Timescape

decoded message in the air, slicing blades of sunlight descending from the windows.

“Then we are agreed.” Lakin smiled. “A very strange effect. Something makes the nuclear spins relax, bing, like that. Spontaneous resonance.”

“Thai’s crap.” Gordon had thought they were really homing in on the point, and now this old song and dance came up.

“It is a simple statement of what we know.”

“How do you explain this?” He waved the message again.

“I do not.” Lakin shrugged elaborately. “I would not even mention it, if I were you.”

“Until we understand it—”

“No. We do understand enough. Enough to talk in public about spontaneous resonance.” Lakin began a technical summary, ticking off the points on his fingers with a precise gesture. Gordon could see he had grilled Cooper thoroughly. Lakin knew how to present the data, which quantities to plot, how the figures in a paper could build a very convincing case. “Spontaneous resonance” would make an interesting paper. No, an exciting one.

When Lakin was finished, and had sketched out the scientific arguments, Gordon said casually, “Half a true story can still be a lie, you know.”

Lakin grimaced. “I’ve humored you quite a bit, Gordon. For months. It is time to admit the truth.”

“Uh huh. What is it?”

“That your techniques are still faulty.”

“How?”

“I do not know.” He shrugged, dipping his head and raising his eyebrows again. “I cannot be in the laboratory constantly.”

“We have been able to array the resonance signals—”

“So they seem to say something.” Lakin smiled tolerantly. “They could say anything, Gordon, if you fool with them enough. Look—” He spread his hands. “You remember, from astronomy, the fellow Lowell?”

“Yes,” Gordon said suspiciously.

“He ‘discovered’ the canals on Mars. Saw them for years, decades. Other people reported, seeing them. Lowell had his own observatory built in the desert, he was a rich man. He had excellent seeing conditions there. The man had time and fine eyesight. So he discovered evidence of intelligence.”

“Yeah, but—” Gordon began.

“The only mistake was that he had the wrong conclusion. The intelligent life was on his side of the telescope, not the Mars end. His mind—” Lakin jabbed a forefinger at his own temple “—saw a flickering image and then imposed order on it. His own intelligence was tricking him.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Gordon said sourly He couldn’t think of a counterargument. Lakin was better at these things, knew more stories, had a subtle instinct for maneuver.

“I propose that we not turn ourselves into Low-ells.”

“Publish the spontaneous resonance stuff right away,” Gordon said, trying to think.

“Yes. We have to finish the NSF proposal this week. We can feature the spontaneous resonance material. I can write it up from the notebooks, in such a way that we can use the same manuscript for a paper to Physical Review Letters”

“What good will it do to send it to PRL?” Gordon asked, trying to decide what his reaction was.

“In our NSF proposal we can list the paper in the reference? page as ‘submitted to PRL.’ That puts an earmark on it, says it is work of foremost quality. In fact…” he pursed his lips, judging, peering over imaginary hornrims, “… why not say ‘to be published in PRL’? I am certain they will accept it, and ‘to be published’ carries more weight.”

“It’s not true.”

“It soon will be.” Lakin sat down behind his desk and leaned forward on it, hands clasped together. “And I tell you frankly that without something interesting, something new, the grant is in trouble.”

Gordon looked at him steadily for a long moment. Lakin got up and resumed pacing. “No, of course, it was only a thought. We will say ‘submitted to’ and that will have to do it.” He circumnavigated the office with a measured step, thinking. He stopped before the blackboard with its crude sketches of the data. “A very odd effect, and a credit to its discoverer—you.”

“Isaac,” Gordon said carefully, “I’m not going to drop this.”

“Fine, fine,” Lakin said, taking Gordon’s arm. “Throw yourself into it. I’m sure the business with Cooper will resolve itself in time. You should arrange the date of his doctoral candidacy exam, you know.”

Gordon nodded absently. To set out on a full research program for the thesis, a student had to pass the two-hour oral candidacy examination. Cooper would need some coaching; he tended to freeze up if more than two faculty members were within earshot, a remarkably common effect among students. “I’m glad we have this settled,” Lakin murmured. “I’ll show you a draft of the PRL paper on Monday. Meanwhile—” he glanced at his watch—“the Colloquium is starting.”

•  •  •

Gordon tried to concentrate on the Colloquium lecture but somehow the thread of the argument kept eluding him. Only a few rows away Murray GellMann was explaining the “Eight-Fold Way” scheme for understanding the basic particles of all matter. Gordon knew he should be following the discussion closely, for here was a genuinely fundamental question. The particle theorists already said Gell-Mann should get the Nobel for this work. He frowned and shifted forward in his seat, peering at Gell-Mann’s equations. Someone in the audience asked a skeptical question and Gell-Mann turned, always smooth and unperturbed, to counter it. The audience followed the exchange with interest. Gordon remembered his senior year at Columbia, when he had first begun attending the Physics Department Colloquia. He had noticed an obvious feature of the weekly meetings, one he never heard talked about. Anyone could ask a question, and when he did all attention of the audience turned to him. If there were several exchanges between lecturer and questioner, all the better. And a questioner who caught the speaker in an error was rewarded with nodding heads and smiles from those around him. All this was clear, and it was doubly clear that no one in the audience prepared for the Colloquia, no one studied for them.

The Colloquium topic was announced a week in advance. Gordon began reading up on the topic and taking down a few notes. He would look up the speaker’s papers, with special attention to the Conclusions section, where authors usually speculated a bit, threw out “blue sky” ideas, and occasionally took indirect slams at their competitors. Then he would read the competitors’ papers as well. This always generated several good questions. Occasionally such a question, innocently asked, could puncture a speaker’s ideas like a stiletto. This would create a murmur of interest in the audience, and inquiring glances toward Gordon. Even an ordinary question, if well delivered, created the impression of deep understanding. Gordon began by calling out questions from near the back. After a few weeks he moved forward. The senior professors in the department always took the first-row seats, and soon he was sitting only two rows behind them. They began turning in their seats to watch as he asked a question. Within a few more weeks he was in the second row. Full professors began to nod to him as they took their seats before Colloquium began. By Christmas Gordon was known to most of the department. He had felt a slight tug of guilt about it ever since, but, after all, he hadn’t done anything except show a keen and systematic interest. If it benefited him, so much the better. He had been a demon for physics and mathematics then, more interested in watching a lecturer pull an analytic rabbit out of a higher mathematical hat than in a Broadway show. Once he spent a whole week trying to crack Fermat’s Last Theorem, skipping lectures to scribble away. Somewhere around 1650, Pierre de Fermat jotted the equation xⁿ + yⁿ = zⁿin the margin of his copy of Diophantus’ Arithmetic. Fermat wrote that if x, y, z, and n were positive integers, there were no solutions to the equation for n greater than two. “The proof is too long to write in this margin,” Fermat scribbled. In the 300 years since, no one had been able to prove it. Was Fermat bluffing? Maybe there wasn’t a proof. Anyone who could decide the issue with a mathematical demonstration would be famous. Gordon struggled with the riddle and then, falling behind in classes, gave it up. But he swore that some day he would get back to it.

The Last Theorem had a lot of mathematical beauty in it, but that wasn’t why he had attacked it. He liked solving problems, simply because they were there. Most scientists did; they were early chess players and puzzle solvers. That, and ambition, were the two traits scientists truly had in common, it seemed to him. Gordon mused