“Plasmas might very well be better understood if you modeled them as having patterns imposed by spin networks.”
“Really?”
“I think so.”
She closed her eyes — as if she could see it all written down, on the inside of her eyelids. Everything in the world. Sax felt a piercing stab of envy, of — loss. He had always wanted that kind of insight; and there it was, right in the boat beside him. Genius was a strange thing to witness.
“Do you think this theory will mean the end of physics?” he asked.
“Oh no. Although we might work out the fundamentals. You know, the basic laws. That might be possible, sure. But then every level of emergence above that creates its own problems. Taneev’s work only scratches the surface there. It’s like chess — we might learn all the rules, but still not be able to play very well because of emergent properties. Like, you know, pieces are stronger if they’re out in the center of the board. That’s not in the rules, it’s a result of all the rules put together.”
“Like weather.”
“Yes. We already understand atoms better than weather. The interactions of the elements are too complex to follow.”
“There’s holonomy. Study of whole systems.”
“But it’s just a bunch of speculation at this point. The start of a science, if it turns out to work.”
“And so plasmas, though?”
“Those are very homogeneous. There’s only a very few factors involved, so it might be amenable to spin-network analysis.”
“You should talk to the fusion group about that.”
“Yes?” She looked surprised.
“Yes.”
Then a hard gust hit, and they spent a few minutes watching the boat respond, the mast sucking in sails with a bit of humming until they were reset, and running across the strengthening breeze, into the sun. Light flaked off the fine black hair gathered at the back of Bao’s neck; beyond that, the sea cliffs of Da Vinci. Networks, trembling at the touch of the sun — no. He could not see it, with eyes open or closed.
Cautiously he said, “Do you ever wonder about being, you know. Being one of the first great women mathematicians?”
She looked startled, then turned her head away. She had thought about it, he saw. “The atoms in a plasma move in patterns that are big fractals of the spin-network patterns,” she said.
Sax nodded, asked more questions about that. It seemed possible to him that she would be able to help Da Vinci’s fusion group with the problems they were having engineering a lightweight fusion apparatus. “Have you ever done any engineering? Or physics?”
Affronted: “I am a physicist.”
“Well, a mathematical physicist. I was thinking of the engineering side.”
“Physics is physics.”
“True.”
Only once more did he push, and this time indirectly. “When did you first learn math?”
“My mom gave me quadratic equations at four, and all kinds of math games. She was a statistician, very keen about it all.”
“And the Dorsa Brevia schools… .”
She shrugged. “They were fair. Math was mostly something I did by reading, and correspondence with the department in Sabishii.”
“I see.”
And they went back to talking about the new results from CERN; about weather; about the sailboat’s ability to point to within a few degrees of the wind. And then the following week she went out with him again, on one of his walks on the peninsula’s sea cliffs. It was a great pleasure to show her a bit of the tundra. And over time, taking him through it step-by-step, she managed to convince him that they were perhaps coming close to understanding what was happening at the Planck level. A truly amazing thing, he thought, to intuit this level, and then make the speculations and deductions necessary to flesh it out and understand it, creating a very complex powerful physics, for a realm that was so very small, so very far beyond the senses. Awe-inspiring, really. The fabric of reality. Although both of them agreed that just as with all earlier theories, many fundamental questions were left unanswered. It was inevitable. So that they could lie side by side in the grass in the sun, staring as deeply into the petals of a tundra flower as ever one could, and no matter what was happening at the Planck level, in the here and now the petals glowed blue in the light with a quite mysterious power to catch the eye.
Actually, lying on the grass made it clear how much the permafrost was melting. And the melt lay on a hardpan of still-frozen ground, so that the surface became saturated and boggy. When Sax stood up, his ventral side chilled instantly in the breeze. He spread his arms to the sunlight. Photon rain, vibrating across the spin networks. In many regions heat exhaust from nuclear power plants was being directed down into capillary galleries in the permafrost, he told Bao as they walked back to the rover. This was causing trouble in some wet areas, which were tending to saturate at the surface. The land melting, so to speak. Instant wetlands. A very active biome, in fact. Though the Reds objected. But most of the land that would have been affected by permafrost melt was now under the North Sea anyway. What little remained above the sea was to be treasured as swamps and marshes.
The rest of the hydrosphere was almost equally transformative of the surface. It couldn’t be helped; water was a very effective carver of rock, hard though it was to believe when watching a gossamer waterfall drift down a sea cliff, turning to white mist long before it hit the ocean. Then again there was the sight of the massive giant howler waves, battering the cliffs so hard that the ground shook underfoot. A few million years of that and those cliffs would be significantly eroded.
“Have you seen the riverine canyons?” she asked.
“Yes, I saw Nirgal Vallis. Remarkable how satisfying it was to see water down at its bottom. So apt.”
“I didn’t know there was so much tundra out here.”
Tundra was the dominant ecology for much of the southern highlands, he told her. Tundra and desert. In the tundra, fines were fixed very effectively to the ground; no wind could lift mud, or quicksand, of which there was a good quantity, making it dangerous to travel in certain regions. But in the deserts the powerful winds ripped great quantities of dust into the sky, cooling temperatures while they darkened the day, and causing problems where they landed, as they had for Nirgal. Suddenly curious, he said, “Have you ever met Nirgal?”
The sandstorms these days were nothing like the long-forgotten Great Storm of course, but still a factor that had to be considered. Desert pavement formed by microbacteria was one very promising solution, though it tended to fix only the top centimeter of deposits, and if the wind tore the edge of the pavement, what was underneath was then free to be borne away. Not an easy problem. Dust storms would be with them for centuries.
Still, an active hydrosphere. Meaning life everywhere.
Bao’s mother died in a small plane crash, and Bao as the youngest daughter had to go home and take care of things, including possession of the family home. Ultimogeniture in action, modeled on the Hopi matriarchy, he was told. Bao wasn’t sure when she would be back; there was even a chance she wouldn’t be. She was matter-of-fact about it, it was just something that had to be done. Withdrawn already into an internal world. Sax could only wave good-bye to her and walk back to his room, shaking his head. They would understand the fundamental laws of the universe before they had even the slightest handle on society. A particularly obdurate subject of study. He called Michel on screen and expressed something like this, and Michel said, “It’s because culture keeps progressing.”
Sax thought he could see what Michel meant — there were rapid changes in attitudes to many things. Werteswandel, as Bela called it, mutation of values. But they still lived in a society struggling with archaisms of all sorts. Primates banding into tribes, guarding a territory, praying to a god like a cartoon parent… “Sometimes I don’t think there’s been any progress at all,” he said, feeling strangely disconsolate.