Earth

AMBIGUITY

1.

Back when he was still a student, Stan Goldman and his friends used to play a game of make-believe.

“How long do you think it would take Isaac Newton to solve this homework set?” they would ask each other. Or, “If Einstein were alive today, do you think he’d bother with graduate school?”

It was the same sort of lazy, get-nowhere argument he also heard his musician friends debate on occasion: “What d’you figure Mozart would make of our stuff,” they’d pose over bottles of beer, “if we snatched him from his own time to the 1990s? Would he freak out and call it damn noise? Or would he catch on, wear mirror shades, and cut an album right away?”

At that point, Stan used to cut in. “Which Mozart do you mean? The arriviste social climber? The craftsman of the biographies? Or the brash rebel of Amadeus?

The composers and players seemed puzzled by his non sequitur. “Why, the real one, of course.” Their reply convinced him that, for all their closeness, for all their well-known affinity, physicists and musicians would never fully understand each other.

Oh, I see. The real one… of course…

But what is reality?

Through a thick portal of fused quartz, mediated by a series of three hundred field-reinforced half mirrors, Stan now watched the essence of nothingness. Suspended in a sealed vacuum, a potential singularity spun and danced in nonexistence.

In other words, the chamber was empty.

Soon, though, potentiality would turn into reality. The virtual would become actual. Twisted space would spill light and tortured vacuum would briefly give forth matter. The utterly improbable would happen.

Or at least that was the general idea. Stan watched and waited, patiently.

Until the end of his life, Albert Einstein struggled against the implications of quantum mechanics.

He had helped invent the new physics. It bore his imprint as fully as Dirac’s or Heisenberg’s or Bohr’s. And yet, like Max Planck, he had always felt uncomfortable with its implications, insisting that the Copenhagen rules of probabilistic nature must be mere crude approximations of the real patterns governing the world. Beneath the dreadful quantum ambiguity, he felt there must be the signature of a designer.

Only the design eluded Einstein. Its elegant precision fled before experimentalists, who prodded first atoms, then nuclei, and at last the so-called “fundamental” particles. Always, the deeper they probed, the fuzzier grew the mesh of creation.

In fact, to a later generation of physicists, ambiguity was no enemy. Rather it became a tool. It was the law. Stan grew up picturing Nature as a whimsical goddess. She seemed to say — Look at me from afar, and you may pretend that there are firm rules — that here is cause and there effect. But remember, if you need this solace, stay back, and squint!

If, on the other hand, you dare approach — should you examine my garments’ weft and warp — well, then, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

With this machine, Stan Goldman expected to be looking closer than anyone ever had before. And he did not expect much security.

“You ready down there, Stan?”

Alex Lustig’s voice carried down the companionway. He and the others were in the control center, but Stan had volunteered to keep watch here by the peephole. It was a vital job, but one requiring none of the quickness of the younger physicists… in other words, just right for an old codger like himself. “I’m ready as I’ll ever be, Alex,” he called back.

“Good. Your timer should start ru

True to Alex’s word, the display to Stan’s left began counting down whirling milliseconds.

After the end of the Gaia War, when things had calmed down enough to allow a resumption of basic science, their efforts had soon returned to studying the basic nature of singularities. Now, in this lab far beyond the orbit of Mars, they had received permission to embark on the boldest experiment yet.

Stan wiped his palms on his dungarees and wondered why he felt so nervous. After all, he had participated in the manufacture of bizarre objects before. In his youth, at CERN, it had been a zoo of subatomic particles, wrought out of searing heat at the target end of a great accelerator. Even in those days, the names physicists gave the particles they studied told you more about their own personalities than the things they pursued.

He recalled graffiti on the wall of the men’s room in Geneva.

Question: What do you get when you mix a charmed red quark with a strange one that’s green and a third that’s true blue?

Underneath were scrawled answers, in various hands and as many languages:

I don’t know, but to hold them together you’ll need a gluon with attitude!

Sounds like what they served in the cafeteria, today.

Speaking of which, anyone here know the Flavor of Beauty?

Doesn’t it depend on who’s on Top and who’s on the Bottom?

I’m getting a hadron just thinking about it.

Hey! What boson thought of this question, anyway?

Yeah. There’s a guy who ought to be leptonl

Stan smiled, remembering good times. They had been hunters in those days, he and the others, chasing and capturing specimens of elusive microscopic species, expanding the quarky bestiary till a “theory of everything” began to emerge. Gravitons and gravitinos. Magnetic monopoles and photinos. With unification came the power to mix and match and use nature’s ambiguity.

Still, he never dreamed he might someday play with singularities — micro black holes — using them as circuit elements the same blithe way an engineer might string together inductors and resistors. But young fellows like Alex seemed to take it all in stride.

“Three minutes, Stan!”

“I can read a clock!” he shouted back, trying to sound more irritated than he really was. In truth, he really had lost track of the time. His mind now seemed to move at a tangent to that flow… nearly but not quite parallel to the event cone of the objective world.

We’re told subjectivity, that old enemy of science, becomes its ally at the level of the quantum. Some say it’s only the presence of an observer that causes the probability wave to collapse. It’s the observer who ultimately notes the plummet of an electron from its shell, as well as the sparrow in a forest. Without observers, not only is a falling tree without sound… it’s a concept without meaning.

Of late Stan had been wondering ever more about that. Nature, even down to the lowliest quark, seemed to be performing, as if for an audience. Arguments raged between adherents of the strong and weak anthropic principles, over whether observers were required by the universe or merely convenient to it. But everyone now agreed that having an audience mattered.

So much, then, for the debate over what Newton would say if he were snatched out of his time and brought to the present. His clockwork world was as alien to Stan’s as that of a tribal shaman. In fact, in some ways the shaman actually had it hands down over prissy old Isaac. At least, Stan imagined, the shaman would probably make better company at a party.

“One minute! Keep your eye on—”

Alex’s voice cut off suddenly as automatic timers sent the crash doors hissing shut. Stan shook himself, hauling his mind back and making an earnest effort to concentrate. It would have been different were there something for him to do. But everything was sequenced, even data collection. Later, they would pore over it all and argue. For now, though, he had only to watch. To observe…

Before man, he wondered, who performed this role for the universe?

There appears to be no rule that the observer has to be conscious. So animals might have served without being self-aware. And on other worlds, creatures might have existed long before life filled Earth’s seas. It isn’t necessary that every event, every rockfall, every quantum of light be appreciated, only that some of it, somewhere, come to the attention of someone who notices and cares.