ne part of this story that’s really hard is that I’m writing a scientist. This isn’t so much a problem–I am a scientist, or at least I was for a very long time–except for one thing.

1815 science is nothing like science nowadays. There are four huge differences between 1815 and now. Those differences are so huge that the entire landscape has been transformed.

Difference number one is Gauss. Carl Friedrich Gauss. He was one of the last of the greats, one of the last of the people who you could call a “scientist” without having to go into specifics. He was a mathematician and a philosopher and a physicist and a chemist and pretty much everything in between. He has more things–units of measure, theorems, laws–named after him than anyone else. He was an absolutely stunning genius, and he changed the way that we think about science. I’m not talking about his work on electromagnetism; I’m talking about statistics. Gauss posited that data collected in a particular fashion should have certain characteristics, and gave us ways to think about it. The whole idea of “statistical significance” meant nothing before Gauss. And that means that before Gauss, people had no idea how to really go about proving things. They didn’t really understand the difference between anecdote and data. Sure, they had crude measures. But Gauss taught us to quantify that, and once we understood that, we could attach probabilities to measurements.

Before Gauss, the scientific method was all about observation, and duplication of results. After Gauss, the method was honed. You could identify hypothesis, and you could test them. You could isolate other factors that might be relevant, and work with hugely multivariate inputs. Because you had a way to sort them out at the end. Gauss radically changed the way that science was done.

2. Darwin. I’m writing about an ornithologist, and everything I know about biology is completely out the window. Absolutely everything. Our understanding of species is so infused with Darwin at this point. All of our questions–every time we ask a question “why?” about species behavior, our answers feed back to Darwin. I’m writing about an ornithologist who keeps data. Darwin was still in short pants in 1815. Biologists have no idea of species survival, and the “why” questions were answered with “because God made them like it.” Before Darwin, what we currently consider biology was all stamp-collecting: people sketched animals and made observations, but didn’t even have the vocabulary to ask how things came about.

I’m writing a biologist who asks why questions, but I have to pick questions that he can ask, and that he can answer.

3. Entropy. No understanding of entropy. Today, we understand that entropy exists, and that it increases. Back then, the search was for order and for rules. I can’t stress how much that changes the scientific mindset. This wraps in with #2: God created everything, they thought, and so there had to be rules. Boltzmann, who was one of the first to really understand the concept of entropy, was so depressed by the reception the concept received that he committed suicide in 1906. No, I’m serious. Really.

It took decades for the scientific community to accept that disorder was the method of the universe, and I’m writing in a time when it very clearly wasn’t.
#4 Wave behavior. Back in 1815, we knew that electricity and magnetism were interrelated. We didn’t know how. We had absolutely no idea about quantum mechanics, of course; that would take another hundred years or so. But the years of 1800-1950 were the years in which we discovered that the universe was composed of nothing but waveforms (the next 150 years after that, of course, are dedicated to discovering that waveforms are nothing but information after all–but that’s another genre altogether). The effect of this is delicate, but we understand–and are comfortable with–uncertainty to a huge degree.

Do you ever remember being told as a kid that there were only three, or six, or ten people in the world who really understood quantum mechanics? Well, it’s a crock. You were fed lies. Quantum mechanics isn’t really that hard. It’s just that when it first came out, people couldn’t get their heads around it. Just like your grandmother, who pokes at a computer with a confused look on her face, and can’t figure out how to double-click. If your mind gets set in a certain way of thinking, you can’t get out. It’s weird. You say things like, “but how does the electron get to the other side of the orbital?” And your kids laugh at you and say, “No, you dumbshit–the electron is the orbital. It’s not in orbit.” Quantum mechanics isn’t weird stuff if you grow up with it. There’s nothing to understand, any more than there’s nothing to understand about flipping a light switch.

Since 1815, science has shifted from being a rational search for a set of complete rules into a messy, chaotic method for dealing with inevitable, changing uncertainty. It’s evolved from a Plan into a Coping Mechanism. And so I have to make Gareth ring true as a scientist–not a dabbler (”I’m not sure I’d know how to dabble”), but a real scientist, one who forgets everything around him when he starts thinking about things–to modern readers, and yet maintain the historical period.

It’s kind of fun.