'Feynman\nPlaid', illustrating the topographical essence of Beard's work. But at\ninformal gatherings in the canteen these giant children become\nfrontiersmen of theoretical physics and spoke round the Conflation,\ntreated it as one might a dusty formulation by Sir Humphry Davy, and\nmade elliptical references to BLG or some overwrought arcana in\nM-theory or Nambu Lie 3-algebra as if it were not a change of subject.\nAnd that was the problem. Much of the time he did not know what they\nwere saying. The ponytails spoke at speed, on a constant, rising\ninterrogative note, which caused an obsure muscle to tighten in the\nback of Beard's through as he listened. They failed to enunciate their\nwords, going only so far with a thought, until one of the others\nmuttered, 'Right!', after which they would jump to the next unit of\nutterance - one could hardly call it a sentence.

But\nit was far worse than that. Some of the physics which they took for\ngranted was unfamiliar to him. When he looked it up at home, he was\nirritated by the length and complexity of the calculations. He liked to\nthink he was an old hand and knew his way around string theory and its\nmajor variants. But these days there were simply too many add-ons and\nmodifications. When Beard was a twelve-year-old schoolboy, his maths\nteacher had told the class that whenever they found an exam question\ncoming out at eleven nineteenths or thirtheen twenty-sevents, they\nshould know they had the wrong answer. Too messy to be true. Frowning\nfor two hours at a stretch, so that the following morning parallell\npink lines were still visible across his foreheard, he read up on the\nlatest, on Bagger, Lambert and Gustavsson - of course! BLG was not a\nsandwich - and their Lagrangian description of coincident M2-branes.\nGod may or may not have played dice, but surely He was nowhere near\nthis clever, or such a show-off. The material world simply could not be\nso complicated.