Mikhail, a physics genius 50 years ahead of his time, has his scientific spirit crushed because he parts his hair the wrong way.
One might have thought he could adjust, but genius wields a stubborn whip and, speaking metaphorically, wears knee-high leather boots such that nimble gestures never quicken in their step. Marconi wouldn't shine his shoes. Tesla wouldn't change his underwear.
Thus was Mikhail of the Lindemanns a victim of obsession and the ill-fortunes of his time. It was only 1866. Fifty years before the Copenhagen hypothesis and sixty before the geometric ruins of Von Neuberg's catastrophe. Yet, in this misty dawn of the modern world, Mikhail had hit upon the hidden variable. "There is a sub-atomic system," he said, "Really, really little. It moves but tiny fractions in long, dry nanoseconds even as the universe that is known to us seems to inch along unnoticed." He formulated this mathematically. Through his own musings and delicate calculations on a chalk-board he had chanced upon non-locality, struck by the meaninglessness of both time and space, and he had furthermore cracked the code of quanta even before the experts posed the problem. These were items all unknown in the circles of the day. Newton prevailed. Einstein was still in diapers.
The tragedy of it, though, was that Mikhail's parents, Sergio and Natasha, didn't rate his theories very highly. They were more concentrated on the fact that he wore his hair parted in a somewhat outlandish manner. Various neighbours had remarked upon it and several people stared. "For God's sake son," said his father. "Take a blasted comb to your head and do not shame us!"
Mikhail saw nothing wrong. "But I like it the way it is," he would say.
His mother pleaded.
"Son, son," she sobbed, "do what your father says!"
Mikhail tried parting to the left but felt that it made him look a dill. The fashion, in any case, was for a loose, angular arrangement, carefully held in place by a greasy application. Need he be so old fashioned?
His father explained, at this point, that his father and his father's father always parted their follicles in the said way, and it had saved them from the poor house and made their name a thing of wide respect. His grandfather, after whom Mikhail he always said took his bearing, was even rumoured to be handsome precisely because of the careful way he parted in a straight and tidy line and combed his cow's lick sideways at a meticulous angle.
"I'd like to study among the brainy Hapsburgs," said Mikhail.
His father grew cross.
"You're not studying anything looking like that!" he cried.
"There must be some reason," Mikhail went on, "why the non-local particles can bump into each other even though they're distant and remote. It violates all known thermodynamics. If we could unscramble the nucleoids and liberate the energy proportionate to the mass times the energy squared we could quickly build a massive bomb, I'm certain!"
"Are your socks clean?" asked his father.
"We could split the unsplittable," affirmed Mikhail. "We could harness the blinding breath of galaxies and sunbursts!"
"Why won't you wear the shirt your mother bought you?" asked his father persisting.
Mikhail shrugged his shoulder with a wince.
One might have thought, as said before, he could adjust, compromise, do what it takes, meet them half way, accommodate, take the middle course, but once more genius is unyielding. It is, in any case, a random affair. It is a mutation of the nexus. It comes accompanied by minute inflexibilities and obdurate will. Fibonacci picked his nose in public. Blase Pascal refused to clean his teeth. Worse than that, in this instance, great streams of calculus poured through Mikhail's mind and he simply didn't care what his father's simple fears might be. Mighty rivers of algebra cascaded over all his thoughts such that might be misunderstood as headstrong. One day he decided he should tell somebody. But no sooner had he turned the door handle to creep out into the evening when his father called, "Mikhail is that you?" He came rushing in from the chilly parlor. "Just as I thought!" he said, pointing. "Wretched, miserable, child! You're not going anywhere parting your hair to the right!"
Mikhail tried to be indignant.
"Left or right! Is it a matter of vital concern?" he trembled.
"We'll tell that to Bismark!" said the father. "Where would Europe be if he thought left and right were not of vital concern?"
Defeated, Mikhail trudged back upstairs.
That night he anticipated the Rosen-Podolosky Effect and devised new models of the state vector. In particular, he proposed that any statements about what might have been are useless since any state vector can be regarded as the superposition of other state vectors. Energy, he decided, has strange relations with mass.
Late, his mother came with the voice of reason.
"Just try it," she urged. "Part it to the left and see what a difference it makes."
"I've tried it," said Mikhail. "It made me look like a wanted poster!"
"Nonsense," said his mother. "It could only enhance your cheeks, your brow, your manly profiles. Try it for me. Try it for your father. They say you're like your grandfather, you know."
For Mikhail it was a matter of principle. "I'm only interested in hydrogen molecules," he said.
"Must you torment your father like this?" his mother asked.
"It would only take a small quantity of atoms to provoke a mess of fission," Mikhail surmised.
His father, it should be noted, was a reasonable soul. He believed in national fiscal policy and the sway of influential relatives. His tastes, nevertheless, were formed in the relative vacuum of the Thirties in that grim hiatus between the bloomers and the serrated ruff. He had blithely ignored a whole sequence of innovations regarding the neck-tie that even less well-to-do men had acquired, and he earnestly regretted what others labeled items of health and progress. His gravest fear in life was that the Von Crustworts further up the road might one day discover the sum of his weekly wage. He held financial confidentiality - especially from one's fellow workers and from the Von Crustworts - to be sacrosanct beyond all measure.
"You're not wearing that old jacket out, are you?" he'd say.
Mikhail would explain that, if sub-quanta can be both waves and particles simultaneously, it hardly matters what jacket one wears out, does it?
His father would misinterpret this as a challenge to a fight with bar-stools and fire pokers. "You're just not taking life seriously, son," he'd say.
Mikhail's mother would then point out the various streaks of grey in her husband's hair, nominating causality. Large patches of grey were caused, she said, by the time Mikhail wore a scruffy undershirt and parted in a somewhat peculiar fashion at a dinner party attended by the regional manager. Similarly, the grey tips, especially on the temples, were caused by the time Mikhail forgot to get his neck trimmed and turned up undergroomed when Herr Bronswicksterken from the bank arrived for supper unexpected. To make matters worse, Mikhail had shocked him with talk of the Uncertainty Principle, decades ahead of its time. He was firing on all guns. He stared the guest down. "Esse est percepi!" he urged, again and again, as his parents clammered around holding his coat-tails and pleading with him to desist. Such episodes had left their mark upon his father, so his mother said.
"Here, look in the mirror," she said, sticking a mirror inches from his nose.
"Mother!" he said.
"What do you see Mikhail? Hydrogen? Nitrogen? Protons?"
"No mother."
"No? My god, son! Look at your part! It's most irregular! Look!"
"You can't see protons, mother," he then went on. "They're very tiny. You'll never see them in a mirror. Actually, I suspect that when we fully understand the mechanics of the sub-molecular realm we will discover that the vital principle of such mechanics is that nothing in the state vector finally has the slightest reality beyond the perception of the observer, so that in that sense protons are so tiny they don't even exist outside of the conceptual frameworks necessary to discuss them at all."
His mother looked at him, her eyes searching over his face for some clue, anything.
"If you dare talk to me like that again," she said, "I'II tell your father! He can deal with you!"
In his private time Mikhail devised the neutron particle accelerator and the cathode ray tube no less than ninety-three years before the invention of television. He sketched plans for a high-end selenium amplifier to test his theory that the momentum of photons has a discrete numerical value the same as b where b is the frequency of spectrum radiation measured against the earth's unified energy mode or b + hT/c = E where c is never greater than 1. His father wasn't amused.
"You know what the men at the mill were saying this afternoon, don't you?" he asked, rhetorical. "They were saying that a man who has a solid hairstyle has a decent grip on life. That's what they were saying! These are practical men, Mikhail. Men with mortgages. Men with zinc ore and open pit commodities in their blood. Men with wives and drooling grand children. Men with cabbages in their gardens!"
Mikhail daydreamed about electromagnetic spool differentials and the number of real molecules in a mixed state probability distribution.
Exasperated, his father put his face in his hands. He looked up and once more saw his son's wayward part crossing his head rightwards against all the family norms. Again his face fell into his hands and he started sobbing. Where, O where, had he gone wrong?
***
Mikhail attended high school with only moderate success and when he turned eighteen - his parents deciding to put a stop to all the rot - he was apprenticed to a butcher. Like all trainees he began with washing sheep kidneys and mincing up the sausage.
"Ordinarily," he bemused, hacking at a bone, "information is transmitted as an ordering of energy (or energies), or as a signal, as we say..." Customers waited for salami. "But suppose there is an instantaneous transfer of order from one place to another, remote in time and space, without any transfer of energy?" A nobbly white joint, almost hard plastic, stood in his way. "You can't transfer energy," he reasoned, "but no one said anything about information..."
He soon concluded that, deep within the meltdown at the very crack of time, is a spark of information, a truth too intense for the world. He ventured the theory that where (P)t/a then (Q)y on the assumption that particles travel at a constant velocity and that Q has an expectation value equal to any given wave function.
Many of his customers remarked upon his odd method of hair style but none with open disapproval. Besides, as the years went by, and the price of beef went down, new trends struggled up the Danube and a fresh breeze crept into public life. The parting of his ways hardly seemed as unrelenting as it had. Some people seemed to think it just "endearing". Most were more concerned about rumours of his suspect smallgoods and liver.
And indeed, for all his stiff stylistics and those knee-high leather boots that kept him so unbending, Mikhail learnt the chop and grind of his trade and grew to be accustomed with it all. Slowly, his thoughts turned to how to make a steel blade that would never let the blood stains mix, a single innovation, he decided, could save a butcher nearly twenty hours a week on his hands and knees scrubbing at the knives and toothy hackaways. He kissed physics goodbye and started to dream of black puddings, honeyed hams, pork hocks, chuck ribs, blade roast, top shanks, lean brisket, veal shoulder, cutlets, braising chine, cured bratwurst, rookwurst, mettwurst, knackwurst, kaserkrainer, kransky, haggis, salamis, pepperonis, oso bucco, rack of lamb and smoked tasso kishka.
In due course there came a point where he decided that perhaps he should get married.
Nothing had changed.
"You'll need a suit," said his father. "You can't get married in the one you've got. Where are you going to get a new suit?"
"And you'll need a wife," said his mother. "Where are you going to get a wife? Look at your moustache. Couldn't you have it trimmed? You're driving your father grey, you are, you're driving your father grey!"
Mikhail's theorems are recorded for the sake of history only by accident. A Professor of Mathematics, Herr Schoekelgruber-Nashings made remarks upon them in his notebooks after marking term papers on a contract in the ninth grade. His notes say words to the effect that he, the Professor, hopes to one day test the "alarming hypotheses" of this "intense fellow with the scraggy part" whom he also notes, without comment, was soon leaving for a career in the sausage industry. His parents had once come up to seek the Professor's support.
"If it came from you," said his mother, "he might take notice. He respects you."
"Just tell him to part it to the left, for goodness sake!" said his father. "A three-month trial period! Please!"
On this occasion his father spoke as one man to another.
The professor agreed, but never fulfilled his promise. The term ended. The students drifted off to salt baths, health resorts, beer festivals or medieval occupations, and Mikhail of the Lindemanns took up the axe and the chopping block and learnt to smoke his bacon.
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