Dark sky, dark sea. Sax got up and walked, clutched the railing of the corniche, teeth clenched as he suddenly thought of Michel. Michel would have welcomed this great unexplainable inside them. He had to learn to consider it as Michel had.
A clenching of all one’s muscles did not actually impede or redirect one’s thoughts. He groaned and took off again in search of Maya.
Another time, thinking about aspects of this same problem, he went down to the corniche and found Maya in one of her usual haunts, and they went out to a bench to sit and watch the sunset, bags of food in hand, and Sax announced to her, “The thing that makes us specifically human doesn’t exist.”
“How so?”
“Well, we are just animals, mostly. But we have a consciousness which sets us apart, because we have language and memory.”
“Those exist.”
“True, but the only reason they work is because of the past. We remember the past, we learn from it, and everything we have learned is in the past. And the past, being past, properly speaking does not exist. Its presence in us is an illusion only. So the thing that makes us human does not exist!”
“I’ve always maintained that,” Maya said. “But not for the same reason.”
“Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it.” Sax read that in one of the feral rhapsodies, and went outdoors for a walk.
Down on the corniche he saw that a front had passed. Across the sky black clouds pulled east. The evening sun broke underneath them, dull silver at the storm’s west edge; the air over the city was still and dim, dark air between dark planes of sea and cloud. Looking at reflections of the city across the harbor he noticed that the sea’s surface was rippled in some places, flat in others, and the boundaries between the two were delineated with amazing sharpness, though presumably the wind was the same over both. This was puzzling, until it occurred to him that there could be a thin film of oil damping the ripples in the flat patches. Someone’s boat engine must be leaking. If he could get a sample from the water, and from everyone’s boats, he could probably ascertain which one it was.
In preparation for his sea trip with Ann, Sax did research on the various psychological studies of the personality of the scientist. He discovered that Maslow had divided scientists into cool and warm types, which he characterized as green and red in color—to avoid assigning any unwanted value judgments, he said, which made Sax smile. Green scientists were reductive, lovers of lawful explanation, tough-minded, looking for regularity, explanation, parsimony, simplicity. Red scientists on the other hand were expansive, warm, intuitive, mystical, soft-minded, and in search of peak moments of “suchness understanding.”
“Dear me,” Sax said. He went out for a walk. Up the alleyways above Paradeplatz a row of red roses was in bloom, and he stopped to inspect the perfect petals of one young rose, nose a centimeter from it. Such velvet dark reds, there against a stucco wall. Okay, he said, here I am. I wonder what makes that red.
Cosmology and particle physics had become a single science before Sax was born, and in all the time since the hope of both sides was for the grand unified theory which would reconcile quantum mechanics and gravity, and even time itself. And yet his whole life physics had been getting more and more complicated, with postulated microdimensions taken as fact, and symmetries of fairly simple but scarily small strings invoked as explanations even though they were many magnitudes of size smaller than could ever be observed—the unobservability was itself mathematically provable. Thus the search for a final unifying theory was, as Lindley noted, a kind of religious quest; or the messianic movement in the religion that the scientific worldview had become. Then he met Bao Shuyo.
Over a winter in Da Vinci Bao took him through the latest in superstring theory, step by step. The idea of extra microdimensions was straightforward. There were seven extra dimensions but all very small, and arranged in a thing called the “seven sphere.” Then to describe a point in our conventional four dimensions one had to add coordinates in all of the extra seven dimensions, and various combinations determined what kind of particle it was, muon, top quark, etc. But these points are just the ends of strings, and the basic quantummechanical unit is a vibration in the whole string. Trying to do calculations of these produced many faster-than-light problems unless twenty-six dimensions were invoked, and so they were. But that stage of the theory yielded only bosons and not fermions. A derivative of the twenty-six-dimensional string was invoked which existed in ten dimensions, the other sixteen having become properties of the string itself, and part of the geometry of supersymmetry. But the sixteen string dimensions could be combined in a huge variety of ways, all equally possible, none preferred. Then mathematical considerations had shown that of all the possibilities, only two of them, SO(32) and E8XE8, exhibited handedness rather than mirror symmetry. And the universe is right-handed. That only two possibilities remained out of the myriad possibilities was startling. But there matters rested, until this winter, when Bao had shown that E8×E8 was the preferred formulation, and that if you pursued the implications and advanced this formulation, you had quantum mechanics, gravity, and time all explained in a single theory, complex but clear, and powerful throughout.
“So beautiful it must be true,” Bao concluded.
Sax nodded. “But that beauty is its only proof.”
“What do you mean?”
“It is otherwise unconfirmable by experiment. It is the beauty of the mathematics that confirms it.”
“As well as matching all physical observations we can make! That’s more than just math, Sax. That’s everything we’ve ever seen, all conformable to this single theory!”
“True.” He nodded uneasily. It was a good point. And yet. . . . “I think it needs to predict something we have not yet seen, that happens because it and not any other explanation is the right one.”
She shook her head, dismayed by his stubbornness.
“Otherwise it’s just a myth,” he said.
“The Planck realm will never be observable,” she said.
“Well. A very beautiful myth. And valuable, believe me I am quite convinced of that. Perhaps we now say we have reached the end of what physics can explain. And so . . .”
“And so?”
“What next?”
Imbibition is the tendency of granular rock to imbibe a fluid under the force of capillary attraction, in the absence of any pressure. Sax became convinced that this was a quality of mind as well. He would say of someone, “She has great imbibition” and people would say, “Ambition?” and he would reply, “No, imbibition.” “Inhibition?” “No, imbibition.” And because of his stroke people would assume he was just having speech trouble again.
Long walks around Odessa at the end of the day. Aimless, without destination, except perhaps for an evening rendezvous with Maya, down on the corniche. Sauntering through the streets and alleyways. Sax liked Thoreau’s explanation for the word saunter: from à la Saint Terre, describing pilgrims on their way to the Holy Land. There goes a Saint Terrer, a saunterer, a Holy Lander. But it was a false etymology, apparently spread from a book called Country Words, by S. and E. Ray, 1691. Although since the origins of the word were obscure, it might in fact be the true story.