Christopher Hitchens - The Portable Atheist - Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever

“Right,” Dale says. “That’s what I say.”

“Yeah, but no need to go all obscurantist either. Let me give you a homework assignment. Want a homework assignment?”

Dale nods, feeling weak, with a child’s grateful weakness when he is told he is sick and must be put to bed.

“Look up in Sky and Telescope, one of last summer’s issues I think it was, a helluva funny piece in this connection they reprinted from some book in which a bunch of rotifers—you know what rotifers are, don’t you?—microscopic aquatic doohickeys with an anterior retractile disc of cilia that makes them look like their heads are spinning—of course they aren’t really, any more than owls can turn their heads clear around, it just gives that impression— anyway, a bunch of these rotifers are imagined in learned conversation concerning why their puddle had to be exactly the way it was—temperature, alkalinity, mud at the bottom sheltering methane-producing bacteria, all the rest of it—it was clever as hell like I said—and from the fact that if any of these things were even a little bit different—if the heat necessary to vaporize water was any lower, for example, or the freezing temperature of water any higher—this Little Puddlian Philosophical Society, I think it was called, but you can check that when you look it up, deduced that the whole operation was providential and obviously the universe existed to produce their little puddle and them! That’s more or less what you’re trying to tell me, young fella, except you ain’t no rotifer!”

Kriegman’s constant benign smile widens into an audible chuckle. His lips are curious in being the exact same shade of swarthiness as his face, like muscles in a sepia anatomy print. As he raises his glass to these exemplary lips Dale intervenes with “I think, sir—”

“Fuck the ‘sir’ stuff. Name’s Myron. Not Ron, mind you. Myron.”

“I think it’s a little more than that, what I’m trying to say; the puddle analogy is as if the anthropic principle were being argued from the Earth as opposed to the other planets, which of course we can now see, if we ever doubted it, aren’t suitable for life. In that sense, yes, we’re here because we’re here. But in the case of the universe, where you have only one, why should, say, the observed recessional velocity so exactly equal the necessary escape velocity?”

“How do you know there’s only one universe? There might be zillions. There’s no logical reason to say the universe we can observe is the only one.”

“I know there’s no logical reason—”

“Are we talking logic or not? Don’t start getting all intuitive and subjective on me, my pal, because I’m pretty much a pragmatist myself on some scores. If it helps you through the night to believe the moon is green cheese—”

“I don’t—”

“Don’t believe it is? Good for you. I don’t either. Those rocks they brought back didn’t test out as green cheese. But my daughter Florence does; some zonked-out punk with purple hair tells her it is when she’s as stoned as he is. She thinks she’s a Tibetan Buddhist, except on weekends. Her sister Miriam talks about joining some Sufi commune over in New York State. I don’t let it get to me, it’s their lives. But you, if I size you up right, young fella, you’re pulling my leg.”

“I—”

“You really give a damn about cosmology, I’ll tell you where the interesting work is being done right now: it’s the explanation of how things popped up out of nothing. The picture’s filling in from a number of directions, as clear as the hand in front of your face.” He tipped his head back to see Dale better and his eyes seemed to multiply in the trifocals. “As you know,” he said, “inside the Planck length and the Planck duration you have this space-time foam where the quantum fluctuations from matter to non-matter really have very little meaning, mathematically speaking. You have a Higgs field tunneling in a quantum fluctuation through the energy barrier in a false-vacuum state, and you get this bubble of broken symmetry that by negative pressure expands exponentially, and in a couple of microseconds you can have something go from next to nothing to the size and mass of the observable present universe. How about a drink? You look pretty dry, standing there.”

Kriegman takes another plastic glass of white wine from the tray one of the Irish girls is reluctantly passing, and Dale shakes his head, refusing. His stomach has been nervous all this spring. Pastrami and milk don’t mix.

My dear friend and neighbor Myron Kriegman takes a lusty swallow, licks his smiling lips, and continues in his rapid rasping voice. “O.K.; still, you say, you have to begin with something before you have a Higgs field; how do you get to almost nothing from absolutely nothing? Well, the answer turns out to be good old simple geometry. You’re a mathematician, you’ll dig this. What do we know about the simplest structures yet, the quarks? We know—come on, fella, think. ”

Dale gropes. The party noise has increased, a corner high in his stomach hurts, Esther is laughing on the other side of the living room, beneath the knob-and-spindle header of the archway, exhaling smoke in a plume, her little face tipped back jauntily. “They come in colors and flavors,” he says, “and carry positive or negative charges in increments of a third—”

Kriegman pounces: “You’ve got it! They invariably occur in threes, and cannot be pried apart. Now what does that suggest to you? Think. Three things, inseparable.”

Father, Son, and Holy Ghost floats across Dale’s field of inner vision but does not make it to his lips. Nor does Id, Ego, and Superego. Nor Kriegman’s three daughters.

“The three dimensions of space!” Kriegman proclaims. “They can’t be pried apart, either. Now, let’s ask ourselves, what’s so hot about three dimensions? Why don’t we live in two, or four, or twenty-four?”

Odd that the man would mention those almost-magic, almost-revelatory numbers that Dale used to circle painstakingly in red; he now sees them to have been illusions, ripples in nothingness such as Kriegman is rhapsodizing about.

“You’re not thinking. Because,” the answer gleefully runs, “you need no more or less than three dimensions to make a knot, a knot that tightens on itself and won’t pull apart, and that’s what the ultimate particles are—knots in space-time. You can’t make a knot in two dimensions because there’s no over or under, and—here’s the fascinating thing, see if you can picture it—you can make a ravelling in four dimensions but it isn’t a knot, it won’t hold, it will just pull apart, it won’t per sist. Hey, you’re going to ask me—I can see it in your face—what’s this concept, persistence? For persistence you need time, right? And that’s the key right there: without time you don’t have anything, and if time was two-dimensional instead of one, you wouldn’t have anything either, since you could turn around in it and there wouldn’t be any causality. Without causality, there wouldn’t be a universe, it would keep reversing itself. I know this stuff must be pretty elementary to you, I can see from the way you keep looking over my shoulder.”

“No, I just—”

“If you’ve changed your mind about wanting a drink, it’s not Esther’s going to get it for you, you should ask one of the girls.”

Dale blushes, and tries to focus on this tireless exposition, though he feels like a knot in four dimensions, unravelling. “I beg your pardon,” he says, “how did you say we get from nothing to something?”

Kriegman lightly pats himself on the top of his head to make sure the garland is still in place. “O.K. Good question. I was just filling in the geometry so you can see the necessity behind space-time as it is and don’t go getting all teleological on me. A lesser number of spatial dimensions, it just so happens, couldn’t provide enough juxtapositions to get molecules of any complexity, let alone, say, brain cells. More than four, which is what you have with space-time, the complexity increases but not significantly: four is plenty, sufficient. O.K.?”