Dark Matter

I am fifty years of age. My life grows short. Sometimes I seem to feel my own heart rub against my backbone. It is perhaps my own mortality. Soon I will have all the answers, if more answers there be than are on this Earth. Yet even now I do believe that Newton provided us with the greatest answers of all.

Author’s Note

Among his other great discoveries, it was Isaac Newton who defined the modern concept of mass, essential for the development of matter upon which all of modern cosmology rests. Given knowledge only of the velocity of stars, Newton’s laws have enabled scientists to deduce the distribution of matter in a galaxy, of which, typically, between eighty and ninety percent is to be found spread out beyond the spiral disk and not in the form of visible stars and gas. All that modern science knows about this kind of matter is that it does not give off or reflect much light. It is called “dark matter.” And it may be of interest to the reader to note that this seemed to me to be a most suitable title for the tenebrous and crepuscular story that appears here.

The reader may also like to note that England’s greatest scientist really did work for the Royal Mint. In 1696, after twenty-five years of distinguished academe, the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, better known to us today as author of the Principia Mathematica and Optics, accepted what was judged to be little more than a reasonably well-paid sinecure, as Warden of the Royal Mint, then located within the Tower of London, during the period of “the Great Recoinage.” Four years later, he became Master of the Mint, and remained Master of the Mint until his death, in 1728.

In 1696, Newton threw himself into his new tasks with customary thoroughness, pursuing coiners and counterfeiters, taking depositions from witnesses, having himself commissioned as a justice of the peace in all of the home counties, maintaining a network of informers, and sending many men and women to the gallows. The London underworld had never known an investigator quite so thorough and incorruptible, and he was soon regarded among these criminal elements with real fear and hatred. We know a great deal about Isaac Newton’s work at the Mint. But what do we know of Christopher Ellis, who is the narrator of the story contained in the book?

According to State Papers Domestic 362 (1696) in the Public Record Office at Kew, in London, the Lords Justices—the central body of government in the absence of King William III at the war with France—had agreed, on August 26, that an assistant clerk was needed for Dr. Newton following the mysterious disappearance of his previous clerk, George Macey. The clerk whom Newton chose was one Christopher Ellis, the younger brother of Charles Ellis, who, prior to his appointment as Comptroller of the Mint, was Undersecretary to William Lowndes, the Permanent Secretary to the Secretary of State for the Treasury, Lord Godolphin. (Godolphin resigned in the dying days of 1696 and was replaced by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Charles Montagu, the future Earl of Halifax, who was also Newton’s patron in the Mint.) Christopher Ellis’s appointment was approved by the Treasury on November 17 (Treasury Books, 310, 325, 1693-96) to assist Dr. Newton’s “extraordinary work” in detecting and prosecuting clippers and coiners, at the salary of sixty pounds per year, to be paid from September Quarter Day. But beyond these few facts, very little else of Christopher Ellis is known.

Newton’s interest in alchemy, as well as his dissenting, not to say blasphemous, Arian views, which made him violently opposed to the ruling Trinitarian religious orthodoxy of the day, is also accurate. And anyone wishing to know more should read Richard Westfall’s magisterial biography of Newton, as I have done. But any mistakes in the novel are my own.

I am very much indebted to Neil Agarwal of Harvard University for helping me with the code.

—PHILIP KERR, NOVEMBER 29, 2001

About the Author

Philip Kerr was born in Edinburgh in 1956 and now lives in London with his wife and three children. Dark Matter is his eleventh novel.

Michael Maier, Atalanta fugiens, 1618

Dark Matter Reader’s Group Guide

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. The theme of decoding permeates the novel. As Newton and Ellis investigate the third murder, Newton observes, “All of nature is a cipher, and all of science a secret writing that must be unraveled by men who would understand the mystery of things.” In the prologue, Ellis notes, “Newton looked upon all of creation as a riddle … I think he believed that a man who might decipher an earthly code might similarly fathom the heavenly one.” By the end of the novel, how much progress has each man made by decoding? Has Ellis decoded Newton? Has Newton gotten any closer to deciphering the “heavenly code”?