Quipu

by Damien Broderick

  They’re conjectural, true,

  and orthogonal, too,

  so in cases like this, might is right.”

  In the numb air there is a minor burst of tittering. Joseph frowns.

  “Look here, friends, if that’s the best you can manage I’d better try again. I’ll tell you my limerick about black holes. I am not going to explain it, though.”

  “No, no, not that,” Wagner cries in pain and terror.

  Joseph grins. “I’ve changed my mind.”

  “Thank God.”

  “I will explain it.”

  Wagner’s theatrical agony cascades through the sillier members of the assembly. As always, Joseph is a sucker for this manipulation. Beaming, he leans into the microphone.

  “Black holes have very little to do with tachyons, except their outrageousness. Oh, and this—nothing can get out of a black hole…except very very fast tachyons. Okay. The key to this illuminating verse is that physics requires only three quantities, listed hereunder, to define any black hole completely. There’s no way of testing the hole interior to check on other quantities. It has, in brief, no hair. Here we go:

  “Black holes are astoundingly small.

  They’re not really there, after all.

  They’ve momentum and charge,

  and their size (rarely large),

  but no hair on their wee sterile ball.”

  This time the laughter is wonderfully rewarding, surfing through the large room, rebounding, filling Joseph’s hungry heart. He taps the table finally.

  “To return. We’ve listed some major physical and philosophical reasons for supposing that tachyons are just figments of the crazed mathematical imagination. That’s never stopped scientists, let alone out-of-work scientists like me. Particularly when there’s a chance of getting a snapshot of the End of Time.”

  Here it is. He has to explain his vision, his magic, his precious. He cannot convey it. All he tells in his encyclopedia entries are facts. Groping. Keys to their ears from Sunday supplements.

  “Think of the Big Bang. The moment when the universe gushed out of Nowhere, time started ticking, space began spreading out from zero. All that heat and light and pressure shone out into the new spacetime nowhere and cooled down and by now is spread everywhere, a black body hiss at two point seven degrees of temperature above Absolute Zero. You can hook up a radio telescope and aim it at that hiss in the sky and take a snapshot of the start of Everything.

  “Now look forward. Fifty, a hundred thousand million years. All of space and time has reversed its colossal explosive expansion. It’s crashing in toward its fate, which is to be crushed out of reality into the greatest of all Black Holes. The universe will scream with the violence. Some of that violent protest will be tachyonic, if there are tachyons. They’ll erupt backward through time, sleeting into our history, raging toward the First Cause. On their passage past our momentary blink, our fragile slice across the spacetime diagram, some of them will track through detectors set up by curious scientists. Those will be halted, leaving their fossil spore. Fossils of the implosion at the End of the Universe. Autopsy reports.”

  Joseph takes a staggering breath. He is in a mood close to religious exaltation. With a harsh effort he drags his tone back to a banter, a canter into all the wasted, weed-choked weeks and months of the early seventies.

  “Lots of the guys have tried to find them. Around the time I was looking in the bowels of my Superconducting Quantum Interferometry Device, or SQUID for short, a couple of fellows over in Adelaide Uni were checking the heavens for signs.”

  He touches a control, flips the slide carousel another jump. A diagram pours down the wall behind him, secondary and tertiary radiant cascades, clumps and knots of particles.

  “When very high energy cosmic rays strike the upper atmosphere,” he says, “they smash into atmospheric nuclei. In that small-scale catastrophe, ‘air showers’ of other elementary particles burst toward the ground. Most of these particles decay almost instantly to more stable states. Two Australian researchers, Roger Clay and Phil Crouch, thought there might be some tachyons there as well.”

  Another slide, speeding yellow luminal and sub-luminal bullets blazing at the earth, red road runners racing ahead of them.

  “Close to the speed of light, the air shower crashes twenty or so kilometers to the ground in under a fifteen-thousandth of a second. Since tachyons move faster than light, they’d get there appreciably more quickly. They don’t hang around scuffing their shoes like the other stuff.

  “So you leave your detector running an endless tape loop. A big shower stops the tape. If there’s a consistent pattern of hail spattering in ahead of the rain, maybe you have some tachyons. Clay and Crouch could discriminate the arrival of particles hitting the detector 100 millionths of a second prior to the main shower.”

  A photograph of the detector.

  “Did it work? Well, between February and August 1973, they detected 1307 high-energy showers. In 1176 of these, the apparatus recorded one or more particles in the appropriate energy range apparently arriving faster than light. These could have been stray bradyons having absolutely nothing in common with the air shower, but the guys ran some tests and decided that air shower ‘forerunners’ were quite distinctive.”

  He slips a 1974 copy of Nature under the epidiascope. There’s the paper, expanded on the screen. “Possible Observations of Tachyons Associated with Extensive Air Showers.” Nothing in science to beat presentation of the evidence, and this photograph is Joseph’s evidence that he’s not a raving unhinged obsessional loony.

  “They were wrong.” He makes them a droll, gloomy face. “Bad luck. Subsequent tests showed that this evidence was a glitch, just an experimental artefact. Seems incredible, but then most claims of breakthrough are just wishful thinking and strange accidents. My own experiments, which I’ll describe very quickly now, never even got to that point. I should add that to date, as of mid-1975, lots of other eager experimenters have run through all the likely and most of the unlikely places where tachyons might show up, and the cupboard’s been bare. In fact, someone’s stolen the cupboard. There are no tachyons transmitting to us from the future.”

  I hope and pray, Joseph tells himself. He does not really believe it. He is frozen, bolted into the endless marble pillar of his spacetime world line, just the ink from the pen that is sketching his path on the Minkowski diagram.

  1970: the wonders of science

  Armidale

  July 4, 70

  my god, just one year ago we were all storming the barricades and rolling marbles under the coppers’ horses’ hoofs, and getting jumped on; one day we will all join the Returned Servicemen’s League as Honored Deserters and tell tall tales of How We Dodged The Draft

  hello lovely

  I dunno. Jeez. (One of the many things I dunno is whether this letter will ever get delivered. I gather that a new postal strike is snarling up Redfern Mail Exchange again.) Lemme tell ya. The machine is running day and night, except when it gets temperamental and isn’t. We have a wonderful 24-hour background noise profile on computer file. Its sensitive twitching cats whiskers are scanning the heavens even as I sit here scribbling with this goddamned hard awful pencil, sniffing for messages from the far ends of time and space. Bloody hair-stirring, actually. On the face of it, however, we are getting zero. Zip. Zilch. Random scratches and blurts. Cosmic rays. No tachyons. Maybe they’re out on strike in sympathy with the postal workers.

  So much for the wonders of science. Life here in our little wooden house (well, not “ours” exactly; throat-clearing noises) is not getting any more charming. Truczinski keeps up a random barrage of offensive noise. Tonight it was amazingly direct. “He’s going on Thursday, isn’t he?” This while gazing with a sort of baleful opacity at me, Paul working at his own desk in the living room behind Tom’s right shoulder. “You’d better get your results in by Thursday, because you won’t be here after that.” And so on, in the same remarkably creepy vei
n.

  Odious. Naturally, I shall indeed be out of here by Thursday. If there’s any last minute recovery in the Tachyon Stakes I’ll nip off down the road and get a room at a hotel, or somesuch. Absurdly extravagant, given my finances, so the positive evidence would have to be something fierce.

  Otherwise, my fallback plan is to bypass Rozelle and go straight home. You can visit me in Melbourne if you wish and use Shagspeare Towers as a base for your other dutiful-daughter wanderings. Write to me here if the strike is finished, or send a telegram. Okay?

  I need a walk.

  see you, broccoli

  Joseph

  1970: the madhouse number

  Rozzel 7 July

  My dear Joseph

  No strike. Your letter got through the next day.

  I’m rather relieved you’ve decided against stopping off here. I do want to get to Melbourne as quickly as I can after the exams.

  My parents are visiting Sydney this week, staying at a classy Vaucluse place. Nothing but the best for them. I’ve spent much of the weekend with them—pleasant, really, and amusing. My father is a dear. He took us to a quite expensive restaurant, and left me with a wonderful Grange Hermitage when he dropped me off in Rozelle. We shall drink it on some suitable occasion, such as my learning that I’ve passed every subject with High Distinction.

  Mother went like a dog for a rat to the episode of my crack-up. We were obliged to go through the madhouse number all over again. Every sinew in her cries out for continual reassurance that my madness isn’t her fault, and that to the extent she was responsible she was innocent because she didn’t know, how could she know, there was no way she could know, I was always difficult. And so it went on. I dare say it’ll go on until I’m 40, my mother gnawing at my madness and my father forgetting about it the instant the drama is over.

  Don’s moved in, and will stay for a few weeks. Is Lanie smiling? Or smirking? Too soon to say.

  Mother was again struck with pain and silent outrage that I won’t be staying with her and the loving family. I couldn’t find any way to justify it to her, so simply left it as a fact. Ho hum. Until I arrive on your doorstep—

  Caro with love

  1978: snakes & ladders

  * * *

  STANDARD DEVIATION August 1978

  * * *

  Joe Williams did not approve of my efforts at Overarching Theory. He complained in part:

  “You can’t freeze your cake and heat it too. The neo-marxists you appeal to for intellectual support undermined your position before you got to it. Take the Frankfurt School of critical sociologists (since you still seem impressed by Marcuse, that tired old warhorse). Theodor Adorno has shown that sociology cannot be derived from psychology. He was thinking of Freudian attempts, some of them by Sigmund himself, to see political disorders as intrapsychic fuckups writ large, acted out on a wide screen. It doesn’t work except as crude metaphor. The realm of societal interactions is qualitatively distinct from (and in no way reducible to) the realm of individual intrapsychic transactions.”

  Well, Joe, I’m glad to hear that you and Herr Adorno now know how the universe works. No arguments required from you, just a bland assertion that minds and societies are absolutely unlike. Did it ever strike you that societies are, after all, tools brought into being by the interaction of individual minds, and that individual minds are structures drastically shaped by societies, and that these feedbacks imply the most profound mutual interdependency?

  Besides, Adorno was making a propaganda point: that behaviorist sociology, which he was attacking, is corrupted by its ideological adherence to a repressive and alienated status quo. A holonistic analysis starts from the assumption that the status quo has no privileged position of value, being merely one possible arrangement of its elements. Adorno’s dogma is valid only as it stresses that the realms of mind and society are not mutually reducible in one dimension. Pressed dogmatically, his complaint reveals the inevitable Marxist habit of falling back into Hegelian Idealist eschatology.

  Of course holonic analysis is not four-dimensional: it has no freedom to know the future. Popper is correct in arguing that the future contains discontinuities, if only because science keeps generating paradigm-destroying insights. However it does offer what Popper claims is impossible: a real understanding of change. If this is so, human morality becomes a possibility at the political scale.

  Of course a total atom-by-atom overview is impossible. By a stroke of luck, it is not required. Structurally unique constellations are differentially defined precisely by the quite limited sheaf of options that is available to each of them. In Koestler’s terms, one starts by “de-particularizing” phenomena (stripping them down to their defining structures) and locating the codes that establish both their individual character and their functional relations to other levels in the total ecology. The aim is a definitive discrimination between those characteristics of a phenomenon that elaborate the dynamic of the status quo, and those that permit alternative choices without rupturing identity.

  So, returning to Popper’s assertion that an understanding of change cannot be predictive: yes, there is inevitable distortion and loss of register in the de-particularizing process (skulls are more alike than faces). Yes, the complexity of computation limits our implementable capacity to deal with high-level polyoptional systems (even so simple a system as the world’s weather patterns). This is not really so paralyzing, since the optional range of a phenomenon at a given level is brutally restricted by the choices/specifications that have already been made at lower levels (daily forecasts might be a bit iffy, but you’re not really likely to get snow in the Central Australian desert; and witches don’t really give birth to cats or bats).

  But each “fact” in the universe is an actualization of select elements in the structure of (to coin a phrase) its “event ecology.” It represents, in a figure-on-background manner, the suppression of other elements or conformations.

  Yet those alternative “virtual” elements do not disappear. The actualization of “facts” must be seen as a continuous tension between antagonistic elements, just as nuclear particles are liable to collapse into raw energy and re-emerge as quite different particles, conserving only their abstract “quantum numbers.”

  Holonistic theory (based, for example, on von Bertalanffy’s General Systems Theory) promises a structure/function model in which polyoptions serve the valid roles of those tired old work horses, “essential characteristics,” and in which the descriptions of a phenomenon’s holonistic deployment (within its contextual “field”) might achieve the benefits sought and obscured by confused metaphysical notions of “essence.”

  Does any of this matter?

  Well, apart from the intrinsic beauty of developing a coherent vision of the universe, the moral significance is paramount.

  “Values” were classically taken to be prudentially contingent on “facts.” Moral theory must accord with what is possible. Only if we can predict the outcomes of our actions can we make moral choices. The breach between fact and value can be healed within the holonistic perspective, for facts are significant only so far as they relate to each other (and to the “theory” by which they are perceived/created)—since it is primarily the code of relations and transforms that defines each holonic hierarchical level. Values are precisely the preferred options within a field of possible relations.

  That’s quite sufficient for you soi disant freelance intellectuals to chew on for one meal. We’ll come back to this in the next rousing issue, which you will be lucky to see before the end of the year. From here, 1979 looks like a nice relaxed 365 days.

  1970: throwing up

  St. Kilda

  23 July 1970

  well old gastropod here it is thurday and I presume you’re back home tucked into your electric blanket and I’ve done my duty and despatched your left-behind luggage off on a train to Sydney with much irony to boot, the cost of doing so turning out to be in excess of half the concession fare you’
d have been up for, so you’ve saved about four bucks by hitching your hike in the cold and dismal amid undoubtedly threats to your person and virtue.

  then again it may well be that you have in all truth been raped and murdered repeatedly, since I haven’t yet heard from you, that last datum I hasten to add not being by way of a complaint but merely the last datum.

  scientists, even foolish tachyon-besotted amateur scientists, dote on facts. here is a fact:

  after you left on Monday night, I awoke at 3 in the morning (when you would have been where? albury?) and skidded to the lavatory where I chundered with piercing pains and tears and groans, and did it all again at 5 in the morning with amazing velocity and quantity into my carefully positioned little yellow bedside plastic bucket, and felt no better for it.

  reasons for this are murky. Martha has also been puking vigorously, but blames this on her post-parturient condition, namely blood-letting at fortnightly intervals rather than the customary four weekly rate. Bob was stricken almost simultaneously with a bout of prodigious shitting.

  isn’t this wonderfully earthy and non-abstract and gastro-anal, none of your damned pseudo-intellectualisms around this house, cobber.

  let me know how the exam results turned out.

  frail-ly, Joseph

  1970: caroline’s trip

  And there she is on the road again, thumb out. It’s three rides, then, to Benalla, the cold biting. This great roaring monster brakes, and she swings her bag and then her body and is in the seat with a grin.

  Sydney? that’s my way, he says.

  Settling in: Cigarette?

  No thanks.

  She draws out the Drum tobacco.

  Are you fair dinkum?

  Sure. She rolls one, takes a long drag and blows smoke into the windscreen, watching it shoot back at her.