COMING FULL CIRCLE
It might seem reasonable that we begin our exploration with those most basic components of you, the atoms in your body. Instead, though, we’re going to start with a very different, much more human approach. Throughout much of history, a person’s definitive position in the world was not drawn from molecular biology, psychology or physics, but out of the spiderweb diagram of a family tree. It was this that made the difference between royalty and commoner, landowner and peasant. What made you you was explored through genealogy.§
As we will discover, the family tree has its limits – yet it still has plenty of popular power. Genealogy websites flourish, while there’s nothing TV likes better than showing us celebrities making a journey into a small branch of their family tree to discover where they came from. Genealogy is the ideal way to start, as it will eventually enable us to come full circle by exploring the true inner aspects of inheritance when we later return to personality.
Famously, on a popular UK genealogy TV show, working-class actor Danny Dyer, who has specialised in playing unsophisticated cockney geezers, discovered with understandable pride that he was descended from royalty. Even though many of us indulge in a little personal genealogy, few can bring into play the resources available to a TV research team and delve back to make a similar discovery. However, there is no need to feel left out.
I can say with absolute confidence that you too have royal ancestry.
*As the Universe Inside You website www.universeinsideyou.com features some fascinating experiments that reflect a number of the aspects of what makes you a human, we will be making use of them here too – but the two books cover very different ground.
†As we’ll be dealing with several big numbers, from now on we’ll use scientific notation, where the number 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 would be written as the more compact 7 × 1027. Here ×1027 means ‘multiplied by 1 followed by 27 zeros’.
‡To be precise, each atom of any particular isotope is identical. Isotopes are simply variants of the same element with different numbers of neutrons in the nucleus. The name, meaning ‘same place’ was introduced by English chemist Frederick Soddy in 1913, which he explained was ‘because they occupy the same place in the periodic table’.
§It’s not a true science, but at least it is (almost) an ‘ology’ as Maureen Lipman would have said in the old BT advert.
2
YOUR ANCESTORS WERE ROYAL
Many of us enjoy genealogy. It enables us to get a feel for our close family and to look back a number of years – but the approach can only do so much. The word ‘genealogy’ comes from an Ancient Greek word meaning ‘tracing of descent’. The implication is that your pedigree* defines who you are. In part, having a list of ‘who begat whom’ was required to determine which family member would inherit an estate after death, but it also became associated with the idea of a person’s worth. It was as if the family you were born into somehow defined what you would become in life, an assumption perpetuated and locked in by rigid social structures, such as class or caste systems.
Taking the UK as an example, while the class system has become significantly more diffuse in the last 100 years, some still hold to a distinction based purely on birth – and never more so than when there are royal connections. Traditionally the British divided themselves into working class, middle class and upper class (with some gradation, such as ‘upper working’ or ‘lower middle’).† The borderline between working class and middle class has become extremely diffuse. For example, my father’s parents were mill workers – undoubtedly working class. My father didn’t go to university and started work in his teens, so also started off working class. However, he took night classes and became a manager and finally a director of the company where he worked his entire career – making the transition to middle class.
The working-class label remains one that is held with pride. However, the boundary is fuzzy, as the majority of ‘middle-class’ people are no longer in the traditional middle-class professions such as clergy or doctors; nor are they business owners, but typically are employees of an organisation, as much as anyone who regards themselves as working class. By contrast, the remnants of the upper class still define themselves not by their achievements but as a result of the family they were born into, and this is a class that reaches its pinnacle in royalty. It’s for this reason that actor Danny Dyer was so excited to find that he was a descendant of the English king Edward III who lived between 1312 and 1377. Dyer was, of course, related to far more individuals who weren’t royal, but the remnants of class status made this relationship seem more interesting. As we shall discover, though, it doesn’t make Dyer particularly special. Not special at all, in fact.
EXPONENTIAL DOUBLING
Interesting though a family tree may be – and there is no harm in putting one together as entertainment – it’s difficult to look at one for long without realising the limitations of the structure. Go back a few generations and the contents of the tree will become very selective. Whoever constructed it will have chosen only a few of the possible branches to pursue. In truth, it’s not so much a family tree as a family twig. And there’s a good reason for this restriction, arising from the mathematical phenomenon known as exponential doubling.
A (royal) family tree – to fit even these few generations many individuals are missing (Source: Town & Country Magazine).
It’s not uncommon these days for ‘exponential’ to be used to mean extreme – as in ‘this is an exponentially large figure’ – but in mathematics, exponential has a precise meaning, which is far more dramatic. Normal ‘linear’ growth involves going up by some multiple of the factor being considered – time that has passed, or generations, or whatever. So, for instance, after five years, something undergoing linear growth might be five times bigger. After ten years, ten times bigger. And so on. But exponential growth is on a different scale. We’ve already introduced what is known as exponential notation where instead of, say, writing 1,000,000,000 or 1 billion, we use 109. Here the number ‘9’ is the exponent, the number of times that 10 is multiplied by itself to produce the required value. If each unit of time (or whatever) involves an increase of the exponent, growth is exponential. So, for example, after five years it might be 105 times bigger – 100,000 times – while after ten years it might be 1010 times bigger – 10 billion times bigger. That’s not just getting bigger, but the rate of increase is accelerating dramatically. When something grows in this fashion it rapidly gets out of control.
Rather than raising 10 to the exponent, an alternative type of exponential growth involves exponential doubling. Here, the number involved doubles at each step – so after n years (or whatever the factor under study is) the value is 2n times bigger. Exponential doubling is often illustrated using a story involving a chessboard and grains of rice. According to the legend, as a reward for undertaking a task, a wise man asked a king for an apparently simple payment. All he required was a few grains of rice. The total required a spot of calculation and a chessboard. The idea was to put one grain of rice on the first square of the chessboard, two grains on the second, four grains on the third, eight on the fourth and so on, until all the squares had been loaded up with rice. The total number of rice grains involves exponential doubling.