Distress

15

I arrived early for Helen Wu’s lecture. The auditorium was almost empty—but Mosala was there, studying something on her notepad intently. I took a seat one space removed from her. She didn’t look up.

“Good morning.”

She glanced at me, and replied coldly, “Good morning,” then went back to whatever she was viewing. If I kept filming her like this, the audience would conclude that the whole documentary had been made at gunpoint.

Body language could always be edited.

That wasn’t the point, though.

I said, “How does this sound? I promise not to use anything you said about the cults—yesterday, if you agree to give me something more considered later on.”

She thought it over, without lifting her eyes from the screen.

“All right. That’s fair.” She glanced at me again, adding, “I don’t mean to be rude, but I really do have to finish this.” She showed me her notepad; she was half-way through one of Wu’s papers, a Physical Review article about six months old.

I didn’t say anything, but I must have looked momentarily scandalized. Mosala said defensively, “There are only twenty-four hours in a day. Of course I should have read this months ago, but…” She gestured impatiently.

“Can I film you reading it?”

She was horrified. “And let everyone know?”

I said, “'Nobel laureate catches up on homework.’ It would show that you have something in common with us mortals.” I almost added: “It’s what we call humanization.”

Mosala said firmly, “You can start filming when the lecture begins. That’s what it says on the schedule we agreed to. Right?”

“Right.”

She carried on reading—now truly ignoring me; all the self-consciousness and hostility had vanished. I felt a wave of relief wash over me: between us, we’d probably just saved the documentary. Her reaction to the cults had to be dealt with, but she had a right to express it more diplomatically. It was a simple, obvious compromise; I only wished I’d thought of it sooner.

I peeked at Mosala’s notepad while she read (without recording). She invoked some kind of software assistant every time she came to an equation: windows blossomed on the screen, full of algebraic cross-checking and detailed analysis of the links between the steps in Wu’s argument. I wondered if I would have been able to make better sense of Wu’s papers myself, with this kind of help. Probably not: some of the notation in the “explanatory” windows looked even more cryptic to me than that of the original text.

I could follow, in the broadest qualitative terms, most of the issues being discussed at the conference—but Mosala, with a little computerized help, could clearly penetrate right down to the level where the mathematics either survived rigorous scrutiny, or fell apart. No seductive rhetoric, no persuasive metaphors, no appeals to intuition: just a sequence of equations where each one did or did not lead inexorably to the next. Passing this inspection wasn’t proof of anything, of course; an immaculate chain of reasoning led to nothing but an elegant fantasy, if the premises were, physically, wrong. It was crucial to be able to test the connections themselves, though, to check every strand in the web of logic which bound two possibilities together.

The way I saw it, every theory and its logical consequences—every set of general laws, and the specific possibilities they dictated—formed an indivisible whole. Newton’s universal laws of motion and gravity, Kepler’s idealized elliptical orbits, and any number of particular (pre-Einsteinian) models of the solar system, were all part of the same fabric of ideas, the same tightly knit layer of reasoning. None of which had turned out to be entirely correct, so the whole layer of Newtonian cosmology had been peeled away (fingernails slipped under the unraveling corner where velocities approached the speed of light) in search of something deeper… and the same thing had happened half a dozen times since. The trick was to know precisely what constituted each layer, to prise away each interlinked set of falsified ideas and failed predictions, no more and no less… until a layer was reached which was seamless, self-consistent—and which fit every available observation of the real world.

That was what set Violet Mosala apart (from half her colleagues, no doubt, as well as third-rate science journalists—and which no amount of humanization would ever change): If a proposed TOE was inconsistent with experimental data, or unraveled under its own contradictions, she had the ability to follow the logic as far as it went, and peel away the whole beautiful failure, like a perfect sheet of dead skin.

And if it wasn’t a beautiful failure? If the TOE in question turned out to be flawless? Watching her parse Wu’s elaborate mathematical arguments as if they were written in the most transparent prose, I could picture her, when that day came—whether the TOE was her own or not—patiently mapping out the theory’s consequences at every scale, every energy, every level of complexity, doing her best to weave the universe into an indivisible whole.

The auditorium began to fill. Mosala finished the paper just as Wu arrived at the podium. I whispered, “What’s the verdict?”

Mosala was pensive. “I think she’s largely correct. She hasn’t quite proved what she’s set out to prove—not yet. But I'm almost certain that she’s on the right track.”

I was startled. “But doesn’t that worry—?”

She raised a finger to her lips. “Be patient. Let’s hear her out.”

Helen Wu lived in Malaysia, but had worked for the University of Bombay for the last thirty years. She’d co- authored at least a dozen seminal papers—including two with Buzzo and one with Mosala—but somehow she’d never reached the same quasi-celebrity status. She was probably every bit as ingenious and imaginative as Buzzo, and maybe even as rigorous and thorough as Mosala, but she seemed to have been slower to move straight to the frontiers of the field (always really visible only in retrospect), and not as lucky in choosing problems which had yielded spectacular general results.

Much of the lecture was simply beyond me. I covered every word, every graphic, scrupulously, but my thoughts wandered to the question of how I could paraphrase the message without the technicalities. With an interactive dialogue, maybe?

Pick a number between ten and a thousand. Don’t tell me what it is.

[Thinks… 575]

Add the digits together.

[17]

Add them again.

[8]

Add 3.

[11]

Subtract this from the original number.

[564]

Add the digits together.

[15]

Find the remainder left when you divide by nine.

[6]

Square it.

[36]

Add 6.

[42]

The number in your head now is… 42?

[Yes!]

Now try it once again…

The end result, of course, was guaranteed to be the same every time; all the elaborate steps of this cheap