Quipu (21 page)

“I’m not speaking of the physical limits of the Universe, mark you. I had no great interest in quasars, those monstrous flares burning at distances that must be reckoned in the billions of light years. What we know of them are merely images of galactic cores long perished, images that are mere streams of photons coming into our telescopes no faster than three hundred thousand kilometers a second, messages to us from the extinguished boundaries of early time.

“No, I became fascinated by quite the opposite problem. I wanted to get a snapshot of the other End of the Universe. The Big Crunch, when everything falls back under gravity and is swallowed by the gigantic Black Hole that will be all of the Universe at the end of time.”

He can hear them rustling now, can imagine the frowning brow, the cocked ear. These people are not without imagination. “That’s right. I wanted to take a picture of the future.”

1970: cheap shots

Armidale

Tuesday 17 June 1970

Hi kid

Energy might well travel faster than light, but matters here proceed slowly. Paul and I await the arrival from the workshop of our wonderful computer-compatible noise-compensating signal-enhancing cascade-detecting tachyon monitor Mark 1. Can’t do nuthin without it. Can’t give up smoking without it. Tom growls and stamps about the house, or goes off in trizzy fits to get plastered at some poofter pub or club. Hard to comprehend that this is one of the prime minds of our generation.

I can understand his anxiety and jealousy because I’m stealing so much of Paul’s spare time (work time too, once the bloody machine is up, so the prospect is worse than the prevailing case). The irritating thing is the way he whines and carries on precisely like a spoilt child whining for endless attention. While it’s sad and affecting, in a pathetic sort of way, this is just the kind of behavior guaranteed to piss Paul off in the shortest span of time (unless their relationship, heaven forfend, actually bases itself on that sort of pathology).

So the threesome is rapidly becoming intolerable. Still, I’m reluctant to go home before we’ve had a chance to test the theory with some appropriate hardware—and, if I’m honest, I don’t wish to leave Paul to the possible glory and authority of doing it himself in my absence.

If I did go it would certainly remove the immediate strain from Tom, but I suspect it’d leave no more than an illusion of tranquillity. But for all I know, success in our endeavors might introduce a fresh wonderful regime of harmony, prosperity, honor, advancement and sexual joy into their lives.

Later:

Just had an evasive, elliptical discussion with Tom. I wondered obliquely if perhaps he wished me gone, and that this might not be the worst idea in the world, and he alluded to his intermittent feelings of paranoia that were always followed by remorse and self-flagellation if he’d made a scene, and how he’d apologize under such circumstances if his pride would allow it, which of course it wouldn’t. None of this, naturally, was expressed in such brutally crisp and unambiguous terms, but in even more rococo cynical self-sendups from both of us. We scientists are noted for the clarity of our communications. Accordingly, tensions are somewhat eased, though doubtless the central problems remain unsolved.

I rang Shakespeare St. the other day by a curious communications expedient known only to engineers—breaking the university switchboard defenses against long distance calls. This demands iron finger tips and a spectacular natural sense of rhythm…you bang the hanging-up doovers (as they are known technically) a certain number of times to simulate the clicks of a long distance prefix (03 in the case of Melbourne, ten clicks, then three) and this fools the silly creature into letting you through for the price of a local call. However, the timing is critical, and the noise made in whacking the aforementioned doover is not inconsiderable. So I can’t use this method at will; one must wait for an empty office. Another method, involving a bent paperclip, is currently under development, and should permit calls from public boxes.

At any rate, they told me there’s a letter from you languishing on my shelf. Forwarded, it might well arrive tomorrow. I hope you’re okay, me dear, that the impending exams are not too hopelessly daunting. I rush to the late mail box.

luv

The Cosmic Detective

1970: classroom iconoclasm

Friday night &

Saturday morning

dear ornithopter

2 o’clock in the wintry morning and snug in my lecky blanket.

Upheaval in the household. The transients are on their benighted way, taking one of our number with them alas. Patricia Lamb moves into the spare room (remember her? very autonomous, extrovert) which is fine by me. The last two months have been atrocious. I’ve really hated living here in this ha “commune.” Difficult enough to find peace and consolation behind my closed door.

Next week the exams. Burning dreams of the first weeks of cracking up—how long now? ‘68.

Ambiguous pleasures of dealing with my 18th century English novel tutor (not the dreary turd I had for Tragedy). Though hesitant and suspicious, he seems to approve of my attitude. I turned in an essay condemnatory of Jane Austen, which attracted the predictable tute shit-storm. The tutor, though, scribbled this on it:

I’m taking the bloody course, fella, because it’s part of the syllabus, an obligatory prerequisite to study of present-day work.

…No, Joseph, I was not that direct, even with someone who permits criticism of the “great J.A.”

This guy makes it plain that he finds me more than a little eccentric, but he does not fail to seek my opinions in every tutorial, which is flattering. Is this the Caroline who never dares open her mouth in your presence? I’m converting my co-students to Women’s Liberation. A formal group has been established at the university. It’s not doing much yet because of the pending exams—but we look forward to some tough self-analysis!

My chances of passing some of the less appealing courses are about 40/60.

I can’t understand the first thing about tachyons. Are you writing anything about it for a quipu? If so, give me a look at it first (come on, a photostat isn’t that expensive)—I feel quite excited by the aura you’ve created, and I can’t bear to have to wait to find out more.

Maybe I could visit you in Armidale when the exams are over? I wouldn’t mind going to Melbourne the long way. That is, if Paul and Tom don’t object to females (yetch!) around the house.

write with words of comfort

Caroline

1975: faster than light

“It is well known,” Joseph tells the assembled hikes, “that the theory of Relativity shows time slowing to a standstill for a particle accelerating ever closer to the speed of light in vacuum. From the viewpoint of the particle, of course, time ticks along at a reliable rate but
space shrinks.
The universe literally closes up ahead of it. The wavelength of incoming radiation becomes indefinitely short, as more and more troughs and humps are squeezed together by the compressed time of the particle.”

It might be well known, but it remains a perspective to stagger and incapacitate the mind. He has lost some of them already.

“Given that this is true, it seems intuitively plausible that the arrow of time might be reversed by traveling
faster than light
. Sadly, it is axiomatic in Relativity theory that nothing can go faster than light.” For a moment he pauses. “Or is it?”

“Of course it is,” comes a muffled cry from the floor.

“Actually, it’s not,” Joseph tells them, relaxing back into his chair. “There’s a loophole. Certainly it is impossible to push a particle with proper mass through the light-speed boundary. But mathematicians realized more than a decade ago that there’s no prohibition on particles with imaginary mass.”

Unexpectedly, there is a burst of laughter. He is nonplused for a moment. Oh shit, they think it’s a droll jest. Joseph holds up a hand.

“Yes, appealing to a particle with imaginary mass might seem like a gambit from
Alice in Wonderland.
Let me assure you, however, that in mathematics a number is dubbed ‘imaginary’ if the result of multiplying it by itself is a negative number. That is, if it has a negative square.”

Oh Christ. There goes half the remainder. Nothing for it but to push on with scholarly background stuff.

“The era of the imaginary particle was fully launched, after some early discussion by the Russian Terletski, by three Rochester University physicists, Bilaniuk, Deshpande and Sudarshan. It should be clear to anyone who’s ever read the contents page of a professional physics journal that no one with a name as commonplace as ‘Joseph Williams’ could possibly discover anything significant.” Good, friendly laughter. A nice touch, he hadn’t really expected it to play.

“That was in 1962. They described in detail how pairs of imaginary particles might be captured and emitted by particles of proper mass, the sort we’re made out of. Five years later, Gerald Feinberg published a powerful paper on the proposed particles, which he dubbed ‘tachyons,’ from the Greek
tachys,
meaning swift. That made three general categories of particles in the universe: ‘tardyons’ or ‘tardons’ or ‘bradyons,’ depending on which college you went to, which comprise ordinary atoms; ‘luxons’ which are massless and whip along at the speed of light; and ‘tachyons’ which never go slower than light.

“It was plain from the outset that they are dreadfully annoying things, if they exist. Feinberg notes his original paper that ‘a state which contains no tachyons according to one observer will be seen by another observer to contain a large number.”‘

“It’s like the number of holes in your argument,” Brian Wagner yells powerfully from the floor, cupping his mouth with his hands. “It depends whether you’re counting or I am.”

A flock of startled laughter bursts up into the smoky air. Annoyed Joseph forces himself to grin down.

“You’re a horrible fellow, Wagner,” he says, “and no respecter of True Science.”

Amid the giggles, there is some sympathetic hissing at naughty Wagner’s expense. Joseph flips on the overhead projector. A nice clean drawing in several colors is abruptly there, fetched from the aether on strings of light.

“This is a Minkowski diagram,” Joseph tells them. “It is a convenient spacetime chart for plotting four-dimensional ‘world lines’ by compressing all three spatial directions into a single horizontal x-axis, and representing time as the vertical y-axis. By traveling up the diagram, a marked point moves forward in time. Traversing the diagram laterally represents a compressed view of motion in three-dimensional space.”

He flicks the controls of the projector. A new diagram appears, slightly more complicated. “Under certain conditions, the motion of tachyons would imply movement backward in time, that is, back
down
the chart. Tachyon theory,” he says, conscious of an access of bleakness, “appears to invoke a determinate future. One where consequences cannot be evaded because, from the four dimensional perspective, the future can loop back and provide causal inputs to its own past. To avoid logical paradox, this kind of looping can only be sustained if the future that’s doing the looping is directly coupled to the past it is affecting.
Everything
, from the point of view of the Minkowski diagram,
has already happened.”

The hike audience sits very still, regarding the geometric runes.

“Do you grasp what I’m saying? It’s quite horrifying, you see. Even if a message could be transmitted to us now, to this very moment, from the future, using tachyons, we wouldn’t be able to use that information to extend our volitional choices. We could not alter the future. Why not? Because in the future that sent us the tachyon message, it has long since been received. Whatever
has
happened as a result is what
will
happen. We are trapped in a block of rigid spacetime and nothing can ever get us out.”

1971: the last refuge of the incompetent

Sunglare infiltrates the broken slats, abrading Ray Finlay’s eyes. He groans, pushes his face into the rumpled valley between pillows. His jaw persists in sliding off the hard edge of the rubber pillow, dumping his nose and mouth into the suffocating fluffiness of Marjory’s kapok monstrosity. Foul breath comes back at him. He gags. He sags drearily between near-conscious pain and near-sleeping asphyxiation.

At length he stumbles off the low bed and gropes three codeine tablets out of their guaranteed-not-to-tear foil. A pair of mosquitoes lies embalmed like a quote from Yeats on the surface of his bedside glass of water. Grimacing, Ray staggers to the bathroom and sloshes the glass clean. He douses his face and finds all the towels gone. My God, he thinks. That girl has the constitution of an ox.

They had grown maudlin over beer, eventually, and dragged out a bottle of Scotch from Peter’s room, and become very drunk, falling onto the bed in confusion and love, exhausted with the incomprehensibility of the world and their own inadequacy. Now Marjory is down at the laundry and Ray, a decade closer to death even before he started, creeps back to bed.

When next he wakes the September sun glazes the window from eleven o’clock. No Marjory. Marjory at the laundromat. He lies in the sweaty bed and considers the day’s agenda. The concrete stage. No rain, at least. Sun instead. Media cameras. Circus and purpose in one rousing package. He is, he understands, afraid of mass emotion. It is too potent. It is a vehicle for too many disjointed hostilities. Yet what alternatives for persuasion are so accessible? And it is not true, he admits finally, that Peter and Jan expect the apocalypse. Their instinct is valid. One must fight and fight and fight, be there, hold up banners and take the thumps of the cops and the sneers of the poor gulled buggers who haven’t worked it out yet. Nothing is given; not despair, not faith and hope.