Antiphony (6 page)

“Perhaps this is why we can only ever achieve an approximation of the truth.” Now he has found it, the way back, a loose strand in his ramblings that can lead him back towards what he really meant to tell them here today. He dares to look at the people staring up at him. One man in a tasteful gray mock turtle neck sweater meets his gaze with the squinting, screwed up eyes of a bystander who is witnessing a car wreck. “I have spent most of the past decade constructing a set of equations that will yield a result that should satisfy most, if not all, of you here in this room that the fourth term of Perturbation Theory is finite. I believe this is a great accomplishment—it certainly feels that way to me, after a lot of hard work, and false starts, and doubts about whether what I intended to accomplish was even provable. And yet, this is only the fourth term in what is, by definition, an infinite number of terms. A string—if you will pardon the expression—of ever-smaller, more insignificant,
numbers that get us ever closer to the certainty of a final theory that works in every corner of the universe. But it will never be finished. Not in my lifetime, nor in yours, nor any other. We can never solve for an infinite number of terms.”

Now, though he has succeeded in linking the point of his presentation with his initial febrile preamble, he has also quite nicely succeeded in pointing out the utter futility of his work—and, by implication, the work of all the other fine men and women in the audience, who came here this afternoon in good faith expecting little more than an informative and probably slightly tedious summary of his rather finicky sector of their professional world.

He draws another breath and tries to settle his mind.

If only he had his notes. His hands reach for the podium in front of him. He grasps the smooth wooden edges of it and holds on for a moment. An image flashes into his head, a memory of himself lying on the bed in their old house, the three-bedroom red brick colonial they raised their children in, in the residual waning moments of a hectic, tiring day. His eyes close in memory, and he hears the sound of his teenage son's voice singing in the shower. The words of the song are long forgotten, a lilting pop tune from the late nineties. But the sound, the unrestrained sound of joy coming from the young man's voice, nearly brings a tear to his eye now and he must hold it back and focus. Focus.

His notes—if he had them here, what would they tell him? He can envision them folded over twice, once lengthwise and once crosswise, into quadrants. Two sheets of college-ruled paper filled with his cramped and nearly illegible handwriting. Key
equations, the initial building-blocks of his research. And then a brilliant insight, the flash of inspiration that launched him on his way towards discovery: Each term in the theory is a kind of tightening of perspective inward, drawing his viewpoint down to a deeper layer of reality that at the same time expresses a broader and more comprehensive understanding of the universe. And so he built the rest of his research on that insight—it became simple really, years of extrapolation, research grants formalizing the request for funding that would allow him to work out and prove in minute detail a fact that, in his head, he already knew.

He can picture these things, but now he must find the right words to say them.

In the nook beneath the tilted top of the podium there is a digital clock that flashes both the time of day and the duration of his talk. The two numbers read:

1:11

0:00

It does indeed feel as if time has stopped, but it cannot be zero o'clock. It must be one eleven, eleven minutes after one. He must not have pressed the button that starts the duration counter.

These two numbers conspire to mock him. They are both representative of perfect states, a binary on/off expression, 1:11 representing the state where time, and hence the universe, exists, and 0:00 representing the state before, or after, time exists, when there was or will be nothing. All or nothing at all.

The number 1:11 blinks and flashes a new number at him: 1:12.

His son's deep voice comes back to him, haunting, amplified by the years that have passed since that moment and by the pleasing, echoing acoustics of the shower tiles then. Of all the instruments man has fashioned over the centuries, none can match the range of pitch and expression of the human voice. Even a relatively poor singer can create an almost infinite variety of sounds by changing the shape of his throat, his mouth, his tongue, and modulating the flow of air across the vocal cords. And even everyday speaking, as Theodore is attempting to do now, projecting his voice towards the microphone so it can be amplified and carried throughout the wide expanse of this room, is a type of singing, a difference in degree, not in kind. As the next words come out, “During the course of my research,” Theodore realizes that he has changed pitch three times.
During the
are on a kind of default middle tone, call it A, and then he goes up a tone to B on the word
course,
not for emphasis, but as a matter of creating interest for the listener. Back down to A for
of
and
my.
Then up again to B on the first syllable of
research,
and dipping down two whole notes to G for the final syllable,
search.

Re-
search. Searching over—and over—again.

All this modulation in one simple opening phrase of a statement.

“During the course of my research,” Theodore continues singing, “I have come to think of Perturbation Theory, and, in fact, String Theory in general, as a kind of directional sign that is true, that is entirely valid, in and of itself, but is not our final destination, the final Theory of Everything we really want to achieve. It is an arrow pointing towards a deeper reality, the ultimate truth.”

“Where do all the infinities and singularities in our equations come from?” He looks around the room and sees that he has at the very least grabbed their attention, if not their admiration. “Could it be that we are missing something that we are not even capable of seeing, at least with our current way of looking at the world?”

“Could these zeros and lazy eights be telling us something very important that we are simply choosing to ignore?”

He has veered off track once more, away from the comforting set of certainties described by his computer slides. Maybe it would be a good idea to click the remote and display one of those slides on the screen. But another image has entered his head, an image of madness: a disembodied face, an ivory mask floating above a black pool of water, its eyes empty, mouth unsmiling. The mask hovers for a moment over the water and then, what seems to fill Theodore's head, a rustling sound of a wind, a current flowing across the black water as the empty face moves over it. The room before him collapses, the dozens of people and the walls and ceiling and floor collapse; the very substance of time and space have collapsed and there is nothing left before him but a void. A void he must fill. That voice, which called to him inside his head, whose was it? Was it his own?

A grain of sand that grows and grows.

In the next instant, the room is back and all the people with it. Time begins again. And they are watching him as if he never left them.

It is hard to imagine, but quantum theory states that in every second the universe and everything in it essentially disappears
and then reappears in a slightly different, changed state—thousands of times. Perhaps he has merely experienced some sensation of this quantum fluctuation, flashing off and then on again.

Nevertheless, they are looking at him, expecting him to speak.

“If the universe really is nothing more than a giant thought, a thought projection emanating from some form of consciousness, and we are living within this projection, it would be impossible to discover the source of this projection by examining the projection itself in finer levels of detail. We cannot find the source of the thought by carving the thought apart, by dissecting it and relating it to itself. We can only find clues, glimpses of the true, underlying reality.” The mask hovers over the still black water. “The infinities and singularities in our equations may be telling us that what we are missing is unknowable in terms of physical science. These unsolvable terms in our equations may be roadsigns pointing to consciousness—to God—as the missing piece in the puzzle.”

The room has grown very quiet. Only the hush of the ventilation system and the resonating presence of a single syllable his voice has pronounced. It hangs there in the air like the vibration of a giant gong that has been struck, the waves of sound still radiating outward in all directions from their source. He cannot believe it—it seems as if it hasn't really happened—but he knows now that he has crossed a line which he can never step back over again. He has brought God into the equation.

The eyes of the man in the turtle-neck sweater glare at him in disbelief. Others in the front row of chairs are gazing at him
as if he has removed his clothes and begun performing a pornographic dance. At the far back of the room, three men arise from their chairs and glance in his direction for a lingering second, then stride towards the double doors, open them, and vacate the room, indignant, letting the doors slam shut behind them with a loud clattering groan. But at least this noise has wiped away the besmirching remnants of that syllable he pronounced, its single vowel sound still loitering in the shape of Theodore's open mouth like a curse he has uttered—G-
aw
-d. It is, in fact, when he considers it, an ugly Germanic word, commenced by the guttural
G
, the mouth opening wide for the
aw
as if in shock or fright, and then clamped shut at the end by the harsh, terminal
d
.

In the murmur that now arises from the audience, the commotion at the back of the room in the wake of the three men leaving, he hears the familiar voice of Pradeep call for quiet. Theodore's eyes scan the crowd to locate him; he was somewhere towards the back. His face is easy enough to find. Its dark skin stands out among the predominately pale pink of the other faces, and when he spots it he sees that Pradeep is motioning with a downward push of his hand for the others sitting near him to remain seated and calm. And he sees also that there is the faintest hint of a smile on Pradeep's face as he does this.

He must begin again. Whatever damage has been done, Theodore must forge ahead with his presentation and complete it. He cannot stop here. If he stops now, the only thing these people will remember from his speech is this blunder he has committed. But if he goes forward and delivers the body of his presentation, gets back to the facts and the figures of it, perhaps
he can smooth it over and relegate this unfortunate misstep to nothing more than a shaky start. He clicks the nubby rubber button on the remote control that moves the presentation to the next slide on the screen. It seems almost preposterous to juxtapose the next slide with what he has just said, but there doesn't seem to be any other way back to the safe, orderly world of his research that existed before he began this rambling dissertation into madness. The flash of light on the huge screen behind him, the alteration of patterns and colors and words, does appear to focus the audience again on the front of the room—and on him. So, he can try now to brush this aside. There is an entry point back into the overview of Perturbation Theory that he was planning to use as the introduction to his speech, and he begins his talk again with this: The idea that even though he can never prove every term of the Theory, he can get to the point where the only remaining unknowns are infinitesimal, a negligible variance that he can choose to ignore for all practical purposes. The analogy he uses is simple. Just because a centimeter cannot be carved into slices as fine as the smallest possible slice—the Planck length—doesn't mean that a centimeter does not exist. Once he gets going, the words really start to flow. The knowledge was inside his head all along; how could he have ever believed otherwise? The missing notes do not matter; they were only a crutch he thought he needed. He has lived this research every day of his life for the past seven years, and now that he is on the right track, all the key points begin to build on themselves, one after another, a logical, orderly progression from his initial assumptions right up to the final,
crowning equation that appears behind him, taking up the full width of the screen, on slide number 32.

The time has flown by. The digital clock flashes red on the console inside the podium:

1:57

0:00

He has managed to deliver the presentation that he has been envisioning for months, despite the rocky start. Or has he? The clock still mocks him, with its triple zeros. He takes a drink from the glass of water the moderator kindly fetched during the stir and commotion that his invocation of God swept over the room. One last push now, to the finish.

Theodore realizes that he has not really seen the audience for some time; he has been speaking to them and yet apart from them, locked within his own private world. The past forty-five minutes have vanished as he has been absorbed into the concentration and focus required to describe every nuance of his research and mathematical proof. It has been like one of the hours he passes lost in conversation with Pradeep or Victor Fieldman, his mentor at the Institute, in which his mind achieves a momentum of its own that somehow separates itself from the physical structure of the brain and exists, together with these other minds, floating in a nebulous segment of space out
there
—he imagines it in a place up near the ceiling of his office or near one of the chandeliers in this giant room—in an abstract world of its own creation. He has reached the highest point. He thinks of this speech as a kind of symphony he has been conducting. He has led these people through one movement and then another and another, up to the crescendo of his
final equation, and now he must bring them down, gently, back to the ground of the real and tangible world. His eyes skim over the crowd of people spread before him, and several pairs of eyes meet his, as if they have been waiting for him to acknowledge that they exist. They seem to be eager to make a connection with him, to show him they have been paying attention to everything he has to say. And then, as his eyes drift towards the back of the room, he sees her. Ilene. She did not go to the cooking class after all—she has been here all along. And even across the wavering expanse of space between the podium where he stands and the chair where she has been sitting, faithfully watching him throughout the past hour, his eyes lock onto hers and he can see what his mind has not allowed him to recognize as he delivered this speech. She must know, sitting in the audience, she must feel it, what he could not let himself understand. The look in her eyes lets him know, as much as she tries to hide it, that he has committed a blunder so terrible their life together will never be the same again.