Seek!: Selected Nonfiction

by Rudy Rucker

  RR: Can we go to the other bubbles of our fractal universe?

  AL: Far in the future, our sky will start looking a lot different, as our stars start dying. And then we will see into the different parts of universe, some parts with different laws of physics.

  Can we use the energy in our bubble which has cooled off, can we fly to the other tips of the fractal, can we go there and live comfortably? The theory of such cosmic flights suggests that even if you travel at the speed of light, you lose so much time that when you get to another part of the universe, it will already be cold and empty there.

  RR: You say that some of the different bubble-universes have different laws of physics - how does that work?

  AL: We've talked about one scalar field that is responsible for the universe's expansion. It seems that there may also be a second scalar field which makes different kinds of physics in different

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  regions of the universe. There is one overall law of physics for the whole universe, but the scalar fields make for different realizations of this law. It is like water with many different phases. For those who live in water it is very essential that the water be a liquid and not a solid or a gas.

  RR: What if I could somehow fly up to the edge of a region of the universe with different physics? How would it look?

  AL: Between the different regions of the universe, there are boundaries called "domain walls." There is a tendency of the domain walls to straighten up, and also to move one way or the other with a speed approaching the speed of light.

  So first of all it would be very difficult for you to reach a domain wall if it is moving away from you. And if it is moving towards you, it will be very difficult to run from it. In fact, if a wall moves towards you at the speed of light, then you first see it only at the moment it hits you.

  But we don't need to worry too much; the typical estimates in these theories give you a distance from us to this next domain wall which is much much greater than ten billion light years, so we may live for now.

  RR: Might we say that the regions with different physics are competing with each other?

  AL: I think about the moving boundaries of the regions as perhaps like a Darwinian fitness. Should we discriminate and say those with greater volume are winners? There is a lot of place for losers as well, everything which can exist tends to have room for its existence in the self-reproducing inflationary universe. We can think of a Darwinian process without hate and killing, a process that produces all possible species.

  RR: How did the whole process begin?

  AL: Maybe the universe didn't have a beginning. There are some philosophical problems with the idea of the universe having a beginning. When the universe was just created, then where were the laws of physics written? Where were the laws of physics written if there was no space and no time to write them? Maybe the universe was created without obeying any laws, but then I don't understand. Well, maybe the laws and the universe came into existence simultane-

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  ously? Quantum mechanics might say our universe together with its physical laws appeared as a quantum fluctuation, but then where were the laws of quantum mechanics written before creation?

  RR: In one of your papers you talk about relating the nature of our consciousness to our universe. What do you mean?

  AL: For me, the investigation of the universe is mainly a tool for understanding ourselves. The universe is our cosmic home. You look around the house of your friend and imagine you may learn something about your friend by looking at how his house is built. My final purpose is not to understand the universe, but to understand life.

  An example of this is the question of why we humans see time as passing. According to the branch of physics called "quantum cosmology," the universe is best represented as a pattern called a "wave function" which does not depend on time. But then why do I see the universe evolving in time?

  The answer may be that as long as I am observing the universe, the universe breaks into two pieces: me and the-rest-of-the-universe. And it turns out that the wave function for each of these separate pieces does depend on time. But if I merge with the universe then my time stops.

  RR: How do you feel about having left Moscow to live and work in the U.S.? What are some things that strike you about American culture?

  AL: Visiting different countries is one thing, living in different countries is another. People are similar. They are kind here, they are kind there; they are friendly here, they are friendly there. But the laws of society are different in sometimes a very unexpected way. The U.S. bureaucracy is much more complicated. In Russia I was unable to do many things. But for the things that were allowed, there were not so many rules. Here in U.S. you have more opportunities, but each opportunity is well-classified; if you want to know how to use the opportunities you have to know many laws.

  RR: You like to use computers to simulate solutions to your equations. How do you program them?

  AL: I am almost computer-illiterate. All the calculations are made by my son Dmitri. I was begging him to do it when we moved here in 1990, and in the beginning he was not very interested, but

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  then I said what if I got a really good computer for this work? And indeed we got one from Silicon Graphics, and it was a lot of fun to work on it.

  Dmitri is majoring in physics at Caltech; we've written six or seven papers together. Sometimes we get results by looking at computer simulations. The simulation shows a physical effect that is unusual. We study and check, and again see something strange. I shout, "You have an error in your program," and he checks and there is no error and then I understand something new. The simulation really helps us to discover, it's not only a tool to illustrate and to calculate; when you make it visual, you see something and understand it better.

  RR: You've suggested that it might be possible to create a universe in the laboratory by violently compressing some matter, that one milligram of matter may initiate an eternal self-reproducing universe. How would this work?

  AL: We don't have a no-go theorem which says it is impossible. But it is very difficult. You have to do more than just compress the matter, but with high temperatures and by quantum effects there is a chance of creating a universe. Our estimates indicate that you would need a very good laboratory indeed. And it is not very dangerous to try. This new universe would not hurt our universe, it will only expand within itself.

  RR: Can you imagine there being any kind of economic or spiritual gain from creating new universes? Might this lead to a Silicon Valley industry or to a cosmological cult?

  AL: The question is: Is it interesting to create a universe? Would you have a profit or benefit? What would be the use?

  Suppose life in our universe is dying, and we make a small private universe we can jump into so we have a place to live. But it's not easy to jump, when we create a universe it is connected to our universe by a very narrow bridge of space, we can't jump through it, and the new universe will repel us because it is expanding.

  Well, maybe you can get energy from the new universe? No, you can't get energy because of the law of energy conservation. The new universe gets its energy internally, and the energy has to stay inside there.

  We can't get in, we can't use the energy, but maybe we can do like

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  we do with our children: we teach them and we live on in them. Maybe we can give knowledge and information to the new little universe so that they will think about us with gratitude, like, "Oh God who created us, thank you."

  But it is not so easy to send information inside. Say I wrote a message on the surface of an inflationary universe. But then the letters expand so much, that for billions of years to come each race of people in universe will be living in the corner of just one letter. They will never see the message.

  The only way to send information which I have found is strange and unusual. If I create an inflationary universe with a small density, I can prepare the universe
in a particular state which corresponds to different laws of physics, masses of particles, interactions, etc. I can imagine a binary code describing all possible laws of physics; this would be quite a long sequence. So if I am preparing a universe in some peculiar state, I can send the message encoded in the laws of physics.

  Can I send a long message in this way? Let's think about our own universe. Let's imagine that someone made our universe as a message. If our universe were perfect, with all particles having equal masses and charges, then the laws of physics would be trivial, and it would be a very short message. But our particle physics looks weird, and it has a lot of information. We get these strange numbers, there is no harmony. There is information instead of harmony, or to be more precise, the harmony is there, but it is very well-hidden.

  To send a long message, you must make a weird universe with complicated laws of physics. It is the only way to send information. The only people who can read this message are physicists. Since we see around us a rather weird universe, does it imply that our universe was created not by God, but a physicist hacker?

  I don't know for sure whether this is a joke or something more. Until it is proven that it is stupid you must pursue some lines of thought. Even if something seems counterintuitive you must be honest and follow the thought line and not be influenced by the common point of view. If you agree with everything which everybody else thinks, you never move. You should try to think for yourself. Even though sometimes in the end you understand they were right.

  Appeared as "Goodbye Big Bang: Cosmologist Andrei Linde,"

  in Wired, July/Aug 1995.

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  Tech Notes Towards a Cyberpunk Novel

  ASICs, or Application Specific Integrated Circuits, comprise 95% of computer chips made today. Suppose that the ASICs have all been replaced by limpware. This is reasonable. For the people in 2053 to use chip-based computers would be like us now using gear-based computers. We used to have gears in a watch, and now we usually have a chip. A few watches still use gears simply out of nostalgia. But nobody would dream of starting out with a plan to use lots of little gears for the controls of microwave oven, or of a TV, or a traffic light . . .

  In the same way, in 2053, nobody would dream of using a silicon chip for an app. In other words, a microwave oven, or an uvvy, or a car, or a clock - all of these have control circuits that are little smidgens of limpware, made of the special piezoplastic called "imipolex." They are not all that smart. They are dim. They are so dim they will do something like sit in a toaster for seven years waiting for someone to push the toast button. DIM should stand for something, like ASIC. Designer IMipolex.

  Chaos means that you can't control; or that when you try to control, the results are not likely to be what you expected (sensitive dependence on initial conditions). As a cultural paradigm, it could mean accepting that the half-assed parallel-computed way in which social decisions arise is much more robust and adaptive than any kind of dictatorial guiding could be.

  Chelated rare-earth polymers are what Andrea the moldie uses to get high. The rare-earth elements, also called lanthanides, are Lanthanum, Cerium, Praseodymium, Neodymium, Promethium, Samarium, Europium, Gadolinium, Terbium, Dysprosium, Holmium, Erbium, Thulium, Ytterbium, and Lutetium. Ytterbium was first found in a mineral called yttria in the 1878s. The mineral yttria was named for Ytterby, Sweden, in 1794.

  Chipmold is the human-created plague which killed all of the boppers (who were conventional robots using existing tech: garbage

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  cans on wheels with circuit boards and motors in them). But the soft plastic limpware flickercladding gets smarter. It likes the chipmold, it is veined by chipmold like a ripe bleu cheese. Jellyfish limpware eaten through with blue veins of chipmold.

  E-mail in today's ever-more-rude America means a person can just come up and start talking to you, as if this was like some endless global party.

  The endless interplanetary party that everyone is involved with. It should be pleasant and life-enhancing, like you can always plug in with other stoned freaks like yourself in the country, they can see the crazy shit you are doing, like an endless easy guilt-free phone call.

  Femtotechnology is the next big thing beneath nanotechnology. Femtotechnology means technology at the size scale of one quadrillionth of a meter, or at ten to the minus fifteenth power meters. Femto- comes from Danish for fifteen. ("I never met a Dane who wasn't bone-dull." - W. S. Burroughs). A atomic nucleus has a diameter of two times ten to the minus fourteenth meters, which can be expressed as twenty femtometers. Femtotechnology could be in charge of direct transmutation of elements, as well as, I would suppose, the conversion between mass and energy. I think quantum mechanics would start to play a role at this size scale.

  Femtotechnology is the same as what Heinlein called direct matter control.

  Flickercladding is soft imipolex plastic that acts as a giant parallel processor, it has an invisible cellular structure that is patterned in by chelated polymers; these fibers carry the messages. The first flickercladdings had actual wires in them, they used to be like coatings fused or glued onto the bodies of the robots called the boppers. But the coatings got thicker, and soon peeled off the boppers to become independent limpware creatures known as moldies.

  Flying wings of moldie imipolex. Manta rays of flickercladding flying around in the thin upper atmosphere like supersonic airplanes, drenched in solar radiation. Thanks to the algae in their tissues, they eat light.

  Headmounted displays are confining and unnatural. The way to get full Virtual Reality immersion without such a kludge is to place limpware scarves on the neural ganglia. So as not to violate the sanc-

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  tity of the skin, let the limpware interact with the brain tissues via tight electromagnetic fields.

  Lifeboxes are things like a hand-held tape recorder with a computer, you talk to it and tell it the story of your life. The lifebox asks you questions to fill in blank areas. It organizes the information into a hypertext. You make copies of it for your children and grandchildren. "What Grandpa (or Grandma) Was Like." This is going to be a huge industry. Old duffers and ladies always want to write down their life story, but with a lifebox they won't have to write. It'll be like an automatic ghost writer. The hypertext connection will be such that you can always interrupt and say something like, "Grandpa, you just mentioned cars. What was your first car like?"

  Moldies are capable of a weird symbiotic fusions with humans. A moldie might form part of itself into a U-bight, clamp onto your perhaps willing neck, sink fine microprobes into your neural masses, and control you directly.

  Moldies can in fact merge together, and often do this, when at home in the comfort of their nest. They form nests like the speedfreaks described in Andy Warhol's book Popism.

  It would be interesting if the nests were underground, like the burrows of the East African naked mole rats, who like termites and bees have a queen and work together. They are "eusocial." Colonies with hundreds of individuals all with nearly identical DNA.

  A moldie bus is like a hovercraft streetcar that is a single huge jellyfish-like robot. A giant flying jellyfish that flies at a level several inches above the street. They don't actually hover, though, they kind of run like horses. But they have whole row of legs, each leg going across, the bottom is corrugated and the corrugations swing forward and backward in a wave-like motion.

  Oil can be used for plastics such as flickercladding that makes up the moldies' bodies. The moldies would like to absolutely forbid that oil be made into gasoline and burned. The stuff is too valuable for plastic. For a moldie, burning oil is considered on a par with using human blood to make blood-sausage.

  Perpendicular time, with its other order of reality - the sensation that there are other creatures around, that they are the little fast flashes that you see out of the corner of your eye sometimes.

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  Pornography is always the first private use for any new med
ia technology.

  Robots who do well get something like a publishing contract. Lots of copies of them are made and sold. The more servile and agreeable robots are the ones who get copied. The more independent robots look down on them. ''So why not?" says a servile robot. "At least I'm getting copied."