The Whale Song Translation: A Voyage of Discovery To Neptune and Beyond (43 page)

The irony in his voice was not lost on the audience. McPinsky heard sporadic giggling balloon into pervasive laughter, striking him as the comic equivalent of a super-inflationary phase transition. He returned to the podium and resumed. “Now, I ask you, what is the criterion by which the archetypal ‘theory of everything’ is judged to be comprehensive and complete?”

He paused and, with his middle finger, poked his glasses back in place most emphatically. As always, they’d slid down the slippery slope of his nose. “First and foremost, it’s universally acknowledged that the explanation must satisfy the criterion of Occam’s razor. It must be simple and elegant, preferably a single equation which unifies the four fundamental forces of nature. My assertion is that it must also describe just about everything else, including the information-based structures ubiquitous in our daily lives and everywhere else in the universe. Of utmost importance, it should provide the explanation which enables our species to reconnect with the creative process that birthed our universe and all of its inhabitants. This unifying principle would proclaim—”

He slammed a fist onto the podium, startling those in the front row, and intoned with a rhythmic, staccato emphasis on each and every syllable, “‘You are a child of the universe no less than the atoms and the stars; you have a right to be here,’ and I would proclaim this in no uncertain mathematical terms.”

A covey of students leapt to their feet, pumped their arms in the air, and chanted in frenzied unison, “McPinsky, McPinsky, McPinsky—” The attending Ivy Tech administrators wore expressions of incredulity.

McPinsky gestured once again but he couldn’t completely stanch the crowd’s enthusiasm. He was an impatient man, so he continued above the buzz. “As you all know by now, I was inspired by physicist David Bohm’s theories about universal quantum wholeness. As such, I’m a firm believer that information is the intrinsic stuff of the cosmos, more so than elementary forces which, as I shall soon demonstrate, are derivative. In fact, there can be no unified field theory unless the concept of
information
is woven into the fabric of nature’s fundamental laws.”

McPinsky welcomed the expressions of disbelief glaring back at him from some of the distinguished faculty members in the front rows. His confidantes knew that his iconoclastic resolve was fired by such arrogance, so he pressed on. “Since information is, by definition, the measureable distribution of energy and matter in space, I want to introduce you to a trio of radical conceptualizations which form the basis of the new theory.”

When McPinsky requested the lights be dimmed, a movie screen descended from the ceiling for the display of his PowerPoint presentation. “The first concept is that there is an equilibrium state of the universe where all matter and energy are distributed uniformly throughout its entirety. In this baseline state, the density of matter is constant everywhere, space has constant curvature everywhere, and all particles are separated from one another by the same equilibrium distance.

“The second concept I shall hereafter refer to as the ‘Principle of Uniformity’ or ‘Local Conservation.’” He began to speak more slowly, more deliberately, so that as many as possible could grasp his ideas. “Any force acting to change the mass density of the equilibrium state is resisted intrinsically, by space itself, in order to maintain the equilibrium state.” Brandishing a laser pointer, he cast its beam upon a diagram appearing on the screen. “For instance, if particles attempt to approach closer than the equilibrium distance, the curvature of space in the gap between these particles must increase, resulting in the dilation of space itself, so that the local density between particles is conserved. The third concept, the ‘Principle of Global Conservation,’ is related to the second, in that the global curvature of space is conserved even when the local curvature must change due to the Local Conservation principle.”

Murmurs of amazement were beginning to eddy through the lecture hall.

“Invoking these new concepts, we can make the following predictions.” He forwarded to the next slide.

“The first prediction is that the new law of Local Conservation is one and the same as the strong nuclear force. The second is that the new law of Global Conservation causes a complex folding of space that creates all of the fundamental forces as dictated by the curvature of space at different scales. And finally, do you recall how Maxwell unified electromagnetic phenomena by postulating the existence of electromagnetic waves? In a similar fashion, the combined effects of the three new principles can serve to unify a number of existing laws of information and game theory. Thus we can postulate a mathematical and physical model which completely describes and predicts the evolutionary formation of stable, information-based systems—nature’s ‘Grand Organizing Principle.’”

The murmurs were now intensifying as many more minds had been kindled by McPinsky’s proposals.

“A continuum of information-based structures fills the universe. So doesn’t it make sense that the ‘theory of everything’ should provide a fundamental explanation of the formation of information structures, from nuclear particles to living organisms? Until now, physics has only given us the great conservation principles that apply to mass, energy, momentum, charge, spin, etcetera. But it provides no fundamental explanation about how this stuff is organized into complex systems. Physics has left us bankrupt in that regard. Without a fundamental rudder to guide us, we’re left floundering, to be cast adrift in the swirling currents of anecdotal descriptions of philosophy, religion, and myth.”

With the passion of a sermon or a political rally, chants of “yes, yes, yes” and “amen” arose from the audience. McPinsky was well aware that the dons of his parent institution, who held their collective breaths and crossed their fingers whenever he made a public appearance, grew particularly tense at moments like these, when he’d ignited the audience. Still, he continued on in an ever escalating arc of intensity.

“Einstein has given us permission to pursue such an avenue, since general relativity has proven so elegantly that matter warps space on the macroscopic level and that the force of gravity is equivalent to the curvature of space. So doesn’t it make sense that matter and space should interact in an innate manner that subsumes all forces? That yet another set of even more fundamental conservation principles need to be considered to reconcile this interaction, this dance, between matter and space? These new principles are the driving force of the creation of information structures from the primal essence of the universe.”

Some were so stirred that they stood and applauded. McPinsky paused and mopped his brow with a purple handkerchief. Hands were raised around the room but McPinsky had never countenanced the interruption of his discourse. “Questions will be answered at the end.”

Like an implacable force of nature, he surged ahead. He wove the fabric of the universe before their minds’ eyes, completely deconstructing and reconstructing it in his unique fashion.

“Now for the coup de grâce,” he said. “For the equilibrium state of the universe, let’s plot the force due to the local curvature of space for all distances around the equilibrium distance, knowing that the force at the equilibrium distance is by definition zero.” He brought up the next slide, a plot of the force versus distance relationship, and then paused again to blot the moisture on his forehead. “Aren’t the contours of this plot recognizable?”

In a few seconds, a volley of gasps punctured the silence. Most seemed too dazed to respond, but one brave hand finally appeared. “Professor, are you saying that the strong nuclear force is caused by the new conservation of equilibrium density principle?”

“Yes, smart lady!” shouted McPinsky. “And notice from the force versus distance plot that the force is repulsive when the particles are closer together than the Fermi distance and attractive when farther than the Fermi distance. But remember that, according to the new equilibrium distance concept, there is no net force at the equilibrium distance. This corresponds to the zero-crossing point on the nuclear force curve.”

As many more arms were raised, McPinsky sighed and acknowledged one of the queries. “Professor, are you suggesting that all of the forces were unified during the complicated folding of space curvature, when subnuclear particles approached one another to less than the equilibrium distance?”

“Not only that, sir, but all of the forces were born and locked in at the time of baryogenesis, about one-millionth of a second after the Big Bang, when trios of free quarks in the quark-gluon plasma cooled sufficiently to be bound together by the sub-quantum folding of space and to form the nucleons. Thus the fundamental forces, nuclear, electromagnetic, and gravitational, were birthed and forever unified by the complicated folding process shaped by local and global conservation. This is the elegant story of the unification of the fundamental forces.”

More waving hands appeared, but McPinsky ignored them. “In concert with the new conservation principles, we are currently working on the derivation of a super wave equation which reconciles the interaction of matter, energy, and space. This one equation describes the unification of all forces and predicts the wave-particle duality of matter. It also supersedes the probabilistic predictions of quantum theory with a more deterministic model.”

McPinsky saw the blank expressions on many faces, and he knew that it was pointless to continue. The audience was at the breaking point, unable to absorb any more. He initiated the renowned ritual to conclude the final class of a term. He closed his eyes in silent vigil for about thirty seconds, the signal for everyone to prepare for the climactic moment. When the buzz of the crowd had crescendoed to a peak, he opened his eyes, hushing the audience, and recited the signature challenge phrase culled from Frank Herbert’s epic science fiction novel,
Dune
. “‘Without change, something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.’”

Most in the hall leapt to their feet in a standing ovation, unleashing a torrent of raucous whistles and cheers. A familiar rap-like melody emerged from the sea of sound. A raving chorus of students had begun to sing a customized version of the school’s legendary low-tech fight song:

E to the U d u d x, E to the X d x

Tangent, secant, cosine, sine

Three point one four one five nine

Slide rule, slip stick, x y z

Mc Pin Sky, Mc Pin Sky

The students’ fervent repetitions of the verse persisted for more than a minute, but the crowd’s ardor had eventually cooled. Since he was eager for updates about the around-the-clock, global, whale-song-analysis endeavor, McPinsky planned a quick exit. After he’d taken a few curtain calls and posed for some group pictures, he excused himself and escaped through a back door. He’d always enjoyed the brisk early-evening, cross-campus walk back to his office in the old engineering building. As he entered the historic structure and climbed the stairs, he anticipated a reply to his request for assistance from the mathematicians at the Chalmers Institute of Technology.

McPinsky noticed something amiss as soon as he had unlocked the door and entered the office. An open desk drawer seemed odd, and the display at his workstation was in a different state than when he’d last logged off. The old, reliable Einstein screen saver had morphed into a black hole, the screen as blank as dark matter. Well, never mind. It wouldn’t be the first time his seventy-year-old memory had played tricks upon him.

He sat down and opened an email folder, delighted to see a post from Arne Gustafson at Chalmers in Sweden. They’d finally agreed to attempt the verification of the 4D geometric properties of Ivy Tech’s data. For obvious reasons, he’d decided not to inform them about the source of the data.

McPinsky checked the World Clock website on the Internet. Realizing it would soon be morning in Goteborg, he prepared to upload the files to Chalmers. But after he’d pointed and clicked on the link to the directory, and even after an interminable wait, nothing appeared. The directory was empty. He checked the backup drive. It too was wiped clean.

McPinsky smiled. He was not surprised that this epoch-making data had vanished so mysteriously. He had no doubt that the files on his home PC and on the computer in the lab had succumbed to a similar fate. He’d struggled against the enemies of change for most of his career. This time was no different. He knew exactly what had to be done, no matter the consequences.

I
VORY
T
OWER
T
RIBUNAL

SoCalSci Department of Engineering, Main Conference Room—two days later

“Dr. Dmitri,” said Dean Wilson. “This joint engineering and math department hearing was convened to address your current legal situation and its impact on your status here at SoCalSci. To summarize, you were recently arrested and charged with multiple counts of assault and battery. Charges were filed against you, Dr. Gregory Bono, and your grad student, Andrew Chu, in a court of law in the State of Hawaii. You’ve been released on bail, pending further court appearances. Before we proceed, I’d like to introduce you to the members of the panel.”