Would you like the glory of true scientific greatness but at the risk of being shown to be wrong; what the experts call stung? That is a challenge for any scientist looking to improve on Newton. One such was John Barton, a young student genius at Cambridge. The tabloids claim that Barton has distant illegitimate royal links and make some outlandish claims about this new gravity. The problem is that Barton is a violent, manic-depressive man. With that British public-school accent and charm, he becomes a national hero; he ...
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Would you like the glory of true scientific greatness but at the risk of being shown to be wrong; what the experts call stung? That is a challenge for any scientist looking to improve on Newton. One such was John Barton, a young student genius at Cambridge. The tabloids claim that Barton has distant illegitimate royal links and make some outlandish claims about this new gravity. The problem is that Barton is a violent, manic-depressive man. With that British public-school accent and charm, he becomes a national hero; he captains his college to victory in a TV University Quiz and is a born actor playing parts from Shakespeare to a pirate trapesing his magnificent shirtless body across the stage in Gilbert and Sullivan's eponymous comic opera. How does the world of science react to this Barton upstart? How will his new theory affect existing complex relations between scientists and funding structures? One response is to simply deny Barton's veracity and send the young novice away to read his textbooks and think again. But Barton does no such thing and becomes ever more aggressive. Barton's Cambridge supervisor is a dour, old antediluvian scientist, James Crawford who has already fallen into the web of Ed Grace, an American, Ivy League, commercial scientist. Grace's influence is ingratiating, humble and totally self-serving and has already stolen the lion's share of a Nobel Prize for Crawford's entire life's work. Then, cataclysmic disaster strikes when Crawford inadvertently gives Barton's theory to this ruthless retrograde who immediately publishes it and then has the gross audacity to accuse Barton of the terrible sin of plagiarism. To square the circle of intrigue, and after a date arranged by Crawford as a favour to Grace, Barton meets and marries the American's promiscuous daughter, Kate. It is a marriage made in heaven for this quintessential New England girl with her schoolgirl fantasies of being carried away by a handsome prince disguised as a pirate of old. Unfortunately, the marriage brings trouble as Kate becomes a lonely girl in the Cambridge rain looking for her depressed husband; he is likely asleep under a bridge somewhere with a bottle of raw spirits in a paper bag. So she seeks solace elsewhere; savage violence erupts when Barton returns and the story escalates into a battle between her father and one of England's powerful aristocratic families. The novel is incisive, scornful, and cynical over issues of plagiarism, infidelity, violent assault, kidnapping and drug overdose. The ending stirs emotion with casualties gotten in the service of science and money. We leave it to the reader to discover the victim of Newton's Sting.
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