A Perfect Vacuum (30 page)

Acheropoulos was well aware of this. The problem vexed him far more than the total neglect that he had suffered. He adds, to the “moral hypothesis,” others, but no number of weak hypotheses can substitute for one that is strong. At this point I must speak about myself. What did I contribute as a continuator of Acheropoulos? My theory derives from Physics and ends in Physics, but does not itself belong to Physics. Obviously, had it resulted only in the Physics from which I derived it, it would have been a worthless exercise in tautology.

The physicist, to date, has conducted himself like a man observing moves on a chessboard who knows already how each piece works but does not think that the moves of the pieces are tending toward any goal. The Cosmogonic Game proceeds differently from that of chess, for in it the rules change—that is, the manner of the moves, and the pieces themselves, and the board. This is why my theory is not a reconstruction of the entire Game as it has transpired since its inception, but only of its final part. My theory is but a fragment of the whole, and therefore something like a re-creation, based on an observation of chess, of the principle of a gambit. He who has acquainted himself with the principle of a gambit knows that a valuable piece is sacrificed in order that something yet more valuable be gained later on, but he may not necessarily know that the highest gain of all is mate. From the Physics we have at our disposal it is impossible to educe a coherent structure of the Game—or of even a part of it. It was only when I had followed Acheropoulos's intuition of genius and made the assumption that our present Physics needed to be “completed” that I was able to reconstruct the general lines of the play in progress. My procedure was heretical in the extreme, because science's first premise is the thesis that the world comes “ready-made” and “finished” in its laws, whereas I was assuming that our present Physics represented a transitional stage on the way to particular transformations.

The so-called universal constants are not constant. Boltzmann's constant, specifically, is not invariable. This means that although the end state of every initial order in the Universe must be disorder, the rate of increase in chaos may nevertheless be subject to changes brought about by the Players. It would appear (this is merely a supposition, not a deduction from the theory!) that the Players produced the asymmetry of time by a fairly brutal measure, as if they had been “in a hurry” (on the cosmic scale, of course). The brutality lies in their having made the gradient of increasing entropy extremely steep. They used the strong tendency of disorder to increase to institute in the Universe
a single order.
If, since that time, everything goes from harmony to disharmony, the model as a whole proves to be unified, subject to a common principle and thereby brought into general accord.

That the processes of the microworld are in principle reversible has been known for some time. Now follows a most remarkable thing: theoretically, if the energy that Earth's science invests in elementary-particle research were to be multiplied 10
¹⁹
times, that research as a
discovering
of the state of things would turn into a
changing
of that state! Instead of examining the laws of Nature we would be imperceptibly altering them.

This is a sore point, an Achilles heel in the Physics of the present Universum. The microworld currently is the main arena of the Players' construction activity. They have rendered it unstable and control it in a certain way. It seems to me that a certain portion of Physics, already stabilized, they have to some extent loosened again from its moorings. They are making revisions, they are putting laws now moribund back into service. This is the reason they maintain their silence, which is a “strategic quiet.” They inform none of the “outsiders” of what they are doing, or even of the very fact of the Game. A knowledge of the existence of the Game, after all, places all of Physics in an altogether different light. The Players say nothing so as to avoid unwanted disturbances and interventions, and no doubt they will persevere in this silence until the conclusion of their labors. How long will the Silentium Universi last? This we do not know; I would guess at least a hundred million years.

And so the Universe finds itself at a crossroads. Toward what do the Players aim with this monumental reconstruction? We do not know this, either. Our theory shows only that Boltzmann's constant will diminish, along with other constants, until it acquires a certain specific value that is necessary to the Players—but necessary for what, we do not know. We are like one who, understanding at last the principle of a gambit, fails to grasp the purpose served by such an operation in the entirety of the chess game. What I am going to say next goes quite beyond the frontier of our knowledge. We have a true embarrassment of riches in the wide variety of hypotheses that have been put forth over the last few years. The Brooklyn group of Professor Bowman holds that the Players wish to close up the “rift of the reversibility of phenomena” which yet “remains” within the pale of matter, in the domain of the elementary particles. Some contend that the weakening of the entropy gradients has as its goal the Universe's improved adaptedness for the phenomena of life, and even that the Players are working for the “psychozoicization” of the entire Cosmos. These are, in my opinion, hypotheses bold to an excess, particularly in their resemblance to certain anthropocentric ideas.

The notion that the whole Universe is evolving so as to become “one great Intelligence,” so as to “imbue itself with mind,” is a leitmotif of many different philosophies, and of many religious faiths of the past. Professor Ben-Nour has expressed the opinion, in his
Intentional Cosmogony,
that several of the Players nearest Earth (one of which may
be
located in the Andromeda Nebula) have not coordinated their moves optimally, and hence Earth remains in a sector of “physics oscillation”; this would mean that the theory of the Game does not at all reflect the tactics of the Players at the present stage, but only a local, rather random recess of it. A certain popularizer has claimed that the Earth finds itself in a region of “conflict”: two neighboring Players have undertaken a form of “guerrilla warfare” through the “Covert Alteration of the Laws of Physics,” and
this
accounts for the changes in Boltzmann's constant.

The thesis that the Players are “weakening” the Second Law of Thermodynamics is currently very much in vogue. In connection with this, I consider interesting the view of Academician A. Slysz, who in his paper “Logic and the New Cosmogony” (“Logika i Novaya Kosmogoniya”) draws attention to the ambiguity of the interrelation between Physics and Logic. It is quite possible—says Slysz—that the Universe with a weakened tendency to entropy would give rise to very large information systems that would turn out to be very stupid. It seems likely, in the light of the work of several young mathematicians, that the changes in Physics already carried out by the Players have led to changes in mathematics, or—more precisely—to a transformation in the constructibility of noncontradictory systems in the formal sciences. From such a standpoint it is not far to the thesis that Godel's famous proof, contained in his essay “Uber die unentscheidbaren Sätze der formalen Systeme,” showing the limits of perfection attainable in system mathematics, is not valid universally—i.e., “for all possible Universes”—but holds only for the Universe in its present state. (And even that once upon a time, say, half a billion years ago, Godel's proof could not have been drawn, because then the laws governing the constructibility of mathematical systems were
different
from what they are today.)

I must confess that, much as I understand the motivation of those who now are coming forward with their various suppositions concerning the goals of the Game, the intentions of the Players, the main values supposedly adhered to by Them, and so forth, still I am at the same time made rather uneasy by the inaccuracy or even the misleading nature of a good many such (often frivolous) suppositions. Some people now see the Universe in the likeness of an apartment, which may have its furniture rearranged in a moment or two, to suit the tenants. Such a cavalier attitude to the laws of Physics, to the laws of Nature, cannot be taken seriously. The tempo of the actual transformations is, within the scope of our lives, incredibly slow. From which follows, I hasten to add, not a blessed thing relating to the nature of the Players themselves, such as their alleged longevity or outright immortality. On this head, too, nothing is known. Perhaps, as has been written, the Players are not actually living beings, that is, of biological origin; perhaps the members of the First Civilizations in general (and this, from time immemorial) do not attend to the Game themselves but have instead handed it over to enormous automata of some sort—the helmsmen of the Cosmogony. Perhaps a great many of the Protocivilizations that initiated the Game are no longer, and their role is being carried out by self-acting systems, and these make up a percentage of the Partners of the Game. All this may be, but to such questions we will obtain an answer neither in a year nor, I believe, in a hundred.

Still, we have come into the possession of a piece of definite and new knowledge. As is usually the case with knowledge, it tells us more concerning the limitations of action than about the power. Certain theoreticians today maintain that the Players, if they so desired, could remove the limit to the precision of measurements which is imposed upon them by Heisenberg's relation of uncertainty. (Dr. John Command has put forward the idea that the uncertainty relation is a tactical maneuver introduced by the Players on the same principle as the rule of the Silentium Universi: that “no one may manipulate Physics in a manner undesired if he is not himself a Player.”) Even were this so, the Players cannot eliminate the bonds that exist between the changes in the laws of matter and the working of the mind, for the mind is composed of that same matter. The notion that it would be possible to devise a Logic or Metalogic valid “for all constructible Universes” is mistaken, and
even today this has been successfully shown.
I myself think that the Players, well aware of this state of affairs, are encountering difficulties—difficulties obviously not on our scale or measure!

If the realization of the nonomniscience of the Players should cause us alarm, since through it we become sensible of the immanent risk of the Cosmogonic Game, by the same token this reflection brings our existential situation unexpectedly closer to the condition of the Players, for no one in the Universum is all-powerful. The Highest Civilizations also are Parts—Parts That-Do-Not-Fully-Know-the-Whole.

Ronald Schuer has gone the furthest in the advancing of bold conjectures: he states in
The Mind-made Universe: Laws vs. Rules
that the more profoundly the Players transform the Universe, the more markedly do they alter themselves. Change brings about what Schuer calls “the guillotining of memory.” For, in fact, he who transforms himself in a very radical way thereby obliterates to some extent the memory of his own past, his past prior to that operation. The Players, says Schuer, in acquiring greater and greater cosmometamorphic power, are themselves effacing the traces of the path by which the Universe has so far evolved. Creative omnipotence, taken to its limit, spells the paralysis of retrognosis. The Players, if they strive to impart to the Universe the property of a cradle of Mind, to this end reduce the force of the law of entropy; in a billion years, having lost all memory of what was with them and before them, they bring the Universe to a state of which Slysz spoke. With the elimination of the “entropy brake” there begins an explosive growth of biospheres; a great number of undeveloped civilizations prematurely join the Game and bring about its collapse. Thus, through the collapse of the Game, chaos ensues ... out of which, after eons, there emerges a new Collective of Players ... to begin the Game anew. So, then, according to Schuer, the Game proceeds
in a circle,
and therefore the question of the “beginning of the Universum” is meaningless. An unusual image, but unconvincing. If
we
can foresee the inevitability of the collapse, only think of what prognoses the Players are capable.

Ladies and gentlemen, the crystal image of the Game, carried on by Intelligences billions of parsecs apart, who are hidden among the nebular clusters of stars, I have outlined for you, in order then to muddy it with a downpour of obscurities, opposing suppositions, and wholly improbable hypotheses. But such is the normal course of knowledge. Science currently sees the Universe as a palimpsest of Games, Games endowed with a memory reaching beyond the memory of any one Player. This memory is the harmony of the Laws of Nature, which hold the Universe in a homogeneity of motion. We look upon the Universum, then, as upon a field of multibillion-year labors, stratified one on the other over the eons, tending to goals of which only the closest and most minute fragments are fragmentarily perceptible to us. Is this image true? May it not be replaced someday by another, a successor, one radically different, as this model of ours—of the Game of Intelligences—is radically different from all those arisen in history? In place of an answer, I should like to quote here the words of Professor Ernst Ahrens, my teacher. Many years ago, when, still a youth, I went to him with my first drafts containing the conception of the Game, to ask him his opinion, Ahrens said: “A theory? A theory, yet? Maybe it is not a theory. Mankind is going to the stars, yes? Then, even if there is nothing to it, this thing, maybe what we have here is a blueprint, maybe it will all come to pass someday, just so!” With these words of my teacher—not altogether skeptical, I think!—I conclude the lecture. Thank you.

*
Credo quia absurdum est
(Prof. Dobb's note in the text).

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