David Peat

xii PrefaceIn 1900 Henri Poincaré was working on an abstruse technical difficultyinvolving Newtonian mechanics. Over half a century later thiswould explode into chaos theory. Astronomers were looking forwardto the opening of the great telescopes at Mount Wilson in 1904 and, inthe decades that followed, Edwin Hubble would use these instrumentsto discover that the universe was far vaster than ever believed and,moreover, that it was continually expanding.In 1900 biologists rediscovered the work of an obscure mid nineteenthcentury monk, Gregor Mendel. Ignored by the scientific communityin his own day, Mendel had examined the way physical characteristicsare inherited when different varieties of garden peas arecrossed. Who would have guessed that exactly a century after this rediscoveryof the basis of genetic inheritance, the completion of theHuman Genome Project would be announced?This same year, 1900, saw the publication of Sigmund Freud’s Interpretationof Dreams. Much more rational than a Victorian dreambook, which typically flirted with divination and the occult, it demonstratedthat dreams are “the royal road to the unconscious” and, inturn, that our waking lives are ruled by the irrationality of the unconscious.That unconscious had a potential for violence and human irrationalitythat was to be powerfully demonstrated again and again duringthe twentieth century.At the end of the nineteenth century Percival Lowell used his fortuneto establish his own observatory at Flagstaff, Arizona, with theaim of discovering life on Mars. In 1900 H. G. Wells, inspired by theseideas, published War of the Worlds, with its image of the mass destructionof the human race. Ironically the real possibility of global destructionin the twentieth century did not arise from little green men fromMars but from human-made weapons of mass destruction.1900 was the year when the young philosopher Bertrand Russellheard Giuseppe Peano speak at a conference in Paris. The lecture soinspired Russell that he devoted his life’s work to the discovery of certaintyin mathematics and philosophy. How this mathematical HolyGrail itself was eventually subverted forms the core of Chapter 2.In 1900, inspired by the writings of John Ruskin, Marcel Proustvisited Venice. He abandoned the novel on which he had been working