“They are as close to indiscernible as I can make them under these conditions—which is to say, in twilight with frozen hands,” shouted Fatio towards Leibniz, who was a stone’s throw off, wrestling with a snowball that weighed more than he did. When no response came back, he muttered, “I shall go in and warm my hands if that is acceptable.”
But by the time Nicolas Fatio de Duillier had got back to Leibniz’s office, his hands were warm enough to do a few things. He took another look at the papers stuck into the Chinese book. The letter from Eliza was inordinately long, and appeared to consist entirely of gaseous chatter about what everyone was wearing. Yet on top of it was the other document, addressed to the Doctor but written in the Doctor’s hand. A mystery. Perhaps the book was a clue? It was called I Ching. Fatio had seen it once before, in the library of Gresham’s College, where Daniel Waterhouse had fallen asleep over it. The sheaf of papers had been used to mark a particular chapter entitled: 54. Kuei Mei: The Marrying Maiden. The chapter itself was a bucket of claptrap and mystickal gibberish.
He put it back where he’d found it, and went over to the shed’s single tiny window. Leibniz now had his back pressed against an immense snowball and was trying to topple it over by thrusting with both legs. Fatio strolled once around the room, pausing to riffle through any prominent stacks of papers that presented themselves to his big pale eyes. Of which there were several: letters from Huygens, from Arnauld, from the Bernoullis, the late Spinoza, Daniel Waterhouse, and everyone else in Christendom who had a flicker of sense. But one of the larger stacks consisted of letters from Eliza. Fatio reached into the middle, grabbed half a dozen leaves between his thumb and index finger, and snapped them out. He folded them and stuffed them into his breast pocket. Then he ventured back outside.
“Are your hands warm, Monsieur Fatio?”
“Exceeding warm, Doctor Leibniz.”
The Doctor had arranged the three snowballs—one giant one and the two small indiscernibles—on the field between the stable, the Schlo?, and the nearby Arsenal. The triangle defined by these balls was nothing special, being neither equilateral nor isosceles.
“Isn’t this how Sir Francis Bacon died?”
“Descartes, too—froze to death in Sweden,” the Doctor returned cheerfully, “and if Leibniz and Fatio can go down in the annals next to Bacon and Descartes our lives will have been well concluded. Now, if you would be so good as to go to that one and tell me of your perceptions.” The Doctor pointed to a small snowball a few paces in front of Fatio.
“I see the field, the Schlo?, Arsenal, and Library-to-be. I see you, Doctor, standing by a great snowball, and over there to the right, not so far away, a lesser one.”
“Now pray do the same from the other snowball that you made.”
A few moments later Fatio was able to report: “The same.”
“Exactly the same?”
“Well, of course there are slight differences. Now, Doctor, you and the large snowball are to my right, and closer than before, and the small snowball is to my left.”
Leibniz now deserted his post and began stomping towards Fatio. “Newton would have it that this field possesses a reality of its own, which governs the balls, and makes them discernible. But I say the field is not necessary! Forget about it, and consider only the balls’ perceptions.”
“Perceptions?”
“You said yourself that when you stood there you perceived a large snowball on the left, far away, and a small one on the right. Here you perceive a large one on the right, near at hand, and a small one on the left. So even though the balls might be indiscernible, and hence identical, in terms of their external properties such as size, shape, and weight, when we consider their internal properties—such as their perceptions of one another—we see that they are different. So they are discernible! And what is more, they may be discerned without reference to some sort of fixed, absolute space.”
By now they had, without discussion, begun trudging back towards the Schlo?, which looked deceptively warm and inviting as twilight deepened.
“You seem to be granting every object in the Universe the power to perceive, and to record its perceptions,” Fatio ventured.
“If you are going to venture down this road of subdividing objects into smaller and smaller bits, you must somewhere stop, and stick your neck out by saying, ‘This is the fundamental unit of reality, and thus are its properties, on which all other ph?nomena are built,’ ” said the Doctor. “Some think it makes sense that these are like billiard balls, which interact by colliding.”
“I was just about to say,” said Fatio, “what could be simpler than that? A hard wee bit of indivisible matter. That is the most reasonable hypothesis of what an atom is.”
“I disagree! Matter is complicated stuff. Collisions between pieces of matter are more complicated yet. Consider: If these atoms are infinitely small, why, then, is it not true that the likelihood of one atom colliding with another is essentially zero?”