I hesitated. My next note read: Emigration rumors? Now was the logical time to raise the issue – but that progression could be reconstructed during editing. I wasn’t going to risk blowing the interview until I had a lot more material safely in the can.
I skipped ahead to safer ground. “I know you don’t want to reveal the full details of your TOE before your lecture on the eighteenth – but maybe you could give me a rough sketch of the theory, in terms of what’s already been published.”
Mosala relaxed visibly. “Of course. Though the main reason I can’t give you all the details is that I don’t even know them myself.” She explained, “I’ve chosen the complete mathematical framework. All the general equations are fixed. But getting the specific results I need involves a lot of supercomputer calculations – which are in progress even as we speak. They should be completed a few days before the eighteenth, though – barring unforeseen disasters.”
“Okay. So tell me about the framework.”
“That part is extremely simple. Unlike Henry Buzzo and Yasuko Nishide, I’m not looking for a way to make ‘our’ Big Bang seem like less of a ‘coincidence.’ Buzzo and Nishide both take the view that an infinite number of universes must have arisen out of pre-space – freezing out of that perfect symmetry with different sets of physical laws. And they both aim to reevaluate the probability of a universe ‘more-or-less like our own’ being included in that infinite set. It’s relatively easy to find a TOE in which our universe is possible, but freakishly unlikely. Buzzo and Nishide define a successful TOE as one which guarantees that there are so many universes similar to our own that we’re not unlikely at all – that we’re not some kind of miraculous, perfect bullseye on a meta-cosmic dartboard, but just one unexceptional point on a much larger target.”
I said, “A bit like proving – from basic astrophysical principles – that thousands of planets in the galaxy should have carbon-and-water-based life, and not just Earth.”
“Yes and no. Because … yes, the probability of other Earth-like planets can be computed from theory, alone – but it can also be validated by observation. We can observe billions of stars, we’ve already deduced the existence of a few thousand extrasolar planets – and eventually, we’ll visit some of them, and find other carbon-and-water-based life. But – although there are no end of elegant frameworks for assigning probabilities to hypothetical other universes … there is no prospect of observing or visiting them, no conceivable method for checking the theory. So I don’t believe we should choose a TOE on that basis.
“The whole point of moving beyond the Standard Unified Field Theory is that, one, it’s an ugly mess, and two, you have to feed ten completely arbitrary parameters into the equations to make them work. Melting total space into pre-space – moving to an All-Topologies Model – gets rid of the ugliness and the arbitrary nature of the SUFT. But following that step by tinkering with the way you integrate across all the topologies of pre-space – excluding certain topologies for no good reason, throwing out one measure and adopting a new one whenever you don’t like the answers you’re getting – seems like a retrograde step to me. And instead of ‘setting the dials’ of the SUFT machine to ten arbitrary numbers, you now have a sleek black box with no visible controls, apparently self-contained – but in reality, you’re just opening it up and tearing out every internal component which offends you, to much the same effect.”
“Okay. So how do you get around that?”
Mosala said, “I believe we have to take a difficult stand and declare: the probabilities just don’t matter. Forget the hypothetical ensemble of other universes. Forget the need to fine-tune the Big Bang. This universe does exist. The probability of our being here is one hundred per cent . We have to take that as given, instead of bending over backward trying to contrive assumptions which do their best to conceal the fact of that certainty.”
Forget fine-tuning the Big Bang. Take our own existence as given. The parallels with Conroy’s spiel the night before were striking – but I should hardly have been surprised. The whole modus operandi of pseudoscience was to cling as closely as possible to the language and ideas of the orthodoxy of the day – to adopt appropriate camouflage. The ACs would have read every paper Mosala had published – but a similar ring to their words hardly granted their ideas the same legitimacy. And if they clearly shared her vehement distaste for the fantasy that every culture could somehow inhabit a cosmology of its own choosing, I didn’t doubt for a moment that Mosala was infinitely more repelled by their alternative, in which a lone TOE specialist played absolute monarch. Worse than a Belgian or Zairean space-time: a Buzzo, Mosala, or Nishide cosmos.
I said, “So you take the universe for granted. You’re against twisting the mathematics to conform to a perceived need to prove that what we see around us is ‘likely.’ But you don’t exactly go back to setting the dials on the SUFT machine, either.”
“No. I feed in complete descriptions of experiments, instead.”
“You choose the most general All-Topologies Model possible – but you break the perfect symmetry by giving a one-hundred per cent probability to the existence of various setups of experimental apparatus?”
“Yes. Can I just—?” She rose from her chair and went into the bedroom, then returned with her notepad. She held up the screen for me. “Here’s one example. It’s a simple accelerator experiment: a beam of protons and antiprotons collide at a certain energy, and a detector is used to pick up any positrons emitted from the point of collision at a certain angle, with a certain range of energies. The experiment itself has been carried out, in one form or another, for eighty or ninety years.”
The animation showed an architectural schematic of a full-size accelerator ring, and zoomed in toward one of several points where counter-rotating particle beams crossed, and spilt their debris into elaborate detectors.
“Now, I don’t even try to model this entire set-up – a piece of apparatus ten kilometers wide – on a subatomic level, atom by atom, as if I needed to start with a kind of blank, ‘naïve’ TOE which would somehow succeed in telling me that all the superconducting magnets would produce certain fields with certain measurable effects, and the walls of the tunnel would deform in certain ways due to the stresses imposed on them, and the protons and antiprotons would circle in opposite directions. I already know all of those things. So I assign them a probability of one hundred per cent. I take these established facts as a kind of anchor … and then reach down to the level of the TOE, down to the level of infinite sums over all topologies. I calculate what the consequences of my assumptions are … and then I follow them all the way back up again to the macroscopic level, to predict the ultimate results of the experiment: how many times a second will the positron detector register an event.”
The graphics responded to her narration, zooming in from a schematic of the detector array crisscrossed with particle tracks, down into the froth of the vacuum itself, thirty-five powers of ten beyond the reach of vision, into the chaos of writhing wormholes and higher-dimensional deformations – color-coded by topological classification, a thrashing nest of brightly-hued snakes blurring into whiteness at the center of the screen, where they moved and changed too rapidly to follow. But these otherwise perfectly symmetrical convulsions were forced to take heed of the certain existence of accelerator, magnets, and detector – a process hinted at by the panchromatic whiteness acquiring a specific blue tinge … and then the view pulled back, zooming out to an ordinary human scale again, to show the imprint of this submicroscopic bias on the detector circuitry’s final, visible behavior.
The animation, of course, was ninety per cent metaphor, a colorful splash of poetic license – but a supercomputer somewhere was crunching away at the serious, unmetaphoric calculations which made these pictures more than stylish whimsy.
And after all my hasty skimming of incomprehensible scientific papers, and all my agonizing over the near-impenetrable mathematics of ATMs, I thought I finally had a handle on
Mosala’s philosophy.
I said tentatively, “So instead of thinking of pre-space as something from which the whole universe can be derived in one stroke … you see it more as a link between the kind of events we can observe with our raw senses. Something which … glues together the particular set of macroscopic things we find in the world. A star full of fusing hydrogen, and a human eye full of cold protein molecules, are bridged across distances and energies … are able to co-exist, and affect each other … because at the deepest level, they both break the symmetry of pre-space in the same way.”
Mosala seemed pleased with this description. “A link, a bridge. Exactly.” She leaned forward, reached over and took my hand; I glanced down, thinking: I’m in shot now, so this is unusable.
She said, “Without pre-space to mediate between us – without an infinite mixture of topologies able to represent us all with a single flicker of asymmetry – nobody could even touch .
“That’s what the TOE is . And even if I’m wrong in every detail – and Buzzo is wrong, and Nishide is wrong … and nothing is resolved for a thousand years … I still know it’s down there, waiting to be found. Because there has to be something which lets us touch.”
#
We broke off for a while, and Mosala called room service. After three days on the island, I still had no appetite, but I ate a few of the snacks she offered me from the tray which emerged from the service chute, just to be polite. My stomach began protesting – loudly – as soon as I swallowed the first mouthful, rather defeating the point.
Mosala said, “Did you know that Yasuko hasn’t arrived yet? I don’t suppose you’ve heard what’s holding him up?”
“I’m afraid not. I’ve left three messages with his secretary in Kyoto, trying to schedule an interview, and all I’ve got back are promises that he’ll be in touch with me ‘very soon.’”
“It’s odd.” She pursed her lips, obviously concerned, but trying not to plunge the conversation into gloom. “I hope he’s all right. I heard he’d been sick for a while, early in the year – but he assured the conveners he’d be here, so he must have expected to be well enough to travel.”
I said, “Travel to Stateless is more than … travel.”
“That’s a point. He should have pretended to belong to Humble Science! and stolen a ride on one of their charter flights.”
“He might have had better luck with Mystical Renaissance. He’s a self-described Buddhist, so they almost forgive him for working on TOEs. So long as he didn’t remind them that he once wrote that The Tao of Physics was to Zen what a Creation Science biology text was to Christianity.”
Mosala reached up and started massaging the back of her neck, as if talk of the journey was rekindling its symptoms. “I would have brought Pinda, if the flight had been shorter. She would have loved it here. Left me to my boring lectures, and dragged her father off to explore the reefs.”
“How old is she?”
“Three and a bit.” She glanced at her watch and complained wistfully, “It’s still only four in the morning, back home. Not much chance of a call from her , for two or three hours.”
It was another opportunity to raise the emigration rumors – but I held off, yet again.
We resumed the interview. The beam from the skylight had shifted to the east, leaving Mosala almost silhouetted against the window and a dazzling blue sky. When I invoked Witness again, it reached up into my retinas and made some adjustments, enabling me to register the fine details of her face in spite of the back-lighting.
I moved on to the question of Helen Wu’s analysis.
Mosala explained, “My TOE predicts the outcome of various experiments, given a detailed description of the apparatus involved: details which ‘betray’ clues about all the less-fundamental physics which – some people insist – a TOE is meant to pull out of thin air, all by itself. But unraveling those clues certainly isn’t trivial. You or I can’t just glance at an idle particle accelerator and predict, instantly, the outcome of any experiment which might be performed with the machine.”
“But a supercomputer, programmed with your TOE, can. So is that good, bad, or indifferent … are you guilty of circular logic, or not?”
Mosala seemed unsure of the verdict, herself. “Helen and I have been talking it over, trying to thrash out exactly what it means. I have to confess that I started out resenting what she was doing – and then ignoring most of her later work. Now, though … I’m beginning to find it very exciting.”
“Why?”
She hesitated. It was clear that her ideas on this were too new, too unformed; she really didn’t want to say anything more. But I waited patiently, without prompting her, and she finally relented.
“Ask yourself this: If Buzzo or Nishide can come up with a TOE in which the whole universe is more or less implicit in a detailed description of the Big Bang – details deduced, right here and now , from observations of helium abundance, galactic clustering, the cosmic background radiation, and so on – no one accuses them of circular logic. Feeding in the results of any number of ‘telescope experiments’ is fine, apparently. So why is it any more ‘circular’ to have a TOE in which the universe is implicit in the details of ten contemporary particle physics experiments?”
I said, “Okay. But isn’t Helen Wu saying that your equations have virtually no physical content at all? I mean, no amount of pure mathematics could ever produce Newton’s law of gravity – because there’s no purely mathematical reason why the inverse square law couldn’t be replaced by something different. The whole basis for it lies in the way the universe happens to work. Isn’t Wu trying to show that your TOE doesn’t rely on anything out there in the world – that it collapses into a lot of statements about numbers, which simply have to be true?”
Mosala replied, frustrated, “Yes! But even if she’s right … when those ‘statements which have to be true’ are coupled with real, tangible experiments – which are very much ‘out there in the world’ – the theory ceases to be pure mathematics … in the same way that the pure symmetry of pre-space ceases to be symmetrical.
“Newton came up with the inverse square law by analyzing existing astronomical observations . By treating the solar system in the way I treat a particle accelerator: saying, ‘This much we know for a fact.’ Later, the law was used to make predictions – and those predictions turned out to be correct. Okay … but where exactly does the physical content reside, in that whole process? With the inverse-square law itself … or with the observed motions of the planets, from which that equation was deduced in the first place? Because if you stop treating Newton’s law as something given, standing outside the whole show as an eternal truth, and look at … the link, the bridge … between all the different planets orbiting different stars, coexisting in the same universe, having to be consistent with each other … what you’re doing starts to become much more like pure mathematics.”
I thought I had an inkling of what she was suggesting. “It’s a bit like saying that … the general principle that ‘people form net clans with other people with whom they have something in common’ has nothing to do with what those common interests happen to be. Exactly the same process brings together … fans of Jane Austen, or students of the genetics of wasps, or whatever.”
“Right. Jane Austen ‘belongs’ to all the people who read her – not to the sociological principle which suggests that they’ll get together to discuss her books. And the law of gravity ‘belongs’ to all the systems which obey it – not to a TOE which predicts that they’ll get together to form a universe.
“And maybe the Theory of Everything should collapse into nothing but ‘statements about numbers which have to be true.’ Maybe pre-space itself has to melt into nothing but simple arithmetic, simple logic – leaving us with no choices to make about its structure at all.”
I laughed. “I think even SeeNet’s audience might have some trouble wrapping their minds around that .” I certainly did. “Look, maybe it’s going t
o take a while for you and Helen Wu to make sense of all this. We can always do an update on it, back in Cape Town, if it turns out to be an important development.”
Mosala agreed, relieved. Throwing ideas around was one thing, but she clearly didn’t want to take a position on this, officially. Not yet.
Before I could lose my nerve, I said, “Do you think you’ll still be living in Cape Town, in six months’ time?”
I’d braced myself for the kind of outburst the word Anthrocosmologist had produced – but Mosala simply observed dryly, “Well, I didn’t think it could remain a secret for long. I suppose the whole conference is talking about it.”
“Not exactly. I heard it from a local.”
She nodded, unsurprised. “I’ve been having discussions with the academic syndicates here, for months. So it’s probably all over the island by now.” She flashed a wry smile. “Not much into confidentiality , these anarchists. But what can you expect from patent violators and intellectual property thieves?”
I said, “So what’s the attraction?”
She stood. “Can you stop recording, please?” I complied. “When all the details have been worked out, I’ll make a public statement – but I don’t want some off-the-cuff remark on the subject coming out first.”
“I understand.”
She said, “What’s the attraction of patent violators and intellectual property thieves? That very fact. Stateless is renegade, they flout the biotech licensing laws.” She turned toward the window, and stretched out her arms. “And look at them! They’re not the wealthiest people on the planet – but no one here is starving. No one. That’s not true in Europe, Japan, Australia – let alone in Angola, Malawi … ” She trailed off, and studied me for a moment, as if trying to decide if I really had stopped filming. If she really should trust me at all.