Accidental Gods (2 page)

Stephen smiled and replied, “What I meant was what do the letters in WMAP stand for?”

Lisa said, “Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe.”

Stephen continued, this time sounding genuinely curious, “The concept sounds neat, though. Do they have cool pictures like the Hubble?”

Ajay answered, “They make microwave sky maps, which are kind of interesting; they look like world maps but show the radiation distribution across the visible universe—”

“Back to the drawing,” Lisa interrupted, “so it’s not like you just curve around that edge. It must be an actual edge.” She waved her hand dismissively. “Whatever lies beyond that edge is also beyond our ability to understand.”

Ajay turned back to his drawing and mused, “How come everyone acts like this is not an issue?”

Lisa said, “Because infinity is an easy word to say but nearly impossible for humans to conceptualize and
somewhere
in what you are saying sits the infinite.”

“Yeah, and computers don’t really like ‘infinity’ as a variable,” Stephen grumbled from the corner.

Larry walked into Bohrs and closed the door quietly behind him. The hum of the florescent lights masked the door’s opening and closing. Lisa never turned and didn’t seem to notice. He brushed his mop of brown hair from his face and let it hang unkempt. He wore sneakers, jeans, and a black shirt that had “ROOT” centered on the front in green courier lettering.

Ajay glanced at Larry for a fraction of a second, dismissed him, and then turned back to Lisa. “So in reality, Lisa, we are ignoring whatever’s beyond that edge and just assuming it has no impact on the system.”

Thomas motioned Larry forward.

Larry stopped at the conference table, still partially behind Lisa, and rested his hand on the top of a neighboring chair’s back.

Lisa told Ajay, “We have to ignore it. We have no understanding of anything beyond that edge. I think we should just model everything after our own universe. Keep it simple and contained.” After a short pause with no response from Ajay, she continued, “In reality, all that matters is that we recognize that within the edge—inside a universe—is a closed system. The laws of physics work there. If that’s true, everything outside the universe should have no impact on how things work.”

“A closed system.” Ajay nodded.

“Thank God,” Stephen added, raising his hands in victory.

Ajay glared at him.

Stephen said, “If you want us to actually finish this, it has to be constrained in some way. Remember, we haven’t assembled here to theorize for fun. We actually need to build it, and I’m the one who has to program it. I have to figure out how to make all your crazy physicist ideas work inside a computer. So, yes,
thank God
it’ll be closed.”

Ajay erased the outer parts of his drawing until he was left with only the Frisbee-sized circle again.

“Excellent!” Thomas said.

The circle was marred with remnants of Ajay’s earlier arrows, as if they refused to allow that system to remain closed forever.

Lisa laughed. “If it doesn’t work, then we can try to solve the edge dilemma.”

Larry asked, “The edge dilemma?”

His response startled Lisa. She looked at Larry and composed herself. “Yes. I’m applying a fancy name to Ajay’s theory that something is happening on the universe’s horizon—the boundary between the expanding universe and…Larry, why are you here anyway?”

“Memory issue, I guess.”

Lisa asked, “You don’t remember why you came here?”

Stephen ran his hands through his hair again, trying to figure out if these computer puns were intentional or not. He assumed they were, which only made them more irritating.

Larry smirked. “A
hardware
memory issue.”

Thomas explained, “Ajay said we’ll need a universe’s worth of memory…” He nodded his head sideways toward Larry, “his area.”

Larry smiled as if a universe’s worth of memory was nothing. In his experience, these theoretical guys always exaggerated what they really needed.

Larry turned to Lisa and prompted her to continue, “The boundary between the expanding universe and what?”

Lisa nodded vigorously. “Exactly my point.” She turned back to Ajay. “Whatever it’s expanding into, which for now we’re theorizing is nothing—whatever ‘nothing’ is—you can thank me when it makes you famous, Ajay.” She affected a starstruck fan’s voice and posture, clasping her hands in adoration and looking goo-goo-eyed at Ajay. “Oh,
look
. It’s Ajay Narula. He won the Nobel Prize for the edge dilemma!’”

Ajay threw his arms up in surrender and then said, “OK,
for now
, we will focus only on modeling a universe that is a closed system and has the same underlying parameters as our own. Assume all the universal constants are the same as those in our universe…Well, I guess we are not assuming. We are actually making it so.”

Thomas said, “We’ll create the new universe in our universe’s image.”

“Well put,” Ajay said. “So we aren’t likely to get weird results.”

Lisa said, “We can always monkey with universal constants and see what we get once we have the first universe working. Mimicking our universe will also mean we’ll know if we get it right since we know what to expect.”

“So by playing god,” Ajay said, “we can constrain the problems of what’s beyond the edge and use universal constants we understand to prevent results that might veer drastically from what we see in our own universe.”

“I’m all for anything that constrains problems,” Stephen said.

“Then it’s settled,” Ajay said and raised his Diet Coke as if he were making a toast. “To being gods…”

Chapter 2

Year 1

I tried to imagine the easiest way God could have done it.

—Albert Einstein

Stephen sat leaning over a laptop, running his hands repeatedly through his hair. Next to his computer sat a mug of coffee, which was rapidly getting cold. He’d been sitting at this table for two days with few breaks and little sleep. He left infrequently and then only to go down the hall, one way to the bathroom or the other way to the kitchen to nuke a sandwich or refill his coffee.

Lisa was slumped over at the same table next to Stephen, her head on her crossed forearms. Stephen assumed she had finally fallen asleep. Larry sat cross-armed in his chair near the corner of the table. Catherine studied a mass of handwritten notes across from Stephen, her back to Ajay and the dry-erase boards.

Jules sat, in a professional dress suit, chewing the tip of her tongue and typing away on her laptop. She wasn’t one of the scientists. She was Thomas’s assistant, which in this case meant making sure all these brainstorming sessions got recorded.

Stephen looked at the dry-erase boards again and pondered the equations they had been working on.

Ajay was mindlessly staring at the boards as well, but Stephen doubted Ajay saw the math anymore.

Jules stopped typing and waited.

The group seemed so close to framing the flow of quantum mechanics, which would unite both atomic-level interactions and the standard model of physics—or, at least, what they needed to implement their system.

Catherine was noticeably different from the others in the room. She looked as if she had just come from a “Save the Rain Forests” rally. She had crazy blond hair and wore a dress that was not quite hippie but not quite mainstream either. It could best be described as upscale granola chic. She was, like Jules, also quite different from the rest of the core IACP team in more than just appearance. Her doctoral work in ethics at Brown already made her kind of an outcast in the group—not because of her focus on ethics, but because of her lack of a PhD in a “hard science.”

“OK,” Ajay said. “I have an idea.”

Jules started typing again.

“Oh, really?” Stephen asked Ajay. He might have been too exhausted to be sarcastic anymore.

Catherine turned in her chair and faced Ajay.

“Yes,” Ajay said. “Hear me out before you start punching holes in it…or me.”

“Proceed.”

“People think of time as seconds, but seconds are a purely human construct. The universe doesn’t move in seconds. It moves in ticks.”

He then drew four horizontal lines on the board, arranged vertically like ladder rungs without braces.

“Think of each of these as a slice of the universe at any given time,” he said. “So as we grind out the evolution of the universe, what we are actually doing is ticking through small steps that represent steps through the laws—the individual motions of every particle in the universe—first one step, then the next, and the next, and so forth. This is all programmatic, so it really is stepping through each one.”

Stephen nodded and ran his hands through his hair again.

“So each of these ticks is probably equal to one unit of Planck time.”

“Holy shit!” Stephen nodded more vigorously.

“Yes. You see it now?”

Larry frowned. “What the hell are you guys talking about?”

Ajay said, “A single Planck time, as a unit, has two meanings, Larry. One is a unit of measurement, and the other is a point on the big bang time line. I’ll explain them separately, because they are both important—and interrelated. But I’m talking about the unit of time more than I’m talking about the big bang chronology.”

“Look,” Larry said, “I don’t need to know all this.”

“Yes,” Ajay said, “you do, because if I’m right, we’re going to have to design everything around this one principle.”

“OK,” Larry said, bristling.

He thought Ajay was a condescending prick, and Ajay’s proper British accent only irritated him even more. He spent half the time he was stuck in these meetings plotting ways to kill Ajay…and, less frequently, Stephen.

“Planck time,” Ajay said, “is ten to the negative forty-third of a second—point zero, zero, zero…” He rolled his hand in the air in a whirling motion. “…zero one of a second. Specifically, forty-three zeroes. About one trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a half a trillionth of a second. So basically it’s a very, very small unit in time. In fact, the smallest unit of time we can measure.

“In terms of the big bang, Planck time is the first era, which conveniently lasted only ten to the negative forty-third of a second—i.e., one unit of Planck time. Nothing about that first Planck unit is really understood. Basically, during this phase, things were tearing apart so fast that it represents a singularity—a singularity meaning we have some parameter approaching infinity as another goes to zero.”

He wrote an equation on the board, studied it, and nodded.

“This initial singularity from time zero through the first Planck unit of time is when the universe comes into being. During this period, the four fundamental forces—gravity, weak forces, strong forces, and electromagnetic—are unified as one universal force. At about one Planck unit, things start to blow apart. We don’t know what happened before that.”

Larry, pretending to understand, simply said, “OK.”

“Wait,” Catherine said. “Some would differ on singularities. I know you physicists are going to gripe, but I’m going to say it. This event falls outside of our understanding of the universe. The laws of physics do not seem to work at that point. Perhaps they don’t even exist. Some would call that a supernatural event.”

Larry asked, “You mean like God did it?”

Lisa raised her head, which now had a reddish imprint of her hand on it, and rubbed her eyes. They were bloodshot from lack of sleep. “God did what?” she asked groggily.

“I’m not saying that,” Catherine continued. “However, supernatural events, by definition, are merely attributed to a power that seems to violate natural forces or doesn’t exist in nature or they escape explanation by natural laws. It’s not God; it’s just something we don’t understand.”

Ajay scrunched his nose, pursed his lips, and shook his head. “I would make the case that a singularity where the laws of physics break down does not have to be supernatural. Just because we don’t know what or how something happens doesn’t mean there is not an explanation.”

“Regardless of how you define supernatural,” Catherine said, “we have to admit that at the very beginning—”

“Look,” Jules said to Catherine, “let’s not debate what happened yet. They’re trying to figure out how to frame the system.”

Her voice carried the power and tone of a drill sergeant’s. That, combined with the fact that she was effectively a proxy for Thomas, tended to make everyone listen. Plus, it was the first time she had spoken all day.

Jules continued, “I think we all know something pretty extraordinary happened at the exact moment of the big bang. Let’s try not to derail Ajay’s idea. Remember, no poking holes until the end.”

Ajay smiled, a little smugly, and nodded. He shot a quick squinting glare toward Catherine—so quick it was almost undetectable, so quick that he couldn’t have meant for her to see it. It was more like he was simply wondering why Catherine was there at all—a general disdain for philosophy’s interruption of science.

But Catherine did see it, and so did Stephen. He was furiously scratching his head as he wondered why he was wasting time in these meetings. He would have preferred to just start coding and see where things went. These petty arguments made things even worse.

Ajay said, “Thanks, Jules. I’ll continue now.”

Jules focused her attention back on her laptop and started typing again.

Ajay swallowed and took a breath. “To make this work, I think we need to pick a level of detail or granularity to apply to the problem. It’s like when you play a video game. You are looking at an LCD display that has some resolution in pixels—say nineteen hundred by twelve hundred. This resolution is the most detail you can get. From half an arm’s length or more, it looks like whatever you have on your screen—spreadsheets, a game, whatever. But with a magnifying glass, you can see the individual pixels—the smallest point on an LCD panel. The software doesn’t have to get more detailed than the best resolution it supports. So if a game’s max resolution is nineteen hundred by twelve hundred, it doesn’t need to think about what things would be like at twenty-five sixty by sixteen hundred. That doesn’t mean it won’t run in twenty-five sixty by sixteen hundred; it just means it will look the same as it did at the lower resolution—except the pixels might be slightly more visible.”

Both the physicists and the computer scientists all nodded—a rare occasion.

Stephen, finally seemed to get excited, nodded particularly vigorously again and jumped up. “So if we’re going to do this right, we have to decide what resolution our simulated universe will exist in, to define the ticks—the smallest thing.”

“Right!” Ajay nodded.

Stephen said, “It seems contrived, but we can’t build something that has infinite depth.”

“Right again. While there may be things smaller than, say, a quark, we don’t know what they are, so we can’t really model them properly anyway. Also, it actually doesn’t matter, for our purposes, if scientists find something smaller later. The rules will still work. It just means the universe we create won’t have anything smaller.”

Ajay paused. He had to consciously stop himself from going into a further diatribe on the topic. It was a particular irritant for him and had been one of the major drivers in his decision to join the IACP team. He was burned out on this addiction to reductionism in physics. He had concluded that everyone in the field was fixated on smashing particles together in hopes of finding yet smaller particles. That no longer interested him. He needed a different path, preferably one he could blaze himself. When Thomas had told Ajay about the idea to model the big bang, Ajay couldn’t help but jump at the opportunity.

Everyone watched Ajay, but Ajay focused only on Larry. “If you step back and look at the most basic building blocks, you’ve got fermions and bosons—do you want an overview on this?”

“Hell yes,” Larry said.

Ajay said, “There are two types of fermions: leptons and quarks. The most well known leptons are electrons and neutrinos. Quarks bond together, through the strong force, to create protons and neutrons. So basically you have all the building blocks of atoms—protons, neutrons, and electrons. Bosons, the other type of building block, include things like photons—more commonly known as light.”

Stephen sat back down.

“Anyway,” Ajay continued to Larry, “before I go too far down a physics lesson rat hole, let’s just stick to quarks and electrons. There is some debate as to whether they have size or not, given that they are fundamental particles. More specifically, they are not made up of any smaller particles. Another reason for this debate is that they resemble both waves and matter, which can confuse anyone who doesn’t spend all of their time thinking about these problems.”

Larry was interested in hearing more, and Ajay could tell, so he continued, “But assuming they have a size, physicists guess it’s in the range of ten to the negative eighteenth. This makes them larger than a Planck length, a somewhat magical, very small number, about one point six times ten to the negative thirty-fifth of a meter. Planck himself described these units as…”

Ajay squinted at the ceiling trying to remember the quote, but it didn’t come to him verbatim like Hawking’s words had, and that irritated him. “OK, this will be a paraphrase.” He looked back at the group. “Planck said these units will be the same for all times and all civilizations, even extraterrestrial. So they can be designated as natural units. Planck units in both time and length appear, at least with our current understanding, to be the most basic forms of measurement in the universe. Nothing smaller can be measured or found. They are the points at which the universe achieves granularity.”

No one said anything.

Ajay simplified all of this for the group, “They are the
pixels of the universe
.”

Stephen blinked, removed his hand from his hair, and stood back up. “That’s it.” He blinked again. “That’s genius, Ajay.”

Ajay smiled, raising his hands palms up, as if saying, “Ta-da!” Still, though, he was irritated at his memory for not instantly recalling Planck’s exact words.

“God,” Lisa said, “that’s all Ajay needs, an ego boost.”

Ajay shook his head.

Stephen said, “Ego boost or not, I think we can actually use that structure as the underlying framework to build the architecture for our new universe.”

“So you see it?” Thomas asked.

Ajay hadn’t realized Thomas had entered the room. He suspected that Jules had sent him an instant message. Perhaps Thomas had even been eavesdropping before via video.

“Yes,” Stephen said enthusiastically, his shoulders antsy, the tips of his fingers brushing across his thumbs, like he wanted to rush out of the room and start writing code that instant. “Yes,” he said again, “I see how to put it together.”