Distress

yourself, if you really care. I'll start with a man I'm sure you've heard of: a twentieth-century physicist called John Wheeler.' I nodded recognition, although all I could recall immediately was that he'd played a seminal role in the theory of black holes.

Conroy continued, 'Wheeler was a great advocate of the idea of a participatory universe: a universe shaped by the inhabitants who observe and explain it. He had a favorite metaphor for this concept… do you know the old game of twenty questions? One person thinks of an object, and the other keeps asking yes-or-no questions, to try to find out what it is.

'There's another way to play the game, though. You don't choose any object at all, to start with. You just answer the questions 'yes' or 'no,' more or less at random—but constrained by the need to be consistent with what you've already said. If you've said that 'it' is blue all over, you can't change your mind later and say that it's red… even though you still have no precise idea what 'it' really is. But as more and more questions are asked, what 'it' might be becomes narrower and narrower.

'Wheeler suggested that the universe itself behaved like that undefined object— only coming into being as something specific through a similar process of interrogation. We make observations, we carry out experiments—we ask questions about 'it.' We get back answers—some of them more or less random— but they're never absolute contradictions. And the more questions we ask… the more precisely the universe takes shape.'

I said, 'You mean like… making measurements on microscopic objects? Some properties of subatomic particles don't exist until they're measured—and the measurement you get has a random component—but if you measure the same thing a second time, you get the same result.' This was old, old ground, well-established and uncontroversial. 'Surely that's the kind of thing Wheeler would have meant?'

Conroy agreed. 'That's the definitive example. Which dates back to Neils Bohr, of course, whom Wheeler studied under in Copenhagen, in the nineteen-thirties. Quantum measurement was certainly the inspiration for the whole model. Wheeler and his successors took it further, though.

'Quantum measurement is about individual, microscopic events which do or don't happen—at random, but according to probabilities determined by a set of pre-existing laws. About… individual heads and tails, not the shape of the coin, or the overall odds when it's thrown repeatedly. It's easy enough to see that a coin is neither 'heads' nor 'tails' while it's still up in the air, spinning—but what if it's not even any particular coin? What if there really are no pre-existing laws governing the system you're about to measure… any more than there are pre-existing answers to any of those measurements?'

I said warily, 'You tell me.' I'd come here expecting a serve of the usual florid cult-speak from the very start: gibberish about archetypal warlocks and witches, or the urgent need to rediscover the lost wisdom of the alchemists. The strategy of taking quantum mechanics and distorting the boundaries of its counter-intuitive weirdness in whatever direction suited the cult philosophy was far harder to track. In the hands of a smooth- talking charlatan, QM could be blurred into just about anything—from a 'scientific' basis for telepathy, to a 'proof of Zen Buddhism. Still, if I couldn't gauge the precise moment when Conroy moved from established science to Anthrocosmological fantasy, that hardly mattered; I could map it all out later, when I had my electronic teat back, giving me access to some expert guidance.

Conroy smiled at my edginess—and continued in the language of science. 'What happened, historically, was that physics merged with information theory. Or at least, a lot of people explored the union, for a while. They tried to discover whether it made sense to talk about building, not just a space-time of individual microscopic events, but all of the underlying quantum mechanics, and all of the various—then, non- unified—field equations… out of nothing but a stream of yes-and-no answers. Reality from information, from an accumulation of knowledge. As Wheeler put it, 'an it from a bit.''

I said, 'Sounds like one of those nice ideas that just didn't pan out. No one at the conference is talking about anything of the kind.'

Conroy conceded, 'Information physics pretty much vanished from serious contention when the Standard Unified Field Theory rose from the ashes of superstrings. What did the geometry of ten-dimensional total space have to do with sequences of bits? Very little. Geometry took over. And it's been the most productive approach ever since.'

'So where do the Anthrocosmologists fit in? Do you have your own rival TOEs from 'information physics,' which the establishment won't take seriously?'

Conroy laughed. 'Hardly! We couldn't begin to compete in that arena, and we have no wish to do so. Buzzo, Mosala and Nishide can fight it out between themselves. One of them will come up with a flawless TOE in the end, I'm certain of that.'

'Then—?'

'Go back to the old Wheeler model of the universe. Laws of physics emerge from patterns—consistencies— in random data. But if an event doesn't take place unless it's observed… then a law doesn't exist unless it's understood. But that begs the question, doesn't it: understood by whom? Who decides what 'consistent' means? Who decides what form a 'law' can take—or what constitutes an 'explanation'?

'If the universe instantly succumbed to any human explanation whatsoever… we'd be living in a world where Stone Age cosmology was literally true. Or… it would be like the old satires of the afterlife—a separate heaven for every conflicting faith—even before we died. But the world just isn't like that. However much people disagree, we still find ourselves together, arguing about the nature of reality. We don't float off into individual universes where our own private explanations are the ultimate truth.'

'Well, no.' I had a vivid image of the Mystical Renaissance theatre troupe following Carl Jung—dressed in a Pied Piper costume—down a psychedelic wormhole into another cosmos entirely, where no rationalists could follow.

I said, 'Doesn't that suggest to you that the universe might not be participatory, after all? That the laws just might be fixed principles, independent of the people who understand them?'

'No.' Conroy smiled gently, as if this suggestion struck her as quaintly naive. 'Everything in relativity and quantum mechanics cries out against any absolute backdrop: absolute time, absolute history… absolute laws. But I think it does suggest that the whole idea of participation needs to be formulated rigorously in the mathematics of information theory, and different possibilities analyzed with great care.'

It was hard to argue with that. 'To what end, though? If you're not competing for the discovery of a successful TOE…?'

'The point is to understand the means by which TOE science can give rise to an active TOE. How knowledge of the equations can fix the reality they describe firmly in place—so firmly that we can't even hope to see behind them, to glimpse the process which holds them there.'

I laughed. 'If you admit we can't hope to do that, you've just crossed right over into metaphysics.'

Conroy was unfazed. 'Certainly. But we believe it can still be done in the spirit of science: applying logic, using appropriate mathematical tools. That's what Anthrocosmology is: the old information-theoretic approach, revived as something external to physics. It may not be needed to discover the TOE itself—but I believe it can make sense of the fact that there is a TOE at all.'

I leaned forward—I think I was smiling, almost unwillingly—fascinated in spite of my skepticism. As cult pseudoscience went, at least this was high-class bullshit.

'How, exactly? Which of these possibilities you've 'analyzed with great care' can give a theory any kind of power which wasn't already there in nature ?'

Conroy said, 'Imagine this cosmology: Forget about starting the universe with just the right finely-tuned Big Bang needed to create stars, planets, intelligent life… and a culture capable of making sense of it all. Instead, take as your 'starting point' the fact that there's a living human being who can explain an entire universe, in terms of a single theory. Turn everything around, and take it as the only thing given that this one person exists.'

I said irritably, 'How can it be the only thing? You can't have a living human being… and nothing else. And if it's given that this person can explain the universe, then there has to be a universe to explain.'

'Exactly.'

Conroy smiled, calmly and sanely, but the hairs stood up on the back of my neck, and I suddenly knew what