The Einstein Prophecy

by Robert Masello

If you had never seen war up close, it was an easy thing to be brave and bellicose about it. But if you had, it was hard not to despair. What men could wantonly do to each other, in the name of nation or faith or ideology, was unthinkable.

Because he knew in his very bones that there could be no reason, nor any special purpose, for a Divinity. Mankind had made it all up out of whole cloth because, at bottom, everyone was afraid of the dark, afraid of ultimate extinction, afraid to face the fact that individual lives meant nothing in the grand scheme of a vast and utterly indifferent cosmos.

The Axis powers and the Allies were fighting over what amounted, in his view, to a magical talisman.

the Arabic curse “Death to the swine!”

But carbon 14 is extremely rare and extremely unstable, and it decays, slowly, to nitrogen 14, which has a half-life of around 5,730 years. As a result, and depending on how much of the carbon I can detect in a sample in the first place, my experiments can only go back as far as about 40,000 years. After that, kaput. There’s no more carbon 14 left to detect.”