Geoffrey frowned. “Me? I’ve been out of my depth from the start.”
“He seems to have an idea, however. A testable one, he says.”
They had to take special measures to escape the media hounds. The Institute enjoys broad lawns and ample shrubbery, now being trampled by the crowds. Taking a car would guarantee being followed. The Astronomer Royal had chosen his offices here, rather than in his college, out of a desire to escape the busyness of the central town. Now he found himself trapped. Geoffrey had the solution. The Institute kept bicycles for visitors, and upon two of these the men took a narrow, tree-lined path out the back of the Institute, toward town. Slipping down the cobbled streets between ancient, elegant college buildings, they went ignored by students and shoppers alike. Jesus College was a famously well appointed college along the Cam River, approachable across its ample playing fields. The Astronomer Royal felt rather absurd to be pedaling like an undergraduate, but the exercise helped clear his head. When they arrived at the rooms of Professor Wright, holder of the Wittgenstein Chair, he was grateful for tea and small sandwiches with the crusts cut off, one of his favorites.
Wright was a post-postmodern philosopher, reedy and intense. He explained in a compact, energetic way that in some sense, the modern view was that reality could be profitably regarded as a computation.
Geoffrey bridled at this straight away, scowling with his heavy eyebrows. “It’s real, not a bunch of arithmetic.”
Wright pointedly ignored him, turning to the Astronomer Royal. “Martin, surely you would agree with the view that when you fellows search for a Theory of Everything, you are pursuing a belief that there is an abbreviated way to express the logic of the universe, one that can be written down by human beings?”
“Of course,” the Astronomer Royal admitted uncomfortably, but then said out of loyalty to Geoffrey, “All the same, I do not subscribe to the belief that reality can profitably be seen as some kind of cellular automata, carrying out a program.”
Wright smiled without mirth. “One might say you are revolted not by the notion that universe is a computer, but by the evident fact that someone else is using it.”
“You gents have got way beyond me,” Geoffrey said.
“The idea is, how do physical laws act themselves out?” Wright asked in his lecturer voice. “Of course, atoms do not know their own differential equations.” A polite chuckle. “But to find where the moon should be in the next instant, in some fashion the universe must calculate where it must go. We can do that, thanks to Newton.”
The Astronomer Royal saw that Wright was humoring Geoffrey with this simplification, and suspected that it would not go down well. To hurry Wright along he said, “To make it happen, to move the moon—”
“Right, that we do not know. Not a clue. How to breathe fire into the equations, as that Hawking fellow put it—”
“But look, nature doesn’t know maths,” Geoffrey said adamantly. “No more than I do.”
“But something must, you see,” Professor Wright said earnestly, offering them another plate of the little cut sandwiches and deftly opening a bottle of sherry. “Of course I am using our human way of formulating this, the problem of natural order. The world is usefully described by mathematics, so in our sense the world must have some mathematics embedded in it.”
“God’s a bloody mathematician?” Geoffrey scowled.
The Astronomer Royal leaned forward over the antique oak table. “Merely an expression.”
“Only way the stars could get out of whack,” Geoffrey said, glancing back and forth between the experts, “is if whatever caused it came from there, I’d say.”
“Quite right.” The Astronomer Royal pursed his lips. “Unless the speed of light has gone off, as well, no signal could have rearranged the stars straight after doing the moon.”
“So we’re at the tail end of something from out there, far away,” Geoffrey observed.
“A long, thin disturbance propagating from distant stars. A very tight beam of…well, error. But from what?” The Astronomer Royal had gotten little sleep since Geoffrey’s appearance, and showed it.
“The circle of distorted stars,” Professor Wright said slowly, “remains where it was, correct?”
The Astronomer Royal nodded. “We’ve not announced it, but anyone with a cheap telescope—sorry, Geoffrey, not you, of course—can see the moon’s left the disturbance behind, as it follows its orbit.”
Wright said, “Confirming Geoffrey’s notion that the disturbance is a long, thin line of—well, I should call it an error.”
“Is that what you meant by a checkable idea?” the Astronomer Royal asked irritably.
“Not quite. Though that the two regions of error are now separating, as the moon advances, is consistent with a disturbance traveling from the stars to us. That is a first requirement, in my view.”
“Your view of what?” Geoffrey finally gave up handling his small sherry glass and set it down with a decisive rattle.
“Let me put my philosophy clearly,” Wright said. “If the universe is an ongoing calculation, then computational theory proves that it cannot be perfect. No such system can be free of a bug or two, as the programmers put it.”
Into an uncomfortable silence Geoffrey finally inserted, “Then the moon’s being ahead, the stars—it’s all a mistake?”
Wright smiled tightly. “Precisely. One of immense scale, moving at the speed of light.”
Geoffrey’s face scrunched into a mask of perplexity. “And it just—jumped?”
“Our moon hopped forward a bit too far in the universal computation, just as a program advances in little leaps.” Wright smiled as though this were an entirely natural idea.
Another silence. The Astronomer Royal said sourly, “That’s mere philosophy, not physics.”
“Ah!” Wright pounced. “But any universe which is a sort of analog computer must, like any decent digital one, have an error-checking program. Makes no sense otherwise.”
“Why?” Geoffrey was visibly confused, a craftsman out of his depth.
“Any good program, whether it is doing accounts in a bank, or carrying forward the laws of the universe, must be able to correct itself.” Professor Wright sat back triumphantly and swallowed a Jesus College sandwich, smacking his lips.
The Astronomer Royal said, “So you predict…?”
“That both the moon and the stars shall snap back, get themselves right—and at the same time, as the correction arrives here at the speed of light.”
“Nonsense,” the Astronomer Royal said.
“A prediction,” Professor Wright said sternly. “My philosophy stands upon it.”
The Astronomer Royal snorted, letting his fatigue get to him. Geoffrey looked puzzled, and asked a question which would later haunt them.
Professor Wright did not have long to wait.
To his credit, he did not enter the media fray with his prediction. However, he did unwisely air his views at High Table, after a particularly fine bottle of claret brought forward by the oldest member of the college. Only a generation or two earlier, such a conversation among the Fellows would have been secure. Not so now. A Junior Fellow in Political Studies proved to be on a retainer from the Times, and scarcely a day passed before Wright’s conjecture was known in New Delhi and Tokyo.
The furor following from that had barely subsided when the Astronomer Royal received a telephone call from the Max Planck Institute. They excitedly reported that the moon, now under continuous observation, had shifted instantly to the position it should have, had its orbit never been perturbed.
So, too, did the stars in the warped circle return to their rightful places. Once more, all was right with the world. Even so, it was a world that could never again be the same.
Professor Wright was not smug. He received the news from the Astronomer Royal, who had brought along Geoffrey to Jesus College, a refuge now from the Institute. “Nothing, really, but common sense.” He waved away their congratulations.
Geoffrey sat, visibly uneasily, through some talk about how to handle all this in the voracious media glare. Philosophers are not accustomed to much attention until well after they are dead. But as discussion ebbed Geoffrey repeated his probing question of days before: “What sort of universe has mistakes in it?”
Professor Wright said kindly, “An information-ordered one. Think of everything that happens—including us talking here, I suppose—as a kind of analog program acting out. Discovering itself in its own development. Manifesting.”
Geoffrey persisted, “But who’s the programmer of this computer?”
“Questions of first cause are really not germane,” Wright said, drawing himself up.
“Which means that he cannot say,” the Astronomer Royal allowed himself.
Wright stroked his chin at this and eyed the others before venturing, “In light of the name of this college, and you, Geoffrey, being a humble bearer of the message that began all this…”
“Oh no,” the Astronomer Royal said fiercely, “next you’ll point out that Geoffrey’s a carpenter.”
They all laughed, though uneasily.
But as the Astronomer Royal and Geoffrey left the venerable grounds, Geoffrey said moodily, “Y’know, I’m a cabinet maker.”
“Uh, yes?”
“We aren’t bloody carpenters at all,” Geoffrey said angrily. “We’re craftsmen.”
The distinction was lost upon the Royal Astronomer, but then, much else was, these days.
The Japanese had very fast images of the moon’s return to its proper place, taken from their geosynchronous satellite. The transition did indeed proceed at very nearly the speed of light, taking a slight fraction of a second to jerk back to exactly where it should have been. Not the original place where the disturbance occurred, but to its rightful spot along the smooth ellipse. The immense force needed to do this went unexplained, of course, except by Professor Wright’s Computational Principle.
To everyone’s surprise, it was not a member of the now quite raucous press who made the first telling jibe at Wright, but Geoffrey. “I can’t follow, sir, why we can still remember when the moon was in the wrong place.”
“What?” Wright looked startled, almost spilling some of the celebratory tea the three were enjoying. Or rather, that Wright was conspicuously relishing, while the Astronomer Royal gave a convincing impression of a man in a good mood.
“Y’see, if the error’s all straightened out, why don’t our memories of it get fixed, too?”
The two learned men froze.
“We’re part of the physical universe,” the Astronomer Royal said wonderingly, “so why not, eh?”
Wright’s expression confessed his consternation. “That we haven’t been, well, edited…”
“Kinda means we’re not the same as the moon, right?”
Begrudgingly, Wright nodded. “So perhaps the, ah, ‘mind’ that is carrying out the universe’s computation, cannot interfere with our—other—minds.”
“And why’s that?” the Astronomer Royal a little too obviously enjoyed saying.
“I haven’t the slightest.”
Light does not always travel at the same blistering speed. Only in vacuum does it have its maximum velocity.
Light emitted at the center of the sun, for example—which is a million times denser than lead—finds itself absorbed by the close-packed ionized atoms there, held for a tiny sliver of a second, then released. It travels an infinitesimal distance, then is captured by yet another hot ion of the plasma, and the process repeats. The radiation random-walks its way out to the solar surface. In all, the passage from the core takes a many thousands of years. Once free, the photon reaches the Earth in a few minutes.
Radiation from zones nearer the sun’s fiery surface takes less time because the plasma there is far less dense. That was why a full three months elapsed before anyone paid attention to a detail the astronomers had noticed early on, and then neglected.
The “cone of chaos” (as it was now commonly called) that had lanced in from the distant stars and deflected the moon had gone on and intersected the sun at a grazing angle. It had luckily missed the Earth, but that was the end of the luck.
On an otherwise unremarkable morning, Geoffrey rose to begin work on a new pine cabinet. He was glad to be out of the media glare, though still troubled by the issues raised by his discovery. Professor Wright had made no progress in answering Geoffrey’s persistent questions. The Astronomer Royal was busying himself with a Royal Commission appointed to investigate the whole affair, though no one expected a Commission to actually produce an idea. Geoffrey’s hope—that they could “find out more by measuring,” seemed to be at a dead end.
On that fateful morning, out his bedroom window, Geoffrey saw a strange sun. Its lumpy shape he quickly studied by viewing it through his telescope with a dark glass clamped in place. He knew of the arches that occasionally rose from the corona, vast galleries of magnetic field lines bound to the plasma like bunches of wire under tension. Sprouting from the sun at a dozen spots stood twisted parodies of this, snaking in immense weaves of incandescence.
He called his wife to see. Already voices in the cobbled street below were murmuring in alarm. Hanging above the open marsh lands around the ancient cathedral city of Ely was a ruby sun, its grand purple arches swelling like blisters from the troubled rim.
His wife’s voice trembled. “What’s it mean?”
“I’m afraid to ask.”
“I thought everything got put back right.”
“Must be more complicated, somehow.”
“Or a judgment.” In his wife’s severe frown he saw an eternal human impulse, to read meaning into the physical world—and a moral message as well.
He thought of the swirl of atoms in the sun, all moving along their hammering trajectories, immensely complicated. The spike of error must have moved them all, and the later spike of correction could not, somehow, undo the damage. Erasing such detail must be impossible. So even the mechanism that drove the universal computation had its limits. Whatever you called it, Geoffrey mused, the agency that made order also made error—and could not cover its tracks completely.
“Wonder what it means?” he whispered.
The line of error had done its work. Plumes rose like angry necklaces from the blazing rim of the star whose fate governed all intelligence within the solar system.
Thus began a time marked not only by vast disaster, but by the founding of a wholly new science. Only later, once studies were restored at Cambridge University, and Jesus College was rebuilt in a period of relative calm, did this new science and philosophy—for now the two were always linked—acquire a name: the field of Empirical Theology.
Comes The Evolution
(2001)
Lenin is working night shift because there’s extra pay, even though he’s a salaried supervisor and technically can’t get overtime. He ducks a personnel issue and slips into his eighth floor office and turns out the lights so he can watch the big silvery sprawl of Greater L.A. stretching into the distance like some kind of ambiguous metaphor.
He has been thinking about the Revolution a lot lately and somehow this neon consumer gumbo going on forever is at the heart of his terror, but he does not quite know why. So he presses his balding forehead against the cold windowpane and looks at the endless twinkling glitter in the cool spring night and wonders if it will go on forever.
The cleaning lady comes in. A little early, she explains, because her son is sick and she has to get home. Lenin feels a red rage at the very sight of her lined, suffering face. He gives her a twenty.
He picks up the phone and calls his ex, but she has blocked his number. It has been two years since the divorce but he still harbors some dusty hope that it could all work out right after all. She told him months ago to move on. But to what?
Washington is on his way home when his damn cell phone rings. He reaches to answer, stops.
Probably it’s a head hunter
trying to interest him in coming aboard a hot new tech company. Word has already spread that he turned around his present firm, HighUpTech, big time. It’s going on the AMEX next week with a net value over one-fifty mil when the starting gun goes off. Not bad for two years of ruthless trimming, innovative product design, and some poker-faced cunning.
Does he want to do that number again? He lets the phone ring.
He leaves the 405 for the shoot uphill into Palos Verdes and stops for a light. A woman standing on the center divider is selling flowers, gaudy spring blossoms well arranged. He hands her a twenty and waves off the change. She is in the usual dingy uniform of jeans and a rough man’s shirt and smiles at him. He wonders how many wrong turns she had to make to get this far down.
When he gets home his wife hands him a chilled Esplanae glass filled with his favorite Sauvignon Blanc. He prefers that now to a Chardonnay, starting to feel the acid in the stomach, maybe a sign of age? He throws some almonds into his mouth and goes out onto the deck to take in the diamond-sprinkled avenues of the city.
She kisses him meaningfully and he thinks about bed. Bucks in the day, bed at night, maybe catch some basketball in between the two on the digital cable. He tries to think if there’s anything else, maybe something that starts with a B.
Goldman arrives early to meet the Trotsky guy. It’s a homey clapboard coffee place on the beach but the coffee’s strictly chain knockoff product. At least it’s cheaper than the spotless places the chain usually throws up, and here you can read the newspapers as long as you like without ordering another drink. She has a bagel anyway with her mocha supreme grande and has to count out the pennies left at the bottom of her jeans pockets to get the change together. That’s it, she’s flat busted again.
And Trotsky doesn’t show up on time. She finishes the Newspap on the table’s screen and sips the mocha with cinnamon on top, a real perversion, while the sunny dusk turns to a crystal night outside in Venice. A rollerblader comes in, a wiry woman in shorts despite the chill. Long hair, kinda dirty-blonde in the way Emma likes.
The Best of Gregory Benford Page 48
