It’s a bit of an odd feeling to be reading a novel and stumble upon yourself as a character. Well, at least a well-disguised version of yourself. The novel is Victor Snaith’s The Yukiad, and the character is a large Scotsman named Pans who tugs at his earrings when he becomes agitated. I am neither Scottish, nor earringed, nor particularly large, but I suspect that Pans, viewed through the haze of poetic license, is I.
When we meet Pans, he is hovering over a glass contraption—a perpetual motion machine, really—consisting of a circular tube containing several colored beads, which travel around the tube, some clockwise, some counterclockwise, all at the same speed, bouncing off each other in perfectly elastic collisions whenever they collide. Pans is currently tugging at his earrings so hard as to cause some concern for the integrity of his earlobes, as he ponders the following question:
But wull tha’ aver gut bark to weer tha’s started, at a’, at a’?
Well, okay, maybe I’m not Pans. Maybe I’m the character Sherloch Humes, a “trim but rather wrinkled gentleman in worsteds”, who calculates for Pans’s benefit that “the configuration of beads is guaranteed to have exactly replicated itself by the year two thousand and nineteen”. I believe that I am the inspiration for one of these characters and that the mathematician Leonid Vaserstein (who is neither Scottish nor wrinkled) is the inspiration for the other, and here is why:
Continue reading ‘The Yukiad, Perpetual Motion and Me’
Professor Joseph Weiler, who is 
