Tomorrow Happens (26 page)

It occurred to me that the phrase "
designer of Providence
" might not—in this case—have solely a religious import!

Could it be a coded salutation to an
architectural surveyor
? One who established the street plan of the capital of Rhode Island?

Might "father" in this case refer not to the Almighty, but instead to somebody far more temporal and immediate—the way two apprentices refer to their beloved master?

What I
can
verify from the open record is this. Soon after helping Roger Williams return to Boston in triumph, Henry Stephens hastily took his leave of America and his family, departing on a vessel bound for Holland.

Why that particular moment? It should have been an exciting time for such a fellow. The foundations for a whole new civilization were being laid. Who can doubt that Henry took an important part in early discussions with Williams, Winthrop, Anne Hutchinson and others—deliberations over the best way to establish tolerance and lasting peace with native tribes. How to institute better systems of justice and education. Discussions that would soon bear surprising fruit.

And yet, just as the fruit was ripening, Stephens
left
, hurrying back to a Europe that he now considered decadent and corrupt. What provoked this sudden flight from his cherished New World?

It was July, 1634. Antwerp shipping records show him disembarking there on the 5th.

On the 20th a vague notation in the Town Hall archive tells of a meeting between several guildmasters and a group of "foreign doctors"—a term that could apply to any group of educated people from beyond the city walls. Only the timing seems provocative.

In early August, the Maritime Bank recorded a large withdrawal of 250 florins from the account of Willebrord Snellius, authorized in payment to "H. Stefuns" by letter of credit from Leiden.

Travel expenses? Plus some extra for clandestine bribes? Yes, the clues are slim even for speculating. And yet we also know that at this time the young exiled scholar, Evangelista Torricelli, vacated his home. Bidding farewell to his local patrons, he then mysteriously vanished from sight forever.

So, temporarily, did Henry Stephens. For almost a year there is no sign of either man. No letters. No known mention of anyone seeing them . . .

. . . not until the spring of 1635, when Henry stepped once more upon the wharf in Boston Town, into the waiting arms of Prosper and their children. Sons and daughters who presumably clamored around their Papa, shouting the age-old refrain—

"
What did you bring me? What did you bring me
?"

What he brought them was the future.

Oops, sorry about that, Lilly. You must be chafing for me to get to the point.

Or did you cheat?

Have you already done a quick mentat-scan of the archives, skipping past Henry's name on the
Gravenhage
ship manifest, looking to see who
else
disembarked along with him that bright April day?

No, it won't be that obvious. They were afraid, you see, and with good reason.

True, the Holy See quickly forgave the fugitive and declared him safe from retribution. But the secretive masters of the Inquisition were less eager to pardon a famous escapee. They had already proved relentless in pursuit of those who slip away. While pretending that he still languished in custody, they must have sent agents everywhere, searching . . .

So look instead for assumed names! Protective camouflage.

Try
Mr. Quicksilver
, which was the common word in English for mercury, a metal that is liquid at room temperature and a key ingredient in early barometers. Is the name familiar? It would be if you went to
this
university. And now it's plain—that had to be Torricelli! A flood of scholarly papers may come from this connection alone. An old mystery solved.

But move on now to the real news. Have you scanned the passenger list carefully?

How about "Mr. Kinneret"?

Kinneret
—one of the alternate names, in Hebrew, for the Sea of Galilee.

Yes, dear. Kinneret.

I'm looking at his portrait right now, on the Wall of Founders. And despite obvious efforts at disguise—no beard, for example—it astonishes me that no one has commented till now on the resemblance between Harvard's earliest Professor of Natural Philosophy and the scholar who we are told died quietly under house arrest in Pisa, way back in 1642.

It makes you wonder. Would a Catholic savant from "papist" Italy have been welcome in Puritan Boston—or on the faculty of John Harvard's new college—without the quiet revolution of reason that Roger Williams set in motion?

Would that revolution have been so profound or successful, without strong support from the Surveyor's Guild and the Seven United Tribes?

Lacking the influence of Kinneret, might the American tradition of excellence in mathematics and science have been delayed for decades? Maybe centuries?

Sitting here in the Harvard University Library, staring out the window at rowers on the river, I can scarcely believe that less than four centuries have passed since the
Gravenhage
docked not far from here on that chilly spring morning of 1635. Three hundred and sixty seven years ago, to be exact.

Is that all? Think about it, Lilly, just fifteen human generations, from those rustic beginnings to the dawn of a new millennium. How the world has changed.

Ill-disciplined, I left my transcriber set to record
Surface Thoughts
, and so these personal musings have all been logged for you to savor, if you choose high-fidelity download. But can even that convey the emotion I feel while marveling at the secret twists and turns of history?

If only some kind of time—or para-time—travel were possible, so history could become an observational . . . or even experimental . . . science! Instead we are left to use primitive methods, piecing together clues, sniffing and burrowing in dusty records, hoping the essential story has not been completely lost.

Yearning to shed a ray of light on whatever made us who we are.

How much difference can one person make, I wonder? Even one gifted with talent and goodness and skill—and the indomitable will to persevere?

Maybe some group
other
than the Iroquois would have invented the steamboat and the Continental Train, even if James Watt hadn't emigrated and "gone native." But how ever could the Pan American Covenant have succeeded without Ben Franklin sitting there in Havana, to jest and soothe all the bickering delegates into signing?

How important was Abraham Lincoln's Johannesburg Address in rousing the world to finish off slavery and apartheid? Might the flagging struggle have failed without him? Or is progress really a team effort, the way Kip Thorne credits his colleagues—
meta-Einstein
and
meta-Feynman
—claiming that he never could have created the Transfer Drive without their help?

Even this fine Widener Library where I sit—bequeathed to Harvard by one of the alumni who died when
Titanic
hit that asteroid in 1912—seems to support the notion that things will happen pretty much the same, whether or not a specific individual or group happens to be on the scene.

No one can answer these questions. My own recent discoveries—following a path blazed by Kuiper and others—don't change things very much. Except perhaps to offer a sense of satisfaction—much like the gratification Henry Stephens must have felt the day he stepped down the wharf, embracing his family, shaking the hand of his friend Williams, and breathing the heady air of freedom in this new world . . .

. . . then turning to introduce his friends from across the sea. Friends who would do epochal things during the following twenty years, becoming legends while Henry himself faded into contented obscurity.

Can one person change the world?

Maybe not.

So instead let's ask; what would
Harvard
be like, if not for Quicksilver-Torricelli?

Or if not for Professor Galileo Galilei.

"
It is the business of the future

to be dangerous." —A. N. Whitehead

Ah, robots.

Ever since Karel Capek coined the word "robot" in his stage play "R.U.R.," its meaning has gone through steady transformation. The fleshy slave-workers of Capek's drama would today be called "androids" or be likened to the replicants of the movie
Bladerunner
. Robots became associated with metal and plastic . . . computer chips and cool, artificial intelligence without direct connection to protoplasm.

Like aliens, robots have served as foils for the two great drivers of sci-fi plotting—the Other Who Must Be Feared . . . and the Innocent Other Who Must Be Protected From Vile Humanity . . . especially our wretched and oppressive institutions. We all remember many examples of both kinds. From the viciously genocidal machines of
Terminator
and
The Matrix
to cute little robots who are pursued by nasty generals in
Short Circuit
and
D.A.R.Y.L
.

Some science fiction tales did try to move beyond these awful clichés. I am reminded of Robert Heinlein's
The Door Into Summer
, whose hero, a tinkerer-inventor, wants to build household robots that are actually useful in the home, without necessarily writing sonnets or planning extinction for all humankind. Indeed, this gradual introduction of utilitarian models better predicted events than any of the clanking humanoids that spun off the pages and screens of bad sci-fi over the decades.

No discussion of robots would be complete without turning our attention to the biggest and most impressive science-fictional universe in which robots hold a major presence—the "Robots and Foundation" universe that was created, over the course of a lifetime, by one of SF's Grand Masters . . . the good doctor Isaac Asimov.

I was originally asked to comment on this topic, in part because I had the honor of being chosen to "clean up" . . . to tie many of the loose ends that Isaac left dangling when he so unfortunately left us, some years ago. Along with my collaborators and pals, Gregory Benford and Greg Bear, I helped create the new
Second Foundation Trilogy
, with the blessing of Isaac's heirs, his wife Janet and daughter Robin. As author of the final book in that loose trilogy (the books all involve the same character, but can be read separately), I tried to bring together all of Isaac's themes in a final grand adventure, titled
Foundation's Triumph
.

And now, by request, I'll let you in on some of the background story . . .

Isaac Asimov first began pondering human destiny while working in his father's candy store, at a time when the world was in turmoil. Vast, inscrutable forces appeared to be working on humanity, making whole populations behave in unfathomably dangerous ways—often against their own self-interest. Countless millions believed that the answer lay in prescriptions—in formulas for human existence—called ideologies.

Young Isaac was too smart to fall for any of the ideologies then on sale. From Marxism to fascism to ultra-capitalism, they all preached that human beings were
simple
creatures, easily described and predictable according to incantations scribbled on a few printed pages. As a scientist and a trained observer, he could tell that these scenarios were wishful thinking, having more in common with religion than real science. And yet, Isaac could easily understand why people yearned for a model—a paradigm—for human behavior. Surrounded by irrationality on all sides, Isaac dreamed that maybe, someday, someone might discover how to deal with the quirky complexity of people . . . if not individuals, then perhaps the great mass of humanity.

He had no idea how to solve such a problem, and was too sensible to expect formulae from the fools preaching and ranting contradictory slogans on mid-Twentieth-Century radios. But what about the far future? How about when human beings filled the galaxy? Might so many individual foibles cancel out, letting
mathematics
describe human momentum, the way dynamic formulas of chemistry's gas laws simplify the behavior of vast numbers of molecules?

Take this notion and combine it with young Isaac's reading matter; one summer he devoured Gibbon's
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
. Now stir in a little yearning for adventure and you can start to see a pattern developing. One that would eventually turn into one of the great classics of mid-Twentiethth-Century science fiction.

It all starts with Hari Seldon, a character that most critics closely identify with Asimov, the writer-scientist himself. Seldon only appears as an active character at the very beginning of the
Foundation Trilogy
. But his shadow stretches onward, across all of the many short stories and novels that span five hundred years of history and many thousands of starry parsecs.

Only in later novels will we learn of meddling by another trade-marked Asimov character, the mighty immortal robot, Daneel Olivaw. At first, here in Asimov's first great work—the Trilogy—the tale appears to be limited to human beings. Ten quadrillion human beings . . . and an idea. One of the biggest ideas.

The idea that we—or maybe just a few of us—might look ahead, spot the inevitable mistakes and jagged reefs, and somehow chart a course around the most dangerous shoals, leading eventually to a better shore.

That is quite a concept to explore! But Isaac Asimov's fertile mind did not stop there. Another matter roiling in his brain was the problem of Robots. Far too long maligned as Frankenstein monsters, in magazines with lurid covers, they seemed to him filled with far greater possibilities. Yes, the simpleminded approach was to make them objects of dread. But what if we could program them to grow with us? And maybe to grow
better
than us . . . while remaining loyal to the last?