Ambiguity Machines

by Vandana Singh

  At last she gathered the torn cards and put them in the recycling, and washed her face. Three of her sticky notes had fallen off the white wall. She picked them up and stuck them back on.

  Alien Manipulations in an Unfinished Universe: an Anti-Occam’s Razor Hypothesis

  The neutrino was predicted by Wolfgang Pauli in 1930. It took until 1956 to discover that it actually existed.

  One of the great predictions of particle physics, from considerations of symmetry, was the Omega particle. Predicted in 1962, discovered in 1964.

  In an effort to distract herself, Sujata made some tea, set out a plate of cookies, and began to complete the list. Pink sticky notes on the prediction and discovery of the tau neutrino, the top and bottom quarks, dark matter, the Higgs boson.

  When Sujata was in graduate school, she had founded the Anti-Occam’s Razor Society. Membership varied between one and four. Occam’s Razor, a guiding principle of science, posited that the simplest idea that explained a phenomenon was most likely to be correct. She had always found this a dull notion, a surrendering of the imagination to the tyranny of the mundane. She liked to invent complicated explanations for straightforward phenomena, a kind of intellectual Rube-Goldbergism, just to thumb her nose at William of Occam. It was a joke, of course.

  Over the years, as an extension of the long joke of ideas, she’d come up with the Alien Manipulation hypothesis. This is how she had first explained it to Veenu:

  The universe is a massive quantum-mechanical relativistic Rube Goldberg machine in continual need of adjustment by a bunch of super-intelligent aliens. Suppose an intelligent species comes up with a theory, and a prediction. The aliens then adjust the machine in order to make the prediction come true. One reason why interstellar civilizations cannot meet is because contradictory predictions must be avoided. There is bedrock reality—you know, Pythagoras’ theorem, gravity, not falling through floors. But beyond bedrock reality there are multiple ways to explain the universe, and the duplicitous alien manipulators ensure that we are taken in by our own illusions. But—if everything we predicted was exactly right, we would become suspicious, or worse, even more arrogant than we are now. So they throw in the occasional surprise result—accelerating expansion of the universe, stars at the edges of galaxies moving faster than visible matter would entail.

  They had laughed about it, she and Veenu. That the universe is an illusion had been suspected by many a mystic in many a tradition, but to construct an argument based on logic and physics was truly fun. Every once in a while Sujata would get a feeling of a feather (or antenna) being drawn slowly down her spine, and she would shiver. It was as though the alien overlords of the universe were warning her not to think (outside the box) too much. Because however indulgent these entities might be toward the intellectual inventions of human beings, the one idea they would not want people to take too seriously was this: that the whole thing was a goddamned magic show; that all laws were ad hoc, imperfect, made-up, inelegant. If the Standard Model was so messy that even particle physicists called it the sub-standard model, then better to let people believe that it was only a part of a greater, more elegant truth, instead of accepting that reality itself was a mess.

  Veenu: How would you know that the universe is one giant theater performance, with your hypothetical aliens running the show? I mean, if it is all show, how would you get to go backstage?

  Sujata (after a week): I think you’d have to bump up against something that was irrefutably there—a phenomenon or an artifact or a prop—that didn’t fit anywhere on stage. Something that couldn’t be explained in any schema.

  Veenu: So you mean you’d have to catch the aliens napping?

  Sujata: Yes. Yes, I know. Sounds unlikely.

  Veenu (accusingly): And you wouldn’t know whether your unexplained phenomenon was just a really hard problem you were up against, or whether it was something that violated all explanations of reality . . . I think your idea is full of shit.

  Sujata (unreasonably annoyed): Well, of course! Can’t you take a joke? Of course it’s full of shit!

  It was at that moment she realized she sort-of believed the shit. Despite all reason, all sensible feeling, it rang true, at least in a coarse-grained way. There were details to work out . . . So far, for each phenomenon in her life she had found a schema, a scaffolding in which things fit, made sense. When they didn’t, it usually meant that there were other schemas to be invented and elaborated. An essential element of science was the faith, after all, that the universe was comprehensible.

  Until the day Veenu walked away.

  Furiously she began to scribble a new series of sticky notes, in green:

  Hypotheses for Veenu’s Departure

  Schema One: I am a terrible person who did something wrong. I am so stupid that I don’t even know what it is I did wrong. Stupid, naïve, what’s the difference? (Unless she has amnesia, she can’t recall anything that could cause Veenu to leave.)

  Schema Two: There’s been some misunderstanding. (There’ve been misunderstandings before and they’ve always managed to work through them.)

  Schema Three: Veenu left because there was something urgent that needed doing, nothing to do with me. (An attractive idea: Veenu as a secret agent with some kind of covert agenda, but there are no supporting pieces of evidence—although if the agent was really secret, would there be?)

  Schema Four: Veenu is insane and irrational. (Veenu is one of the most clear-headed and rational people she knows.)

  Schema Five: Veenu is not what I thought she was; despite these years of knowing Veenu, I really don’t know Veenu. So I am blind as well as naïve and stupid.

  She stayed up that night coming up with seventeen more schemas, researching each, and coming up empty. The facts didn’t fit the hypotheses, although there were some facts that fit some, if only slightly. Of all of them, only Schema Five had a somewhat higher probability than the others.

  To know something, or someone, is to be able to see them without the cloud of preconceived notions, prejudices, and paradigms that we carry around with us. But is it even possible to lose that cloud? Everyone goes about with such a cloud, and inevitably their world-view is distorted, refracted, diffracted. It’s as inevitable as an electron carrying around with it its cloak of virtual particles. Nothing in the frigging universe is naked.

  The interesting thing was this: Schema Five was consistent with her half-in-jest notion that the universe was a sham controlled by crazed aliens. As the dawn light poured in through the kitchen window, she remembered another conversation she had once had with Veenu.

  Veenu: So tell me more about your idea.

  Sujata: Well, there are the deadjims.

  Veenu: The what?

  Sujata: It’s an old Star Trek joke . . . did I tell you I used to watch Star Trek all through graduate school? Well, I made up the word from something to do with Star Trek, for the people who’ve figured it out.

  Veenu: Figured what out?

  Sujata: You know. That the universe is a sham run by aliens. They know there is no point trying to come up with grand unified theories of the physical universe. Or of human nature. The aliens did a shoddy job of putting together a foundation for the universe, and they take our ideas and improvise with them to do the finishing touches. Take the Higgs boson . . .

  Veenu: Never mind the Higgs boson. You already told me how it took so long for the aliens to construct the evidence for it. Tell me about the deadjims.

  Sujata: There’s this homeless guy who hangs around outside the grocery store, looking for a handout. Big, smelly guy with a salt-and-pepper beard. Used to be a brilliant physicist. All he’ll tell me is that it doesn’t mean anything to him anymore. There’s this look in his eyes, like he’s seeing through everything. You know, from the parking lots and the walls to the scripted conversations between people—he sees what’s under it, what’s real. And it’s not a grand unified theory he sees, it’s a mess.

  Veenu: So he’s a deadjim?


  Sujata: He’s a deadjim.

  Veenu: Is there no other choice? Confronted with your hypothesis a person could become a nihilist, an existentialist, even a bodhisattva!

  Sujata (annoyed): Not necessarily. There are different reasons why people become nihilists or bodhisattvas. A deadjim is a person who’s seen through the façade, the surface illusions . . . oh, I see your point. Damn!

  Veenu (consolingly): Still, it’s a damned cool idea. The aliens-at-the-controls is nothing new, but the deadjims! Nice touch.

  Sujata (growling): Stop mocking me.

  Veenu (thoughtfully): Tell me something else, though. If I dream up an idea, something totally crazy, like “the distant stars are made of cheese,” does that mean the aliens will have to scramble to make it so?

  Sujata: It doesn’t work like that! That would be stupid. See, ideas have to have weight. Weight comes from internal consistency, and how much in line the idea is with the bedrock, the foundation the aliens have already laid. Weight also comes from how long the idea has lain around, and how many people believe it.

  Veenu: You really believe this, don’t you? So why do you keep publishing papers in physics?

  Sujata: One, we have to eat. Two, I don’t want the aliens to suspect that I’m on to them, do I? Plus it’s fun to have a role in the construction of the universe. Hey, don’t look at me like that! I don’t really believe this shit! I like making things up, in case you haven’t figured it out by now!

  Over the next few days Sujata went about her life doing what was expected of her, in a blind and oblivious fashion. She had to play the game for now. That’s what everyone else did, didn’t they? Step around each other in polite little circles, mouthing scripted lines, as though from a play. When the actor realizes it’s just a play, what can the actor do but continue to repeat her words? When there are no words she can come up with as a substitute?

  In the evenings she wrote furiously on sticky notes until she ran out of room on the white wall. She stuck some around her mother’s little altar, so that they formed colorful little haloes around the Buddha, the Nataraja, the garish Lakshmi, and Jesus.

  Sujata’s Cosmic Censorship Principle: All material objects are surrounded by clouds of ambiguity—which may be virtual particles or prejudices or paradigms. Nothing in the universe is naked.

  Sujata’s Cosmic Uncertainty Principle: The universe exists as a superposition of unformed possibilities for theorists to speculate about, and experimenters to discover. The alien technicians set things up so that the “discovery” causes a possibility or a combination thereof to become “real.”

  She submitted her paper on the Higgs boson (the straightforward one) without bothering to review it, and began work on “The Higgs Field Considered as a Metaphor for the Entanglement of Matter in Time.”

  Just as the Higgs field gives mass to matter through coupling with various particles to different degrees, so does an analogous field tangle us in linear time, like a leaf carried by a river.

  De-couple from that field, and you can wander outside of linear time. Aliens do not want you to do this because then you can see what they’ve been up to.

  The thought came to Sujata then that the people she called deadjims must be able to do such a thing, that if she was turning into a deadjim too, she should be able to walk off linear time and see what the aliens were up to, if they were really there.

  Sujata had been fourteen when she had first realized there was something strange about the universe. It happened when she began to notice that whenever she drew a graph, within a day or two she would see the shape of it in the real world: a city skyline, the planes of a face, the curving of a stair railing in a tall building. When she drew her first world-line, in her relativity class in high school, the road appeared before her for the first time. It took a few of these ghostly visitations for her to realize that the road was nothing but a world-line, her world-line, her path in life through space and time, made real, or as real as a vision could get. After that first time, the road appeared at random intervals, without warning. She had learned early in life that the universe was more than the notions of theorists and pundits.

  As she remembered this, a thought came to her. She had been chewing the end of her pen; she set it down on an untouched plate of fish tacos. She marched up to the white wall and glared at it, and demanded silently that the road appear. This had never worked before. Her head hurt; the sticky notes swam before her eyes. There was a shimmer and a crackle, and the smell of hot plastic and cinnamon. There, before her, was the road.

  ——

  This time she did walk up to the demarcation, the place where the road ended. At first the road seemed to make a half-hearted effort to maintain a distance between Sujata and the clean finish line, but her fury carried her forward until she was at the blank wall where the road stopped. She took a deep breath, tucked a stray tendril of hair behind her right ear, and walked through the wall.

  She found herself on the lawn outside her house. The neighborhood was simultaneously familiar and different. She could tell that everything around was a hastily put-together construct. She didn’t know how she could tell, because it looked the same. But some inner eye had opened within her. She had wandered backstage at last, and she could see, in a manner of speaking, the supports for the stage-sets, the gantries, the unpainted cardboard backs of the façade that made up reality. She walked around like a child, eyes round with wonder, and saw that her own life was nothing—all her theories and assumptions, her hypotheses about particles or people, were as intangible and meaningless as the cobwebs you brush away from your face when you enter a dark, abandoned room. Even meaning had no meaning. It was all a goddamned sham.

  The why of it bothered her, though. Why would the aliens take all this trouble to deceive? What was in it for them?

  The kid next door waved to her from his front porch. Bright little seven-year-old with a mop of copper-colored hair—she’d help him with mathematics problems sometimes. She could see him with her inner eye, the atoms and molecules ghost-like, great voids of emptiness between them, the forces and reactions clear in places, fuzzy in others, where the processes had not yet been determined or invented. He was a ghost, a hastily put-together construct, needing and awaiting constant tinkering. She stared at him, at the maple trees, whose branches nodded at her as though in agreement. She saw the door of her own house. How had she gotten outside? Oh yes, she had walked through the wall. That meant she was probably locked out, not that it mattered. The road had ended for her because world-lines were part of the illusion of pattern and order. Once you saw that, no need for the illusion. The world swam before her, unfinished and awkward and imperfect. So that is how the homeless man at the grocery store had seen it. She knew that if she looked into a mirror she would find in her eyes the same look. She was a deadjim, and it was funny and not funny at the same time. Veenu’s bizarre behavior had been the thing you could not explain away. Who, or what, was Veenu then?

  She caught herself. There she was, constructing another schema. It was an endless obsession. Humans were so desperate for pattern that they had to invent it, construct it, even where it did not exist. Were other animals like that? Other aliens on other worlds? She thought of the gulf of space and time, and the impossibility of two species meeting and understanding each other. Different schemas might simply tear the cosmic fabric apart, shoddily constructed as it was.

  She began to wander through the neighborhood. Although everything was as usual—the cars in the driveways, the shuttered windows, the guarded expressions on the faces of the few people she passed, the formulaic greetings, the sun beating down on the parking lot in front of the grocery store—she was suddenly frightened. “A nightmare,” she said to herself. “I’m in a nightmare, and I’ll wake up and have tea with Veenu and everything will be back to normal.” But it wasn’t. She passed the place near the store entrance where the homeless man always sat in a dilapidated heap, and as their eyes met, he seemed to solidify, to com
e into focus. A look of recognition passed between them that terrified her. She turned to go home.

  The kid was still there on the front porch of his house. He waved again. Something occurred to her. She went up to him in desperation. Looking at him deliberately made him clearer, more real. She said, “Peter, who else lives in my house?”

  Peter’s eyes went wide.

  “Nobody, just you,” he said. He smiled a little tentatively.

  “Why am I getting sympathy cards then?”

  “Because . . . your mother died.” He stared at her.

  She rubbed her hand across her face. She stumbled away to her house and sat heavily down on the front steps. She scratched absently at an itch on her left calf, where a mosquito had bitten her. She sensed its fat little body, replete with blood, its hum in her ear as it sailed away. For a moment she could see, through its compound eyes, the crazy, patchwork swaying world.

  There was a pad of sticky notes in her pocket. She had no pen. She plucked a blade of grass and began to write in invisible script.

  The universe does not need a bunch of control-freak aliens. The aliens are among us. The aliens are us.

  The universe is a giant quantum-mechanical relativistic Rube-Goldberg patchwork construct, knit by interactions of its constituents, changed and ever changing through these interactions.

  All we ever see are shadows cast on the wall of our limited understanding, and the shadows change depending on how the beast of reality mutates, and which way you shine the light.