Joanes did know, and hastened to answer.
“‘Leave winter to me. You, attack.’”
“That’s right. That was more or less Hitler’s answer. And he meant it literally; he believed he could control the cold.”
Joanes was still at a loss as to the relevance of the story. The reference to Nazism, what’s more, seemed to him an extreme measure. To his mind, anyone who resorted to those kinds of references, even to berate them, was employing the kind of radical, devastating argument that was all too reminiscent of the National Socialists themselves. There was something premeditated, too, about the professor’s argument, a hunch that only fueled Joanes’s general suspicion. His whole cosmogony spiel seemed pre-rehearsed, as indicated by the — albeit shoddy — alliteration of a phrase like “the earth sizzled and spat and cracked open,” and his way of introducing the Nazis as “Wagner-loving opera-goers.”
Joanes imagined the professor in his study or his office or wherever it was he worked, researching and putting his speech together, reading it aloud, adjusting the story to the lesson he wanted to communicate through it. It was clear the professor had not been irritated by the interruption to his conference. Quite the contrary. He’d delighted in the opportunity to share the story with an audience, and he was so self-satisfied that now he was treating Joanes to another round.
“And there’s an even more serious problem,” the professor was saying. “And this is precisely what I tried to make that gentleman at the conference understand when he began speculating over whether a new religion could arise out of Artificial Intelligence. If something like that happened, as was the case with Hörbiger, we’d find ourselves with a case of regression. A scientific advance, a rational advance, a logical advance would make us move backward of our own free will to a state of pre-logical thinking.”
He paused to let his words sink in and added, “And what’s more, this regression would discredit the achievements of the logical advancement that occasioned it. We mustn’t forget that Hörbiger was right, up to a point. It is true that there are celestial bodies out there composed of ice, like comets and the rings of Saturn, and it’s also true that there’s ice on the Moon. We must prevent such kinds of discrediting,” said the professor, pointing an admonishing finger at Joanes, as if he were still his student. “We must never give in to what Jung called ‘the libido of the unreasonable.’”
Joanes shifted position, and his joints cricked. The professor’s wife remained unmoving on the bed, looking out into the nothingness like a zombie.
“And yet. .” Joanes began, as if speaking to himself, but he fell silent again without adding anything.
“And yet what?” the professor prompted him.
“And yet it’s natural, after all, for man to give in to ‘the libido of the unreasonable.’”
“Explain yourself.”
“It’s a natural consequence of our thirst for knowledge. If science takes its time offering us answers, then we have to fill in the gaps with—”
“With what? With fallacies? With mythology?”
“Not always,” responded Joanes. “The physical or mathematical models that scientists use perform the same function. Researchers use them to try to explain what we don’t know. And that leads us to findings as incorrect as those occasioned by religious meddling and myth.”
“You couldn’t be more wrong. Scientific models are hypotheses based on verified facts. They’re not born with the aim of surviving, as religions are, nor of reaching above or beyond themselves, as also happens with religions, rather their aim is to provide a working basis until the number of experimentally verified facts increases.”
“I was only offering a point of comparison,” explained Joanes. “I wasn’t saying that the scientific model exists on the same level as Hörbiger’s cosmogony.”
“I’m pleased to hear it, bearing in mind you’re one of my alumni.”
Joanes wiped the sweat from his brow.
“Scientists have the necessary discipline and knowledge to keep their conjectures under control,” he ventured, “but what happens when unanticipated or tricky or only partly explicable facts, which are the cause of such conjectures, move into a wider forum? In such a case, it’s little wonder the hypothesis gets out of control, as happened when Hörbiger’s ideas came to the Nazis’ attention.”
“That was an extremely specific case,” said the professor.
He spoke softly, waiting to see where his old student’s argument was leading.
Joanes perked up again. He could tell the professor was not enjoying having someone stand up to him.
“Of course it’s a specific case,” he went on, “to which we must add that Hörbiger’s ideas couldn’t be qualified even as a hypothesis. The World Ice Doctrine didn’t have a sufficiently solid scientific basis to endure without Hitler’s backing. But what would have happened if the doctrine’s origins had been altogether different, unquestionably sound and at the same time attractive to a great number of people, demanding our consideration.”
“You mean, for example, something like Artificial Intelligence?”
“I don’t know enough about AI, although I understand why the gentleman at the conference asked what he did.”
“Give me an example.”
“Imagine a tesseract, a hypercube, a four dimensional cube. Do you know what that is?”
“Of course,” the professor replied, glacial.
“Let’s imagine, then, that a century ago, a tesseract appeared before three shepherd children herding their flock on the outskirts of Fatima. What would have happened?”
“Nothing,” responded the professor, growing more and more irritated. “We live in three-dimensional space. The shepherd children would have seen nothing more than a normal, run-of-the-mill cube, not its projection in the fourth dimension.”
“What I mean is let’s imagine what would have happened if that four dimensional cube had appeared as such. I’m talking in abstracto.”
“I understand perfectly well what you’re trying to say. A separate question is whether it’s a pertinent example. I happen to believe it is not.”
Joanes didn’t let himself be put off.
“A tesseract is inconceivable in our world,” he said. “It’s a theoretical construct, but no less real for that. Mathematicians use it every day, extend it to five dimensions, to the nth dimension, lend it practical applications. So tesseracts are real and at the same time. . fantastical. Let’s call them that. Now let’s suppose that one manifested itself as it really is. What would the young shepherds have done? What would they have believed they were seeing? What conclusions would such a vision have led them to when considered in conjunction with the traditional tales or the Sunday sermons they were used to? In what way would their vision have morphed the moment they put it into words and shared it with their neighbors? Might there not exist, today, in Fatima, a shrine — one perhaps with a different image at the altar, but a shrine nonetheless — to which devotees of the fourth dimension would make their pilgrimage?”