Distress

calculus and all its offspring To… I know not whom, for Newton and Leibniz both Died childless.”

I laughed. Mosala said soberly, “You’ve no idea what it was like though, to have that one sane voice cutting through all the noise. The anti-science, traditionalist backlash didn’t really hit South Africa until the forties—but when it did, so many people in public life who’d spoken perfect sense until then seemed to cave in, one way or another… until science was somehow either the rightful ‘property’ of ’the West'—which Africa didn’t need or want anyway—or it was nothing but a weapon of cultural assimilation and genocide.”

“It has been used as exactly that.”

Mosala eyed me balefully. “No shit. Science has been abused for every conceivable purpose under the sun. Which is all the more reason to deliver the power it grants to as many people as possible, as rapidly as possible, instead of leaving it in the hands of a few. It is not a reason to retreat into fantasy—to declare: knowledge is a cultural artifact, nothing is universally true, only mysticism and obfuscation and ignorance will save us.” She reached out and mimed taking hold of a handful of space, saying, “There is no male or female vacuum. There is no Belgian or Zairean space-time. Inhabiting this universe is not a cultural prerogative, or a lifestyle decision. And I don’t have to forgive or forget a single act of enslavement, theft, imperialism, or patriarchy, in order to be a physicist—or to approach the subject with whatever intellectual tools I need. Every scientist sees further by standing on a pile of corpses—and frankly, I don’t care what kind of genitals they had, what language they spoke, or what the color of their skin was.”

I tried not to smile; this was all highly usable. I had no idea which of these slogans were sincere, and which were conscious theatrics—where the telegenic sugar-coating I’d asked for ended, and Mosala’s real passions began—but then, she may not have been entirely clear about the borders, herself.

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 re-evaluate 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 bull’s-eye 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 SUET. 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 percent. 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 Zairian 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-percent 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 spilled 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, ‘naive’ 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 percent. 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 criss-crossed