friends only

[galilei]

It must be spoken about as soon as possible to Professor Flowerdew. The Professor hadn't expressed any sympathy or indeed made any comment about Fred's accident, because he had never heard anything about it. He had been in Vienna, and had missed the first few days of the term. He knew nothing of his young assistant's fall. He was, however, in a state of distress. This, Fred knew, had been caused by the invasion of physics by the pernicious notion of mass. The conservation of mass, it seemed, was to be taken as a principle, along with the constancy of matter. But Flowerdew didn't believe that mass was indestructable, or matter either, and where, he asked, was mass anyway? A crude notion of substance was slipping (or being slipped) unnoticed into science, proving itself constantly insufficient, and always under the necessity of being reduced to smaller and smaller particles. And once again the professor urged upon Fred that to base one's calculations on unobservables -- such as God, such as the soul, such as the atom, such as the elementary particle -- was nothing more than a comforting weakness. 'I don't deny that all human beings need comfort. But scientists should not indulge themselves on quite this scale.'

At the same time Flowerdew reproached himself because his assistant had not yet started upon his own programme of research, whatever it was to be. It was scarcely the moment, then, for Fred to tell him that it would be necessary, for reasons that were at the same time physical and spiritual, for him to resign his appointment at Angels.

I cannot live without Daisy, Fred thought. There is no God, no spiritual authority, no design, there are no causes and no effects -- there is no purpose in the universe, but if there were, it could be shown that there was an intention, throughout recorded and unrecorded time, to give me Daisy.