Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn (39 page)

We set to work on a proposal for a book called
Hunting the Snark: Physicists' Quest for Ultimate Reality.

Like the characters in Carroll's surrealist poem, physicists are on the trail of their own Snark
, we wrote.
Their shadowy creature is ultimate reality, the objective world independent of observers. It is the world “out there,” as it exists in and of itself regardless of how we perceive it. This has proven far thornier than one might think. In the early twentieth century, Albert Einstein found that space and time were not fundamentally real but are observer-dependent. Meanwhile, the founders of quantum mechanics were coming to grips with the realization that observers play a far more profound role than anyone had imagined. But what few people know is that in recent years, things have gotten a whole lot weirder. Today, cutting-edge physics is forcing us to completely rethink the nature of reality and our place in the cosmos. In studying the physics of black holes physicists have found that particles are observer-dependent; in exploring the consequences of the holographic principle they've found that even four-dimensional spacetime—which had been left intact by Einstein's theories—is also observer-dependent, introducing what Leonard Susskind has called “a new kind of relativity.”

Each chapter of the book, we explained, would have physicists hunting for a different Snark—space, time, gravity, particles, spacetime, dimensions, the gauge forces, strings—which would inevitably and profoundly turn out to be observer-dependent Boojums, culminating in a total rethink of cosmology itself.

These are conclusions that boggle the mind. The things we have long believed to be the most fundamental features of reality have turned out to be nothing more than mirages. One by one we see that the seemingly solid building blocks of the universe are consequences of our own points of view—and that the universe itself is a strange kind of fiction. Snarkhunting is no task for the fainthearted. It seems the more deeply we look into the nature of reality, the more clearly we find only a reflection of ourselves. In the end, the closest thing to a Snark may turn out to be Nothing itself.

“I think this is great,” my father said, “but to be honest, it doesn't feel like our book. It feels like
a
book.”

I knew what he meant. Like most imaginary books,
our
book was exhaustive, encompassing every last bit of life, the universe, and everything. It was inimitable. It was infinite. It was the answer to the universe.

“At some point
our
book has to become
a
book,” I said.

He nodded. “I guess that's true.”

Eventually my father went to bed, but I kept working, determined to finish the thing. According to the book I had bought on how to write a book proposal, the next step was to include some biographical information about the authors.

In
Hunting the Snark,
father-daughter writing duo Warren Gefter and Amanda Gefter journey to the frontiers of physics and cosmology in search of ultimate reality. Warren Gefter is …

Fuck.

How was I going to explain my father's role? I had snuck him past the organizers of the Wheeler symposium under the vague guise of “plus one,” but I had no idea how I was going to sneak him past Brockman. His credentials, no matter how impressive in the medical world, were going to seem seriously random here, and his inclusion in the project was sure to raise more questions than it answered. For example, why did I, a supposedly seasoned science journalist, need a coauthor in the first place? Why did said coauthor happen to be my father? And what the hell was a radiologist doing coauthoring a book about ultimate reality?

There was simply no way to explain it. My only choice was to write the proposal as if my father's inclusion were perfectly normal and hope that the book sounded too good to refuse.

For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.

When an email from John Brockman appeared in my inbox, I felt a sickening twist in my stomach. Here we go, I thought. This is it.

I clicked it open, holding my breath.

This wasn't it.

The email made no mention of our proposal. It was an invitation to a conference on moral psychology.

Morality had never been of much interest to me, but I jumped at the chance to attend a Brockman event and drove from Boston down to Washington, Connecticut—a wealthy country town in the southern foothills of the Berkshires, just swanky enough to provide country homes for rich Manhattanites and just rural enough to have no cell phone reception.

The conference was held at a luxury hotel that had the look and feel of a country manor. In true Brockman style, a select group of only nine elite scientists were invited for the roundtable event, along with a handful of press from outlets such as
The New York Times, Newsweek
, and
Scientific American.

The conference lasted three days. On the second night, Brockman invited everyone for dinner at his country home, the legendary farmhouse, which sat on seventy-five sprawling acres in a neighboring town. As I sipped wine and tried to make small talk with the scientists, the surreality of it all had me tongue-tied. It felt as though only yesterday I had been reading about the Brockmans' farmhouse and wondering how I would ever get invited to mingle with the members of the Reality Club. Now, inexplicably, I was.

Everyone helped themselves to food and sat down to eat at the large dining table. Katinka Matson, Brockman's wife, sat down next to me. An artist, agent, and president of Brockman, Inc., Matson was strikingly attractive, with bright white hair that framed her face in sharp, modern angles. As we chatted, she looked down at my arm. “That's not real, is it?” she asked.

I followed her gaze to the tattoo on my forearm and laughed. “Yeah, it's real.”

“That's permanent? What does it say?”

I held out my arm so that she could read the words that were inked there. It was a poem by Seamus Heaney, from
Station Island.

In the book, Heaney travels to Station Island in Donegal, Ireland, the legendary site of Saint Patrick's Purgatory and a place of Catholic pilgrimage. Heaney's not searching for God, but for himself, for his voice
as a writer. At the end of the pilgrimage, sleep-deprived and weak from hunger, Heaney meets the ghost of James Joyce, who tells him,
“Your obligation / is not discharged by any common rite. / What you must do must be done on your own / so get back in harness. The main thing is to write / for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust / that imagines its haven like your hands at night / dreaming in the sunspot of a breast. / You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous. / Take off from here. And don't be so earnest, / let others wear the sackcloth and the ashes. / Let go, let fly, forget. / You've listened long enough. Now strike your note.”

In the next poem, Heaney does. Entitled “The First Gloss,” it is inked in black Garamond on my writing arm. Matson read the words aloud:
“Take hold of the shaft of the pen. / Subscribe to the first step taken / from a justified line / into the margin.”

When I had gotten the tattoo years earlier, the tattooist had suggested that I take a photo of my arm and send it to Heaney. “He would be so honored!” he insisted.

“Sure,” I had replied, “I'm sure he'd hang it right next to his Nobel Prize.”

“Did John see this?” Matson asked. “John! Come look at this!”

Brockman came over to the table, and Matson pointed to my arm.

He read the poem aloud, then looked up at me. “Why did you get that?”

“It's about being true to your voice,” I said. “About taking risks in your writing.”

He nodded approvingly.

The following afternoon, as the conference wrapped up, I walked over to Brockman to say goodbye before heading back to Boston.

“You should come down to New York,” Brockman said. “I'll take you around to meet all the publishers. See if we can find a project for you.”

I started to nod, unsure what to say.
What about
Hunting the Snark
?

“John, she already has a book she wants to write,” said Matson, who had just walked over. I wanted to hug her.

“Okay, fine,” he said. “Tell me about it. But I don't want to hear any of that Alice-in-Wonderland shit.”

I explained that it was about what the latest, most cutting-edge theoretical physics was telling us about the nature of ultimate reality.

“What's the title?” Brockman demanded. “It's got to hit hard.”

My mind raced. Suddenly every thought that popped into my head was some kind of Alice-in-Wonderland shit. It was like trying not to think of a pink elephant. Or a pink Cheshire cat. Finally I spat something out:
“The End of Reality.”

“Not bad,” he said. “Send me a proposal. Two pages.”

“Okay,” I said, enthusiastically. “I will.”

I thanked them both for having me, then walked away.

“Good luck with your tattoo!” Matson shouted as I made my way out the door.

After writing my article on horizon complementarity, I couldn't help thinking back to the Santa Barbara debate about the string landscape, and I was suddenly more than a little suspicious of the whole notion of the multiverse. When we talk about the multiverse, we're talking about an infinite number of causally disconnected universes, all separated by horizons. If you violate the laws of physics with a description across one event horizon, I was pretty sure you'd obliterate them with a description across an infinite number. If the laws of physics only made sense within the reference frame of a single observer, what the hell could the multiverse even mean?

I was about to call Susskind to ask him when an email from him popped up in my inbox. He was sending me an early draft of his book about horizon complementarity and his thirty-year battle with Stephen Hawking, the one that Brockman had convinced him to write. I was thrilled to get to read it so far ahead of publication, and I dove right in.

Toward the end, Susskind described the current acceleration of the universe's expansion and wondered if horizon complementarity applied to our de Sitter horizon in the same way that it applied to the horizon of a black hole.
“At the present time, we understand very little
about cosmic horizons,” he wrote. “The meaning of the objects behind the horizon—whether they are real and what role they play in our description of the universe—may be the deepest question of cosmology.”

“We all read your proposal and we all agreed that while we'd like to work with you, this just isn't your book.”

Katinka Matson had called to deliver the verdict on our proposal for
The End of Reality.
“The coauthorship structure is too confusing,” she said. “It's not clear why your father is involved.”

“I get that,” I said. “But this has always been a joint project.”

“We can't sell the coauthorship,” Matson said. “There's no voice. Where are
you
in this? Your tattoo, where's
that
?”

I cringed. The irony of the words inked on my forearm was not lost on me. For years now I had not been true to my voice; I had been writing in a whisper. I could barely hear myself at all in the magazine articles I wrote, because from the start I had been pretending to be someone else, someone with a different voice, a proper voice, the voice of a journalist. I certainly couldn't hear myself in the papers I'd written for school, which I had composed under the guise of a stuffy British man. And thinking about it now, I saw that Matson was right—I couldn't hear myself in the voice I had conjured for those stillborn books, either,
The Alice-in-Wonderland Shit
and
The End of Reality
, books intended to simulate other books.

“Just think about it,” Matson said kindly.

I told her I would, and hung up the phone.

Matson's words echoed:
There's no voice.
For one long decade, the only way I had ever known to get to the truth of reality was to be a fake. But what exactly was I covering up? What if behind this mask there was nothing, and even the imposter was an imposter itself? What if I was like Clark Kent ripping off his business suit only to reveal another business suit underneath? What if I was nothing more than an ordinary journalist who had somehow convinced herself that she was on some secret mission to uncover the nature of reality, because it made life exciting and meaningful, and my father, being a father, had played
along for my sake, or perhaps had himself been similarly duped? We shared so many thoughts, I figured, it was hardly a stretch to think we could share a delusion.

Matson felt it was the coauthorship that had muted my voice. Maybe she was right. Maybe it was like Safe and Screwed, like
their
confusing coauthorship structure. You violate the laws of physics when you try to speak from two observers' points of view simultaneously. Maybe you violate the laws of publishing, too. Maybe our book had been an impossible object from the start. Maybe it didn't make sense to try to write a book using both of our voices, since it would add up to no voice at all.

Suddenly I understood just what had struck me as so funny about the academic use of the royal “we,” back when I was writing my thesis. That pronoun, which was meant to denote pure objectivity, pure
reality
—the essence and observer-independence of science—was in fact describing something nonexistent, forbidden by physics, disappointingly voiceless, and markedly
not real.

The only pronoun that held any hope of reality was
I
, but I wasn't sure that I knew who that was. After so many years of writing with phony voices, I was no longer convinced I had a real one to offer.

Somewhere in the world—on a shelf? encased in glass? in a box under a bed?—sat a stack of dusty hardbound notebooks, and somewhere in the handwritten pages of those notebooks hid the solutions to Wheeler's riddles.