Grisha was very glad to have received this unexpected moral support.
“Don’t worry, it’s in a secure repository. Everything has been written down. You see, you see, Vitya, your son immediately grasped what I’m talking about! The world is a book that we only learn to read letter by letter. We try, with the help of our alphabets, rudimentary sign systems, to read texts of enormous complexity, which exist beyond the limits of our own consciousness. Take Plato!”
At this point, Vitya, who hadn’t read a word of Plato since the day he was born, lost all patience and shouted: “Martha! How’s the dinner coming along?”
Grisha stopped importuning Vitya; he had found a marvelous listener in Yurik. He laid out his entire theory to him, offering Yurik a whole slew of new information—for the most part, all of it from the high-school curriculum. The school textbooks were dull, however, and the knowledge they contained was completely at odds with the things Yurik was interested in. So, recognizing that he had found an avid listener in Yurik, for three whole days—with breaks only for meals and a bit of shut-eye, right up to the moment he left—Grisha told Yurik, who was stunned by the plethora of information, thrilling things at which he could only marvel.
Beginning with the Law of Correspondences—the universe, the cell, and the atom are all constructed according to the same principle, “As above, so below; as below, so above”—advancing to the rhythmical character of the natural processes, from the rotation of the planets to the respiratory, circulatory, and other rhythms of the human organism, Grisha led him to the notion of informational energy and formulated the First Law of Thermodynamics.
“Let me remind you,” Grisha said, in a voice slightly hoarse from his nonstop monologue, “that Lord Kelvin, in the middle of the last century, expressed the notion that the Creator, when he created the world, endowed it with an inexhaustible store of energy, that this divine gift would exist for all eternity. But he couldn’t be more wrong!”
Skimming through the Second Law of Thermodynamics, Grisha reached the cell theory in its classic form, and, starting with Schleiden and Schwann, solemnly announced that now they had arrived at the most essential matter, about which the originators of this cell theory of all living things had no clue—that the cell was a molecular computer that functioned according to the DNA program created by God the Almighty.
“To be alive means, within the boundaries of the organism, not to increase the entropy throughout the course of the life cycle, in spite of all the possibilities the cell has at its disposal—in particular, reproduction. The cell is an immensely complex system. To understand how it functions, scientists create models that possess the characteristics of the living cell. And it seems that Vitya, your pops, is the world’s foremost expert in this area. He’s a genius, but he doesn’t understand one fundamental thing, as is often the case with geniuses.” Here Grisha again began waving his arms around and berating Vitya, who early that morning had ridden his bicycle to the lab to work—offering his son to Grisha as fodder for his training exercises in proselytizing. But, like a true devotee, Grisha was happy with anyone who would listen. All the more since he had now come to his hobbyhorse. “You know how a computer works, broadly speaking?”
Yurik nodded. “My father has explained the basics to me.”
“The technical side of things, the hardware, doesn’t concern us here,” Grisha said dismissively. “We’ll be focusing our attention on the organization of the information process itself. What is information exactly? Not long ago, it was considered to be a message that was transmitted from mouth to mouth, in written form, or with the help of some sort of signal, from one person to another. The theory of information was created—the transmission may occur not only from person to person, but from person to machine, from machine to machine. And there is an algorithm, a system of rules, according to which information is deployed for solving problems and tasks on different levels.
“Such algorithmic processes are also present in cells. And it is immaterial how we understand this process—whether as a means of communication between concrete, material objects, or whether we consider that the cell itself utilizes various material objects to realize its existence. The main idea here is that information and matter do not exist independent of one another. The life of a cell is revealed through the operation of its informational system.
“One can compare it to a symphony orchestra, in which a composer, a conductor, musicians, musical instruments, the score, and even the electricity that illuminates the sheet music, all take part. Yes, it’s a good example; as a musician you would be predisposed to understand it. The composer writes the music—the algorithm for playing it—and transcribes it—programs or encodes it—in the form of a score with the help of notes—a special alphabet—for a long-term memory—that is, on paper or in the computer memory. The score contains information about the beginning and end of the musical composition, and about what and how each musical instrument should play at a given moment in time, during the course of performing the work. That’s it!”
Grisha was beaming—with his eyes, his wrinkles, his swarthy pate, and every hair of his scraggly beard.
“That’s it! Do you understand who the composer is here? The Creator! The score is written by Him with the help of the Text, by means of DNA. Because DNA is the alphabet of the Creator. And now please explain to me why your father shies away from this simple truth, like the devil from holy water? It’s so obvious. The Creator created the Law, but He Himself is subordinate to his own law. The universe is intelligent and multitiered. On every tier or level, understanding has its limits. This multitiered nature of things is described in various ways in all religious systems, and it is from this that the inherent intelligibility of the universe derives. If the universe is intelligible, it is possible to model it. Your father, who does computer programming, and does it better than anyone else, refuses to accept the Author of All Scores. It’s incomprehensible! There is only one explanation for this: his work belongs to a higher level, but he himself is still on a lower one. And I can’t force him to break through to the next one. Everyone must accomplish this on his own.”
When Vitya returned home from the lab, Grisha redirected his attention to him. But no dialogue resulted: Grisha ranted and railed, and Vitya grunted occasionally, saying, “Hmm, interesting,” while he ate a microwaved dinner that Martha had prepared for him and sipped Coca-Cola. Grisha’s ardent inspiration made it impossible for him to accept that his friend couldn’t hear what he was saying.
After three days of failure to elicit any sympathy from Vitya, and having exhausted his store of pent-up zeal on Yurik, Grisha flew back to Israel. Yurik saw off the agitated Grisha at JFK, boarded his favorite subway line, the A train, and felt that he had escaped from a bender without any withdrawal pains or other unpleasant consequences purely by means of intellectual exertions, the most powerful of his entire life thus far. He didn’t remember the details of what Grisha had told him, but he was left with a sensation of soaring and flight.
He sat looking out the window of the train—it hadn’t yet plunged underground—and listened to a melody in his head. He managed to remember what Grisha had said, that all music is written in the heavenly spheres.
Yurik transferred to a train going north and stopped near South Ferry. By that time the melody in his head had completely taken shape, with a strange hook at the beginning, then a repetition in which the hook straightened itself out, put out a little shoot, and then another … It could even have been depicted graphically, but it would have been better to play it first. When he emerged from the subway, he sat on the shore, took out his guitar, and played as much of it as he could, from beginning to end. The piece was as elegant and slender as a fish, as light as a bird, absolutely alive.