Dancing With Myself

by Charles Sheffield

  Implausible? Not if we look at the past. Today’s small portables have the computer power of a large mainframe of 1958 vintage, and they are infinitely easier to use. The rate of increase of computer speed shows no signs of slowing, and arithmetic calculations are only the beginning. Computer hardware is as dumb as ever, but software gets smarter all the time. We are entering the age of expert systems, where human experience is captured in complex programs and used as a starting point for efficient computer algorithms.

  The list of applications grows all the time, everything from messy algebraic manipulations to real-time flight simulators to crop forecasting to department store management. In addition to counting, today’s computers can do algebra and complex logic far faster and more accurately than humans. A few years ago, a computer was used to make an algebraic check of the Delaunay theory of the motion of the moon, a vast mass of complicated formulae that took the French astronomer C. E. Delaunay over twenty years to develop. Most people find it amazing that his 1,800 pages of working, contained in two huge volumes published in 1860 and 1867, are correct except for a couple of insignificant errors. But should we be more amazed by this, or by the fact that today’s computers can perform a complete check of the algebra in a few hours? Or that ten years from now, the same calculations will take minutes or maybe seconds?

  Time to stop.

  We have come a long way from the simple 1,2,3…counting that we learn before we can read. How far can computers go, in performing functions that only a few decades ago were considered solely the prerogative of humans?

  A long way. I don’t want to get into the old argument about whether or not a computer can ever think, particularly when there is so much evidence that people can’t. But let me summarize my own opinions, by suggesting that a thousand years from now there will (finally) be a new and wholly satisfactory definition of humankind:

  “Man is the ideal computer I/O unit.”

  ——————————————————————————————————

  story: a braver thing

  The palace banquet is predictably dull, but while the formal speeches roll on with their obligatory nods to the memory of Alfred Nobel and his famous bequest, it is not considered good manners to leave or to chat with one’s neighbors. I have the time and opportunity to think about yesterday; and, at last, to decide on the speech that I will give tomorrow.

  A Nobel Prize in physics means different things to different people. If it is awarded late in life, it is often viewed by the recipient as the capstone on a career of accomplishment. Awarded early (Lawrence Bragg was a Nobel Laureate at twenty-five) it often defines the winner’s future; an early Prize may also announce to the world at large the arrival of a new titan of science (Paul Dirac was a Nobel Laureate at thirty-one).

  To read the names of the Nobel Prize winners in physics is almost to recapitulate the history of twentieth-century physics, so much so that the choice of winners often seems self-evident. No one can imagine a list without Planck, the Curies, Einstein, Bohr, Schrödinger, Dirac, Fermi, Yukawa, Bardeen, Feynman, Weinberg, or the several Wilson’s (though Rutherford is, bizarrely, missing from the Physics roster, having been awarded his Nobel Prize in Chemistry).

  And yet the decision-making process is far from simple. A Nobel Prize is awarded not for a lifetime’s work, but explicitly for a particular achievement. It is given only to living persons, and as Alfred Nobel specified in his will, the prize goes to “the person who shall have made the most important discovery or invention within the field of physics.”

  It is those constraints that make the task of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences so difficult. Consider these questions:

  What should one do when an individual is regarded by his peers as one of the leading intellectual forces of his generation, but no single accomplishment offers the clear basis for an award? John Archibald Wheeler is not a Nobel Laureate; yet he is a “physicist’s physicist,” a man who has been a creative force in half a dozen different fields.

  How does one weight a candidate’s age? In principle, not at all. It is not a variable for consideration; but in practice every committee member knows when time is running out for older candidates, while the young competition will have opportunities for many years to come.

  How soon after a theory or discovery is it appropriate to make an award? Certainly, one should wait long enough to be sure that the accomplishment is “most important,” as Nobel’s will stipulates; but if one waits too long, the opportunity may vanish with the candidate. Max Born was seventy-two years old when he received the Nobel Prize in 1954—for work done almost thirty years earlier on the probabilistic interpretation of the quantum mechanical wave function. Had George Gamow lived as long as Born, surely he would have shared with Penzias and Wilson the 1978 prize, for the discovery of the cosmic background radiation. Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1921, at the age of forty-two. But it cited his work on the photoelectric effect, rather than the theory of relativity, which was still considered open to question. And if his life had been no longer than that of Henry Moseley or Heinrich Hertz, Einstein would have died unhonored by the Nobel Committee.

  So much for logical choices. I conclude that the Nobel rules allow blind Atropos to play no less a part than Athene in the award process.

  My musings can afford to be quite detached. I know how the voting must have gone in my own case, since although the work for which my award is now being given was published only four years ago, already it has stimulated an unprecedented flood of other papers. Scores more are appearing every week, in every language. The popular press might seem oblivious to the fundamental new view of nature implied by the theory associated with my name, but they are very aware of its monstrous practical potential. A small test unit in orbit around Neptune is already returning data, and in the tabloids I have been dubbed Giles “Starman” Turnbull. To quote The New York Times: “The situation is unprecedented in modern physics. Not even the madcap run from the 1986 work of Muller and Bednorz to today’s room-temperature superconductors can compete with the rapid acceptance of Giles Turnbull’s theories, and the stampede to apply them. The story is scarcely begun, but already we can say this, with confidence: Professor Turnbull has given us the stars.”

  The world desperately needs heroes. Today, it seems, I am a hero. Tomorrow? We shall see.

  In a taped television interview last week, I was asked how long my ideas had been gestating before I wrote out the first version of the Turnbull Concession theory. And can you recall a moment or an event, asked the reporter, which you would pinpoint as seminal?

  My answer must have been too vague to be satisfactory, since it did not appear in the final television clip. But in fact I could have provided a very precise location in spacetime, at the start of the road that led me to Stockholm, to this dinner, and to my first (and, I will guarantee, my last) meeting with Swedish royalty.

  Eighteen years ago, it began. In late June, I was playing in a public park two miles from my home when I found a leather satchel sitting underneath a bench. It was nine o’clock at night, and nearly dark. I took the satchel home with me.

  My father’s ideas of honesty and proper behavior were and are precise to a fault. He would allow me to examine the satchel long enough to determine its owner, but not enough to explore the contents. Thus it was, sitting in the kitchen of our semi-detached council house, that I first encountered the name of Arthur Sandford Shaw, penned in careful red ink on the soft beige leather interior of the satchel. Below his name was an address on the other side of town, as far from the park as we were but in the opposite direction.

  Should we telephone Arthur Sandford Shaw’s house, tell him that we had his satchel, and advise him where he could collect it?

  No, said my father gruffly. Tomorrow is Saturday. You cycle over in the morning and return it.

  To a fifteen-year-old, even one w
ithout specific plans, a Saturday morning in June is precious. I hated my father then, for his unswerving, blinkered attitude, as I hated him for the next seventeen years. Only recently have I realized that “hate” is a word with a thousand meanings.

  I rode over the next morning. Twice I had to stop and ask my way. The Shaw house was in the Garden Village part of the town, an area that I seldom visited. The weather was preposterously hot, and at my father’s insistence I was wearing a jacket and tie. By the time that I dismounted in front of the yellow brick house with its steep red-tile roof and diamond glazed windows, sweat was trickling down my face and neck. I leaned my bike against a privet hedge that was studded with sweet-smelling and tiny white flowers, lifted the satchel out of my saddle-bag, and rubbed my sleeve across my forehead.

  I peered through the double gates. They led to an oval driveway, enclosing a bed of well-kept annuals.

  I saw pansies, love-in-a-mist, delphiniums, phlox, and snapdragons. I know their names now, but of course I did not know them then.

  And if you ask me, do I truly remember this so clearly, I must say, of course I do; and will, until my last goodnight. I have that sort of memory. Lev Landau once said, “I am not a genius. Einstein and Bohr are geniuses. But I am very talented.” To my mind, Landau (1962 Nobel Laureate, and the premier Soviet physicist of his generation) was certainly a genius. But I will echo him, and say that while I am not a genius, I am certainly very talented. My memory in particular has always been unusually precise and complete.

  The sides of the drive curved symmetrically around to meet at a brown-and-white painted front door. I followed the edge of the gravel as far as the front step, and there I hesitated.

  For my age, I was not lacking in self-confidence. I had surveyed the students in my school, and seen nothing there to produce discomfort. It was clear to me that I was mentally far superior to all of them, and the uneasy attitude of my teachers was evidence—to me, at any rate—that they agreed with my assessment.

  But this place overwhelmed me. And not just with the size of the house, though that was six times as big as the one that I lived in. I had seen other big houses; far more disconcerting were the trained climbing roses and espaliered fruit trees, the weed-free lawn, the bird-feeders, and the height, texture and improbable but right color balance within the flower beds. The garden was so carefully structured that it seemed a logical extension of the building at its center. For the first time, I realized that a garden could comprise more than a hodge-podge of grass and straggly flowers.

  So I hesitated. And before I could summon my resolve and lift the brass knocker, the door opened.

  A woman stood there. At five-feet five, she matched my height exactly. She smiled at me, eye to eye.

  Did I say that the road to Stockholm began when I found the satchel? I was wrong. It began with that smile.

  “Yes? Can I help you?”

  The voice was one that I still thought of as “posh,” high-pitched and musical, with clear vowels. The woman was smiling again, straight white teeth and a broad mouth in a high-cheekboned face framed by curly, ash-blond hair. I can see that face before me now, and I know intellectually that she was thirty-five years old. But on that day I could not guess her age to within fifteen years. She could have been twenty, or thirty, or fifty, and it would have made no difference. She was wearing a pale-blue blouse with full sleeves, secured at the top with a mother-of-pearl brooch and tucked into a gray wool skirt that descended to mid-calf. On her feet she wore low-heeled tan shoes, and no stockings.

  I found my voice.

  “I’ve brought this back.” I held out the satchel, my defense against witchcraft.

  “So I see.” She took it from me. “Drat that boy, I doubt it he even knows he lost it. I’m Marion Shaw. Come in.”

  It was an order. I closed the door behind me and found myself following her along a hall that passed another open door on the left. As we approached, a piano started playing rapid staccato triplets, and I saw a red-haired girl crouched over the keyboard of a baby grand.

  My guide paused and stuck her head in for a moment. “Not so fast, Meg. You’ll never keep up that pace for the whole song.” And then to me, as we walked on, “Poor old Schubert. Impatience is right, it’s what he’d feel if he heard that. Do you play?”

  “We don’t have a piano.”

  “Mm. I sometimes wonder why we do.”

  We had reached an airy room that faced the back garden of the house. My guide went in before me, peered behind the door, and clucked in annoyance.

  “Arthur’s gone again. Well, he can’t be far. I know for a fact that he was here five minutes ago.” She turned to me. “Make yourself at home, Giles. I’ll find him.”

  Giles. I have been terribly self-conscious about my first name since I was nine years old. By the time that I was twenty I had learned how to use it to my advantage, to suggest a lineage that I never had. But at fifteen it was the bane of my life. In a class full of Tom’s and Ron’s and Brian’s and Bill’s, it did not fit. I cursed my fate, to be stuck with a “funny” name, just because one of my long-dead uncles had suffered with it.

  But there was stronger witchcraft at work here. I had arrived unheralded on her doorstep.

  “How do you know my name?”

  That earned another smile. “From your father. He called me early this morning, to make sure someone would be home. He didn’t want you to bike all this way for nothing.”

  She went out, and left me in the room of my dreams.

  It was about twelve feet square, with an uncarpeted floor of polished hardwood. All across the far wall was a window that began at waist height, ran to the ceiling, and looked south to a vegetable garden. The window sill was a long work bench, two feet deep, and on it stood a dozen projects that I could identify. In the center was a compound microscope, with slides scattered all around. I found tiny objects on them as various as a fly’s leg, a single strand of hair, and two or three iron filings. The mess on the left-hand side of the bench was a half-ground telescope lens, covered with its layer of hardened pitch and with the grinding surface sitting next to it. The right side, just as disorderly, was a partially assembled model airplane, radio-controlled and with a two cc diesel engine. Next to that stood an electronic balance, designed to weigh anything from a milligram to a couple of kilos, and on the other side was a blood-type testing kit. The only discordant note to my squeamish taste was a dead puppy, carefully dissected, laid out, and pinned organ by organ on a two-foot square of thick hard-board. But that hint of a possible future was overwhelmed by the most important thing of all: everywhere, in among the experiments and on the floor and by the two free-standing aquariums and next to the flat plastic box behind the door with its half-inch of water and its four black-backed, fawn-bellied newts, there were books.

  Books and books and books. The other three walls of the room were shelved and loaded from floor to ceiling, and the volumes that scattered the work bench were no more than a small sample that had been taken out and not replaced. I had never seen so many hard-cover books outside a public library or the town’s one and only technical bookstore.

  When Marion Shaw returned with Arthur Sandford Shaw in tow I was standing in the middle of the room like Buridan’s Ass, unable to decide what I wanted to look at the most. I was in no position to see my own eyes, but if I had been able to do so I have no doubt that the pupils would have been twice their normal size. I was suffering from sensory overload, first from the house and garden, then from Marion Shaw, and finally from that paradise of a study. Thus my initial impressions of someone whose life so powerfully influenced and finally directed my own are not as clear in my mind as they ought to be. I also honestly believe that I never did see Arthur clearly, if his mother were in the room.

  Some things I can be sure of. Arthur Shaw made his height early, and although I eventually grew to within an inch of him, at our first mee
ting he towered over me by seven or eight inches. His coordination had not kept pace with his growth, and he had a gawky and awkward manner of moving that would never completely disappear. I know also that he was holding in his right hand a live frog that he had brought in from the garden, because he had to pop that in an aquarium before he could, at his mother’s insistence, shake hands with me.

  For the rest, his expression was surely the half-amused, half-bemused smile that seldom left his face. His hair, neatly enough cut, never looked it. Some stray spike on top always managed to elude brush and comb, and his habit of running his hands up past his temples swept his hair untidily off his forehead.

  “I’m pleased to meet you,” he said. “Thank you for bringing it back.”

  He was, I think, neither pleased nor displeased to meet me. It was nice to have his satchel back (as Marion Shaw had predicted, he did not know he had left it behind in the park), but the thought of what might have happened had he lost it, with its cargo of schoolbooks, did not disturb him as it would have disturbed me.

  His mother had been following my eyes.

  “Why don’t you show Giles your things,” she said. “I’ll bet that he’s interested in science, too.”

  It was an implied question. I nodded.

  “And why don’t I call your mother,” she said, “and see if it’s all right for you to stay to lunch?”

  “My mother’s dead.” I wanted to stay to lunch, desperately. “And my dad will be at work ’til late.”

  She raised her eyebrows, but all she said was, “So that’s settled, then.” She held out her hand. “Let me take your jacket, you don’t need that while you’re indoors.”

  Mrs. Shaw left to organize lunch. We played, though Arthur Shaw and I would both have been outraged to hear such a verb applied to our efforts. We were engaging in serious experiments of chemistry and physics, and reviewing the notebooks in which he recorded all his earlier results. Even in our first meeting he struck me as a bit strange, but that slight negative was swamped by a dozen positive reactions. The orbit in which I had traveled all my life contained no one whose interests in any way resembled my own. It was doubly shocking to meet a person who was as interested in science as I was, and who had on the shelves of his own study more reference sources than I dreamed existed.