The Secret Science of Magic Read online

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  CHAPTER ONE: THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE

  CHAPTER TWO: THE PARADOX OF TIME TRAVEL

  CHAPTER THREE: THE THEORY OF GRAVITATION

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE: THE LAWS OF THERMODYNAMICS

  CHAPTER SIX: THE MAGNETIC MOMENTS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES

  CHAPTER SEVEN: THE EXTRA DIMENSIONS IN STRING THEORY

  CHAPTER EIGHT: THE ECCENTRIC ORBITS OF BINARY STARS

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN: THE CAUSALITY PRINCIPLE

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: THE MULTIVERSE CONJECTURE

  CHAPTER TWELVE: THE MECHANICS OF BEING JOINED AT THE FACE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: THE EXCLUSION PRINCIPLE

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: THE OBSERVATION OF BLACK HOLES

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: THE PROOF OF DARK MATTER

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: THE ILLUSION OF SPACETIME

  CHAPTER NINETEEN: THE POTENTIAL OF FREE PARTICLES

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: THE LIMITS OF THE OBSERVABLE UNIVERSE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: THE DUALITY PRINCIPLE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: THE EXPANDING UNIVERSE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  No performer should attempt to bite off red-hot iron unless he has a good set of teeth.

  – HARRY HOUDINI

  The greatest card trick in history is known by many names. Sometimes it’s called Topping the Deck; sometimes, the Ambitious Card. But most magicians know it as The Trick that Fooled Houdini.

  See, the self-proclaimed World’s Greatest Magician was so convinced of his own awesomeness that he issued an open challenge to his fellow magicians: show him any trick, three times in a row, and he’d tell you how it was done. Houdini really believed there was nothing in the world he couldn’t explain, no illusion he couldn’t deduce.

  It’s possible that Houdini was a bit of a git. And he was clearly unfamiliar with the concept of a giant, karmic arse-kicking.

  Dai Vernon, one of the best cardsmen of all time, took up the challenge. He asked Houdini to pick a card from a deck, and to write his initials on the chosen card. He slipped it into the middle of the pack. Vernon snapped his fingers and – bammo! – Houdini’s card appeared on top of the deck. Houdini made Vernon repeat the trick again. And again. Vernon repeated it seven times, but Houdini could not explain how it was done. Needless to say, the World’s Greatest Magician was pissed. Houdini may have aced jailbreaks and underwater escapes, but he never did learn Vernon’s trick.

  I figured it out when I was ten.

  Now, I would never claim this makes me a better magician than Houdini – that would make me sound like a tool. But still, pulling off something the master magician couldn’t do is a pretty nice boost to a guy’s ego. And anyway, with practice, the Ambitious Card isn’t even that hard. Like all my favourite tricks, its brilliance lies precisely in its simplicity: a majorly clever sleight-of-hand, and some skill in palming the cards.

  Sleight-of-hand is critical to most illusions. Misdirection, of course, is vital. But the fundamental key to all magic is simple:

  Timing.

  Without careful, precise timing, a magician will end up dropping his cards, or, you know, sawing his own legs off. I cannot stress this enough – the most important tool in a magician’s bag is timing.

  Well, timing – and an audience. A willing participant, who chooses to follow your escapades, is kinda crucial as well.

  I risk a glance at the front of the Biology lab. Mr Grayson is attempting to load a YouTube clip – I assume it’s bio-related – onto the smart board. He’s trying to look convincing, but the panicked thumping on his laptop betrays the fact that Grayson is about as tech savvy as a Franciscan monk. The lab is airless and dim. The class is alternating between somnambulism and unashamed sleep.

  Except for one person.

  Sophia.

  I drop my eyes to my bench.

  Sophia. Known to her best friend, the sweet-faced Elsie Nayer, as ‘Rey’. Known to our teachers, who address her with a combination of apprehension and awe, as ‘Ms Reyhart’. Known to everyone else as ‘The Genius’.

  Sophia is staring at the spinning wheel of death on the smart-board screen. She’s tapping her pencil impatiently against her lip, her body folded over as though she’s trying to vanish inside her own skin.

  In a moment you’ll hear her mention me. Pay attention, cos if you blink you might miss it.

  I believe she will shortly describe me as ‘that dipshit who’s always smiling at himself’.

  This is not ideal. But, to be fair, not entirely surprising.

  Sophia glances over her shoulder, black hair bouncing. Her sharp eyes survey the room, passing over me with what I perceive as the faintest hint of distaste.

  So, yeah. I’m not exactly Mr Popular. A guy who spends his spare time installed like a fern in the History stacks of the library does not endear himself to other human life forms.

  And maybe I do tend to ‘loom like a gimp’, as I once heard some rando jock-head say. I thought that was a bit unfair. It’s hard not to loom when you’re six foot three and built like a praying mantis.

  Oh. And I may have recently been spotted at the train station while wearing a cape.

  What can I say? My timing isn’t always stupendous.

  I sneak another peek at her lab station.

  Significant moments meld to your memories in weird, mysterious ways. I remember the assembly was in spring, because the school was canopied by leaves, colossal red maples that seemed to block out the sky. I remember an army of year sevens jammed into the Arts building on the far side of the East Lawn, a hundred grey uniforms cold and damp from drizzle. I clearly remember being herded into a wobbly seat behind some dude who’d won a prize for writing to the Queen – and beside the girl with the thick black ponytail whom I’d been observing from a distance for the better part of a year.

  The girl in whom I recognised a familiar skin-shifty restlessness, like her molecules were bouncing between different dimensions.

  I remember nothing about the parade of speeches on stage. All I remember is Sophia, sitting aloof and straight beside me. Her eyes were focused on the page she held, which was covered with scrawls like some incomprehensible secret language; the answer to a national maths prize that had our teachers falling over themselves.

  I remember clearing my throat, an involuntary sound that I’m pretty sure came out as a whimper.

  She looked up from her paper, dark eyes unblinking, for just a moment.

  And despite the fact that I’d barely spoken a single word aloud that year, a rusty voice bubbled out of my mouth.

  ‘What do you see?’

  She looked down again, fingers fluttering reverently over her equation. She smiled, without glancing up. And she said one word – the only word Sophia Reyhart has spoken to me in almost five years:

  ‘Magic.’

  And I knew my life was supposed to have her in it.

  I would bet money that Sophia doesn’t remember that moment. I would stake my collection of first-edition Raymond E. Feists, or my super-rare vintage Russian marine watch, still in its box, on the fact that she doesn’t see me as anything other than a looming, too-smiley weird guy – if she ever thinks about me at all.

  This is okay.

  I tap my hand against the deck in my pocket.

  I will avoid the obvious pun about playing my cards right.

  But, as I have mentioned, timing is everything.

  And I think it’s almost, just about, time.

  CHAPTER ON
E

  The uncertainty principle

  A basic theory of particle physics states that every atom in existence has already lived a life as a billion other things. Nothing – not a single particle in the universe – is new. So it’s entirely possible that the atoms you breathe have passed through the heart of a star, or the pee of a dinosaur.

  Right at this second I’m staring at the mole on the side of Mr Grayson’s left nostril and wondering where exactly in the universe that has been. Does his mole share its atoms with one of Jupiter’s moons, or a prehistoric sloth, or a piece of ancient gypsum, or Euclid? Christ, is there a more depressing thought than that? One of the greatest mathematicians in history, and his atoms end up in the nostril-mole of a balding year-twelve biology teacher who, at this moment, is frowning at his laptop screen as if spellbound by the spinning wheel of death.

  Why am I obsessing about nose-moles? Who knows. I’ve always assumed there’s some kind of rhyme or reason to my brain’s meanderings. But lately, I’ve started to suspect that most of the things I know are just, like, intellectual leftovers – gunk churning in the soup that is my cerebellum and bobbing up to the surface at arbitrary moments.

  Mr Grayson is wrestling with YouTube, because evidently, learning about mitosis must involve an animation and a rockin’ soundtrack. The remnants of his lunch are perched on his desk; a sad triangle of cheese on rye and a banana, slick with bruises.

  Fact: Bananas are naturally radioactive, containing potassium-40, a radioactive isotope of potassium.

  Fact: Every human shares fifty per cent of their DNA with a banana. Elsie recently made me spend a Saturday watching an entire season of Dance Moms on Netflix. This fact? No longer so surprising.

  Fact: The song ‘Yes, We Have No Bananas’, a hit in 1923, was inspired by a chronic Brazilian banana shortage.

  Great – now that stupid song is stuck in my head.

  Shut up shut up shut –

  Under our desk, Elsie gives my wrist a quick, sharp tap. ‘Sophia. Stop. Freaking. Out,’ she murmurs. Her voice is that glass-calm she has taken to using on me lately, the sort of calm to which I’m sure potential ledge-jumpers are subjected.

  ‘I’m. Not. Freaking. Out,’ I murmur back.

  Elsie’s deep-set eyes are almost imperceptible in the dim room, but I surmise that she is glaring at me with her no-nonsense stern face. ‘Yeah, you are. Close your eyes, Sophia. Breathe.’

  Since my only options are to comply or endure another meditation session with her brother Colin, who has recently discovered the ‘art of mindfulness’, I do what she tells me. I close my eyes and concentrate on slowing the hammering in my chest.

  Panic attacks – even the mild ones – suck balls.

  Elsie’s hand hovers near mine until my breathing sort of returns to normal. Only then does she move away. I don’t know how she knows when to do this. When I open my eyes she winks at me and turns back to the smart board.

  Mr Grayson has mercifully figured out the restart function on his MacBook, and the screen jerks to life – eukaryotic cells, accompanied by music that sounds like the death-throes of a defective Dalek. I breathe. And, involuntarily, I glance over my shoulder at the eighteen faces in the dark behind me.

  There’s Margo Cantor and Jonathan Tran, gazing at each other with their strange moo-eyes, and Lucas Kelly, his school tie peeking through his open fly. In the back corner is the new guy, Damien Pagono, notable only for the fact that he is, once again, picking his nose with his pencil. Beside him is that dipshit who’s always smiling at himself. His head is bent over his books, a curtain of dark hair obscuring all but one pale cheekbone.

  I flick my eyes back to the smart board. Mitosis. Hoorah.

  I’m not a prodigy – not in the true sense of the word. I didn’t solve the Riemann hypothesis when I was a foetus or write symphonies when I was two or anything. But I could read before I could walk. And I understand numbers like I’ve been told other people understand regular language. I have no idea what my IQ is because my parents never wanted it tested. And frankly, I’ve never been that desperate to know.

  In the words of my mum, I am ‘just a bit sharp’, not ‘special’ or ‘different’.

  In the words of Matt Smith, my favourite Doctor Who Doctor, ‘I think a lot. Sometimes it’s hard to keep track.’

  But, here’s the thing – for every Former Child Genius who’s attempting to cure cancer or build an intelligent sex-bot or whatever, there’s another one living under a bridge, talking to their shoes and eating their own toenails. For every young prodigy winning a Nobel Prize or a Fields Medal, there are a dozen others who’ve sunk into nothingness, their promise evaporating like those has-been celebrities Mum likes to read about in Who Weekly.

  And then, of course, there is my very favourite brilliant burnout.

  Grigori Perelman should be, like, a maths superhero. He should be living in a Russian penthouse with a gaggle of supermodels, or whatever it is that famous boys are supposed to dream of. He figured out the frigging Poincaré conjecture – the first person in history to solve this supposedly unsolvable problem. The Poincaré conjecture helped explain the very shape of the universe. In certain circles, this is considered to be a remarkable thing. In certain circles, Perelman should be a god.

  What he should not be doing is living in a cockroach-infested apartment with his mum, shunning his career and maths and personal hygiene – becoming a hermit who turned down the million-dollar prize for cracking a puzzle that had some of the best minds in the world stumped. Not even Elsie, who geeks out over bizarre medical stories, appreciates the magnitude of this.

  I read an article about Perelman in a journal over the summer. Strangely, that was around the time my panic attacks began.

  I so should not have mentioned any of this to my parents. Because now, the curriculum of my final year of high school – on the school counsellor’s recommendation, after consultation with my mum and dad – includes year-twelve Drama.

  It’s supposed to be ‘cathartic’.

  It’s supposed to help my ‘current mental state’ by forcing me to do something that ‘lies outside my skill set’.

  It’s supposed to be ‘fun’.

  So instead of using my free time for useful things, like sleeping, or actually trying to solve the Riemann hypothesis, I have to stand on stage in the dilapidated Arts building, pretending to be a tree while trying desperately to emote.

  Elsie taps her pen on the desk, snapping my focus. ‘You’re okay, Rey,’ she mutters. I think it’s a statement, not a question.

  I close my eyes, and I breathe. I am okay. But I’m supposed to be more than okay.

  I am supposed to be extraordinary.

  The bell rings. The lights go on. The half of the class that is awake bolts; everyone else drags themselves blearily to their feet. I shake off my maudlin navel-gazing and swing myself from my stool.

  Elsie gathers her things. Damien Pagono passes us while humming the chorus of ‘Brown Sugar’, grinning at Elsie and giving her a wink that she has categorically defined as ‘skeezy’. Evidently, our complete lack of response to the last half a dozen times he has serenaded us with songs about brown girls has not lessened his enthusiasm. Elsie and I have discussed this at length, but we still can’t decide whether it’s racist. As usual, we both ignore him.

  ‘Another week down. Sixteen to go.’ Elsie tucks her books into her bag. ‘So. Are you really okay?’

  I struggle into my blazer as the class jostles around me, a swirling vortex of polyester and wool. ‘Yes. I’m fine. Just … had a moment.’

  ‘Sure, okay. Any reason why your moments seem to be happening more frequently lately?’ she asks carefully.

  ‘Is this your attempt at an official diagnosis, Doctor Nayer?’ I say, straightening out my uniform.

  Elsie raises an eyebrow. ‘When I’m head of cardiology at a flash hospital, I’ll remind you that you used doctor so belittleishly.’

  I didn’t mean to sound so crabby, a
nd I don’t think she’s actually annoyed, but just to be safe I say, ‘I’m sorry, Els. I’m just … tired.’

  Elsie picks up my chewed pencil, which has somehow ended up on the floor. ‘Sophia, go home. Watch telly. Tomorrow will still be tomorrow tomorrow.’

  I force a smile. ‘Fortune cookie?’

  She grins. ‘Nope. Quote-of-the-day loo paper.’

  ‘So the best advice you can offer me is from the toilet? Is that supposed to be a metaphor for my life?’

  Elsie reaches behind me, briefly, and untwists the strap of my bag. ‘Metaphorical toilet or not, Rey, I think, all things considered, you should take your inspiration wherever you can find it.’

  I grab the TARDIS wallet that holds my pens, and pull back the zip.

  There is a card in my pencil case.

  It is smooth and new-looking, blue with a silver pattern of swirls and stars on one side. A standard poker-sized playing card. (Sixty-three by eighty-eight millimetres. I don’t know how I know this fact.)

  I flip the card over.

  On the reverse is the two of hearts.

  Elsie leans across the bench. ‘Are you taking up blackjack? We could make a fortune with your endetic memory.’

  ‘Eidetic. Elsie, this isn’t mine. Is it yours?’

  She snorts. ‘Do I look like my Auntie Amita? I’ll start playing cards when I develop that hormonal moustache.’

  I frown at the card. It stares back at me.

  The two of hearts is contained within a finely drawn black hourglass. The top and bottom bulbs hold the red hearts, one pointing down and the other pointing up; in the middle of the bulbs, through the neck of the glass, a trickle of red sand joins the hearts together. It’s simple. But sort of beautiful.

  ‘Elsie, seriously, how did this get here?’

  She sighs. ‘Sophia, don’t fixate. It’s just a card.’ She tugs at her ponytail, black waves bouncing – her annoyed-sign that I know means she is ending this conversation. ‘I gotta get to band practice. You sure you’re okay?’

  I shake myself out of my stupor. ‘Yes. I’m fine. I’ll see you tonight?’

  ‘Yup. Need help with Physics homework. And Maths. And I’ve got more brochures for campus accommodation that we need to evaluate. Seriously, if we don’t choose wisely, I’m gonna end up in a dorm with a bunch of toothy American cheerleaders. Or worse – the Bible kids.’ She throws me one of her wide smiles and skips out of the lab before I can respond.