Editorial, Social Text, Vol. 48, p. 81:
The recent “discovery” of a “Cosm” (plainly a calculated term, devised to gain the most respect for her findings by the “discoverer”) has excited much comment. We remain to be convinced that in fact the talk of creating a portal or opening to another universe has any substance. Surely the members of the scientific establishment have noted the extreme secrecy and hermitlike seclusion of the “discoverer”? Her unwillingness to allow teams of disinterested observers to visit this “Cosm”?
Most astonishing is the lack of philosophical sophistication on the part of many physicists, who seem ready to accept mere publication of a paper—a textual event—as solid evidence, independent of interpretation. The central doctrine of our more modern view, emerging from scholars in science studies, is that society constructs its science in narratives peculiar to a time, place, and culture. Science’s chief function is to create stories about the world consonant with dominant social and political values. They are no more “true” or even more reliable than any other culture-specific description. Independent reality is itself a recent, modern western social idea, one disputed by many other philosophies which challenge the intellectual hegemony and the familiar but impermissibly universal claims of western rationalism…
… as a leading “ghost” writer for several prominent scientists (names on request, of course under a confidentiality agreement), I can promise a completed draft within three months of our interview series. If needed, agenting services to major publishers may be discreetly arranged…
Council of Churches
5000 Riverside Drive
New York, New York 11054
… attend and address our annual national meeting, to give the keynote address, perhaps based upon your stimulating remarks to the press concerning the “reproducibility” of the creation of subuniverses…
Editorial from The New York Times. Sunday edition:
In the end, perhaps we are trying to be logical about a question that is not really susceptible to logical argument: the question of what should or should not engage our sense of wonder…
Letters to the Editor, the Washington Post:
The fatuousness of this and other similar “acceptable” uses for making universes in a laboratory, revealingly described as “a free lunch” by physicists, merely points out the lengths to which some scientists and science apologists will go to justify what is really just a desire to tinker, to fiddle around and then claim that a technology developed out of that desire satisfies some pressing human or societal need.
Gina Montebello
Miami Beach, FL
ARCHBISHOP SAYS ‘COSM’ PROVES GOD’S BEHIND UNIVERSE
‘We Must Talk Philosophy with Science’
(UPI) A prominent cleric has declared, in light of the recent claims of discovering an entire universe that fits into a laboratory, that “the ‘reason within’—rational minds that conceived mathematics—had to be connected with the ‘reason without’—the rational structure of the physical world—by an overarching cause, i.e., God.”
Archbishop Erma Ehrlich of San Francisco believes this is a “more compelling proof that what these scientists are doing is in fact acting in the cause of God, not, as some believe, the reverse…”
Max tossed the printout aside. “Archbishop be damned.”
Alicia was compiling data tapes and did not look up from her keyboard. “She’s just trying to piggyback on the news.”
Max circled in the confined space available in the observatory. Only computer screens lit the area.
“I know, I know, and true enough, Einstein said that the only incomprehensible thing about the universe was that it was comprehensible. But resorting to God forgets what biology says—that our minds came out of the physical world, y’know, through evolution of early brain stems and neural systems to higher levels of complexity.”
Alicia looked up at last. He was agitated and she couldn’t see why. “Hey, let this media rain run off your back, old duck.”
“No, I’m working on an idea here…”
He paused, studying the wealth of color and movement flickering across the nearby face of the Cosm. It was brighter than ever, almost lurid in the view of stars wheeling across a lacy blue-white firmament. The Cosm was passing through a molecular cloud where banks of dust glowered with the irritations of young suns.
After a long moment, he said suddenly, “Boy, do I hate these holier-than-thou types.”
“Clerics?”
“Anybody who tries to hem science in, tell it what it can and cannot do. Boundaries are best defined by pushing against them. Expanding our horizons, our sense of wonder.”
She smiled. “There’s nothing holier than wow!?”
He brightened, nodded. “Something like that. Look—somewhere in our past there was probably a primate who saw the curve of a rock thrown through the air as a complicated arc, a mess, tough to follow—”
“How can that be? It isn’t a mess. It’s just a parabola.”
“To you and me, sure. But that primate, he got selected against. He wasn’t good at bringing down game, so he starved—or his children did, in the end the same result.”
Her thoughts leaped ahead. “So intuitions of order, symmetry, and even beauty came to have use in the world: they made it simpler.”
“Right.” Max paced eagerly and the Cosm glow played along his angular features. “Easier to control, to succeed. In the long run even the beauties we look for in math, they have this elegance and symmetry.”
She said, “All that stuff about math being unreasonably good at describing the world, then that’s because it came out of the world.”
He beamed. “Damn right. It’s as unremarkable as the fact that a glove, made by hand, then fit hands.”
She enjoyed his harangues. He paced and muttered some more and she thought through the idea, too, wondering where he was going with it. In its search for aesthetic principles which could preside when selecting among candidate mathematical theories, science echoed the ancient shaping forces at work on African plains. So science’s success did not need a God to explain it; the world was enough.
Something told her that Max would not stop there, however.
4
In its own time frame the Cosm’s speeding spectacle was now approaching the age of our own universe. Events in the dark spherical lens sped ever-faster. The other side spent most of its time gliding between stars in the bulge of a giant elliptical galaxy. As the banks of dust thinned, collapsing into fierce young stars, the vault of night cleared and they could see farther with their telescopes. The swoop and gyre of galaxies they witnessed in real time. Stars stirred across the foreground like snowflakes in a blizzard, whipped by gravity’s winds. Beyond, galaxies themselves glided like pale, coasting birds, orbiting in the cluster, which had this elliptical as its heart. Zak and Alicia measured the images of far more distant galaxies and found that they were receding. This was a stretching of space-time like the one found by Hubble eighty years before. Would it continue? Could this new universe’s expansion ever reverse? A closed universe seemed the ultimate doom, all structure ultimately ending as an imploding fiery mass.
This was still the crucial unanswered riddle in our own cosmology. With enough matter, eventually gravitation would win out over the expansion. The new Cosm universe gave no clearer answer.
“They may have different fundamental constants,” Max said, “but they could share our same fate—whatever that is.”
“Implosion,” she said, “or else a slow freezing as space-time expands forever and matter runs out of heat.”
“Right. Either way, they’re doomed. But then, so are we, when you think about it.”
Which she tried not to, actually. Alicia shivered, watching the grand gavotte of galaxies. If the Cosm followed roughly the course of our universe, for its first fifty billion years it would brim with light. Gas and dust would still fold into fresh suns. For an equal span the stars woul
d linger. Beside reddening suns, any planetary life would warm itself by the waning fires that herald stellar death. And within a few weeks, she could see it all play out.
Silently witnessing, she wondered if even now—well, wrong word, but “now” in Cosm time—something like an inquisitive chimpanzee, in mind though almost certainly not in body, was restlessly spreading over a green world, somewhere in this same storm of stars. Minds embodied in strange shapes would still find themselves sharpened against evolution’s ceaseless whetstone.
What challenges would they face? In the end the universe as a whole was life’s ultimate opponent.
She and Max met Bernie Ross for lunch at the Phoenix Grill on campus. Bernie looked uncomfortable sitting outside in the slanting autumn sunlight, on plastic chairs and eating a coconut curry, but he got right to the point.
“The UCI administration is coming under pressure from the Department of Energy. They’re undertaking legal moves to reclaim the Cosm.”
She stopped eating. Bernie was usually reassuringly jovial, but not now. “You can’t block them?”
“This is federal to the hilt. They’re going for injunctions against UCI, calling in other agencies to hit them from every angle. Inspecting the books on research, oversight visits on health and safety issues, invoking inspection of compliance with regs in the med school, the works.”
Max said disbelievingly, “Just like that?”
Bernie allowed himself a narrow smile. “Government doesn’t often move quickly, but when they do, it’s like an elephant stampede.”
“Don’t be in its way,” Alicia said, frowning down into her plate of red enchiladas. “You know this for sure?”
“I have my sources and they’re reliable.”
“Inside UCI?” Alicia asked.
“Not everybody is a total toady of the administration.”
“They’re been pretty good about giving me an umbrella so far.”
“The Feds are another matter, believe me.” Bernie stopped working on his curry and leaned across the table, taking Alicia’s left hand.
“You really can’t block them somehow?” she asked forlornly.
“I promised your father I would look after your interests. The best thing to do now is give it up while you still have a choice.”
“We’re at a crucial time!” Alicia cried. Heads turned at nearby tables. “It’s losing mass, time is accelerating—”
“There’s never a good time,” Bernie said comfortingly. “You kept it as long as you could.”
She looked plaintively at Max. He was visibly torn between supporting her and following the advice of someone who understood legal matters; to Max they were hieroglyphics, their needless complexity clear evidence of the underlying irrationality of mankind. He spread his hands and shrugged. “I remember your father saying to you, ‘Hire the best people, then follow their advice.’”
“So he did…” Her voice trailed off.
“I believe I can get the right figures in the administration to handle this with discretion. No alerting of the press, no pictures, just a quiet transfer.”
“Mighty decent of them,” Max said sarcastically.
“An elephant stampede,” Alicia said. “Don’t be in its way.”
Chairman Onell had not expected her outburst. Blinking, he sat back and stared and then noticed that his jaw was still hanging open and closed it.
She repeated, “No, I will not show the Cosm to a bunch of donors.”
“They have all given a minimum of ten thousand—”
“And I don’t give a—” She stopped, breathed deeply.
“Pressure from vice chancellor—”
“Look, I don’t have her style. I’d like to be remote and subtle about this, too. I’d like to play this the way a cool analytical academic plays things. But nobody will let me—not Brookhaven or the Department of Energy or UCI. I try to keep some space between me and them. But I keep feeling I’m going to wake up next morning in an alley with the cats looking me over.”
“You’re self-dramatizing.”
“I’m being metaphorical. That’s a good academic word, isn’t it?”
“I advise you to cool down.”
“I’ve got a universe that’s doing just that and I have to get back to it.”
Jill said, “These big things are awfully hard to drive.”
Alicia studied the bay of the Pathfinder. “I always wanted to drive one. Sit up high, four-wheel drive, go where you want.”
“It’s a lot of cash just to get a view of all the traffic.” Jill looked around at the dealer’s showroom. “I liked your Miata a lot better.”
“Well, a few billion years have passed since then.”
“Big-ticket items, these.”
“That’s why I’m going to get one used. This is just an educational visit.” Alicia pointed to a meek little compact car across the lot. “I’m going to buy one of those.”
Jill grimaced. “That? It’s style-impaired.”
“Cheap, though.”
“Strictly transportation. Dykey, too.”
“I’m tired of renting, and I just got my insurance money from the Miata. Thought I might take off with Max, camp out down in Baja.” Her plans were still shaping in her mind, but it wouldn’t hurt to throw out some false clues that could mislead people later.
Jill frowned. “He doesn’t seem quite the type, but go ahead.”
“You think I’m rushing into this too fast.”
“You ask me, your whole life is moving too fast.”
“Max and I have been working together for months—”
“Might be best to keep a little more distance.”
Alicia grinned. “Think I’m overplaying my hand?”
“Clingy is out.”
“You don’t mean as in negligees.”
“As in needy, speedy.”
She kept to a narrow track, wary of crowds. No day went by without the kidnappers coming to mind. A stranger would approach her or an odd phone call would set her off, bring the panic reaction swarming back.
Detective Sturges called again; no progress there, but the religious angle was looking fruitful. His veiled tone made her impatient, but he would reveal nothing more.
The fourth floor of the physics department had a security guard just to keep away the curious. Whenever she happened by the department coffee and tea cart, somebody snagged her for news. She was the focus of much gossip and speculation, she knew, but there simply wasn’t time to bring everybody up to date.
She noted a subtle shift in the attitude of her fellow high-energy experimenters, as well. She remembered her high school advanced physics text extolling particle physics, “the spearhead of our penetration into the unknown”; she had laughed at the metaphor. Particle physicists knew in their guts that the spearhead had a shaft following: engineering, chemistry, then biology, with (if they ever thought of it) social sciences and then humanities far back (though not, of course, the real balls of the matter). Math and fine arts shared traits with particle physics—imagination, rigor, grace—and so were not in the continuum. Particle physics was a very male arena, and she had entered it at breakneck pace, under a cloud.
Still, to make it in a dramatically different way, to open whole horizons through an accident, definitely made one a member of the club, though her methods definitely did not fit the clubby manner. By holding on to the Cosm and extracting some understanding from it, she had become both audacious pioneer and sacred monster. To herself, she had to admit that mostly she had been just plain lucky.
PRESIDENT ISSUES EXECUTIVE ORDER BANNING
MORE ‘COSM’ PRODUCTION
Declares Ethics and Dangers Must Be Evaluated
Appoints Blue Ribbon Panel
“Dad, why would the President go on TV—”
“He’s in trouble, honey, taking flak on the budget, the medical bankruptcy thing—”
“This hasn’t got anything to do with those.”
His warm chuckle came o
ver the line and she could imagine him shaking his head at a daughter so out of it. “Sure, but he needs to be seen doing something.”
“I hope it doesn’t interfere with our experiments. Finding out about it is the only way to know what to do.”
“He wanted to get out in front on the issue. Congress—”
“When he came here, he was so positive.”
“That was ancient history, weeks ago. He’s been reading the letters to the editor, op-ed pieces.”
“Well, yours are good.”
“And pretty lonely. Just check out the late-night TV talk shows, hon. They’ve got some pretty funny jokes, actually.”
“I haven’t got the time—”
“I’ll tape ‘em for you.”
“—and don’t need being laughed at just before bedtime.”
His patented diplomatic pause, then, “You don’t have any idea how strongly people feel about this, do you?”
“Not really. I’m too busy.”
CONGRESSIONAL SUBPOENA
You are directed to appear before the House Committee on Science and Technology, Rep. Lois Friedman, chairman. This hearing shall require full documentation of your involvement with the Department of Energy Brookhaven National Laboratory, said documents to be presented two (2) weeks before your appearance date…
“Bernie?”
“Hey, thanks for getting back to me so fast. I can’t delay this matter anymore, Alicia, I’m sorry.”
“What’s this subpoena thing?”
“They’re trying to get our attention—”
“Well, it sure worked.”
“Just a shot across our bow—and not even a close one.” His tone was warm, casual, professionally reassuring. “Plenty more will happen before that House Committee can get organized. They’re doing it to get before the cameras. The real negotiations with DoE and UCI, those I’ve been handling.”
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