Walking with Wallace

© 2012 by Michael Koe. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 03/08/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4678-8913-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4678-8915-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4678-8914-8 (e)

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CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1—In The Beginning

Chapter 2—Young Wallace

Chapter 3—Enter Wilson

Chapter 4—Enter Archie

Chapter 5—Dogs in Wallace’s Life

Chapter 6—Routine and Not Going Abroad

Chapter 7—Measuring Intelligence

Chapter 8—Assessing Risks

Chapter 9—Ageing and illness

Chapter 10—The Meaning of life

Chapter 11—Some Tentative Conclusions

Introduction

The Author, Michael Koe, would like to point out that neither the views expressed by the mythical Brigadier, nor those attributed to his Grandson, Archie, on their walks with Wallace, are necessarily their own. Wallace too might well wish to point out that some of the views he is quoted as expressing are not his, either!

‘Walking with Wallace’ is, therefore, correctly designated as fiction. However its story is a real life account of Wallace and Michael’s walks in the beautiful South Northamptonshire countryside, during which they debate important philosophical and scientific issues of concern to man and dog.

Wallace’s views are as close to Michael’s perception of the truth as possible, as too are the scientific and philosophical facts debated by the three on their walks together. These are (as far as they are understood by the Author) mainly, indeed, almost exclusively, factual. So, too, is the relationship between the Brigadier, his family, his Grandson Archie, Wallace’s predecessor Wilson and, of course, Wallace himself.

Wilson had been ‘rescued’ from Battersea Dogs’ Home by Michael’s son Jamie and proved to be the most gentlemanly and well behaved Staffie possible, despite his attraction to and skill with the rugby ball. Due to the pressure of Jamie’s work and life in London, Wilson’s visits to Michael and his Wife, Sara in South Northamptonshire increased to the point that he

relocated to live up there and became Mummy’s Staffie, on a more permanent basis, with an implicit transfer of ownership, though his allegiance to Jamie remained throughout his short life.

Wallace, easily identifiable from the photograph on the cover, is a handsome and loving Staffordshire Bull Terrier. He and Michael have lived under the same roof (and at night, it must be admitted, after some skilful early manoeuvring by Wallace, on the same bed), over the last thirteen years, during which time they have probably seen more of each other than of any other living creature.

Michael, whose lovely wife, Sara, sadly died from a devastating neurodegenerative disease in 1994, has—in his eyes anyway—four brilliant sons, four beautiful—and, of course, brilliant—daughters in laws and twelve wonderful grandchildren, all of whom he and Wallace see as often as possible. You, like them, Michael hopes, might like to read more about Wallace and the Brigadier and their philosophical debates.

Finally, Michael would like to thank all those who have so generously helped him, in different ways; with a special thank you both to Debbie Benadie, for her hours of proof reading of content and to his own family for their patient encouragement and helpful input in putting this book together.

Chapter 1—In The Beginning

The Brigadier was a keen amateur cosmologist. He avidly read newspaper articles about the latest discoveries in particle physics and kept on his desk a list of questions concerning the universe, life on earth and on other planets, dark energy and dark matter; and on other important related philosophical issues. He would then discuss these with Wallace during their walks around the beautiful South Northamptonshire countryside.

Wallace ponders matters in the garden

Despite Wallace’s tendency to be distracted by what was going on around him and to keep his thoughts to himself, he always appeared to have as good an understanding as any on these issues; and anyway, the Brigadier felt he knew him well enough to be able, when in doubt, broadly to interpret his thoughts, though he accepted not always correctly, for Wallace could, at times, be remarkably unpredictable.

On a clear, sunny Spring morning, as the Brigadier turned the key in the garden door, Wallace, as usual, magically materialised alongside him. They crossed the house’s brick paved terrace together, climbed up the two steps on to the still wet lawn, sparkling in the early morning sunshine; and made their way on up the gentle slope of grass to the top gate. This opened onto a small extension of the Church cemetery, with a public footpath running left and right to the green fields beyond. As they moved left through the cemetery, Wallace was unsurprisingly up ahead, full of energy at the start of his morning walk.

Passing through the cemetery extension, their interest turned to the rows of ageing tombstones. As Wallace meaningfully approached one, the Brigadier felt himself travelling back through time. In his mind’s eye, he dwelled on the comparatively short lives of those buried there. He looked back on his own life and the happy years with his late wife, Sara, and their four sons, as they grew up.

He pictured Wilson, his son Jamie’s puppy, romping in the grass in the garden of the house where Sara and he had lived, when they had ‘inherited’ him from Jamie as their first Staffie. He recalled stories about these wonderfully loyal, brave and handsome bull terriers, brutalised in the eighteenth century and trained to fight to the death in cellars in the Staffordshire mining country.

His thoughts went on back to their breeding from bulldogs and terriers to their powerful and aggressive ancestors, used in battles in Roman times. He thought too about his own, at that time anyway, powerful and aggressive Viking ancestors (though, he recalled that his great-great grandfather had sailed over peacefully enough from Copenhagen, to set up as a barrister in London, at around the time that Darwin was born).

Charles Robert Darwin, he reminded Wallace, was the scientist, whose book ‘On the Origin of Species’ spelled out his theory that was to challenge accepted views on this controversial subject across the World. Their thoughts about Darwin and evolution quickly transported the Brigadier, in his mind’s eye, back to the emergence of the human race from the animal world, then further on back to the beginning of life itself on earth, the formation of the stars and galaxies and on and on still further, some 13.5 billion years ago to the Big Bang itself, the very creation of the universe. (Some cosmologists still argue that the date this event took place was actually somewhere between 8 and 20 billion years ago, dependent on the disputed size of the Hubble constant).

In the beginning—I mean in the very beginning, not when you or I came into this world, nor even when our ancestors arrived, the Brigadier remarked to Wallace, as the latter sniffed the grass close by a nearby tombstone, "neither you nor I nor any living creature was around in any recognisable form—though each of us, I suppose, could have been a cluster of unspecified quarks (elementary particles and fundamental constituents of matter). For everything that is anything started with the ‘Big Bang’. This was the moment of creation, when time and space began and our majestic universe grew in a few micro seconds from nothing into an unbelievably hot, ever expanding fiery ball of fundamental particles that make up all its and our constituent parts.

In less than a minute, it had grown to over a billion miles across, still expanding unbelievably fast, doubling in size every microsecond. Everything you can now see, feel or touch just grew from this miniscule black hole, far smaller than the size of a full stop."

Wallace looked annoyingly unimpressed, no doubt thinking what was the old man on about and why should we bother about when and how the universe started or worry about its size some 13.5 billion years ago. No one he knew was around then and no one he knew really cared how it all began. He certainly didn’t. In his view, there was quite enough going on in the here and now on this beautiful morning to keep everyone happy, without such irrelevant distractions as fundamental particles.

Admiring his philosophic acumen, but sensing his lack of historical perspective, the Brigadier ploughed on—it has to be said, without engendering much further interest in what was rapidly becoming a rather one sided philosophical monologue. He half apologetically added, to anyone still listening, that such scientific assertions had always fascinated and worried him.

Perhaps, he suggested to Wallace, the universe around us was formed from the immensely compressed contents of the death throes of another dying universe or even from nothing, surrounded by nothing; though if just nothing, one had to ask what, if anything, did this nothing consist of? And what was going on before that Big Bang? And what was around that black hole, when it arrived; more of this nothing?

Some astronomers, he recalled, reasoned that, put another way, ‘nothing’ consisted of equally balanced quantities of plus and minus ‘half nothings’ or, in more scientific terms, of exactly balancing of matter and anti-matter particles. Whenever a particle of matter meets a particle of anti-matter, the pair will, they tell us, like true warriors, annihilate each other—back to nothing (with the tell tale emission of gamma rays). In which case, the Brigadier wondered why had the matter all around us not been annihilated by its anti-matter pair? And, since it had not, where had all that missing anti-matter gone?

Is it even now hanging around, waiting its moment, and if so where?, he asked, as Wallace moved off toward a nearby tombstone. Was he too wondering where those antimatter particles had gone; or even whether they were hiding there behind that nearby tombstone, for that certainly had his full attention. More likely, the Brigadier feared, just sniffing out another mark.

It was, he reflected, anyway, an extremely difficult question even for our brightest scientists to answer satisfactorily, particularly in light of recent experiments at CERN (The European Centre for Particle Physics) in Geneva. The Large Hadron Collider there accelerates, to speeds near that of light, particles travelling in opposite directions through its 34 mile long elliptical tunnel under France and Switzerland to a designated narrow section, where such particles either narrowly miss or collide with each other. These near speed of light collisions, which mimic conditions in the universe a few trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, have successfully (without blowing the world apart as some forecast or feared) created, albeit briefly, small quantities of antimatter, confirming its existence.

At the time of the Big Bang, anti matter was, cosmologists assure us, around in large quantities. Its disappearance and the existence of dark energy and dark matter, they believe, all play crucial roles in the existence and balance of our expanding universe. Their experiments too support the strong theoretical and mathematical evidence that ordinary (positive) matter represents only 4% of the universe, with dark matter representing some 23% and dark energy the rest, a massive 73%.

We must talk more about this dark matter and dark energy later, said the Brigadier, who anyway was already finding it extremely difficult to get his own head around some of these cosmological propositions. He also feared Wallace was no longer paying the necessary attention and that he would currently be wasting his time in asking him his views on such matters or, indeed, on anything else at that moment.

However, the possibility that, before the Big Bang, there was no time, no space, no anything but the eternal present stretching back for ever, chimed well with Wallace’s focus on the ‘here and now’. His expressive brown eyes made it clear too that he was much more interested in the eternal present than the distant past, though he was prepared to reflect briefly on the more recent past (possibly breakfast) and the near term future (probably lunch), before returning to the present and continuing to size up the next nearby tombstone.

The Brigadier hastily pulled him away, thinking though perhaps he was right. Shouldn’t we all just be enjoying today; for it goes so quickly and it is that which we do here and now, over which we have at least some control? Wallace would certainly have argued that that was what was of overriding and immediate importance.

However, as any historian worth his salt would have done, the Brigadier reminded him that what