Distress

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 percent 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 toward, 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 convenors 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 other 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