“Afraid not,” King said.
The man soured. “Then what’s this about?”
Alexander took a seat and cut right to the heart of the matter. “Golems.”
Davidson leaned back slowly. A pen appeared in his hand and went to his mouth. “What’s the application? Is this for a theory?”
“Real-world application,” Alexander replied.
Davidson plucked the pen from his mouth. “Well, I’m afraid that while the written word is powerful, it is not that powerful. It cannot grant life.”
“What about the spoken word?” King asked.
A grin came to Davidson’s face. “So you are seeking the opinion of a physicist and an ex-rabbi?”
King’s and Alexander’s silence answered the question. Davidson looked at his watch. “Very well. I have a few minutes. I must warn you, however, to not expect two diverging theories. My research in religion and science have come to the same conclusion.”
“That’s why we’re here,” Alexander said.
“Then let’s start at the beginning. The big-bang theory attempts to answer how the universe was first formed, but it doesn’t answer the bigger question: Why does the universe exist? Because of this, it’s a hollow mathematical model. It assumes everything came from nothing, ex nihilo, and states that the universe had a beginning. But there is another option: the universe has always existed.”
He stood and erased a portion of the whiteboard, marring his yellow sleeve. He wrote out an equation: 0 = 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 …
“This is the mathematical statement that shows the big bang is impossible. The sum of nothing, is nothing!”
He erased some of the plus signs and added minus: 0 = 0 − 0 + 0 − 0 + 0 − 0. “This is the Null Axiom, developed by Terence Witt, which states that the difference of nothing is nothing, meaning everything is made of nothing. Thus, the universe never had a beginning because it is nothing, which is also limitless and timeless.”
Davidson checked his watch. “Limitless also describes my thoughts on the matter and I need to speak at the symposium in an hour, so rather than blather on about nonexpansion, cosmic microwaves, decaying photons, or eternal equilibrium, I’ll cut right to the theological meat of the matter.
“Null physics mathematically describes the speaking of the reality into existence. In the same way the press spins a story by changing the context of facts, the nonreal is made real by the words of a creator spinning the context of limitless nothingness and telling a story.”
King rolled his head from side to side. “So … if God”—he made air quotations with his fingers—“spoke existence into being, what language did He speak?”
Davidson burst into laughter. When he saw neither of his guests sharing in the moment, he stopped. “You’re serious? The language of God?”
“Quite,” Alexander said.
The pen reentered Davidson’s mouth. “Some have speculated that DNA is the language of God. It has a coding system—an alphabet if you will—rules of spelling and grammar as well as meaning and purpose. In many ways it resembles computer code. And ninety-seven percent of it is considered junk, meaning we have yet to figure out what it says. It also obeys Zipf’s law, which simply shows that when words from a document, say a novel, are graphed by the number of times they appear in a book, from most popular to least popular, you get a straight line. DNA broken up into words and listed by popularity align perfectly with Zipf’s law. Shazam, it’s a language!”
“But we can’t speak the language of DNA,” King said. “We can’t verbalize it.”
“In your case, you don’t have to. It’s already present, but if your speech spins the context…” His eyes brightened. “Researchers at the Hado Institute Australia have shown how words can affect the physical world. Spoken words create vibrations. Each word has its own unique resonance—its own pattern of vibration. They spoke different words, both positive and negative, to water before freezing it, transforming it into its crystalline state. Water exposed to the words ‘angel,’ ‘beautiful,’ and ‘life’ formed dazzling, symmetrical crystals. Water exposed to words such as ‘dirty,’ ‘devil,’ and ‘death’ became malformed, cracked, and burst, almost like something had exploded from within.
“A sound wave is, in essence, a disturbance moving through a medium, shifting energy from a starting point to an ending point. And where there is energy, there is information. We detect sound waves through our ears, which transfers the information to our brain, where it is translated into sound. But there is more information in sound than our brains can decipher.”
“If sounds are affecting the physical world around us, why are we not noticing?” King asked.
“We are limited by what we can sense. In the same way that our ears cannot hear the information conveyed in every sound, our other senses might miss the results. Take steganography for instance.”
King nodded. He was familiar with the use of steganography in military applications. World War II microdots, Morse code in fabric patterns, and sign language hidden in photographs had all been used in military history. In more modern applications, terrorists had used the technology to communicate through coded message board avatars.
Davidson opened his laptop, tapped the keys, and brought up a Web site. He showed them a photo on the screen.
“Though this looks like an ordinary photo of an oceanside park, it is much more. By adjusting the pixels minutely, you can encode text or other photos within an image and it is imperceptible to the human eye. Decoded, this picture reads…”
He clicked on the image, which opened a page of text:
Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
“Poe,” Alexander said. “Part of his sonnet to science. Cute.”
Davidson waggled his finger. “Perhaps even more applicable to your query is the spectrogram.”
King sat up straighter. Much of what the professor had said either sounded like bunk, or he already knew. But spectrograms were new to him and he suspected the man was about to uncover a nugget of truth.
“As I mentioned before, sound carries more information than the human ear can perceive. A spectrograph is a visual representation of a sound wave. Most times it’s innocuous, but images, and messages, can be coded into sounds and, in theory, into words. There is a video online…” Davidson spun the laptop around, showing them a YouTube video titled “Alien Abduction Caught Live on Ustream.”
King winced, fearing Davidson was a crackpot.
The facial expression didn’t go unnoticed. “Have no fear, this is just an example of clever marketing.” He played the video, which showed two men talking about aliens and abductions before one of them moved to the kitchen where a star chart, and an alien in the window, awaited. What followed was a creatively made abduction scene featuring bright lights and a wavering, high-pitched sound.
“That sound you hear is much more than a simple noise. It is an image.” Davidson quickly located a file online, downloaded it, and opened up a small software package. He ran the sound through the software and an image of several vertical and horizontal lines was shown. He zoomed in on a portion so the lines could be more easily seen.
The lines meant nothing to King, but Alexander figured it out. “Binary. Tall lines represent the number one. Short lines … zero. Or vice versa.”