The Proteus Operation

by James P. Hogan

  "In the cupboard underneath," Cassidy prompted.

  "Where the sugar and cream are," Ferracini said needlessly.

  "Oh, yeah . . . lemme take a look."

  Einstein pulled up a chair and sat down at the table, at the same time stretching the neck of his sweater to take his pipe from a shirt pocket. "You know, this year I have my sixtieth birthday. In all this time, never do I learn to drive the automobile, and only just have I mastered the intricacies of a camera—too much fiddling and twiddling and fussing, you understand. He gestured over his shoulder with the stem of his pipe. "And now this machine of yours you spring on me—an old man, set in his ways and his thoughts, who was foolish enough to believe he had caught a glimpse of how God was thinking when He designed the universe. Always I am telling myself that when we see complications in Nature, then what we are looking at is not yet the truth. Underneath, truth is always the simplest. But now this! How am I to reconcile the things I am hearing now with the faith I refuse to abandon that Nature reasonable and orderly is, and unreasonably malicious is not?"

  Lamson squatted down and buried his face in the cupboard, while Cassidy made an extended performance of folding his paper. Loyalty in combat situations and so forth was all very fine, but this was something else: Harry was on his own.

  Ferracini swallowed and made a conscious effort to look smarter than he felt just at that moment. "That sounds kind of strange, sir—Professor," he stammered.

  " 'Dr. Einstein' is good," Einstein said. "So what is so strange, Captain, yes? Or is it the first name that you prefer, being American?"

  "Harry's fine—everyone else uses it here, anyhow. . . . Oh, you being confused by something complicated, I guess. Most people think of you as being about as complicated as a guy can get."

  "Is not true, Harry." Einstein looked around him invitingly. "And . . . ?"

  ""Er . . . oh, I'm Cassidy."

  "Floyd."

  "Harry, Cassidy, and Floyd. You know, always I have used just one soap for the shaving and for the face-washing. Most people, they use two soaps. But, I ask, why there is need to use two soaps? Those are the things that make life too fiddling and twiddling, like cameras—more things to do that aren't important, and more things to remember that don't matter. So always I use just one soap."

  Ferracini was perplexed. Here was probably the greatest physicist of the century, he'd been told—supposedly, one of the greatest minds of all time, who had just been confronted by people from the future and the reality of time-travel—looking like a benign, Chaplinesque grandfather and rambling on genially about cameras and shaving soap. Ferracini didn't know what he was supposed to say. Army training hadn't covered situations like this. The other two seemed to be having the same problem.

  "So you are with the Army," Einstein said, pulling tobacco from a worn pouch that he had produced from somewhere and packing the tobacco into his pipe. "Cassidy and Floyd, you are sergeants, I was told earlier—yes?"

  "That's right," Cassidy said.

  Einstein nodded. "In Switzerland, when I was a young man, they turn me down for military service, because I have flat feet and varicose veins, they say. But then, perhaps, it was more serious in the world that you are from. The whole country has become a military camp, to me it sounds."

  That was a tricky subject. Einstein had refused vehemently to have anything to do with German militarism at the time of the Great War, and the soldiers were unsure how to respond without risking offense. Cassidy said cautiously, "It had gone past politics or economics. The only choice we had left was to surrender what we believed in, or else to defend it with everything we had. If you'd seen the things that were happening all over the rest of the world . . ."

  "But I have seen the things which for years now are already happening in Germany," Einstein said. Just for a moment there was a hint of sharpness in his voice. He nodded in acknowledgment as Lamson placed an enamel mug of steaming tea in front of him, then relaxed with a smile and a sigh. "Your worrying is not necessary, Cassidy. People, they do not understand. . . ."

  "Wir können uns auch auf Deutsch unterhalten, wenn es Ihnen lieber ust," Lamson interjected as he sat down. (We can continue the conversation in German, if you prefer.)

  Einstein's eyebrows shot upward in surprise. "Das habe ich wirklich nicht erwartet, dass ihr alle Deutsch sprecht!" (I really didn't expect this—that you all speak German!)

  "We've all worked overseas in Nazi Europe," Ferracini said, switching to German also. "You had to speak German to get picked for those kinds of operations."

  "So where did you learn it?" Einstein asked, looking around the table.

  "Army school, most of us," Cassidy told him. "The training was intensive in everything. It had to be—your life was at stake, usually for months at a time."

  Einstein nodded. "Yes, I suppose so. . . . But, anyway, where were we? Ah, yes—people don't understand. Because I refused to contribute to the war effort in 1914, they think I'm one of these pacifists who want us to pay any price for peace, as if 'peace' could be anything but an illusion under those terms."

  "You're not?" Lamson, who had decided that Einstein was human after all, sounded mildly surprised.

  "Not if it leads to the kind of world that you three are from." Einstein held a match to his pipe and puffed several times. "Certainly, I deplore aggression and violence as a way of solving problems. They can only lead to worse grievances and problems in the long run. But being prepared to defend yourself if you have to is not the same thing. This monstrosity consuming Europe is a cancer of the tissues of civilization. When the body is infected, it mobilizes its antibodies and destroys that which is alien to it. So, too, must the planetary organism. In other words, I accept, regretfully, that there are some evils that can only be stopped by force. Appealing to their better nature is as futile as attempting to reason with a virus."

  Einstein shrugged. "So, when, in Belgium, they asked me if young men should go to do military service, I answered that they should not only go, but go cheerfully, because they would be helping to save European civilization. But the pacifists, who had misunderstood my position all along and tried to adopt me as a patron saint, howled in fury and denounced me as a traitor."

  "Maybe they were accusing you more of being inconsistent," Lamson suggested. Ferracini was surprised. For Lamson to express an opinion about anything in more than a grunt or a monosyllable was unusual. Einstein seemed to be having the same effect on all of them.

  Einstein shook his head. "Really, there is no inconsistency. I am opposed to the cult of militarism and the suppression of freedom by force of any kind. Twenty-five years ago, resisting war served that goal. With the situation that exists today, however, the only hope that the free nations have for survival is the strength of their armed forces. So, the means that are different superficially, at a deeper level serve the same end." He thought for a moment, and his eyes twinkled. "Or, as I suppose you might say, 'Everything is relative."

  Ferracini grinned faintly and caught Cassidy's eye. Cassidy nodded back in a way that said, this guy is okay.

  Lamson shifted his weight in his chair and frowned, then looked up at Einstein. "So, do you think it's possible to avoid it—the kind of future we're from?" he asked. "Even if we do avoid the mistakes that led to that mess, who's to say we won't walk straight head-on into another one? There are plenty of mistakes around, just waiting to be made."

  Einstein shrugged. "Maybe, maybe not. . . I'm no longer young enough to know everything. I suppose I still have faith in people, despite it all," he said.

  "The older you get, the less you know?" Cassidy queried, raising an eyebrow.

  "Oh, but it's very true," Einstein assured him. "Except for scientists, of course. They never know anything at all." The other three exchanged puzzled looks. "It's true," Einstein told them. He sipped his tea and puffed a cloud of smoke from his pipe. "Most of the world still doesn't have the faintest notion of what science is. They think it is all madmen in white coats who want
to take over the world with giant cabbages that eat people . . . But science isn't a thing at all—like electricity or gravity or atoms. Those are subjects that might be studied in a scientific manner, but science is the process itself—the process of studying them, or anything else, for that matter. It is a process for arriving at conclusions about what is probably true, and what is probably not. That's all. Its end product is simply reliable information. And the problem of knowing what to believe—what is true and what is not—is surely the most important problem that the human race has been grappling with for as long as it has existed. How many isms and ologies have been invented, all purporting to have the answer? And what were their answers worth?" He looked around. The others waited without interrupting.

  "Most systems set out to prove or rationalize something that they have made their minds up about already. But that's a hopeless way to proceed if what you really want to know is the truth. Science doesn't do that. Its goal is to understand what's really out there—what the world is really like—and it accepts that whatever the reality is, it will be totally uninfluenced by what you or I might choose to think, or by how many others we might persuade to agree with us. The truth isn't impressed and doesn't care. That's why scientists don't pay much attention to debating skills. We leave those to lawyers and theologians. The eloquence and emotional appeal of the way ideas are presented has nothing to do with whether they're right or not."

  "Pretty obvious when you think about it, Cassidy commented. "Just plain common sense."

  "But that's all science is, Cassidy," Einstein said. "Formalized common sense. And since the purpose is to understand the world as it really is, and not to persuade anybody of anything in particular, there is no place for deception, especially unconscious self-deception. You can't get away with fooling yourself. Because all that will happen at the end of the process if you fail to detect your errors is that your aeroplane won't fly. The laws of Nature, you see, can't be deceived. So there is a strong underlying ethical principle woven into the very fabric of the scientific process—something which is all too often overlooked. Wouldn't it be nice if the same were true in certain other fields of human activity?"

  Einstein put down the mug and sat hack to spread his hands on the table. "So instead of trying to prop up the things that it would like to be true, science does the opposite—it tries everything it can think of to bring its ideas down. That's what experiments are designed to do—to prove theories false. And if the theory survives, it comes out so much the stronger. Hence, like an evolutionary process, which indeed it is, science is all the time testing itself and correcting itself. It thrives on questions, challenges, dissent, and criticism. The most ruthless scrutiny that it is subjected to is its own. And so it stays healthy and grows sturdier."

  "But how pathetic and fragile are the systems of thought that daren't expose their followers to any dissenting view or alternative explanation. Such systems are forced to ban what they have no answers for, and to suppress everything they can't compete with. Eventually, they wither, and they die. Eventually, the oppressors always end up being buried by their intended victims."

  Einstein took his pipe from his mouth and nodded solemnly. "So it will be with Hitler and his 'Reich that will last a thousand years,' " he assured his listeners. "And that, gentlemen, is why I continue to have faith in people."

  CHAPTER 20

  THE CLASSICAL NEWTONIAN UNIVERSE was an orderly affair of billiard-ball particles hurtling around on gravitational and electromagnetic trajectories and bouncing off one another according to straightforward rules which in principle operated down to arbitrarily small scales of magnitude. Thus, it was a vast machine, and only the limits of observational accuracy and the sheer number of observations that would have been required prevented the motions of all its parts from being specified precisely at any instant that might be chosen. Every past and future state of the machine, everything that had happened in it, was happening, or would happen, could then be computed by applying Newtonian laws to this all-embracing snapshot and extrapolating it forward on backward in time. Whether such a stupendous computation was possible in practice was beside the point; the conclusion still followed that the universe was determinate, its future state unfolding as inevitably from past conditions as the cycles of the planets or the alignments of parts in a clockwork toy. This might have been good news for hedonists or conscience-plagued criminals, but it bothered those who believed in free will and liked to believe that free will had some part to play in the shaping of humanity's future.

  By the close of the nineteenth century, however, the straws of irrefutable experimental data were accumulating on the back of accepted theory, and the revolution in physics that followed had, by the 1920s, permanently demolished any notion of the subatomic realm as simply a Newtonian world in miniature. It was made up not of intuitively familiar, billiard-ball-like objects that occupied definite positions in space, moved along exact paths, and behaved generally as ordinary things do; rather, it was made up of perplexing new conceptual entities without parallel at the everyday level, which could be described accurately only in the abstract mathematical formulations that emerged as quantum mechanics.

  Of particular consequence, events in the quantum-mechanical world were not determinate: A given present situation did not lead inexorably to an automatically defined future one. What was usually described as a particle, for example, ceased being a solid, immutable "thing" located in a pointlike "place," but became something that physicists called a "wave function"—a vibrating haze that moved and spread through space, its shape and density pattern changing continually.

  A haze made up of what?

  Nothing that had any physical attributes. But when it encountered another such entity, for example, by interacting with a measuring instrument designed to find out something about it, the act of interaction caused it to take on the properties more commonly thought of as "particle," which would instantly localize somewhere within the volume where the haze had been. Where it would localize exactly, nobody could say for sure. All anyone could say was where, probably. The density of the haze at any point as it vibrated and changed gave, from instant to instant, the probability that the particle would be found at that point.

  Quantum-mechanical billiards, therefore, was played with the balls zipping around inside separate smokescreens, and it was never possible to predict in advance precisely what the outcome of a given collision would be. But it was possible to predict what it would probably be, and such predictions could be tested by experiments based on repeating an event many times and observing how frequently its various possible outcomes, in fact, occurred. Judged on the basis of its predictions in this way, quantum mechanics turned out to be, perhaps, science's most successful theory ever.

  The universe was no longer clockwork; but neither had it reverted to being clay capable of being molded to freely expressed human will, either. For the laws of chance had replaced those of determinism. The idea of dice running the universe bothered some people even more than that of rigid causality. One of the most notable among them was Albert Einstein.

  "Niels Bohr and I went over this again and again," he said in German to Winslade, Scholder, Teller, and Szilard. They were standing in one of the cluttered instrumentation bays below the raised walkway running alongside of the return-gate cylinder. They had been studying a section of the system, and on the far side of a partition wall formed by electrical panels and a vacuum pump, Wigner, Greene, and others from the Proteus team, were repeating some of the tests. "The thought of being a lemon in a fruit machine has always struck me as even more repugnant than being a tooth on a cogwheel," Einstein said. "So, I view the theory as still incomplete. The reason it yields uncertainties is that experiments aren't sensitive enough yet to uncover the variables that operate at even finer levels."

  Szilard shook his head. "I've never accepted that. If there's no experimental evidence of such variables, then there's no justification for assuming they exist."

&nb
sp; "I feel the same way," Teller agreed. "Only the mathematical formalism has been verified, nothing else. The idea of invisible variables serves no other purpose than to satisfy your ideological conviction, Albert. It's imposed metaphysics, not physics."

  "So, you don't subscribe to any interpretation." Scholder said.

  Teller spread his hands. "Give me a guideline to construct one, and I'll consider anything. But if it's based on intuition, it will probably be misleading and hinder more than help. We've seen that time and time again."

  "What other approach is there?" Szilard asked.

  "Allow the mathematical formalism to yield its own interpretation," Scholder replied. "Don't try to impose anything on it."

  A faraway look came over Einstein's face. He stood up from the box that he had been sitting on and paced slowly toward the far wall, where he halted before a tool locker, his hands clasped behind his back. "Yes, philosophically that's an interesting proposition. . . ." he said.

  The others watched him for a second, then looked away as Scholder went on, "Couldn't the big mistake all along have been in viewing the quantum realm as some kind of ghost world whose symbols represent only possibilities? Couldn't the symbols of quantum mechanics represent reality faithfully, just as much as those of classical theory?"

  "Faithfully?" Teller glanced uncertainly at Szilard, then looked back at Scholder. "Well, anything's possible, I suppose. But what does that mean?"

  Szilard frowned as he thought about it. "How could it even be possible?" he objected. "There are two ways in which the wave function of an object can change. It can evolve continuously and predictably in time in the manner described by its differential wave equation; or alternatively, it can interact with the wave function of another object, such as when an electron interacts with a measuring instrument, in which case the change is discontinuous and the result will be one of a number of discrete possible outcomes, each with a given probability. But the two are fundamentally different. The first implies an isolated system, and the second doesn't. That must give contradictions if we attempt to interpret it literally. How can an inherently self-contradicting model represent reality?"