If Louis was handsome to a certain extreme, almost as if Prince Paris, who had given the golden apples to Aphrodite, had stepped out of mythology, or as if the archangel who had blown the trumpet of Armageddon had descended from the clouds to the earth with flames and thunderbolts; then the next friend whom Armand had introduced to Joseph was, in looks, almost another extreme.
It was a short, dry, thin man. He had a waxy face with two large eyes and a large but flat nose as if someone had slapped it so hard across the face that it had flattened it. He also had a flat forehead, while his jaws were very thick and protruded outward. It made his mouth look extraordinarily large, and when he looked at it fiercely, it looked like a toad. Combined with the withered, but somewhat protruding finger joints of the palms, and the extra dry, flaky, black and yellow skin from the skin disease, it was like a monster slipped out of a nightmare.
"Joseph, this is my friend Mr. Mara."
"It's a pleasure to meet you." Joseph nodded and offered him his hand.
Mara also reached out and took Joseph's hand. His grip was shallow, though, barely more than a gentle squeeze of the tips of Joseph's fingers. Joseph noticed that Mara's hands were quite cold.
"Mr. Bonaparte, I've read your paper, do you think light is a wave?" Mara said slowly, his voice just as cold.
"It's not so much what I think as it is what the available evidence leads me to prefer that judgment. I myself have no preconceived notions about whether light is a particle or a wave." Joseph replied.
"Why are you afraid to clearly support your point of view, instead of covering up your position with such weak statements? Is this because you yourself have no confidence in your own judgment?" Mara, however, said this in a tone tinged with sarcasm.
Joseph couldn't help but frown, and a phrase bubbled up in his mind all at once: "Ugly Bastard!"
Indeed, "Ugly Bastard". Generally speaking, people with too low a face value are prone to all kinds of discrimination in society, and this discrimination often fills their hearts with anger and makes them become aggressive. In Joseph's opinion, Mara was such a typical example.
But Joseph wasn't too keen on offending Mara at this point because it was just too dangerous to offend the guy. Although Joseph didn't know the history of the Revolution very well, (After all, before traversing the world, it was foreign history, wasn't it? To be honest, to know Mara's name would have been a good indication that he hadn't dozed off in history and art class in the first place) but he did know that Mara was, he feared, responsible for a lot of the horrendous atrocities of the Revolution. There would be no shortage of personal vendettas here, and Joseph would not want to mess with such a rabid dog.
'This guy won't live long anyway, so just let him be.' Joseph suppressed his intention to sneer back and said this to himself.
"I do have no preconceived notions about whether light is a wave or a particle. As for my point, my point is that what it really is depends on the experimental phenomena as well as the mathematical explanation. If the interference phenomenon could be explained mathematically, from the point of view of the particles, then I would be happy too. After all, the world is so varied that the only thing we can really trust is math." Joseph explained.
"Ah, Joseph, that's a very slightly Pythagorean view of yours." On one side, Danton smiled, "Does everything count?"
Pythagoras was a famous mathematician in ancient Greece. He and his disciples formed an important thought, the Pythagoreanism. One of the basic concepts of this school of thought is that "everything is number". They believe that math is the only thing that can be used to describe the whole world and what it really is.
"I'm not as fanatical as they are." Joseph chuckled slightly, "At least, I'm not going to throw someone overboard just because they found an irrational number. But, my friend, you may consider it so. Is our vision reliable? That's not always the case, for example, I've noticed that some people don't see colors quite the same as others. I think ..."
"Wait ... what did you just say? You say some people see colors differently than others? Are you sure there are such people?" Mara suddenly interrupted him.
"Yes, what is it?" Joseph asked.
"It may be a new, previously unnoticed disease." Mara said, "Can you tell us how you found out?"
"I had a friend when I was a kid who came up to me out of the blue one day and told me that he had noticed that the Geraniums in my house took on a different color during the day and in the evening. Geraniums appear sky blue during the day, but in the evening they are bright red. But, in my opinion, at any given time, those geraniums are pink. When I told him this, he was still very surprised and even suspected that there was something wrong with my eyes. So we got a few more people to ask and, as a result, everyone except his brother agreed that geraniums should be pink. We later found out that his uncle also thought those geraniums were blue during the day and bright red in the evening. But at the time I was envious of them because they got to see two colors of geraniums."
"Can that friend of yours be found for me to look at?" Mara asked again.
"He's a Corsican, in Corsica, and there's no way to find him now." Joseph spread his hands.
"Ah ...," Mara said with a mean-spirited grimace, "You know, Mr. Bonaparte, I have a friend who is so bouncy that he can jump right to the moon."
Joseph hurriedly said several times to himself in his heart, 'Don't get on this guy's bad side' before he could suppress the impulse to sneer directly back at him. But at that moment, Danton spoke up:
"Could it be, could it be that geraniums don't change color during the day and in the evening? Is it just that I'm seeing things wrong? Is there something wrong with my vision?"
So, together, everyone set their sights on Danton.
"What are you guys staring at me like that for?" Danton said.
"Danton, in your eyes, geraniums change color during the day and in the evening?" Mara asked, staring at Danton with the same gaze as if he were viewing a cherished animal.
"Yeah ... that's not what you guys saw?" Danton asked rhetorically.
"Would you look at what color this is?" Mara asked, suddenly pointing to Louis' hair.
"Flaxen, I think?" Danton was a little less sure.
"Well, yes, no problem at all yeah ... Well, what color is Armand's hat?" Mara asked again.
"Green." Danton answered immediately.
"You see again?" Mara said.
Danton's eyes widened as he stared at Armand's hat for a moment, then said, "It's just green."
"Jesus! There really are people whose eyes see colors differently than others! That hat of Armand's is obviously light red!" Mara clapped his hands, then he turned to Joseph and said, "Mr. Bonaparte, look at how slow you are, don't you realize that this is a great medical discovery?"
"I'm not a doctor after all." Joseph smiled, "I'm almost completely illiterate when it comes to medicine."
"Aren't you going to do any serious research on the subject?" Mara asked.
"No, it's not an area I'm familiar with and interested in, and there are a lot of mathematical aspects that remain to be studied." Joseph replied, "Let's go back to the beginning. I think that our vision is unreliable, as is our hearing. Some people claim they can hear things that others can't..."
"That's just a trick of the clergy to deceive people." Mara interjected.
"Ordinary people have their moments." Joseph said, "When dreaming, for example, we hear a lot of sounds and see a lot of things that aren't there at all. Our sight can lie to us, our hearing can lie to us, and even our imagination can lie to us, like 0.9999... equals one. But the math won't. Well, I remember which priest said, 'When the heavens are turned upside down, the cross stands.' I won't comment on whether or not the 'cross' will stand, but I'm pretty sure that even if the entire solar system were to go to hell, I'm pretty sure that two points would still determine a straight line. So, when nothing else can be relied on, the only thing I can trust is math. Since the math calculations show that light is likely to be is waves, I'll concede that possibility."
"So what if your math's calculations show that light also looks like particles a lot of the time?" Mara asked again.
"Then it could also be particles." Joseph replied.
"Incorrigible Pythagorean believer." Mara shook his head, "Mr. Bonaparte, truth is not only presented through mathematics alone, it has other, higher ways of being presented."
"What way?" Joseph asked.
"An intuition from the soul." Mara replied, "Have you read De Anima and Principia Philosophiae? I think there are some valid observations in there. For example, different people's eyes see different colors, and that must be related to their souls ..."
"De Anima and Principia Philosophiae." These two pieces, Lavoisier, in his ramblings, referring to Mara, did mention these two pieces:
"That Mara, in his bullshit paper, also quoted bullshit ravings from inside the same two bullshit articles, what with 'De Anima' and 'Principia Philosophiae'. With that kind of disorganized and confused mindset, I'm pretty sure he wrote those two anonymously published contraptions himself."
Today, it seems that this speculation of Lavoisier's should be very reliable.
'I really didn't expect to encounter a crank even in this era.' Joseph couldn't help but sigh in his heart.
But his later life experience has taught him not to try to convince a crank, not to try to argue with a crank because he'll force you down into the realm of low IQ and then use his vast experience to beat you. When it comes to a crank, the only sensible thing to do is to agree with him, encourage him, and develop him into a big shit.