Master of Space and Time

Master of Space and Time
Rudy Rucker
pp 229

1984 is a little outside "my period" for science fiction - I remember having a conversation with the fellow at the till about it: as good as the Star Wars and Star Trek films were (and in the case of the latter, the series and original books), the tie-ins that started appearing, in Britain at least, flooded the market with fiction that wasn't as cerebral as one would like sci-fi to be. But when I looked at the list of chapters and saw titles like This is the Name of this Chapter, Godzilla meets the Toad Man and 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, I knew I had to read it. James Warhola's cover art also intrigued me.

Rucker is a great-great-great grandson of the German philosopher GF Hegel. According to the author's online autobiography, his grandfather "could sense the gathering storm" in 1937, and sent Rucker's mother to America - "the land of the future" identified by the great philosopher in The Philosophy of History, "where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World's History shall reveal itself".

Rucker is the originator of the literary art of transrealism, and has written a manifesto in which he sets out his stall, perhaps a trifle hubristically, but then the mathematician and computer scientist turned author displays his ability to dissect the makeup of a novel in his Writer's Toolkit. Here in his manifesto he explains the relation between SF and other forms of fiction:

The familiar tools of SF — time travel, antigravity, alternate worlds, telepathy, etc. — are in fact symbolic of archetypal modes of perception. Time travel is memory, flight is enlightenment, alternate worlds symbolize the great variety of individual world-views, and telepathy stands for the ability to communicate fully. This is the “Trans” aspect. The “realism” aspect has to do with the fact that a valid work of art should deal with the world the way it actually is. Transrealism tries to treat not only immediate reality, but also the higher reality in which life is embedded.

Drs Harry Gerber and Joe Fletcher used to build fantastic machines together - for example, for the military, to make the enemy's water supply radioactive - but couldn't get patents for their inventions because they couldn't explain how they worked.

The machine at the centre of this novel is a "blunzer", a machine that works by altering the value of Planck's measurement in a flow of gluons (which hold quarks together in subatomic particles) which is then injected into the brain of the blunzee, giving him or her godlike powers for a limited period of time.

But time, as Einstein found, is the joker of the pack. Harry Gerber builds the machine first (before he forgets how he did it), but Fletcher sends him back the instructions upon being blunzed. Then...but that would be telling.

Herein lies one of the themes of the novel: as one reviewer stated, "Rucker is bewitched by the absurdities of the universe implied by quantum theory".

And boy, is the quantum universe absurd, as are its architects. Even as certain scientists fight tooth-and-nail to remove any trace of God from their universe, the "god-particle", the elusive Higgs boson, is sought by the Large Hadron Collider at Cern - the underground basilica of physics to which preposterous sums of money are sacrificed (although Austria has had enough of haemmorhaging shrinking resources, and may be the first of many). Even other scientists, including Cambridge's eminent Stephen Hawking, are sidelined: Hawking was publicly subjected to the astounding charge of his work being not good enough by Professor Stephen Higgs, who proposed the eponymous particle's existence in 1964, who had not read the paper in which Hawking stated that the universe would be "more exciting" if it were not found than if it were.

However, the novel transcends mere science, and is also a meditation on the traditional Hungarian folk-tale of "the peasant and the sausage" - a peasant catches a fish, which promises him three wishes in return for its release. Going home and telling his wife of his good fortune, he unthinkingly wishes for a sausage, and one appears; his wife, cursing his stupidity for wasting a wish, cries that the sausage should grow on his nose; and the third wish has to be used to remove the sausage. So, remembering that there are three sorts of gluons...anyway, the tale can be seen in only slightly altered form at the start of MGM's 1958 version of Tom Thumb.

Religion of a sort is present: the Church of Scientific Mysticism has "grown out of the mystical teachings of Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel", and has a minister with the surname Bitter - Rucker's mother's maiden name (his father became an Episcopal minister). Fletcher's wife finds some comfort here, being worried about world hunger, but feeling angry and offended at Gerber's indication of an answer typical of those scientists who set the western agenda - that "there are too many people".

I don't think Rucker's being facetious here. Born in 1946, he would have been in his senior years at St Xavier's High School in Kentucky at a time when some theologians started to speak more and more like social workers, leaving scientists to pick up the discarded mantle and sew their own cloth thereon. For, as much as scientists try to obliterate God from the world they present for the consumption of the masses, all they succede in doing is effacing religious language. They are still left with some form of intentionality, or at the most basic level the question of the goldilocks universe, "why us?" Rucker deals with this question in a way that I found totally unexpected; his solution is far from an orthodox Judaeo-Christian one, but he nevertheless points, in his own way, towards "the higher reality in which life is embedded.

As both a modern take on the dangers of getting what you wish for and a fun read, I thoroughly recommend this cynical and witty working-out of quantum science in action as an antidote to theoreticians who take themselves a little too seriously.

why the large hadron collider will find the Higgs boson

The last time I had a jar with Professor Calculus, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN had just been fired for the first time. Given that the world had obstinately refused to end in the face of hysterical objections by the sort of people who become amorous about trees, I put it to him that either the world had not ended, or it had done so and I was, in fact, a figment of his imagination, therefore mine's was a pint. He didn't see my reasoning. Sometimes scientists just don't get it.

The somewhat histrionic coverage of the opening of the Large Hadron collider seems to be in measure with the epithet given to its chosen prey, the hypothetical Higgs boson: the God particle. This has even, in recent times, leaked into popular culture in the remake - starring George Clooney - of the Russian film Solaris, where ghosts are sent to wherever ghosts go when they're killed by a "Higgs beam". In reality, the Higgs boson, if it exists, is estimated to exist for a fraction of a fraction of a second, so it's difficult to imagine it getting up to any of the activities predicated of various deities by different cultures.

The Large Hadron Collider cost around £4.4 billion ($7.8 billion) to build. Many countries have contributed to it - for example, the US gave $531 million (£300 million), Spain €55 million (£44 million/$77 million) and Japan ¥5 billion (£26 million/$47 million); the UK gives CERN £70 million($124 million) per year.

It's difficult to imagine these countries donating such significant sums through the goodness of their rulers' hearts; especially as, in the case of Great Britain, there were 25,700 "excess winter fuel deaths" due to people not being able to heat their houses at the same time as buying food.

On the other hand, perhaps it's exactly the point that our countries are contributing to CERN while older people die. It's not a new phenomenon - in the Who's 1973 album Quadrophenia, Pete Townshend writes in Helpless Dancer: "people die because they're old/or left alone because they're cold".

Steven Hawking, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, made a rather strange statement recently:

Both the LHC and the Space program are vital if the human race is not to stultify and eventually die out. Together they cost less than one tenth of a per cent of world GDP. If the human race can not afford this, then it doesn't deserve the epithet 'human'.

As much as I'm an admirer of Professor Hawking, who exemplifies the great potential of people who, like myself, have a disability, I have to to admit to being a bit put out by this statement. Is he saying it's worth spending up to $6.5 trillion (£3.6 trillion - 10% of world GDP) on research into sub-atomic particles and interstellar peripateticism? If he, and anybody else, thinks this way, I recommend a swift dose of Gattaca, the 1997 film starring Uma Thurman and Jude Law which presents a society driven by eugenics wherein engineered humans are free to leave the planet, and the rest are cleaners. (There's a cool twist - check out the film.)

The thing is, unfortunately, there has been a tendency to believe that some people are worth more than others, which in the middle of the 19th century acquired a sheen of respectability with the publication of Darwin's evolutionary theory, incorporating the concept of the survival of the fittest into the Malthusian fable that famine and war are necessary to control population (a travesty of Darwin's concept which horrified him).

Unmasked by the Holocaust, this tendency is rising again with the tendency of scientists and writers, like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, to force science onto the street-corner so that it can lead the unsuspecting curious to be shanghaied into the radical militant atheist army meretriciously peddling the idea that science is a jealous god, and will tolerate no system of belief that posits intuition inexplicable by detectable particles.

This first operation of the large hadron collider was nothing more than a booting-up, and produced a "fuzzy dot". And yet already there's a conflict, with Steven Hawking saying that the results would be more interesting if the Higgs boson weren't found than if it were, and the eponymous Professor Higgs opposing this view; probably only one of them can look forward to a Nobel prize.

The Large Hadron Collider appears to keep 6000 scientists in tea and biscuits. More than this, it is required to find the Higgs boson so that a business case can be made in 2012 for a larger collider.

I wonder how much difference there is between a fuzzy dot, and smoke and mirrors. Anyhow, there are so many careers and reputations riding on the discovery of the Higgs boson that I'm sure it will be discovered, whether it exists or not.


Related post: Solaris - the boson delusion