the world’s great polymaths. Born in the tiny village of Milverton in Somerset, England, he was an infant prodigy, having learned to read by the age of two. The firstborn son of a devout Quaker family, he worked his way through the entire Bible (twice!) at four, and soon topped this achievement by acquiring the basics of Latin grammar. He was able to converse and write letters in Latin to his no-doubt perplexed friends and family when he was six years old.
Young Thomas outgrew teachers faster than his family could find them—a few weeks of study and he would know as much as the master instructing the class. When he landed at Thompson’s School in Dorset at the age of eight, he found a tutor who understood his genius, gave him free reign of the library, and assisted the voracious student in learning whatever he happened to fancy—which, apparently, was everything. By fourteen years of age he was fluent in not only ancient Greek and Latin—he amused himself by translating his textbooks into and out of classical languages—but had also acquired French, Italian, Hebrew, German, Chaldean, Syriac, Samaritan, Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and, of course, Amharic.
Medicine inevitably captured his interest, and that took him to London and Edinburgh, briefly, before moving on to Germany to delve into the toddling discipline of physics. His expertise and authority in various and wide-ranging fields were such that in a few short years it was being said of him that he knew everything there was to be known. As a practicing physician he earned his daily crust, and devoted his spare time to experiments, which often led to revolutionary discoveries: it was Young who devised a means to demonstrate in simple and elegant experiments that light did indeed behave as a wave—not only as a particle, as Isaac Newton had theorised. He also established that the different colours we perceive are made by light at different wavelengths that correspond to variations in electromagnetic energy.
Never confined to any singular endeavour, Dr. Young’s insatiable curiosity stretched to other, even more exotic pursuits, including—conveniently for my story—archaeology: especially the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphics. No one at the time could read the ancient pictorial rebus script but, aided by the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799, Young—not the Frenchman Champollion, as most history texts have it—cracked the code and defined the basic rules of translation that others (including Champollion, who grudgingly admitted as much) have followed and built on ever since.
A more recent genius, Albert Einstein (1879–1955), was a great admirer of Dr. Young and ranked him next to Isaac Newton, mentioning Young’s inestimable contributions to science when he was asked to provide a forward for Newton’s Opticks, when that seminal work was republished in 1931. Einstein knew a thing or three about physics himself. In addition to creating the powerhouse E = mc2 equation, Einstein also had a knack for pithy sound bites. His observation that “the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion . . .” speaks directly to one of the central devices of The Bone House, as characters struggle with the diverse yet interconnecting realities of a universe unlimited by space or time.
Although the idea of a many-dimensioned universe had been knocking around for some time—the word multiverse itself was coined by the philosopher William James around 1895—it was Einstein who laid the theoretical groundwork for the notion—a suggestion later picked up and given more definite shape by physicists and cosmologists such as Hugh Everett, Max Tegmark, and John Wheeler, amongst others. The idea gained momentum in the scientific community through the 1970s and ’80s until it has become such an accepted feature in the landscape of scientific thought that it is now a useful construct for theorising about the apparent anomalies encountered when dealing with the universe in its largest, and very smallest, expressions.
It is also a highly useful construct for a writer of imaginative fiction. For the characters enmeshed in the BRIGHT EMPIRES quest are not time-travelling explorers, à la H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine or Steven Spielberg’s Back to the Future series—merely running backwards and forwards along chronological train tracks, confined to rails permanently fixed in a singular direction. Rather, Kit and company are bouncing around a multidimensional universe in the equivalent of a helicopter that can travel in any of a thousand different directions. And if that hypothetical helicopter is a vehicle that can also zoom off into hidden dimensions and lands in any possible alternate world—with