Physicists seem to be having a cultural moment. Last year, there was Christopher Nolan’s Oscar-sweeping Oppenheimer , based on the American theoretical physicist’s biography by Kai Bird. Then came Benjamin Labatut’s The Maniac , a novel that explored the life of polymath John von Neumann.
Now, there is M.G. Vassanji’s Everything There Is , inspired by the life of Pakistani nuclear physicist and Nobel Prize recipient Abdus Salam.
What first intrigued Vassanji about Salam, as he puts it in his author’s note, was that while most physicists of his calibre have been agnostics, Salam was a devout Muslim. However, the author goes on to clarify that all the characters and incidents in the novel are his inventions, “including cameos by Feynman, Dirac, and Gell-Mann..
. only the physics is real”. Vassanji’s protagonist is named Nurul Islam, publicly acclaimed for his contributions to the Theory of Everything, and privately caught between science and faith, as well as morality and desire.
These conjoined threads run throughout the book, a fictional exploration of such issues in a complex world. The sections on quantum physics are commendably and clearly handled, especially for the uninitiated. Primarily set in the 70s, Everything There Is begins with Nurul’s visit to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he is invited to deliver a guest lecture at MIT.
Here, he meets Hilary, graduate student and designated chaperone, and there is an almost immediate chemistry between them. Th.
