The God Patent

by Ransom Stephens

  He flipped open the folder and read the university brochure. EWU had been founded by a man named Joseph Bowie, a distant descendent of legendary Texan Jim Bowie. Joseph’s father was an oil man, not quite in the class of Rockefeller, and his life goal defined the university mission statement: “We will build an ivory tower that will reach from Earth to Heaven, where the Word can be studied in both letters and science to provide a foundation that is based in Scripture and supported by faith.”

  It wasn’t like anything he’d seen at UMass or at any business. That feeling came back for an instant, the sense of stepping off, but Ryan buried it under the realization that he couldn’t recall anyone ever taking a mission statement seriously.

  When Foster got back from teaching his class, he led Ryan down a hallway to a bridge that connected the Department of Earthly Science to the Creation Energy Annex. The bridge crossed over the lab’s loading dock, flanked by two tanker trucks marked with green “nonflammable gas” signs, one for liquid nitrogen and the other for liquid helium. The tankers were attached to a huge stainless steel structure of pipes. Steam boiled off valves at the connections.

  Inside the annex, a steel cylinder stretched from one end of the building to the other, at least fifty yards. Every few feet, the cylinder passed through ceiling-high towers with big valves connected to pipes feeding down. The ceiling itself was covered in trays that routed cables to the different areas of the lab. The steel tube ended at a two-story-tall device that looked like a giant soup can on its side. The floor had been dug out and the ceiling tiles removed to accommodate its height. Thousands of green cables emerging from seemingly every point of the device’s surface were assembled in a great coil that disappeared into the ceiling.

  Covering the opposite wall were endless racks of blade servers. Each rack held sixty-four separate computers connected by a spaghetti of orange cables—no monitors or keyboards, just raw computing power. Behind each rack, a fist-thick blue cable ran up the wall to a tray that fed the cables to the front of the building. Just to the side, as they walked in, the cables dropped like a waterfall behind a wall of flat-screen monitors. The displays were cluttered with charts and graphs and gauges with rapidly changing numbers. It looked like Mission Control at NASA but with a lot more cables.

  A dozen men sat at workstations along each side of the control center. Some nodded to Foster, but most continued working. A young man stepped away from a granite lab bench. He was a short man with a big smile and short messy blond hair, wearing tan pants and a blue shirt. He was the only other person in the lab who wasn’t wearing a tie. Foster said, “This is Matthew Smith—my graduate student.”

  Ryan shook Matt’s hand but couldn’t take his eyes off the endless row of blade servers. “How many teraflops have you got?” A teraflop is a measure of computing horsepower: one teraflop is a trillion floating operations per second.

  Foster wagged his head to the side and said, “Not ‘tera,’ my friend, exaflops. Each CPU has half a gig of cache and ten gigs of RAM. They’re networked with five-gig fiber-optics so that you—yes, you, Ryan McNear—can configure the entire system as a single massive serial processor or over forty thousand parallel processors.” Foster wagged his head to the other side. “You like?”

  Ryan ran his fingers along one of the racks. “Fuckin’ A.”

  Foster said, “Remember what I said about swearing.”

  Matt went back to work, and Foster pried Ryan away from the computers to continue the tour. He indicated equipment they’d purchased and showed off equipment they’d built. As he spoke, Foster’s enthusiasm increased. When he twiddled the knobs on a high-end oscilloscope to show Ryan a signal, Ryan felt the rhythm he’d always felt while working with Foster.

  The long steel cylinder was a particle accelerator, a collider. Foster referred to the spaghetti of green cables as the system’s nerves and the thick blue cables emerging from the computer racks as its spinal cord. “Right now, just one of the servers on one of the racks is controlling the collider. It will be your job to implement your invention—your patent of the soul—on this system of processors.” Then he said the thing that made Ryan want to work here more than anything he would ever say again: “Did I get you enough computer power?”

  Ryan nodded his head and licked his already smiling lips.

  “Okay,” Foster said, “now it’s time for me to explain what we’re doing. First—oh dang! I forgot to have you sign the form.”

  “Form?”

  “Yes.” Foster held out his hands in a gesture of surrender. “I’ve acquired a bad case of absentminded professor. You have to sign a nondisclosure agreement.”

  Foster led Ryan back across the bridge to his office, where Mabel provided a three-page form. Ryan had to sign in two places—one pledging that he wouldn’t share any information, the other agreeing to yield rights to any intellectual property he conceived while working for Creation Energy. They were the standard nondisclosure agreement, NDA, and patent waiver forms that Ryan had signed at every company he’d ever worked for.

  Back in the lab, Foster pulled a lab stool over to a wall covered from floor to ceiling with whiteboard. Then he handed Ryan a pad of quadrille-marked graph paper and motioned for him to sit.

  Ryan took his mechanical pencil from his shirt pocket. Foster took a black marker from a tray. Foster had that same sparkle in his eye that he’d always gotten when he was about to share a cool idea. “Of course, it all started when we wrote our patents—Creation and the soul. When I was a graduate student, I discovered how the two fit together.” Foster wrote and spoke at the same time: “The key is that the link between the physical and the spiritual cannot be observed directly.

  “We start with the precept of faith.” He turned and made eye contact with Ryan. “Faith is important here. Maybe it’s obvious, but it’s worth emphasizing. To be successful here, your faith in God cannot be in doubt.”

  That feeling nibbled at the edge of Ryan’s conscience again. He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly.

  Foster turned back to the whiteboard. “The precept of faith is based on the fact that believing in God, accepting Jesus, and obeying the commandments have no value unless they are done by choice. Free choice. If you could win the lottery by praying, then why have faith?”

  Ryan said, “It wouldn’t be much of a lottery if everybody who prayed won.”

  “Right, belief requires faith, and if acts of God could be directly and reproducibly verified by experiment, then there would be no reason for faith. The precept of faith means that we cannot observe God directly.” Foster held the marker like a conductor’s baton. “The next ingredient is Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. The uncertainty principle defines a boundary between processes that can be observed, real processes, and processes that can’t be observed but still must be accounted for, virtual processes.”

  Foster took a laser pointer from his shirt pocket and aimed it at the cylinder stretching from one end of the lab to the other. “At that end of the particle accelerator, we’re colliding positrons into electrons and—”

  “Positrons? You have antimatter right there?”

  “It’s shielded. And the antimatter isn’t a big deal. It comes from a radioactive source that emits positrons. The big labs like Fermilab and SLAC have been using positrons for decades. We know how to handle it.” He put the laser pointer in his pocket and drew the same diagrams that Emmy had drawn.

  “These are called Feynman diagrams; Feynman was the perfect example of the scientific establishment—made incredible discoveries but wouldn’t go to the Bible to see how it fit into the Lord’s plan. Born Jewish, he fell to atheism.

  “In these diagrams, the only things that we can actually observe are what goes in, the electron and positron, and what comes out, the energy of the two photons—everything that happens in the middle of the diagrams is unobservable or virtual. They’re happening, but the way that God works and our place in Creation prevents us from being able to observe them. In other
words, they’re not directly observable, but we know they are there. If we ignore them, our calculations are wrong.

  “The precept of faith works the same way. It requires that God’s actions cannot be directly observed, but still, we know He is there. Do you see the symmetry?”

  “Yeah, but it kinda sounds like you’re rationalizing that God is unobservable.” Ryan started to relax. The hardware in the lab and the lecture gave him the permission he needed to question things, and that helped wash the feeling of vertigo from his mind.

  “Just stay with me.” Foster acted like he was packed with secrets that he couldn’t share fast enough. “The precept of faith plus the Heisenberg uncertainty principle mean that God acts in the physical universe through virtual processes.”

  Ryan chewed the end of his pencil. “So He can act in our lives, but we still have to make a leap of faith to believe in Him?”

  “It’s not a leap; it’s a gift.”

  Now Foster sounded put off. Ryan found it oddly comforting. “Are you saying that God is virtual?”

  “Of course not; the correct word is spiritual.” He stared at the whiteboard. “The next piece is God created man in His own image. Think for a moment. What is an image?” Foster drew a vertical line. He labeled one side of the line spiritual and the other side physical. “When you look in a mirror, your reflection is slightly different from how you really look.”

  Ryan said, “Left and right are reversed.”

  “Right on,” Foster said. “Think of a different type of mirror, a mirror with a different type of asymmetry, one that reflects the worldly image of a spiritual process.” He indicated the vertical line. “I call it Heisenberg’s mirror.”

  “Not bad,” Ryan said. “Dude gets credit for stuff he probably wouldn’t even believe.”

  “Remember the other thing that Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle tells us, that our observations affect our measurements. That is free will.” He wrote the words free will along the vertical line. “We use free will to choose how we live in Creation. All our choices affect our eternal souls.” He added the word Creation below physical on one side of the line and soul under spiritual on the other. “If we could look in the Heisenberg mirror, then we would see our spiritual selves and how our choices affect our souls. We’d see that not only do our choices affect our destiny on Earth, but they reflect our destiny in heaven.” He wrote heaven on the spiritual side of the line and earth on the physical side.

  “It is in this sense that He created us in His image. We are His image in the Heisenberg mirror.” Foster spoke softer to add, “This is controversial. Remember, the Bible doesn’t tell us where the soul is. But, look, the symmetry is too perfect not to believe.”

  Ryan gathered it all together. Foster’s theory was like a metaphysical layer on top of QED, a self-consistent layer, but still. Ryan tried to be diplomatic. “How can we see into Heisenberg’s mirror?”

  “When we pray, we can sometimes catch a glimpse, but our senses are stuck in the physical universe.” Foster stepped to a blank part of the whiteboard. “This is the piece of the puzzle that gets us to technology. Ready?”

  Ryan nodded, expectant, hoping to believe what Foster was about to say.

  Foster wrote energy-time and said, “Creation was an act of God’s will. During the six days of Creation, He allowed energy to transfer from the spiritual to the physical universe. That’s how He ‘let there be light’ and, on the seventh day, when the right amount of energy was in the physical universe, He closed the window between the spiritual and physical, and since then, He’s only influenced our reality through spiritual processes.”

  It wasn’t that Ryan wanted to believe—he needed to. To see his son, to reclaim his life—it all rode on Foster being able to convince him that this lab was really onto something. The blur between science and religion wasn’t any worse than Ryan’s own nagging question about consciousness and matter, and fortunately, Foster’s confidence was contagious.

  “This brings me to why I need you.” He pointed at Ryan with both index fingers. “Our power generator is based on the image of Creation. Where God is a purely spiritual being, our power generator is a purely physical thing that, with those computers and your soul algorithm, will acquire free will and transfer energy across the boundary. See? It’s a simple symmetry transformation, like any other process in nature.”

  Foster went silent. Ryan could feel his stare.

  Ryan clung to what Katarina had said: “The universe is proof that something came from nothing, so there must be a way for it to happen again.” Wasn’t that proof of principle?

  The whole argument was based on symmetry. Ryan tried to separate the science from the religion. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle requires that there are processes that cannot be observed but still affect the universe—that’s physics. Emmy had said the same thing. Foster brought up this other thing, though: the precept of faith—that if God’s actions were observable and verifiable, then there would be no need for faith. That was religion.

  At some point, Ryan had stood and started pacing. Foster leaned against the wall, waiting. Ryan said, “If I get this right, then the link between science and religion, the gift of faith, I guess you would call it, is that the uncertainty principle is to the physical world as the precept of faith is to the spiritual world.”

  Foster nodded, encouraging Ryan to continue.

  “And the technology assumes this symmetry.” Ryan stopped pacing. He looked at Foster. He had to do it, had to air out his doubts. “If there isn’t a spiritual side—no God, no soul, nothing spiritual—if it’s all physical and we’re just biochemical machines, then the precept of faith is just a way to hide some mistaken superstition.”

  “Hold it.” Foster jerked his head toward Ryan. “Of course it is a question of faith. Don’t you remember what I told you? Faith is important here.” It was the first time today that Foster had shown any sign that he might question whether Ryan was right for this position. But then his tone switched back. It was Foster again, his best friend, who said, “Come on, think about it. The Bible has to be consistent with science. Otherwise, Creation doesn’t make sense.”

  Ryan sat back on the stool, wishing he hadn’t shared his doubts. He scrambled for something to say and came up with “What about prayer?”

  It worked. Foster returned to his lecture. “In Matthew, it says that whatever you ask for in prayer with faith, you will receive. To maintain the precept of faith, prayers must be answered in ways that cannot be directly observed. If they were directly observable, they wouldn’t be in faith. Prayer is a spiritual act and so are God’s actions in response to prayer.”

  Ryan said, “And since spiritual actions affect the physical universe as virtual processes, they happen, they have an effect, but they can’t be directly observed.”

  “Yes. You rock!” Foster raised his hand for a high five. “It’s just another way of saying that God acts in mysterious ways.”

  Ryan raised his hand and Foster gave it a firm slap. But Ryan’s enthusiasm was slipping away. He couldn’t shake a lesson he’d learned a long time ago. His freshman physics professor at UMass had been very clear: the laws of thermodynamics limit the amount of energy that an engine can produce, and it is always well under 100 percent of the energy that goes in. He could picture Dr. Kofler in front of the chalkboard saying over and over, “There’s no free lunch, no perpetual motion machines. Energy can’t be created or destroyed; it can just change form. And all types of energy—heat, motion, even relativity’s mass-energy—can be traced back to this simple definition: energy is the ability to do work, force times distance.”

  Foster waited.

  Ryan felt the tension. He ran his tongue along his lips, put on his disarming smile, and said, “Do you have a product requirements document?”

  Foster slapped Ryan’s knee and walked across the room. He opened a drawer, dug around, and came back with a colorful brochure. He indicated a paragraph on the back that read, “Crea
tion Energy’s power generator is a matter-antimatter collider, operating on the cusp of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle that will replicate the conditions of Creation and allow spiritual energy to flow into the physical universe.”

  Ryan stared straight down, pretending to examine the brochure. Was it enough to think of this as an experiment? That the only way to know for sure was to try? Was he rationalizing his way into this or did he really believe it might work? If only Katarina were here to help him hash through it.

  Foster walked across the lab and motioned for Ryan to follow. “Here’s your power generator.” He indicated the huge steel structure at the end of the accelerator. “This is where the positrons and electrons annihilate into energy. Right now, it detects the reaction and measures the energy released. It’s called a calorimeter.” He pointed at the rack of computers. “Once we implement your soul algorithm, we’ll use that energy to power a generator.”

  Ryan walked around the calorimeter, touching cables and connectors. As he circled around he saw the control center, the graphs, the monitors, the waterfall of cables, and the technicians at their workstations. He could feel the data being acquired. “You’re creating energy now?”

  “Yes, but it takes quite a bit more energy to create the reaction than comes out.” He paused. “First, we have to break even. At breakeven, the amount of energy that’s generated is the same as the amount consumed. Once we get over the breakeven hurdle, we’ll have a power generator.” He pointed at one of the monitors in the control center. It displayed two numbers: 138 kilowatt, the energy consumed by the collider, and 0.97 microwatt, the energy being produced.

  Without thinking about the consequences, Ryan said, “That’s a long way from generating anything.”