Грег Иган - Distress

"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 Witnessagain, 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 to a TOE which predicts that they’ll get together to form a universe.

"And maybe the Theory of Everything should collapse into nothing but statements about numbers which have to be true. Maybe pre-space itself has to melt into nothing but simple arithmetic, simple logic—leaving us with no choices to make about its structure at all."

I laughed. "I think even SeeNet’s audience might have some trouble wrapping their minds around that ." I certainly did. "Look, maybe it’s going to take a while for you and Helen Wu to make sense of all this. We can always do an update on it, back in Cape Town, if it turns out to be an important development."

Mosala agreed, relieved. Throwing ideas around was one thing, but she clearly didn’t want to take a position on this, officially. Not yet.

Before I could lose my nerve, I said, "Do you think you’ll still be living in Cape Town, in six months' time?"

I’d braced myself for the kind of outburst the word Anthrocosmologist had produced—but Mosala simply observed drily, "Well, I didn’t think it could remain a secret for long. I suppose the whole conference is talking about it."

"Not exactly. I heard it from a local."

She nodded, unsurprised. "I’ve been having discussions with the academic syndicates here, for months. So it’s probably all over the island by now." She flashed a wry smile. "Not much into confidentiality, these anarchists. But what can you expect from patent violators and intellectual property thieves?"

I said, "So what’s the attraction?"

She stood. "Can you stop recording, please?" I complied. "When all the details have been worked out, I’ll make a public statement—but I don’t want some off-the-cuff remark on the subject coming out first."

"I understand."

She said, "What’s the attraction of patent violators and intellectual property thieves? That very fact. Stateless is renegade, they flout the biotech licensing laws. She turned toward the window, and stretched out her arms. "And look at them! They’re not the wealthiest people on the planet—but no one here is starving. No one . That’s not true in Europe, Japan, Australia—let alone in Angola, Malawi…" She trailed off, and studied me for a moment, as if trying to decide if I really had stopped filming. If she really should trust me at all.

I waited. She continued.

"What’s that got to do with me? My own country’s doing well enough. I’m not exactly in danger of malnutrition, am I?" She closed her eyes and groaned. "This is very hard for me to say. But… like it or not, the Nobel prize has given me a certain kind of power. If I move to Stateless—and state the reasons why—it will make news. It will make an impact, in certain places."

She hesitated again.

I said, "I can keep my mouth shut."

Mosala smiled faintly. "I know that. I think."

"So what kind of impact do you want to make?"