Collected Essays

by Rucker, Rudy

  If you model a magic door in physics, it often takes on the form of a so-called Einstein-Rosen bridge, which will look a little like one of a Christmas tree’s mirror balls—a little sphere that seems to have another world inside it. And if you push towards an E-R sphere, you get smaller, and you fit inside it, and then you’re in the alternate world.

  I like to think of a character with spherical portals like this swarming around him or her like multicolored fireflies. Wheeling about like a cloud of memories. Some of them may lead to alternate worlds, but some might lead into the past…or even into the afterworld.

  Alternate Worlds

  Contemporary physicists speak of worlds parallel to ours as “branes.” In some theories there’s only two branes or perhaps a few more, maybe seven.

  I like the idea of a limited number of parallel worlds, as I’ve always found the notion that all possible universes exist to be kind of inane and defeatist. If every possible world exists, then there’s no particular reason for anything. But if you actually pay attention to the world we’re in, you’ll notice that it’s very highly structured. It’s hard to be sure, but reality seems shot through with interesting coincidences—what C. G. Jung called synchronicities. To me, it feels as if our universe is as least as well crafted as an extremely good novel.

  Who wrote the novel we live in? In Mathematicians in Love, I took up this question, and had the divine author be a large jellyfish living in a lagoon in a parallel brane. The jellyfish turns in a fresh draft of our universe every Friday, and each draft is better than the one before.

  An idea I haven’t explored very much is that our universe might in some way self-organize itself—like a pattern of ice-crystals forming upon our spacetime brane as metatime elapses.

  A particularly virulent version of the all-possible-universes mind-virus is the notion that our time is continually branching. The physicist Hugh Everett showed that this notion is consistent in his famous papers on “The Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.”

  Last year I read Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, in which time has a branching quality, and the characters have an ability to sniff out the best universe for them to be moving forward into. It’s a good read, but there’s to be something fundamentally incoherent about the SFictional notion of picking an optimal world from many equally real possible worlds.

  My sense is that if time really branches, then you wholeheartedly go into each branch; you’re conscious in each of them, and there’s no single “lit-up by the searchlight of the mind” branch that zigzags up through the time-tree to limn the path that you “really” take. The whole tree is lit. You really and truly think you’re in each branch that has a version of you.

  Turning, however, from logic to emotion, I do have an appreciation and a longing for the heroic concept that I really am selecting a best possible path. I mean, that’s how a human life is lived. You consider the outcomes of possible actions, and you direct your actions so as to realize the more favorable results.

  We have an emotional, experiential sense that the bad, unchosen paths are in fact shriveling away to the left and the right. There’s a sense of this in Phil Dick’s vintage precog story, “The Golden Man.” I’d like to see a story in which the unchosen paths really are withering away. Suppose, for instance, suppose that my branch is not quite a pure jagged line. It does very commonly grow a stub out a few seconds past a given branch point, then back up and go into the proper branch. There’s a continuous line of time but it sometimes loops back a bit and then starts forward on a new tack.

  The backups are very common, in fact they’re all but ubiquitous. Most people don’t notice this, because when time backs up, events run backwards and memories get erased. But our hero or heroine does learn to notice.

  The Subdimensions

  For too long we’ve let the quantum mechanics tell us that nothing smaller than the Planck length. Let’s view this tiny size scale as a membrane, a frontier, but not a wall. Some string theorists speculate that the subdimensional world below the Planck length is a kind of mirror version of ours. Other physicists have recently suggested that, at the microscale, space has a higher-dimensional thickness.

  Suppose we can delve into space and get down below the Planck length to enter the land of—the subdimensions. I think pulp writers used that word in the 1940s. Recently I’ve taken to using it a lot myself.

  One of the tricks of SF writing is to keep switching to newer buzzwords for your magical mysteries. In the 1940s they were content with talking about radio and radiation. And then it was curved space and black holes. Then came cybernetics and quantum mechanics. And then quarks and string theory. These days I’m liking bosons and the subdimensions.

  Aliens can visit us from the subdimensions, so there’s no need for those tiresome star ships. Just focus on a speck of dust and get into it.

  Recently a news-media-controlled man asked me if I was planning to write an SF story about the recent Louisiana oil spill. I wouldn’t exactly want to write about that. But it would be nice to do a happy story in which we discover an incredible new energy source.

  This has, of course, been done before. But I like the idea of getting our energy from—the subdimensions. And, as a transreal kicker, because we pump out too much energy, space starts to, like, shrivel and collapse. We turn as wrinkled as leaky balloons.

  Infinity and Beyond

  I’ve always like to think about a world that’s an endless flat plane, a place where you can walk (or fly your electric glider) forever in a straight line and never come back to where you started. This is, after all, the underlying dream of a long road trip. Just keep going and you’ll encounter—the cockroach men! The empire of the two-headed women!

  Larry Niven’s Ringworld has some of this quality of being an incredibly large place where you can drive around. And I’ve been told that Charles Stross’s “Missile Gap,” explores a very large world as well.

  But infinite would be better. What if our world were suddenly to become infinite over night. There’s a rumble like from an earthquake and, wow, our little planet will have unrolled, ready for you to start out on the ultimate On the Road adventure and, oh my God, Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady are parked right outside your house!

  I got a Ph. D. in mathematics, and my thesis topic was set theory, the science of transfinite numbers. I studied infinities bigger than infinities—big boys like alef-one and alef-seven.

  Historically, physicists eventually find a physical application for just about every sufficiently batshit idea that pure mathematicians dream up. To pave the way, we need SF about transfinite numbers in the large (as in space being larger than infinity) and in the small (as in matter being more than infinitely divisible).

  I wrote a story along these lines called “Jack and the Aktuals, or, Physical Applications of Transfinite Set Theory.” You can find it online at Tor.com. But there’s plenty of room for more.

  Dreams and Memories

  I think there’s still a lot of interesting things to be done with dreams. Waking up inside them? Finding out that they’re really happening in a higher dimension?

  I quite recently wrote a story with Bruce Sterling which is about some SF-writer types whose job is crafting dreams to sell to other people. And this isn’t a new theme.

  In the mental front, we might also consider viewing memories as in some sense real. Maybe memory is a form of time-travel, and you really can flip back into the past or, more oddly, bring people from your past into your present.

  I’ve never gotten it together to writ a full time-travel novel, I haven’t been able to see a way to make it new. And getting around the paradoxes in a fresh way is tricky. Maybe a guy develops 4D consciousness so that he’s present at each instant of his life. And then his long world-snake of a time body starts to writhe…

  Higher Realities

  I’ve always thought there should be more SF that speculates about what happens to people after they die. This can shade into fantasy, of cours
e, but giving it an SF slant would be interesting. Certainly it’s nice to speculate that there’s some kind of afterworld…rather than nothing.

  I’ve written two novels about the afterworld, my early White Light (which is also about a transfinite world) and my recent Jim and the Flims, which hasn’t yet appeared. My personal motivation for returning to the afterworld theme is that, as I get older, death is becoming increasingly real to me. It’s easy to believe that death is a lights-out situation. But it’s comforting to write an SF novel in which things work out differently.

  If we develop a SFictional notion of an afterworld, then we’re also free to write about ghosts. Perhaps people might develop some new augmented senses. What if you could “see” radio-waves, electrical charges, neutrinos, Higgs bosons, or neutrinos? Maybe these senses would let you see specters.

  Not that the specters necessarily have to be the ghosts of dead people. I’ve often imagined that our world is in fact replete with alien beings whom, for whatever reason, we’re ordinarily unable to perceive. Those flashes of light you see out of the corner of your eye sometimes—maybe those are alien beings.

  Thinking along these lines leads to notions of higher realities. It would be nice to see some stories about levels at which archetypes are real. It would be nice to visit God’s art studio.

  Why?

  Why are we here? What’s it all for? What’s the meaning of life? Why does anything exist at all? Why is there something instead of nothing? I await your answers.

  * * *

  Note on “New Futures in SF”

  Written June, 2010.

  Published on Rudy's Blog with illustrations, June 30, 2010.

  These were my notes for a talk I gave at Westercon in Pasadena, CA, July 4, 2010. I was thinking in terms of amassing some ideas that I might myself use in future novels or stories.

  Part 5: THE PHILOSOPHY OF COMPUTATION

  * * *

  A Brief History of Computers

  Calculating Devices

  One of the simplest kinds of computations is adding numbers. There are two ancient technologies used for this: the abacus and the counting board.

  In the familiar abacus, you have columns of beads corresponding to separate powers of ten—though often abacuses are designed with each column of beads broken into two parts, a lower part of five “unit” beads and an upper part with one or two “fives” beads that stand for five of the “unit” beads.

  A counting board is a more primitive idea; here instead of having beads on wires, you have loose tokens that can be placed into columns standing for successive powers of ten. Whenever you build up more than ten counters in one column, you can remove the counters from that column and perform a “carry” operation by adding a counter to the next higher column. Often counting boards would have successive rows to stand for different quantities, in the style of a ledger-book, and sometimes the alternating rows and columns would be marked in different colors like a checkerboard. This is the origin of the British word “Exchequer” for their (rough) equivalent of the U. S. Treasury.

  One problem in using an abacus or a counting board is that the answer is ruined if you forget to do one of the carry operations. The beginnings of a solution were provided by an odometer described by Heron of Alexandria in Roman times. Just like today, Heron’s odometer was a device to measure how far a vehicle such as a chariot had rolled. The idea was to have a series of linked gears, where a low-ranking gear would have to turn all the way around before moving the next higher-ranking gear one notch.

  In 1644, the great French philosopher-mathematician Blaise Pascal used the idea of the odometer gear-train to create a hand-held mechanical adding machine which he proudly named the Pascaline. Instead of only turning the lowest-ranking gear one notch at a time, like in an odometer, users of the Pascaline would use a stylus to turn each of eight wheels by an appropriate amount to represent the digits of a number to be added into the result. In the 1950s, in the days before pocket calculators, it was common to see cheap plastic Pascaline-like devices for sale in gift-shops.

  Numerous variations on the Pascaline arose. One of the harder problems was to create a machine which could multiply. The philosopher Leibniz attempted one such device in 1673, but it didn’t work completely reliably. It also had the flaw that the user couldn’t just put in the numbers, turn a crank and get an answer; instead the user had to carry out several intermediate steps.

  Babbage’s Difference Engine

  The high point of gear-based calculation came with the work of Charles Babbage and his followers in the mid 1800s. This was the height of the steam age—of locomotives and spinning jennies. So why not a machine to crank out calculations just as a power-loom weaves cloth? The ideal application for wholesale, repetitive calculations is the generation of mathematical tables, such as tables of logarithms and of trigonometric functions. The science of the 1800s made extensive use of such tables, and of other kinds of tables as well, for instance astronomical tables giving the computed positions of celestial bodies at various times, and life-insurance tables giving the expected earnings or annuities of people of various ages.

  Babbage hit on the idea of building a machine out of gears which could calculate and print mathematical tables. Instead of allowing errors to slip in by passing a written result to a typesetter, why not let the calculating machine set the type itself? It was a most appropriate idea for Industrial Revolution Britain.

  Babbage called his first proposed computing device a Difference Engine. Far from being a general-purpose computer, a difference engine was a very specialized clockwork device designed to use the so-called “method of differences” in order to generate the values of polynomial functions by using nested additions.

  [In general, a Babbage machine that handles N differences can tabulate the values of Nth degree polynomials. Thus two differences suffice for quadratic functions such as 3.9 x2 + 0.7 x - 1.1, three difference suffice for the cubic functions involving x3, and so on. Trigonometric and logarithmic functions can be accurately approximated by polynomials of a high enough degree.]

  Babbage completed a small model of his proposed Difference Engine. The model could handle three differences and numbers of six figures. In 1822, he convinced the Chancellor of the Exchequer to give him 1,500 pounds towards the development of a Difference Engine that would work to twenty decimal places and sixth order differences.

  [Unless a finitely long decimal number happens to represent a simple fraction, its very last decimal place is always a source of inaccuracy—due to the fact that the endless digits beyond the last place are being ignored. As you add and multiply these numbers, the last-place errors work their way to the left at a rate of about one place per operation. Babbage wanted to carry out about six steps of computation with each of his numbers, and he wanted twelve of the digits to be of perfect accuracy. So to be safe he planned to use twenty digits. Even if the last six digits became corrupted by a six-step calculation, the first fourteen would still be good, and the first twelve would be, as Babbage might have said, impeccable.]

  As it turned out, Babbage was an early example of a type of individual not uncommon in the computer field—a vaporware engineer, that is, a compulsive tinkerer who never finishes anything. Babbage’s draftsmen, toolmakers, and workmen were unable to finish any substantial part of the Difference Engine because Babbage kept having new ideas and changing the plans. Over the ten years following his initial grant, he spent 17,000 pounds of the government’s money and a comparable amount of his own. Finally the government cut off support, and Babbage’s workmen quit.

  A detail of Scheutz’s Difference Engine.

  Though Babbage complained a lot about the limits of the gear-making technology of his time, but there was in fact no real practical barrier to completing a functioning Difference Engine. Inspired by Babbage, the Swedish publisher and inventor Georg Scheutz did eventually complete and sell two working Difference Engines which handled fifteen digits and four orders of differences
. Rather than being envious, the big-hearted Babbage encouraged Scheutz and helped him sell his first machine to an astronomical observatory in Albany, New York.

  Writing in 1859, the American astronomer Benjamin A. Gould reported on the first real computation carried out by the first Difference Engine, the first extensive computation by a machine:

  The strictly algebraic problems for feeding the machine made quite as heavy demands upon time, and thought, and perseverance, as did the problem of regulating its mechanical action; but soon all was in operation and…the True Anomaly of Mars was computed and stereotyped [printed on paper-maché molds] for intervals of a tenth of day throughout the cycle; and a sufficient number of the plates electrotyped, to enable me to be confident that all the difficulties were surmounted. Since that time the Eccentric Anomaly of Mars and the logarithm of is Radius-Vector have been computed…making a series of tables upon which the reputation of the engine may well be rested. [Uta C. Merzbach, Georg Scheutz and the First Printing Calculator, (Smithsonian Institution Press).]

  This sounds like nobly pure science indeed. The Eccentric Anomaly of Mars! All right! Scheutz’s second Difference Engine was used to compute something more commercial: William Farr’s English Life Tables, a book which used information about 6.5 million deaths to show life-insurance annuities, broken down for single and married people according to age.

  The Analytical Engine

  One reason that Babbage never finished his Difference Engine was that he was distracted by dreams of an even more fabulous piece of vaporware, a machine he called the Analytical Engine.

  Babbage’s description of the Analytical Engine is in fact the very first outline for a programmable computer, a machine that would be, in principal, capable of carrying out any kind of computation at all. The Analytical Engine was to have a “mill” that carried out nested additions like the Difference Engine, and was also to have a “store” which would provide a kind of scratch paper: short-term memory for temporary variables used by the calculation. The novel idea was that the actions of the mill were to be controlled by a user-supplied program. In what form did Babbage plan to feed programs to the Analytical Engine? With punch cards!