Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn (36 page)

“Hey, look!” I said, spotting a small case mounted on the wall off to Oppenheimer's side.
It was filled with small, grayish rocks, “a new, manmade mineral, christened ‘trinitite,' ” the plaque explained. “These are the rocks you were talking about!”

“Oh, yeah!” My father peered into the case, smiling like he had just rediscovered a long-lost childhood toy. But as he read the description, his smile quickly turned to a look of confusion and concern. “Seriously, though, who would have given that to me? They're radioactive. My parents just let me sit around holding those things.… ”

I was glad we had come here. I felt like we had been nudged just a little closer to understanding Wheeler's words. According to Zurek, the self-excited circuit meant that observers have the power to create information—a result, presumably, of the fact that the world is divided into pieces, itself a result of our being stuck inside the universe with no access to a God's-eye view. The boundary of a boundary—the simple geometric fact that “when you put a boundary on something, you don't have to bind it anymore”—somehow suggested a way to bring that information into existence
from nothingness
, but I still wasn't sure how. It from bit, bit from nothing. Deep questions remained unanswered. Decoherence was great for hiding reality's quantumness, but why was reality quantum at all? Wheeler's question remained as probing as ever, hanging like a mushroom cloud over the New Mexico desert.
Why the quantum?

Back at home, I was hunting around online for more information on Wheeler's former students, trying to find more people who might be able to help us decipher those phrases, when I came across a profile of Wheeler in a 1978 issue of the
Alcade
, the University of Texas at Austin's alumni magazine, written one year after he had moved to Texas from Princeton. One particular paragraph caught my attention.

“And when he gets that new idea, what does he do with it?” the article asked. “He records it in a hardbound, handwritten notebook. Dr. Wheeler has filled almost forty of these notebooks since he started keeping them during the war.… When he talks with a colleague, he records what the person told him and what he thought about it afterward. When he is asked to give a lecture, he organizes what he will say
in the notebook, writing it out in black ink, in beautiful, legible script. When a neighborhood child constructs a paper greeting for his birthday, when he buys a postcard in a foreign country, when he comes across a cartoon that makes him laugh, he pastes these items into his notebooks, saving them for his own future reference and for the future delight of science historians.”

Holy shit.

Wheeler kept journals?
Forty
journals? Recording his every thought and conversation? That was in 1978. How many more had he filled in the three decades that followed? What had become of them? How were we going to get our hands on them?

All I knew was that we needed to see those journals.

At Arizona State University in Tempe, physicist Lawrence Krauss was launching the Origins Initiative, an ongoing project to explore “the origin of the universe, stars, planets, life, consciousness, culture, and human institutions.” I wondered what exactly that wouldn't include. To kick it off, they were throwing a huge symposium, and
New Scientist
sent me to cover the event. Over the course of three days, it featured talks by some of the biggest names in science. But by the end of the first night, I had only one name in mind: Brockman.

The first day had featured panels of physicists discussing the knowability of the universe's origin. Andrei Linde evangelized the merits of the multiverse, while David Gross sat shaking his head and looking like he was itching to stab someone. Guth and Vilenkin optimistically addressed the difficulties of making predictions in an infinite multiverse. Then Gross took an axe to them all. We don't know what string theory is, it doesn't offer a consistent cosmology, the technical and conceptual underpinnings of eternal inflation are shaky at best, and we simply don't know the rules of the game, he said. Resorting to the multiverse is a cop-out. We ought to be searching for real answers. The crowd cheered.

Oddly, no one mentioned what seemed to me to be the biggest cosmological challenges—like what it means to talk about “the universe” when each of our observer-dependent de Sitter horizons delineates our own universe, or how we can move beyond inflation's semiclassicality to understand the universe's quantum origin, or whether the origin lives not in the past but the present, a top-down, delayed-choice kind of birth, its umbilical cord looped back around its observer?

(Left to right) Sheldon Glashow, David Gross, Andrei Linde, Paul Davies, Alex Vilenkin, and Alan Guth at the ASU Origins Symposium
Dan Falk

That evening there was a cocktail reception at the university's art museum. I was wandering around the outdoor plaza, attempting small talk, when I saw it. The Panama hat. I didn't need to see the head it sat on.

My mouth went dry and my heart began to race. I pulled out my phone and texted my father:
Brockman is here! What do I do?

A minute later my phone buzzed with his reply:
Panic?!

Strategy
, I told myself.
I just need a strategy.

I came up with a good one: slink pathetically around the party, keep a safe distance, and rehearse what I might say in case I muster up the guts.

I didn't.

Milan Kundera says that every action is a self-portrait of the one
who acts. Today's painting looked something like this: a girl, pressed against a wall, conspicuously inconspicuous, peering round a corner at a man in a Panama hat. Title:
Pull It Together.

The next day's lectures were held at the Boulders, a posh resort in Scottsdale that sat against a backdrop of 12-million-year-old granite rock formations and proud saguaros in the foothills of the Sonoran desert. During a break between sessions, everyone filed out into the hallway where coffee and snacks were being served. I stood chatting with Dan Falk, a freelance journalist whom I had met back at the Davis conference and had gotten to know at several physics conferences since, discussing the lectures we had just seen and trading notes about whom we were hoping to interview. “Honestly,” I confessed, “I really just want to talk to John Brockman. But he scares the crap out of me.”

“Here's your chance,” Falk said, pointing his chin toward the far end of the hall behind me. I turned around.

There was Brockman in his white linen suit and Panama, looking like a meaner, tougher Tom Wolfe and talking to a pack of Nobel laureates. It wasn't the kind of conversation you interrupt. But eventually the Nobelists headed back toward the lecture hall and for a brief minute Brockman was alone. I had to introduce myself. I couldn't pass up the opportunity, even if every biological instinct in my body was screaming,
Flight! Flight!

Falk laughed as I took a deep breath, pushed my shoulders back, and walked down the hallway toward Brockman. Then I panicked. At the last second I veered off to the side and began waving at some imaginary colleague I'd apparently just spotted. I headed back into the lecture hall, defeated.

The next round of talks was followed by a break for lunch, which was being served in the main dining area of the resort, a short walk away. I was heading outside when I saw Brockman hanging out by the door. I mustered up all the nerve I could find. He caught my eye as I approached; there was no chickening out now.

“Hi, John? I just wanted to introduce myself. My name is Amanda Gefter. I work for
New Scientist.
” I offered my hand for a shake, but Brockman just stood there.

With a stern expression, he looked me up and down, then in a husky voice said flatly, “I know who you are.”

I hadn't seen that coming. I wasn't sure how to respond, so I went with a bewildered, “You do?”

“Roger's talked about you,” he said.

Roger, I assumed, was Roger Highfield, the British science journalist who had recently taken over as editor of
New Scientist.
I knew that Roger had written several science books, but I hadn't realized that he was one of Brockman's clients. The idea that Roger Highfield and John Brockman had had any kind of conversation about me was exhilarating, if surreal, but I had a good suspicion that it had probably gone something like this.

Brockman:
How's life since you've taken over
New Scientist?

Roger:
It would be spectacular if it weren't for Amanda Gefter, who is probably going to get us sued and bankrupt the bloody magazine.

I had recently written an opinion piece that provoked the threat of a libel suit.

I cringed sheepishly. “I've been causing a bit of trouble for Roger.”

Brockman stared me down with stony approval. “It's good.”

I smiled. It didn't surprise me that Brockman would approve of a little troublemaking. I opened my mouth to respond, but apparently he had decided that three sentences were the most he was willing to waste on me, and he abruptly walked away to talk to someone more important.

Back in Cambridge, I was eager to delve deeper into Susskind's horizon complementarity. Brockman had convinced him to write a book about it, so I knew it had to be important. I also knew that if I could write an article about it for the magazine, I'd have the perfect excuse to talk more with Susskind, to finish the conversation we had started on the Santa Barbara beach.

“He says it's a new and stronger form of relativity,” I told one of the
features editors, knowing full well that no editor can resist a story that messes with Einstein. It worked like a charm. I got the green light and immediately contacted Susskind.

It all began with a paradox, he told me over the phone, one born of Hawking's monumental discovery, and rendered graver still in Susskind's Bronx inflection. When black holes radiate, they evaporate, ever-shrinking spheres that eventually up and vanish from the universe, taking with them whatever had fallen in. That's what Hawking had believed, anyway: if an elephant falls into a black hole and the black hole radiates away, it takes the elephant with it, leaving no trace of it behind, not a single bit of information to betray its strange extinction.

For Susskind, the scenario was nothing short of a crisis. “We have a principle that in physics information is never lost,” he told me. “In quantum mechanics it means that the initial state can be recovered from the final state. That's very, very fundamental. Quantum states should mean something. All of physics as we know it is conditioned on the fact that information is conserved, even if it's badly scrambled.”

If a physical law like the conservation of information could fail at the edge of a black hole, it could fail anywhere. Either the world is described by quantum mechanics or it isn't—find one scenario in which it breaks down and the whole thing is totally useless. If black holes could lose information, Susskind said, the entire edifice of quantum mechanics would come crumbling down. The Schrödinger equation, which describes the evolution of quantum systems in time, would be meaningless. Wavefunctions would go limp and wither. Any semblance of continuity from past to future would melt away. Predictions based on quantum mechanics would be rendered absurd, as probabilities would sum to less than and greater than 1.

On the other hand, if black holes
couldn't
lose information, then general relativity was doomed. That's because there was only one realistic way to save the information from evaporating into oblivion. It couldn't climb up out of the black hole's interior and escape, because crossing back over the horizon would require moving faster than light. The only hope was that the information never fell into the black hole in the first place, that the horizon somehow prevents its passage into the dark.

That scenario, however, violates the equivalence principle, the cornerstone of general relativity. Einstein's happiest thought was that a free-falling observer always finds himself in an inertial frame free from gravity, a conviction that any physical experiment will inevitably confirm. Like a man falling off a roof, an elephant falling into a black hole feels no gravity. As far as physics is concerned, the elephant may as well be at rest. “Gravity” is the fictitious force we introduce when we view the elephant from some other reference frame in which it appears to be inexplicably accelerating. It is our way of patching up two misaligned frames to save the semblance of a single reality.

If the elephant is at rest in its own reference frame, some kind of impenetrable wall isn't going to suddenly materialize in front of it. Information-blocking walls don't just appear out of nowhere—not without violating the laws of physics.

“The equivalence principle says that if you're in a neighborhood of spacetime where the curvature is small, then you should experience no strange or violent behavior,” Susskind explained. “The curvature is very small near a horizon, so someone falling through shouldn't experience anything strange. If no information is to be lost, then it must never pass through the horizon. On the other hand, the principle of equivalence says that the horizon is no place special, so information should be able to pass right through.”