My last book of April – well, technically the first book of May, as I finished it after midnight – was Michaela Roessner’s Vanishing Point, an sf novel about the aftermath of 90% of humanity vanishing. The Winchester Mystery House plays a pivotal role, perhaps unsurprisingly, given the nature of reality in a house where stairs lead into the ceiling.
So I’m reading along, and we’re well into the part where, if you were writing a Star Trek script and weren’t much of a scientist, you’d put ‘TECH TECH TECH’ and move on to the space battle/alien invasion/deeply moving character development. Planck’s constant, negative-energy electrons, gamma ray bursts, yada yada, and then we move on to Feynman diagrams. Or, to quote the book:
She drew a matching set of Feynman diagrams on the screen.
ART TO GO HERE
“Remember these? Electron-positron annihilation looks like like a single electron scattering off a virtual photon tech tech tech oh Jean-Luc I have always loved you!”
Erm, sorry, that’s getting away from the book. But you can see that no one ever actually got the illustrations from the art department, or noticed they were missing until it was too late. Odd!
