I seem to be a bit obsessed with apples, they’ve appeared in my writing in all sorts of different ways.
The first apple was fairly obvious. I was writing a short story about Alan Turing and it’s known that he died as a result of cyanide poisoning. Andrew Hodge’s biography suggests that this was suicide, Turing dipped an apple in cyanide after becoming overwhelmed by his criminal conviction for homosexuality and subsequent treatment with hormones. Other people think this his death wasn’t so clear-cut; he enjoyed experimenting with chemicals at home and it may simply have been a terrible accident. But what about Snow White? It’s well known that Turing adored this story and he could have taken inspiration from the make-believe poisoned apple.
But then I discovered that this was not actually the first apple, there was one several years beforehand. Robert Oppenheimer, before he became a brilliant theoretical physicist and scientific director of the Manhattan project, was a PhD student at Cambridge University in the 1920s. This was the era of quantum physics and European physicists were coming up with new theories and ideas practically every week. But the physics department at Cambridge was more focused on experimental work and Oppenheimer struggled to find his feet. His PhD supervisor was Patrick Blackett, renowned for his work in the laboratory and development of pioneering equipment. Blackett and Oppenheimer were very unalike, and Oppenheimer started to sink fast. He had some sort of breakdown in which he tried to poison Blackett – with an apple.
The final apple is really the archetype – Newton’s famous thought experiment in which he realised that an apple falling from the tree to the ground is obeying the same laws of physics as a planet orbiting the Sun. This apple leaves behind a gap – picture an apple-shaped void hanging off the branch. It took Einstein to realise that the apple and the space around it were actually connected. In his general theory of relativity he showed how an object’s mass curves space-time, and in turn this space-time tells the object how to behave.
For me, this deep connection between apparently unrelated entities is mirrored in our use of words to represent things. Language is a unifying principle, just as Einstein’s equations are. And perhaps I write words because I can’t do maths.
