MATT became a globetrotter. For almost three years he sought out people who might have insights that had been denied him in his education, which had been the best possible in the sciences but quite deficient in everything else.
He wandered India, speaking to the holy men of that country's thousand religions. He bathed in the Ganges. He went to Tibet, to Rome, to Jerusalem, to Mecca. He climbed Mount Fujiyama, sought out eremites in Ethiopia and Egypt. He sat in a sweat lodge in Arizona and chewed peyote and tried LSD.
Since the days of Einstein, scientists had been searching for a "Theory of Everything," a paradigm that would tie together all the known forces in the universe. Much progress had been made, but every time humanity seemed on the verge of being able to write it all down in an equation as elegant as E=mc2, something else came along that made the results more complicated rather than less, requiring more theories to explain the new data.
Matt had begun to wonder if everybody was looking in the wrong direction. "YOU'RE not going religious on me, are you, Matt?" Susan smiled at him.
"Listen, I know you don't want to hear more about string theory, but bear with me a minute. You'll be relieved when I get through it, I promise you.
"What we call a 'string' is a sort of loop of pure energy. They would be very small. Imagine the sun, one million miles across. Now imagine a proton in the center of the sun. Expand that proton until it is the size of the Solar System, out to the orbit of Pluto. A string within that proton would be the size of the proton before we expanded it."
"Pretty damn small."
"The technical term for it is 'teeny weeny weeny weeny weeny weeny.' Now, the thing is, string theory has been around a long time now... but no one has come up with any experiment that could prove or disprove it. No one has thought of a way to detect a string, to shine a light on it. There are good theoretical reasons to believe that there is no way for us to detect them. We keep fiddling with the theory because the math is intriguing, it works out elegantly... but we have no way to know if it connects with reality." Matt snorted. "As if we even had a useful definition of 'reality.' "
Susan frowned. "I need a beer. You want one?"
"Sure."
She got up and walked the few steps to the refrigerator, glad to have a chance to turn her back on him for a moment. What he had said earlier had settled her mind a lot, but she supposed she would never be entirely comfortable when he was in his professorial mode.
You'd better learn to get comfortable with it, girl. A professor is what he is, that's the guy you've fallen in love with, so get used to it.
She popped the tops on two cans of Henry Weinhard's and handed one to Matt, then sat back down in the little lecture hall and tried to look alert.
"So you're saying it could all be just a mental game," she said.
"What we mathematicians call 'jacking off,' " Matt agreed. "Nothing wrong with that. Much of mathematics has nothing to do with the 'real' world. But don't worry about it. String theory has nothing to do with it, I'm just showing you some examples. Say we could prove string theory. Strings are made of pure energy. Okay, but what is the nature of energy? Don't answer that, it doesn't matter."
"Very likely. We've been reaching dead ends all over the realm of physics. Don't get me wrong, there is a vast amount still to learn, and if the past is any guide, a lot of what we think we know now is wrong.
"But look at the other end of the scale. We can now see out to the theoretical end of the universe. It's fourteen or fifteen billion light-years away, and it seems we can't see any farther than that because there is no 'farther than that.' Space is curved, and what we see out there is what was happening fifteen billion years ago. If somebody is out there, on the edge of the universe, looking at us... what they are seeing is an infant universe. Quasars, protogalaxies."
"You've lost me again."
"Don't worry about it. The point is, it's another limit. One more example. Black holes. They were postulated a long time ago, and then we found them. A triumph for astrophysics. We can observe their effects, we can make a good stab at describing the conditions that exist around them, we can construct a theoretical model of what might be inside them, if that term has any real meaning with a black hole... but we can never, never look into one. Another dead end.
"What I'm saying is, we're reaching end points everywhere in what I have believed in all my life, what you might call rational science. So what's left?"
"Irrational science?"
Matt laughed.
"That's a good term for it. I like it better than mysticism, or pseudoscience, or 'wacko New Age stuff.' There are irrational numbers in math, and they are quite useful.
"Susan, we experienced something that, in a rational universe as I thought I understood it, simply could not happen. Therefore, a lot of my assumptions were wrong. I've been looking for answers in other places."
"And have you found anything?"
Matt spread his hands and sighed. "I'm ashamed to tell you just how little."
"Don't be ashamed. I've got a feeling you've found out more than anyone else would have."
"Maybe so, maybe not. Look... we all travel through time. We think of it as a train traveling at a steady speed on a straight track. Somebody buys us a ticket—"
"Are you talking about our mothers, or... God?"
"I don't know. We come into existence, we come into consciousness, we ride the train for a while, not knowing what our destination is, and then we get off. Not only do we not know what's outside the train, what's at the station, we don't even know what we are. What is consciousness? Would time exist without consciousness to appreciate it? Could consciousness somehow be the basis of it all? Would there be a universe at all without an aware being to witness it? These are the questions I've tried to answer."
Matt smiled. "Maybe 'finding an answer' was the wrong way to put it. I never expected that. I was exploring the concept of a creator, among other things. Different cultures have come up with very different ways of looking at the idea. I just wondered, do any of them have a better way of looking at it than the one I was taught?"
"Do you have a religion? I never asked you that."
"I never asked you, either. I was raised in the Christian world, therefore I see the world through that prism, even if I don't believe in it. Christianity and Islam, the great monotheistic religions, see God as omniscient and all-powerful. With Christianity, God is good and Satan is evil... but as I understand it, the game is rigged. At Armageddon a great battle will be fought, and the outcome is already known. I mean, we don't call him God for nothing. Which means that even God's fate is predestined. By himself, I guess, though I can't imagine why he'd bother to play the game if he knows the outcome."
Susan laughed. "I hate to say this, but you're losing me even quicker with this stuff than you did with the physics."
"That's exactly how I felt. So I looked around. The older religions, what we look down our noses at and call 'mythology,' like the Romans and Norse and Greeks, had a different worldview. Hindus today still see the universe like that. Their gods duke it out from time to time. They are willful, vain, childish, vindictive, quite willing to play dice with human lives."
"So's the Christian God, in my opinion."
"I couldn't agree with you more. But we put all those attributes into one being. Animists and others give different attributes to different gods." Matt sighed heavily. "What I'm going to tell you is that I've begun to get a... a hint of an inkling of an intuition of an enigma. Remember the old fable of the blind men and the elephant? One feels his trunk and says an elephant is like a snake. Another thinks he's like a tree, from feeling his leg. Another thinks an elephant is like a wall.