The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever

“I know there’s no logical reason—”

“Are we talking logic or not? Don’t start getting all intuitive and subjective on me, my pal, because I’m pretty much a pragmatist myself on some scores. If it helps you through the night to believe the moon is green cheese —”

“I don’t—”

“Don’t believe it is? Good for you. I don’t either. Those rocks they brought back didn’t test out as green cheese. But my daughter Florence does; some zonked-out punk with purple hair tells her it is when she’s as stoned as he is. She thinks she’s a Tibetan Buddhist, except on weekends. Her sister Miriam talks about joining some Sufi commune over in New York State. I don’t let it get to me, it’s their lives. But you, if I size you up right, young fella, you’re pulling my leg.”

“I—”

“You really give a damn about cosmology, I’ll tell you where the interesting work is being done right now: it’s the explanation of how things popped up out of nothing. The picture’s filling in from a number of directions, as clear as the hand in front of your face.” He tipped his head back to see Dale better and his eyes seemed to multiply in the trifocals. “As you know,” he said, “inside the Planck length and the Planck duration you have this space-time foam where the quantum fluctuations from matter to non-matter really have very little meaning, mathematically speaking. You have a Higgs field tunneling in a quantum fluctuation through the energy barrier in a false-vacuum state, and you get this bubble of broken symmetry that by negative pressure expands exponentially, and in a couple of microseconds you can have something go from next to nothing to the size and mass of the observable present universe. How about a drink? You look pretty dry, standing there.”

Kriegman takes another plastic glass of white wine from the tray one of the Irish girls is reluctantly passing, and Dale shakes his head, refusing. His stomach has been nervous all this spring. Pastrami and milk don’t mix.

My dear friend and neighbor Myron Kriegman takes a lusty swallow, licks his smiling lips, and continues in his rapid rasping voice. “O.K.; still, you say, you have to begin with something before you have a Higgs field; how do you get to almost nothing from absolutely nothing? Well, the answer turns out to be good old simple geometry. You’re a mathematician, you’ll dig this. What do we know about the simplest structures yet, the quarks? We know—come on, fella, think.”

Dale gropes. The party noise has increased, a corner high in his stomach hurts, Esther is laughing on the other side of the living room, beneath the knob-and-spindle header of the archway, exhaling smoke in a plume, her little face tipped back jauntily. “They come in colors and flavors,” he says, “and carry positive or negative charges in increments of a third—”

Kriegman pounces: “You’ve got it! They invariably occur in threes, and cannot be pried apart. Now what does that suggest to you? Think. Three things, inseparable.”

Father, Son, and Holy Ghost floats across Dale’s field of inner vision but does not make it to his lips. Nor does Id, Ego, and Superego. Nor Kriegman’s three daughters.

“The three dimensions of space!” Kriegman proclaims. “They can’t be pried apart, either. Now, let’s ask ourselves, what’s so hot about three dimensions? Why don’t we live in two, or four, or twenty-four?”

Odd that the man would mention those almost-magic, almost-revelatory numbers that Dale used to circle painstakingly in red; he now sees them to have been illusions, ripples in nothingness such as Kriegman is rhapsodizing about.

“You’re not thinking. Because,” the answer gleefully runs, “you need no more or less than three dimensions to make a knot, a knot that tightens on itself and won’t pull apart, and that’s what the ultimate particles are—knots in space-time. You can’t make a knot in two dimensions because there’s no over or under, and—here’s the fascinating thing, see if you can picture it—you can make a ravelling in four dimensions but it isn’t a knot, it won’t hold, it will just pull apart, it won’t persist. Hey, you’re going to ask me—I can see it in your face—what’s this concept, persistence? For persistence you need time, right? And that’s the key right there: without time you don’t have anything, and if time was two-dimensional instead of one, you wouldn’t have anything either, since you could turn around in it and there wouldn’t be any causality. Without causality, there wouldn’t be a universe, it would keep reversing itself. I know this stuff must be pretty elementary to you, I can see from the way you keep looking over my shoulder.”

“No, I just—”

“If you’ve changed your mind about wanting a drink, it’s not Esther’s going to get it for you, you should ask one of the girls.”

Dale blushes, and tries to focus on this tireless exposition, though he feels like a knot in four dimensions, unravelling. “I beg your pardon,” he says, “how did you say we get from nothing to something?”

Kriegman lightly pats himself on the top of his head to make sure the garland is still in place. “O.K. Good question. I was just filling in the geometry so you can see the necessity behind space-time as it is and don’t go getting all teleological on me. A lesser number of spatial dimensions, it just so happens, couldn’t provide enough juxtapositions to get molecules of any complexity, let alone, say, brain cells. More than four, which is what you have with space-time, the complexity increases but not significantly: four is plenty, sufficient. O.K.?”

Dale nods, thinking of Esther and myself, himself and Verna. Juxtapositions.

“So,” says Kriegman. “Imagine nothing, a total vacuum. But wait! There’s something in it! Points, potential geometry. A kind of dust of structureless points. Or, if that’s too woolly for you, try ‘a Borel set of points not yet assembled into a manifold of any particular dimensionality.’ Think of this dust as swirling; since there’s no dimension yet, no nearness or farness, it’s not exactly swirling as you and I know swirling but, anyway, some of them blow into straight lines and then vanish, because there’s nothing to hold the structure. Same thing if they happen, by chance—all this is chance, blind chance it has to be, Jesus”—Kriegman is shrinking, growing stooped; his chins are melting more solidly into his chest; he bobs like a man being given repeated blows on the back of his head—“if they configurate into two dimensions, into three, even into four where the fourth isn’t time; they all vanish, just accidents in this dust of points, nothing could be said to exist, until—even the word ‘until’ is deceptive, implying duration, which doesn’t exist yet—until bingo! Space-time. Three spatial dimensions, plus time. It knots. It freezes. The seed of the universe has come into being. Out of nothing. Out of nothing and brute geometry, laws that can’t be otherwise, nobody handed them to Moses, nobody had to. Once you’ve got that seed, that little itty- bitty mustard seed—ka-boom! Big Bang is right around the corner.”

“But—” Dale is awed not so much by what this man says as by his fervor, the light of faith in his little tripartite spectacles, the tan monotone of his face and its cascading folds, his receding springy hair, his thick eyebrows thrust outward and up like tiny rhinoceros horns. This man is living, he is on top of his life, life is no burden to him. Dale feels crushed beneath his beady, shuttling, joyful, and unembarrassed gaze. “But,” he weakly argues, “‘dust of points,’ ‘freezes,’ ‘seed’—this is all metaphor.”

“What isn’t?” Kriegman says. “Like Plato says, shadows at the back of the cave. Still, you can’t quit on reason; next thing you’ll get somebody like Hitler or Bonzo’s pal running things. Look. You know computers. Think binary. When matter meets antimatter, both vanish, into pure energy. But both existed; I mean, there was a condition we’ll call ‘existence.’ Think of one and minus one. Together they add up to zero, nothing, nada, niente, right? Picture them together, then picture them separating—peeling apart.” He hands Dale his drink and demonstrates separating with his thick hairy hands palm to palm, then gliding upward and apart. “Get it?” He makes two fists at the level of his shoulders. “Now you have something, you have two somethings, where once you had nothing.”

“But in the binary system,” Dale points out, handing back the squeezable glass, “the alternative to one isn’t minus one, it’s zero. That’s the beauty of it, mechanically.”

“O.K. Gotcha. You’re asking me, What’s this minus one? I’ll tell you. It’s a plus one moving backward in time. This is all in the space-time foam, inside the Planck duration, don’t forget. The dust of points gives birth to time, and time gives birth to the dust of points. Elegant, huh? It has to be. It’s blind chance, plus pure math. They’re proving it, every day. Astronomy, particle physics, it’s all coming together. Relax into it, young fella. It feels great. Space-time foam.”

Kriegman is joking; Dale prefers him zealous, evangelical on behalf of nonbelief. Esther has vanished from the archway. New guests keep arriving: Noreen Davis, the black receptionist who so smilingly gave him those forms seven months ago, with her bald co-worker in the Divinity School front office, and somebody who looks like Amy Eubank but can’t be, his recognition apparatus must be out of whack. He masochistically asks Kriegman, “How