So, how is matter made?
Later, over a dinner of mushrooms on toast, the discussion starts again.
"I told Ariel about my book," Lura says to Burlem. "Or at least that thought experiment about the computer."
"That's the only bit I really understand," he says. Then, to me: "The rest is mostly maths."
"I haven't answered your question yet," I say to Lura. "'How is matter made?'"
Burlem laughs. "That's a nice conundrum to set someone for a rainy afternoon."
The sky has been darkening all day, and by three o'clock I wasn't sure what was happening outside: whether it was night, or the storm. At about five o'clock I was making a coffee and I saw Burlem trying to entice Planck out of the door. But all the dog would do was reverse back into the house. It was the quickest way to get out of the rain, but it looked faintly comical.
"I didn't expect you to," Lura says, with a friendly smile.
"But I get that quarks and electrons are just like zeroes and ones," I say. "And it seems obvious to me now that thought is matter..." Except I have a bit of a problem with this. If thought is matter, then everything is real. But I thought that nothing was real. Derrida's difference; Baudrillard's simulacra. If thought is matter, then everything becomes real. But if you turn the equation around—if matter is actually thought—then nothing is real. Can both of these ideas be true at the same time? Can this equation work in the same way as 'energy equals mass'?"
"Although thought doesn't make more matter," Lura says, "neither thought nor matter can come from nowhere."
"No. I can see that, I think. But thought kind of ... shapes..."
"Encodes," Lura says. "Thought encodes matter."
"Which means what?" I take a sip of red wine and my hand trembles.
"When you think, you potentially change things."
I think about this, and everything she's said. I imagine the little binary people in their world where all the stuff they see around them, and all their thoughts, are made of the same thing. Presumably in this world you could create things just by thinking them. There'd be no difference between a thought of rain and rain itself. But surely that doesn't follow in this world.
"Are you saying that if I think a tree, I can make a tree?" I say to Lura, unconvinced.
"Not in this world," she says.
"But in the computer world? In the thought experiment?"
"Sort of," she says. She looks at Burlem. "She has a very good knack for simplification," she says.
"Not a skill you really need in an English department," he says. "But yes."
"Why 'sort of'?" I ask Lura. "Why can I only sort of make a tree by thinking it if I'm one of these beings?"
"Because it depends on what sort of code you're thinking in," she says. "Whether you can think in machine code or just within the software program."
"I'm having trouble with this," I say, frowning.
I can barely taste my food. I'm so aware that this is reality we're talking about: This is the room I'm in, and the chair I'm sitting on, and my mind and my dreams and everything that makes me exist. I have the bizarre sensation that if I get any of these questions wrong, things will start melting around me: that the existence of everything depends on this.
And then I think, Don't be stupid: It's just a theory.
But I've seen the evidence for it. I've been in the Troposphere.
But the Troposphere could mean anything, surely?
"Trouble?" Burlem says, laughing. "Oh, join the club."
"I mean, it's as though the whole world is turning, I don't know..."
"Upside down?" Lura says.
"Yeah. But in more dimensions than just four. I can't..." What do I want to say? I'm not sure. "So what is machine code?" I ask. "And why can't I think trees?"
She takes a sip of wine. "My whole book is about what this 'machine code' possibly is. I'm not sure myself yet. I've got my hypothesis that it exists, but I'm still looking for the mathematics that completely explains it ... I think I'm probably seventy-five percent there." She puts her wine down. "You know, of course, that in the real world you can't make something just by thinking it. You can't create a ten-pound note when you're poor, or a sandwich when you're hungry. The mind just can't do that."
"It's a shame," Burlem says.
"But we also know—or we've agreed for the time being—that thought is matter. Thought is encoded; thought never goes away. Everyone's thoughts exist in another dimension, which we are experiencing as the Troposphere."
"Yes," I say, putting my fork down.
"We know thought is matter because it is happening in a closed system, in which everything is made from matter. Just like in the computer program in our thought experiment. There's nothing in there that isn't written in code, because, well, you just can't have something on a computer that isn't written in code. Anything outside the system by definition couldn't exist within it."
I imagine my laptop again, and the little binary beings in their little world. I'm outside of their program—their world—as is the plastic case that holds the screen and the hard drive, and the computer screen itself, and the desk the laptop sits on, and the whole of this world. And the beings would never, ever be aware of those things. Even if we did decide to tell them about it—we'd have to put it into their world using their code. And then, somehow, it would be part of their world.
"But we also know that thought doesn't create more matter," Lura says.
"I can see that," I say. "The computer beings couldn't just will more RAM into existence, for example."
"Good," Lura says. "But the matter that is there can be manipulated."
Where have I heard the term "spoon-bending" recently? This is what comes into my mind, but I don't say anything. I'm not even sure spoon-bending really happens, and there don't seem to be any examples of people thinking of a goldfish, for example, and making one appear. Magicians who seem to turn silk scarves into doves don't really do it: It's just an illusion.
"I'm not sure I can see how matter is manipulated," I say. "I mean, well, maybe I can just about see how it can be..." And then my brain cartwheels around and I think I can see it all. "Hang on," I say. "Do we just see what the majority of people see? Like, I could think a tree and it wouldn't be there, but if lots of us thought a tree, that would be enough?"
"That's intriguing," says Burlem. "That's what we thought of last, before Lura started working on the book properly. But the world is not a projection of the Troposphere."
"Yes—that's very good," Lura says. "But I think it's got more to do with this idea of the machine code. Machine code is the code that makes the machine run, rather than the software. The machine code tells the software what to do. The machine code sets the rules for everything in the system: how the trees are invented in this computer-program world, for example."
"OK," I say.
Now, on my little image of my laptop I can imagine two layers of code: the stuff that makes the program and the stuff that makes the machine work. I can see that the two would be closely related, but that one—the machine code—is operating on a deeper level than the other.
"So in our world, what is written in machine code?" Lura asks me.