It’s a dire Italian but it’s the only Italian. Nostalgic already for the cooking of the Glasgow Italians, a mighty race, Vishram had lit upon the prospect of pasta and ruffino before he remembered that Varanasi has no rooted Italian community, has no Italian in its genes at all. The staff is all local. The music is compiled from the charts. The wine is overheated and tired from the long drought. There is something on the menu called pasta-tikka.
“I’m sorry it’s so terrible,” he apologises to Sonia Yadav.
She struggles with overcooked spaghetti.
“I’ve never eaten Italian before.”
“You’re not eating Italian now.”
She has made an effort for this dire dinner. She has done something with her hair, hung a little gold and amber around her. Arpege 27: that’ll have been some European duty-free somewhere. He likes it that she has worn a business sari and not an ugly Western-style suit. Vishram sits back in his chair, touches his fingertips together, then realises he looks too much like a James Bond villain and unfolds.
“How much could you reasonably expect a liberal arts boy to understand about zero-point power?”
Sonia Yadav pushes her plate away from her with evident relief.
“Okay, well for starters, it’s not strictly zero-point as most people think of it.” Sonia Yadav has a slight pucker between the eyes when she is saying or thinking or contemplating something difficult. It’s very cute. “Do you remember what I said back in the lab about cold and hot? The classic zero-point theories are cold theories. Now, our theories suggest they won’t work. Can’t work: there’s a ground-state wall you just can’t get around. You don’t beat the second law of thermodynamics.”
Vishram lifts a breadstick, breaks it theatrically in two. “I got the cold and hot bit.”
“Okay. I’ll try. And by the way, I saw that thing with the breadstick in the remake of the Pyar Diwana Hota Hai.”
“Little more wine, then?”
She takes the refill but doesn’t touch it. Wise woman. Vishram settles back with the traumatised Chianti in the ancient ritual of listening to a woman tell a story.
It’s a strange and magical tale as full of contradictions and impossibilities as any legend from the Mahabharata. There are multiple worlds and entities that can be two contradictory things at the same time. There are beings that can never be fully known or predicted, that once entangled remain linked though they be removed to opposite ends of the universe so that what happens to one is instantly felt by the other. Vishram watches Sonia’s demonstration of the double-slit experiment with a fork, two capers, and ripples in the tablecloth and thinks, what a strange and alien world you inhabit, woman. The quantum universe is as capricious and uncertain and unknowable as the triple world that rested on the back of the great turtle, ruled by gods and demons.
“Because of the uncertainty principle, there are always virtual particle pairs being born and vanishing again at all possible energy levels. So, in effect, in every cubic centimetre of empty space, there is theoretically an infinite amount of energy, if we can just stop the virtual particles disappearing.”
“I have to tell you, this liberal arts boy doesn’t understand a word of this.”
“No one does. Not deep down; understand as we understand understanding. All we have is a description of how it works, and it works better than any theory we’ve ever come up with, and that’s including M-Star theory. It’s like the mind of Brahma; no one can understand the thoughts of a creator deity, but that doesn’t mean that there is no creation.”
“For a scientist, you use a lot of religious metaphors.”
“This scientist believes we live in a Hindu universe.” Sonia Yadav presses her point. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m not like those Christian fundamentalist creation scientists—that’s not science; it denies empiricism and the very fact the universe is knowable. Creationists adapt the empirical evidence to suit their particular scriptural interpretation. I think what I think because of the empirical evidence. I’m a rational Hindu. I’m not saying I believe in actual gods, but quantum information theory and M-Star theory teach you the connectedness of all things and how properties emerge that can never be predicted by any of the constituent elements and that the very large and the very small are two sides of the same superstring. Do I need to tell a Ray about Hindu philosophy?”
“Maybe this Ray. So you’ll not be pulling N. K. Jivanjee on his rath yatra.” He’d seen the photographs on the evening news. Hell of a scoop.
“I’ll not be pulling, but I might be in the crowd. And anyway, it’s got a biodiesel engine in it.”
Vishram sits back in his chair, pulls at his lower lip as he does when observations and turns of phrase come flocking and cawing into a comedy routine.
“So tell me; you haven’t got a bindi and you’re out without a chaperone; how does this all sit with N. K. Jivanjee and the mind of Brahma?”
Sonia Yadav does the pucker again.
“I will say this straight and simple. Jati and varna have benighted our nation for three thousand years. Caste was never a Dravidian concept—it was those Aryans and their obsession with division and power. That’s why the British loved it here—they’re still fascinated with anything to do with this country. The class divide is their national narrative.”
“Not the bit of Britain I was in,” Vishram asides.
“For me, N. K. Jivanjee is about national pride, about Bharat for Bharat, not sold by the kilo to the Americans. About Hindu zero-point energy. And in the twenty first century, no woman needs a chaperone; and anyway, my husband trusts me.”
“Ah,” Vishram says, hoping his crestfallenness doesn’t carry. “So, M-Star theory?”
As far as he can get it, it’s like this. First there was string theory, which Vishram has heard of, something to do with everything being notes from vibrating strings. Very pretty. Very musical. Very Hindu. Then there was M-theory, which attempted to resolve the contradictions of string theory but which reached in different directions, like the legs of a starfish. The theoretical centre arrived last, in the late twenties in the shape of M-Star theory.
“I can see the star, but what’s the M for?”
“That’s a mystery,” Sonia Yadav smiles. They’re on Stregas now. The liqueur holds up well against the climate.
In M-Star theory the wrappings and foldings of the primal strings in eleven dimensions into membranes create the polyverse of all possible universes, all with fundamental properties differing from those experienced by humans.
“Everything is there,” says Sonia Yadav. “Universes with an extra time dimension, two-dimensional universes—there’s no gravity in two-dimensional universes. Universes where self-organisation and life is a basic property of space-time. An infinite number of universes. And that’s the difference between cold and hot zero-point theory.”
Vishram calls for another round of Stregas. He doesn’t know if it’s the Sip that Charms or the physics, but his brain is at the Swaddled in Cottonwool stage.
“What stops cold zero-point theory in its tracks is the second law of thermodynamics.” The waiter serves the second round. Vishram studies Sonia Yadav through the gold in the little bubble glass. “Stop that, and pay attention! To be useful, energy has to go somewhere. It’s got to flow from higher to lower, hot to cold, if you like. But in our universe the zero point, the quantum fluctuation, is the ground state. There’s nowhere for the energy to flow; it’s all uphill. But in another universe.”
“The ground state, whatever you call it, might be higher.” Sonia Yadav claps her hands together in a silent namaste.
“Exactly! Exactly! It would naturally flow from higher to lower. We could tap that infinite energy.”