Quipu (23 page)

1970: the incredible culture

still Armidale

Thursday June 25 70

old dear

I mentioned to Tom and Paul the possibility that you might motor through and maybe could you stay over??…Tom indicated that he’d rather you didn’t. He explained rather pointedly that he might sort of go crazy (he’s given to random hysterical turns, it seems) which would embarrass both him and you. Might be best if I wrapped things up here as quickly as possible and met you back in Melbourne—it’s pretty crazy having you drive all the way up here in any case.

I sympathize with your nerves, but try not to get too hung-up about the exams. Think Zen thoughts. It’s all a Game.

Speaking of Jane Austen, as so many people presumably are these days (though hardly ever around the physics department at the University of New England, mate), I’m reading John Fowles’
The French Lieutenant’s Woman,
which evidently has become an even more swollen best seller than
The Magus
. Formally it’s unlike his previous work—he adopts a slangy variety of 19th century diction interrupted by Brechtian bursts of “Hoy, listen, this is fiction you’re reading, you know, it’s all invented,” and “The Victorians, unlike us, did, thought, felt, believed X, Y and Z.” His philosophy remains game-theory existentialism, but the protagonists are even more alienated from the incredible culture they move through. He’s clearly done stacks of research into Victoria England and projects the milieu quite brilliantly. An agreeable book, one I mean to treat as a bridge back to the actual novelists of the time. (Yeah, and I know Jane Austen was 50 years earlier, but her emphasis on propriety, duty, form and so on permeates the book. I say this authoritatively on the basis of what you’ve told me, never having read J.A.)

run run run to the mailbox

Joseph

1970: there are endless possibilities

Rozelle Cloisters

30 June

My dear Joseph

Calm at last. Four out, one in. I loll at home, wallowing in silence without yelling bastards and neurotic women. I wonder how long this wonderful regime will last.

Perhaps I’m just ratty with exam fever, but Lanie is giving me the shits. Don (one of the bold New Left revolutionaries) is due to arrive for a few days—his wife has booted him out, hurrah!—and maybe Lanie will get the fuck she’s anguishing after. She’s in dire need, she claims. To gauge from her foul moods I’m not going to deny it.

If Lanie is in physical need, mine is mental. I ache for someone to converse with, just talk. (Not about my hang-ups or pocked mind—some cerebral exercise.) Politics is the sole topic in this hole. It’s interesting, but hardly the kind of thing to grip the soul, to dissolve into.

Two exams down, very shaky. English was passable. Psychology wasn’t. I think they used the same principles in designing their horrid multiple-choice quiz that we apply to rats in mazes. The optional answers were identical to within a whisker. It was more like a test of interpretive semantics than a measure of our knowledge of psychology. You would have loved it, it was exactly like one of those bloody Two Six IQ tests.

Of course I got there late (caught in a traffic jam), so I missed the reading period and five minutes of writing time—and had to fill in batches of useless fucking forms before I could start. My tutor agrees that if enough of the others were as confused as me, they’ll have to adjust everyone’s marks upward, which is the only way I’m likely to get through.

Exams finish in nine days, so if you wish to come down here for a day or two on your way home from Armidale to Melbourne, please wait until after that date. It might be nice. The sun shines every day. We could walk and talk in the sun, perhaps drive to the beach or the mountains—who knows, there are endless possibilities.

I’ve developed a friendship with the woman next door. Architect’s wife. He’s shot through, pays for the house and some small contribution to the kids’ food and clothing. She’s been struggling along with three small kids for the past year. A pleasant, kind woman—it’s an unstimulating but very comfortable relationship.

Still—although her friendship is generous, and the kids are interesting to one without any (and without any prospects of ever having any—I don’t want to produce a repeat performance of my mother’s wonderful little mad brood), it could lead to emotional dependency. She wanted me to move in with her when everyone was leaving this place. But why shouldn’t I be prepared to offer emotional support to a person needing strength? I haven’t a care, not a distraction, no responsibilities to anyone or anything. Yes, come to Sydney.

Caroline, with love

1975: bursting in air

“So we have these dreadful conjectural things,” Joseph tells his highly intelligent audience. “If they exist they probably decay almost immediately on production, burning off their substance in Cerenkov radiation. To slow them down from infinite velocities is fairly easy, but braking them to anywhere reasonably near the speed of light takes ever-increasing amounts of energy. This is the exact reverse of the situation we good Relativists confront when we try to push ordinary particles toward the light cone boundary from this side. But that doesn’t mean tachyons don’t exist. Just to prove my case, I’ve invented a little limerick for you. Are you ready to hear an elementary particle limerick?”

Joseph allows his eyes to roam, unfocused, across the impressionist spatter of faces and bodies. Brian Wagner’s voice rises from the silence: “We’re with you, Joe.”

“A ringing vote of confidence. All right, here it is:

“
Tachyons, faster than light,

are detectable only in flight.

They’re conjectural, true,

and orthogonal, too,

so in cases like this, might is right.
”

In the numb air there is a minor burst of tittering. Joseph frowns.

“Look here, friends, if that’s the best you can manage I’d better try again. I’ll tell you my limerick about black holes. I am not going to explain it, though.”

“No, no, not that,” Wagner cries in pain and terror.

Joseph grins. “I’ve changed my mind.”

“Thank God.”

“I
will
explain it.”

Wagner’s theatrical agony cascades through the sillier members of the assembly. As always, Joseph is a sucker for this manipulation. Beaming, he leans into the microphone.

“Black holes have very little to do with tachyons, except their outrageousness. Oh, and this—nothing can get out of a black hole…except very very fast tachyons. Okay. The key to this illuminating verse is that physics requires only three quantities, listed hereunder, to define any black hole completely. There’s no way of testing the hole interior to check on other quantities. It has, in brief, no hair. Here we go:

“
Black holes are astoundingly small.

They’re not really there, after all.

They’ve momentum and charge,

and their size (rarely large),

but no hair on their wee sterile ball.
”

This time the laughter is wonderfully rewarding, surfing through the large room, rebounding, filling Joseph’s hungry heart. He taps the table finally.

“To return. We’ve listed some major physical and philosophical reasons for supposing that tachyons are just figments of the crazed mathematical imagination. That’s never stopped scientists, let alone out-of-work scientists like me. Particularly when there’s a chance of getting a snapshot of the End of Time.”

Here it is. He has to explain his vision, his magic, his precious. He cannot convey it. All he tells in his encyclopedia entries are facts. Groping. Keys to their ears from Sunday supplements.

“Think of the Big Bang. The moment when the universe gushed out of Nowhere, time started ticking, space began spreading out from zero. All that heat and light and pressure shone out into the new spacetime nowhere and cooled down and by now is spread everywhere, a black body hiss at two point seven degrees of temperature above Absolute Zero. You can hook up a radio telescope and aim it at that hiss in the sky and take a snapshot of the start of Everything.

“Now look forward. Fifty, a hundred thousand million years. All of space and time has reversed its colossal explosive expansion. It’s crashing in toward its fate, which is to be crushed out of reality into the greatest of all Black Holes. The universe will scream with the violence. Some of that violent protest will be tachyonic, if there are tachyons. They’ll erupt backward through time, sleeting into our history, raging toward the First Cause. On their passage past our momentary blink, our fragile slice across the spacetime diagram, some of them will track through detectors set up by curious scientists. Those will be halted, leaving their fossil spore. Fossils of the implosion at the End of the Universe. Autopsy reports.”

Joseph takes a staggering breath. He is in a mood close to religious exaltation. With a harsh effort he drags his tone back to a banter, a canter into all the wasted, weed-choked weeks and months of the early seventies.

“Lots of the guys have tried to find them. Around the time I was looking in the bowels of my Superconducting Quantum Interferometry Device, or SQUID for short, a couple of fellows over in Adelaide Uni were checking the heavens for signs.”

He touches a control, flips the slide carousel another jump. A diagram pours down the wall behind him, secondary and tertiary radiant cascades, clumps and knots of particles.

“When very high energy cosmic rays strike the upper atmosphere,” he says, “they smash into atmospheric nuclei. In that small-scale catastrophe, ‘air showers’ of other elementary particles burst toward the ground. Most of these particles decay almost instantly to more stable states. Two Australian researchers, Roger Clay and Phil Crouch, thought there might be some tachyons there as well.”

Another slide, speeding yellow luminal and sub-luminal bullets blazing at the earth, red road runners racing ahead of them.

“Close to the speed of light, the air shower crashes twenty or so kilometers to the ground in under a fifteen-thousandth of a second. Since tachyons move faster than light, they’d get there appreciably more quickly. They don’t hang around scuffing their shoes like the other stuff.

“So you leave your detector running an endless tape loop. A big shower stops the tape. If there’s a consistent pattern of hail spattering in
ahead
of the rain, maybe you have some tachyons. Clay and Crouch could discriminate the arrival of particles hitting the detector 100 millionths of a second prior to the main shower.”

A photograph of the detector.

“Did it work? Well, between February and August 1973, they detected 1307 high-energy showers. In 1176 of these, the apparatus recorded one or more particles in the appropriate energy range apparently arriving faster than light. These could have been stray bradyons having absolutely nothing in common with the air shower, but the guys ran some tests and decided that air shower ‘forerunners’ were quite distinctive.”

He slips a 1974 copy of
Nature
under the epidiascope. There’s the paper, expanded on the screen. “Possible Observations of Tachyons Associated with Extensive Air Showers.” Nothing in science to beat presentation of the evidence, and this photograph is Joseph’s evidence that he’s not a raving unhinged obsessional loony.

“They were wrong.” He makes them a droll, gloomy face. “Bad luck. Subsequent tests showed that this evidence was a glitch, just an experimental artefact. Seems incredible, but then most claims of breakthrough are just wishful thinking and strange accidents. My own experiments, which I’ll describe very quickly now, never even got to that point. I should add that to date, as of mid-1975, lots of other eager experimenters have run through all the likely and most of the unlikely places where tachyons might show up, and the cupboard’s been bare. In fact, someone’s stolen the cupboard. There are no tachyons transmitting to us from the future.”

I hope and pray, Joseph tells himself. He does not really believe it. He is frozen, bolted into the endless marble pillar of his spacetime world line, just the ink from the pen that is sketching his path on the Minkowski diagram.

1970: the wonders of science

Armidale

July 4, 70

my god, just one year ago we were all storming the barricades and rolling marbles under the coppers’ horses’ hoofs, and getting jumped on; one day we will all join the Returned Servicemen’s League as Honored Deserters and tell tall tales of How We Dodged The Draft

hello lovely

I dunno. Jeez. (One of the many things I dunno is whether this letter will ever get delivered. I gather that a new postal strike is snarling up Redfern Mail Exchange again.) Lemme tell ya. The machine is running day and night, except when it gets temperamental and isn’t. We have a wonderful 24-hour background noise profile on computer file. Its sensitive twitching cats whiskers are scanning the heavens even as I sit here scribbling with this goddamned hard awful pencil, sniffing for messages from the far ends of time and space. Bloody hair-stirring, actually. On the face of it, however, we are getting zero. Zip. Zilch. Random scratches and blurts. Cosmic rays. No tachyons. Maybe they’re out on strike in sympathy with the postal workers.

So much for the wonders of science. Life here in our little wooden house (well, not “ours” exactly; throat-clearing noises) is not getting any more charming. Truczinski keeps up a random barrage of offensive noise. Tonight it was amazingly direct. “He’s
going
on Thursday, isn’t he?” This while gazing with a sort of baleful opacity at me, Paul working at his own desk in the living room behind Tom’s right shoulder. “You’d better get your results in by Thursday, because you won’t be here after that.” And so on, in the same remarkably creepy vein.

Odious. Naturally, I shall indeed be out of here by Thursday. If there’s any last minute recovery in the Tachyon Stakes I’ll nip off down the road and get a room at a hotel, or somesuch. Absurdly extravagant, given my finances, so the positive evidence would have to be something fierce.

Otherwise, my fallback plan is to bypass Rozelle and go straight home. You can visit me in Melbourne if you wish and use Shagspeare Towers as a base for your other dutiful-daughter wanderings. Write to me here if the strike is finished, or send a telegram. Okay?

I need a walk.

see you, broccoli

Joseph

1970: the madhouse number

Rozzel 7 July

My dear Joseph

No strike. Your letter got through the next day.

I’m rather relieved you’ve decided against stopping off here. I do want to get to Melbourne as quickly as I can after the exams.

My parents are visiting Sydney this week, staying at a classy Vaucluse place. Nothing but the best for them. I’ve spent much of the weekend with them—pleasant, really, and amusing. My father is a dear. He took us to a quite expensive restaurant, and left me with a wonderful Grange Hermitage when he dropped me off in Rozelle. We shall drink it on some suitable occasion, such as my learning that I’ve passed every subject with High Distinction.

Mother went like a dog for a rat to the episode of my crack-up. We were obliged to go through the madhouse number all over again. Every sinew in her cries out for continual reassurance that my madness isn’t her fault, and that to the extent she was responsible she was innocent because she didn’t know, how could she know, there was no way she could know, I was always difficult. And so it went on. I dare say it’ll go on until I’m 40, my mother gnawing at my madness and my father forgetting about it the instant the drama is over.

Don’s moved in, and will stay for a few weeks. Is Lanie smiling? Or smirking? Too soon to say.

Mother was again struck with pain and silent outrage that I won’t be staying with her and the loving family. I couldn’t find any way to justify it to her, so simply left it as a fact. Ho hum. Until I arrive on your doorstep—