The fire in the Senior Common Room burned with its customary indifference to human affairs. Professor Quillibrace sat in his usual armchair reading a volume of Newton's Principia. Mr Blottisham was examining a portrait of Einstein hanging above the mantelpiece.
"I've always admired scientific geniuses," said Blottisham.
Professor Quillibrace lowered his spectacles slightly.
"Indeed?"
"They simply see what nobody else can."
"An enviable gift."
"Quite. Newton. Darwin. Einstein. Extraordinary fellows. They had ideas centuries ahead of everyone else."
Quillibrace closed the book.
"A small question, if I may."
"Certainly."
"Could Newton have discovered general relativity?"
Blottisham laughed.
"Of course not."
"Why not?"
"Because Einstein hadn't thought of it yet."
"I see."
Miss Elowen Stray looked up from her embroidery.
"I'm not sure that answers the question."
Blottisham waved a hand.
"Well... Newton lacked the mathematics."
"So if we'd taught him modern mathematics?"
"He might have managed."
"And Maxwell's field theory?"
"Give him that as well."
"And non-Euclidean geometry?"
"Certainly."
"The Michelson-Morley experiment?"
"Naturally."
"The growing difficulties within nineteenth-century mechanics?"
Blottisham hesitated.
"I suppose so."
Quillibrace smiled gently.
"My dear Blottisham, you appear to be lending Newton the entire nineteenth century."
There was a brief silence.
Miss Stray looked thoughtfully into the fire.
"It isn't merely that Newton lacked information," she said.
"No?"
"He lacked a world in which relativity could even be imagined."
Quillibrace nodded.
"Precisely."
Blottisham frowned.
"But ideas don't require worlds."
"Don't they?"
"They require clever people."
"Then why," asked Quillibrace, "did several clever people invent calculus at almost the same time?"
"A coincidence."
"And natural selection?"
"Another coincidence."
"And oxygen?"
"Remarkable luck."
"And group theory?"
"Very fortunate."
Miss Stray smiled.
"One begins to suspect that coincidence is working rather hard."
Blottisham considered this.
"So you're saying great discoveries happen when enough clever people exist?"
"I am saying no such thing."
"Then what?"
Quillibrace rose and wandered towards the window overlooking the college gardens.
"Suppose," he said, "that someone plants an oak."
"Very well."
"How long before there is shade?"
"Many years."
"Could someone have sat beneath that shade on the day the acorn was planted?"
"Obviously not."
"Why not?"
"Because there was no shade."
"Exactly."
He turned.
"The shade did not exist because the conditions that make shade possible did not yet exist."
Blottisham looked unconvinced.
"But theories aren't trees."
"No."
"They're ideas."
"Indeed."
"So where are they before they're discovered?"
Quillibrace smiled.
"I wonder whether that is the wrong question."
Miss Stray looked up.
"What should we ask instead?"
"Not where is the theory?"
He paused.
"But when does the theory become possible?"
The room became unusually quiet.
Outside, gardeners were preparing beds for the spring.
Miss Stray watched them through the window.
"We usually imagine discoveries as buried treasure," she said.
"Yes."
"As though the theory already exists somewhere beneath the ground."
"And?"
"But perhaps they're more like gardens."
Blottisham looked puzzled.
"Gardens?"
"You cannot discover roses in soil that has never been planted."
Quillibrace's eyes brightened.
"An excellent metaphor."
"The gardener does not invent spring," she continued. "Nor does spring guarantee roses. But together they create conditions under which roses become possible."
Blottisham stared into the fire.
"So Einstein wasn't simply cleverer than Newton."
"No."
"He inherited a different intellectual climate."
"Just so."
"And if Newton had lived in Einstein's century..."
"He would not have been Newton."
"No..."
"He would have been someone whose mind had itself been shaped by everything that happened between them."
Blottisham sighed.
"History does complicate things."
"It has a regrettable tendency to do so."
The college clock struck the hour.
Miss Stray closed her embroidery.
"It seems," she said quietly, "that ideas have biographies before they have authors."
Professor Quillibrace looked at her with evident satisfaction.
"I believe," he replied, "that is the best thing said this afternoon."
Mr Blottisham frowned.
"I still think genius matters."
"So do I," said Quillibrace.
Blottisham looked relieved.
"It is simply that genius," continued Quillibrace, "cannot harvest fields that history has not yet sown."
The fire crackled.
Outside, one of the gardeners scattered seeds into freshly turned earth.
No one remarked upon it.
Yet each silently suspected that the garden, too, possessed a history before its flowers.
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