The End Of Mr. Y (19 page)

‘Do I? Oh, can I have some more vegetables, please?’ ‘Only if you agree with me,’ says Heather, laughing.

‘Oh, well, in that case …’ Adam holds up his hands as if to stop something big from crashing into him.

‘No, I’m only kidding about. Here …’ She pushes the dish of vegetables towards Adam. ‘But I still don’t see how you can disagree with scientific fact.’

‘“Fact” is a word. Science itself is just a collection of words. I’m guessing that truth exists beyond language, and what we call “reality”. It must do; well, if it exists at all, that is.’

‘Come again?’ says Heather, frowning.

‘Aha,’ I say, nodding and raising an eyebrow. ‘He may have you there.’

‘It’s all just an illusion,’ says Adam. ‘Creation myths, religion, science. We tell ourselves how time works – so, for example, you can imagine running your tape-of-the-universe backwards and be sure of what you’d get in this portion of time we call “yesterday” – but yesterday only exists because we made it up: it’s not real. You can’t prove to me that yesterday even happened. Everything we tell ourselves to believe is simply a fiction, a story.’

‘Well,’ says Heather, ‘you can’t argue with that – which makes me suspicious. And anyway, if all reality is just an illusion, then why do we bother?’

‘Bother what?’

‘Trying to work it all out. Trying to find the truth.’

‘You can try to find the truth outside reality,’ Adam says.

‘By doing what exactly?’

Adam shrugs. ‘Meditation, I think. Or possibly getting very drunk.’

I was going to say something pithy about Derrida, but Heather looks genuinely upset now, so I decide not to.

‘Meditation isn’t science,’ she says.

‘That’s the point,’ says Adam.

‘For God’s sake,’ she says, slightly breathlessly. ‘All that woolly, superstitious stuff … No offence, but you just need words and logic to do science. I teach this evening class on the scientific method for adult returners, and I always give them the example of the spiders’ webs outside the room I teach in. Basically, there’s this long passageway outside the classroom with these orange lights attached to the wall. The lights are always on. In the evening you can see the spiders’ webs stretched over the lights, and you can see all the daddy-long-legs and other night insects that get trapped in them. You could look at that and think: “Aren’t the spiders clever because they know to build webs where the other insects will fly because they’re attracted to the light?” Or you can go one step further and realise that you can only see the webs near the lights and that’s why you have assumed those are the only ones. A poet might stand there and dream about the cunningness of spiders. A scientist would record exactly how many webs there are, and where, and conclude that some of them are built over the lights just by chance.’

‘But all of that just proves what I’m saying,’ Adam says. ‘I wouldn’t conclude that the spiders intended to use the light to help trap the insects. I’d assume that I could never understand what the spiders were doing and why, because I’m not a spider.’

‘But scientists have to try to understand things. They have to ask why.’ ‘Yes, but they’ll never get a proper answer,’ Adam says.

‘Anyway,’ I say, in a louder voice than I intended. ‘Er… Anyway, I was just going to say that this stuff about science and language is really interesting in relation to something I read about the Big Bang. It’s a bit complicated, but it shows that if you start with a few basic assumptions about the Big Bang, then logic takes you to a situation where we’re either living in a multiverse, or a universe created by God. There’s really no other option.’

‘My head’s going to be wrecked by the end of tonight,’ says Heather.

‘Just drink more wine,’ says Adam, smiling at her.

I’ve just finished the last piece of garlic bread, and Heather and Adam have both put down their knives and forks. I pick up my bag and take out a packet of cigarettes.

‘If you’re into all this meditation, are you supposed to drink wine?’ Heather asks.

‘Oh, I do it very rarely,’ says Adam.

I don’t know if he means meditation or drinking, and although I expect Heather to ask him, she doesn’t. Instead, she picks up a stray rocket leaf and puts it back in the salad bowl.

‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ I ask her.

‘No, not at all. I’ll open the back door, though, if you don’t mind.’

She gets up to do that, and Adam and I briefly start making movements towards clearing the table before she tells us not to fuss and just leave it all.

‘No, come on,’ she says. ‘Tell me about this whole God-or-the-multiverse thing.’

‘OK,’ I say, lighting my cigarette. ‘Sorry – do you have some sort of ashtray? I can go outside, if you want …’

‘No, I’ll get you a saucer.’

‘God or the multiverse,’ says Adam softly as Heather gets a saucer. ‘Hmm.’

‘Are you both familiar with basic quantum physics?’ I say. ‘Not the really hardcore stuff, but the kind of thing you’d find in a popular science book. You know, the wavefunction and probability and that sort of thing.’

Adam’s shaking his head. Heather cocks her head to one side as if she’s trying to make the information roll down a hill in her mind and come to rest in a place she can access it.

‘I should know it,’ she says. ‘I think I did know it once. But you ignore all that stuff when you’re working on the molecular level. It just doesn’t have any perceivable effects, so it can be disregarded.’

‘I’m afraid I’m completely in the dark,’ says Adam.

‘OK, well, in a nutshell – and I warn you, I’m doing a humanities PhD, so you could probably get this from a more reliable source – quantum physics deals with subatomic particles; in other words, particles that are smaller than atoms.’

Adam now frowns. ‘Call me nuts, but I’m having this odd sensation as if I’d seen one of these particles once or something,’ he says. ‘Maybe I’m drunk. I must have learnt this at some point and then forgotten it. Anyway, despite all that, my brain is begging me to ask you: what on earth is smaller than an atom?’

‘Oh, well, everyone knows that an atom is made up of neutrons, protons and electrons,’ says Heather.

‘And those parts are all made up of quarks,’ I say. ‘Apart from the electron, which is indivisible – or at least people think it is. People thought the atom was indivisible a hundred years ago, and before that they didn’t think it existed, so it’s not as if we know everything.’

It’s cold with the back door open; Heather gets up and takes a small cardigan from the back of a chair and puts it on.

‘I think we’re pretty sure about the electron,’ she says. ‘Brrr. It’s cold.’ Adam and I exchange a look.

‘Anyway,’ I say, ‘quantum physics deals with those tiny particles of matter. But when physicists first began theorising about these particles, and observing them in action in particle accelerators and so on, they found out that the subatomic world doesn’t act the way we’d expect.’

‘How?’ asks Adam.

‘All that common sense stuff – the past happening before the future, cause and effect, Newtonian physics and Aristotelian poetics – none of it is applicable at a subatomic level. In a deterministic universe, which is the sort Newton thought we lived in, you can always tell what’s going to happen next, if you have enough information about what went before. And you can always know things for sure. It’s either day or night, for example: it’s never both at once. On a quantum level, things don’t make sense in that way.’

‘This is the stuff that does my head in,’ says Heather.

‘Yeah, it’s weird,’ I say. ‘It’s like … there are particles that can go through walls just like that. There are pairs of particles that seem to be connected and stay connected in some way even when they are separated by millions of miles. Einstein called it “spooky action at a distance” and rejected it completely, as it seemed to suggest that information could travel faster than the speed of light.’ ‘And nothing can travel faster than the speed of light,’ Heather says. ‘I’m with Einstein on that one.’ ‘Anyway, one of the weirdest things about subatomic particles is that something peculiar happens when you observe them. Until they are observed, they exist in a smeared-out state of all possible positions in the atom: the superposition, or the wavefunction.’

Adam’s shaking his head. ‘You’ve lost me, I’m afraid,’ he says.

‘OK,’ I say. ‘Imagine that you are out on a walk and I don’t know where you are. You could be at the university, in the park, in the shop, in a spaceship, on Pluto, whatever. These are all possibilities, although some are more likely than others.’

‘All right,’ says Adam.

‘Well, conventional logic tells us that you are definitely in one place or another, regardless of whether or not I’ve seen you there, or know for sure that you are there. You are somewhere, I just don’t know where that is.’

Adam’s nodding and, for a second, I imagine a life so normal that I could be with someone like him, perhaps sharing a house like this, and have such a mundane, but somehow amazing, thought: is he in the shop or is he at work?

‘Anyway,’ I say, ‘obviously you’re standing in for the particle in this example … Well, quantum physics says that when your situation is unknown – so you could be in the shop or in the park, for all I know – you actually exist in all places at once until someone finds out for sure by observing you.

So instead of one clear “reality”, there’s a smear. You’re in the shop and the park and the university, and it’s only when I go out looking for you and see that you’re in the park that all the other possibilities melt away and reality is set.’

‘So observation has an effect on reality?’ says Adam.

‘Yes – well, in this way of looking at it. This idea that all probabilities exist as a wavefunction until an external observer looks at – and therefore collapses – the wavefunction is called the Copenhagen interpretation.’

‘Are there other ways?’

‘Yes. There’s the many-worlds interpretation. In a nutshell, while the Copenhagen interpretation suggests that all probabilities collapse into one definite reality on observation, the many-worlds interpretation suggests that all the possibilities exist at once, but that each one has its own universe to go with it. So there are, literally, many worlds, each one with a tiny difference. So in one universe you’re in the park, and in another you’re at work, and in another you’re on the moon, or at the zoo or wherever.’

‘Those are the only two choices, right?’ Heather says. ‘Like, most people believe in one or other of those two?’

‘Yeah, I think so,’ I say. ‘I think most people favour the Copenhagen interpretation, though.’ ‘So how does this relate to the Big Bang?’

‘Well,’ I say. ‘If you imagine the primordial particle: the thing that went “bang” fourteen billion years ago … That particle should be just like any other particle. It would have its own wavefunction – a series of probabilities about where it was and what it was doing. So what we know of quantum physics suggests that unless an external observer showed up and observed the exact state of the particle, its wavefunction would not collapse. In other words, it would exist in a state of all the different probabilities at once. It would be both fast and slow, moving left and right, here and over there all at once. An observer external to the universe must be God. So perhaps God collapsed the wave-function that became the universe. In other words, out of all probabilities God collapsed the original particle into one universe, in which we now live. That’s the Copenhagen interpretation applied to the original particle. If you reject that, you’re left with the many-worlds interpretation, which would suggest that there is no external observer and no collapse. Instead, all the probabilities exist “out there” – every possible universe you could think of exists alongside this one: some hot, come cold, some with people, some without, some that create their own “baby universes”, and some that don’t …’

Heather groans. ‘I knew there was a reason I’d forgotten this stuff.’ ‘What if you reject this quantum physics?’ asks Adam.

‘Then I guess your CD player and credit cards stop working.’ ‘I don’t have a CD player or a credit card.’

I grin at him. ‘Yes, but you know what I mean. Real technology is built on quantum physics. Engineers have to learn it. I mean, it is nuts, but it works out there in the real world.’

‘God or the multiverse,’ says Heather. ‘Which one would you choose?’

‘I’m not happy with either of them,’ I say. ‘But probably God – whatever that actually means. Call it the Thomas Hardy interpretation: I’d rather have something out there that means something than feel like I exist in a vast ocean of pure meaninglessness.’

‘What about you, Adam?’

‘God,’ he says. ‘Even though I thought I’d given all that up.’ He smiles without showing his teeth, as

if doing more with his mouth would break his face. ‘No, it does make sense: the idea of an external consciousness. I prefer that anyway, given this choice.’

‘Oh, well, I’m on my own then with the multiverse,’ says Heather.

‘You’re never alone in the multiverse,’ I say.

‘Ha ha,’ she says. ‘Seriously, I can’t believe that God made life, not with the research I’m doing. I mean, the evidence just isn’t there. And I get so many threatening letters from creationists that I just can’t align myself to them in any way.’

‘I don’t think this means aligning yourself with creationists,’ I say. ‘Surely some external being could have sparked the very beginning of the universe and then everything else just evolved as scientists think it did?’

Although, as I say this I think “Via Newtonian cause and effect”, and I realise that this is at odds with the idea of a quantum universe, and I suddenly don’t know what to say.

‘What is your research exactly?’ asks Adam.

‘Looking for LUCA,’ she says. ‘Well, that’s how the headlines put it whenever science journalists write about it. LUCA stands for Last Universal Common Ancestor. In other words, searching for the mother of us all.’

‘She’s got this computer model,’ I say. ‘You have to see it next time you’re in the office. I didn’t understand it when I looked at it, but it still gave me the shivers somehow.’