Collected Essays

by Rucker, Rudy

  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 simultaneously? 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 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 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.

  * * *

  Note on “Goodbye Big Bang: Cosmologist Andrei Linde”

  Written 1995.

  Appeared in Wired, July/Aug 1995.

  For a very short time, I was able to use my Wired connection as a carte blanche to meet whoever I wanted to, and I was curious about Linde’s theories. But soon I’d learn that Wired had a very short institutional memory—there was a continual turn-over and churn in the editorial staff. The next set of editors had no idea who I was, nor of the articles I’d written for Wired in the past. Although I continued to contribute the occasional small squib, “Goodbye Big Bang” would prove to be last commissioned article I was able to sell to Wired.

  Mr. Nanotech: Eric Drexler

  The French word for dwarf is nain. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter, which is just a bit larger than the diameter of your average atom. Nanotechnology envisions doing things with individual atoms, one at a time. “You done building that roast beef out of dirt yet, Bob?” “Ten molecules down, ten to the twenty-sixth power to go.”

  Of course nature does build cows out of dirt, with some
light, water and grass along the way, so maybe we can learn how to do it. The dream of nanotechnology is to get lots and lots of little machines to build materials for us.

  Present day nanotechnology comes in two flavors: dry and wet. Dry nanotechnology is about tiny rods and gears made out of diamond whiskers and the like. The recent discovery that icosahedron-shaped “buckyballs” of carbon can be found in ordinary soot is a big boost for dry nanotechnology. Wonderfully intricate images, some resembling automobile transmissions, have been cranked out by Ralph Merkle of the computational nanotechnology project at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (the legendary “PARC” where Saint Englebart invented windows and the mouse).

  No dry nanotechologist has yet been able to assemble the kind of three-dimensional structures that Merkle and others envision. But there is a device known as an STM (for “Scanning Tunneling Microscope) which allows nanohackers to see, pick up, and move around individual atoms on a surface. Quite recently, Don Eigler and a group of at IBM’s Almaden Research Lab managed to use an STM to draw things. First they drew a little man with carbon monoxide molecules on platinum, and then they wrote ‘IBM’ in xenon atoms on nickel. The next big effort will be to assemble a free-standing three-dimensional structure atom-by-atom—how about a six hundred sixty-six-atom model of Danny DeVito?

  An ultimate goal of dry nanotechnology is the creation of an “assembler”, a fantastic little nanomachine that can turn out more nanomachines—including copies of itself (an onanistic process known as “self-replication”). You might set an assembler to work making assemblers for awhile, and then somehow signal the godzillion assemblers that now they should switch over to making, say, incredibly strong “club sandwiches” of alternating single-atom sheets of two kinds of metal. The “gray goo” problem crops up here. What if, like the brooms in the tale of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, the assemblers can’t be turned off? What if they turn everything they can get their nasty little pincers on into more assemblers? The whole planet could end up as a glistering sludge of horny little can-openers. But the nanonauts assure us this won’t happen; it is perhaps comforting that the main nanotechnology group is known as the Foresight Institute.

  Wet nanotechnology proposes that instead of trying to build our own tiny machines, we use a “machine” that nature has already designed: the cellular reproduction apparatus of DNA, RNA, enzymes, and proteins. It’s like finding a way to tell one of your DNA strands something like, “Oh, next time you copy yourself, could you whip up a few million copies of this particular tryptamine molecule for me as well?” It’s all in how you say it, and Gerald Joyce and others at the Scripps Institute are making some slow progress in guiding the “machines” of biological reproduction. But there’s still major obstacles in convincing DNA to do technological things like putting together copper yttrium sandwiches. “No, man, I wanna fuck!”

  What it comes down to is that dry nanotechnology is about machines that we can design but can’t yet build, and wet technology is about machines that we can build but can’t yet design.

  The field of nanotechnology was more or less invented by one man: Eric Drexler, who designed his own Ph.D. curriculum in nanotechnology while at MIT Drexler’s 1986 book Engines of Creation was something of a popular science best-seller. This year he published a second popular book, Unbounding the Future, and a highly technical work called Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation.

  Drexler has the high forehead and the hunched shoulders of a Hollywood mad scientist, but his personality is quite mild and patient. A few years ago, many people were ready to write off nanotechnology as a playground for nuts and idle dreamers. It is thanks to Drexler’s calm, nearly Vulcan, logicalness that the field continues to grow and evolve.

  Our interview was taped at The First General Conference on Nanotechnology, which was held at the Palo Alto Holiday Inn in November, 1991. Despite the name, this wasn’t really the first “First Nanotechnology Conference,” as that one took place in 1989. But this was the first First Nanotechnology Conference open to the public, for fifty to a hundred dollars per day, and the public packed the lecture rooms to the rafters.

  Rudy Rucker: Eric, what would be in your mind a benchmark, like something specific happening, where it started to look like nanotechnology was really taking off?

  Eric Drexler: Well, if you’d asked me that in 1986 when Engines of Creation came out, I would have said that a couple of important benchmarks are the first successful design of a protein molecule from scratch—that happened in 1988—and another one would be the precise placement of atoms by some mechanical means. We saw that coming out of Don Eigler’s group. At present I would say that the next major milestone that I would expect is the ability to position reactive, organic molecules so that they can be used as building blocks to make some stable three-dimensional structure at room temperature.

  RR: When people like to think of the fun dreams of things that could happen with nanotechnology, what are a couple of your favorite ones?

  ED: I’ve mostly been thinking lately about efficient ways of transforming molecules into other molecules and making high density energy storage systems. But if you imagine the range of things that can be done in an era where you have a billion times as much computer power available, which would presumably include Virtual Reality applications, that’s one large class of applications.

  RR: I notice that you’re talking on nanotechnology and space tomorrow. Can you give me a brief preview of your ideas there?

  ED: The central problem in opening the space frontier has been transportation. How do you get into space economically, safely, routinely? And that’s largely a question of what you can build. With high strength-to-weight ratio materials of the kind that can be made by molecular manufacturing, calculations indicate that you can make a four-passenger single-staged orbit vehicle with a lift-off weight that’s about equivalent to a heavy station wagon, and where the dry weight of the vehicle is sixty kilograms.

  RR: So you would be using nanotechnology to make the material of the thing so thin and strong?

  ED: Diamond fiber composites. Also, much better solar electric propulsion systems.

  RR: I’ve noticed people seem to approach nanotechnology with a lot of humor. It’s almost like people are nervous. They can’t decide if it’s fantasy or if it’s real. For you it’s real—you think it’s going to happen?

  ED: It’s hard for me to imagine a future in which it doesn’t happen, because there are so many ways of doing the job and so many reasons to proceed, and so many countries and companies that have reason to try.

  RR: Could you make some comments about the notorious gray goo question?

  ED: In Engines of Creation I over-emphasized the problem of someone making a self-replicating machine that could run wild. That’s a technical possibility and something we very much need to avoid, but I think it’s one of the smaller problems overall, because there’s very little incentive for someone to do it; it’s difficult to do; and there are so many other ways in which the technology could be abused where there’s a more obvious motive. For example, the use of molecular manufacturing to produce high performance weapon systems which could be more directly used to help with goals that we’ve seen people pursuing.

  RR: I’ve heard people talk about injecting nanomachines into their blood and having it clean out their arteries. That’s always struck me as the last thing I would do. Having worked in the computer business and seen the impossibility of ever completely debugging a program, I can’t imagine shooting myself up with machines that had been designed by hackers on a deadline.

  ED: In terms of the sequence of developments that one would expect to see I think it is one of the last things that you’d expect to see.

  * * *

  Note on “Mr. Nanotech: Eric Drexler”

  Written 1992.

  Appeared in Mondo 2000, Spring, 1992.

  At this point, I was still resisting the idea of nanotech. But it’s never a good id
ea for an SF writer to balk at the latest new wrinkles in science. In the years to come, I let nanotech into my heart—but in the more plausible form of biotech. Tweaked organisms seem a lot likelier than tiny Victorian-style machines made of diamond rods and gears.

  Part 3: WEIRD SCREENS

  * * *

  Cellular Automata

  What Are Cellular Automata?

  Cellular automata are self-generating computer graphics movies. The most important near-term application of cellular automata will be to commercial computer graphics; in coming years you won’t be able to watch television for an hour without seeing some kind of CA.

  Three other key applications of cellular automata will be to simulation of biological systems (Artificial Life), to simulation of physical phenomena (such as heat-flow and turbulence), and to the design of massively parallel computers.

  Most of the cellular automata I’ve investigated are two-dimensional cellular automata. In these programs the computer screen is divided up into “cells” which are colored pixels or dots. Each cell is repeatedly “updated” by changing its old color to a new color. The net effect of the individual updates is that you see an ever-evolving sequence of screens. A graphics program of this nature is specifically called a cellular automaton when it is (1) parallel, (2) local, and (3) homogeneous.

  (1) Parallelism means that the individual cell updates are performed independently of each other. That is, we think of all of the updates being done at once. (Strictly speaking, your computer only updates one cell at a time, but we use a buffer to store the new cell values until a whole screen’s worth has been computed to refresh the display.)