Greg Egan Distress

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just helpfully, cynically, trying to accommodate SeeNet's demand for
cliches-but then, that was the price I paid for asking her to play the game.
She said, "Muteba spelled out the role of science more clearly than anyone
else at the time. And in a couple of sentences, he could . . . incinerate any
doubts I might have had about ransacking the entire planetary storehouse of
culture and science, and taking exactly what I wanted." She hesitated, then
recited:
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"When Leopold the Second rises from the grave Saying, 'My conscience plagues
me, take back This un-
Belgian ivory and rubber and gold!' Then I will renounce my ill-gotten
un-African gains And piously abandon the calculus and all its offspring To ...
I know not whom, for Newton and Leibniz both Died childless."
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I laughed. Mosala said soberly, "You've no idea what it was like though, to
have that one sane voice cutting through all the noise. The anti-science,
traditionalist backlash didn't really hit
South Africa until the forties-but when it did, so many people in public life
who'd spoken perfect sense until then seemed to cave in, one way or another .
. . until science was somehow either the rightful 'property' of 'the
West'-which Africa didn't need or want anyway-or it was nothing but a weapon
of cultural assimilation and genocide."
"It has been used as exactly that."
Mosala eyed me balefully. "No shit. Science has been abused for every
conceivable purpose under the sun. Which is all the more reason to deliver the
power it grants to as many people as possible, as rapidly as possible, instead
of leaving it in the hands of a few. It is not a reason to retreat into
fantasy-to declare: knowledge is a cultural artifact, nothing is universally
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true, only mysticism and obfuscation and ignorance will save us." She reached
out and mimed taking hold of a handful of space, saying, "There is no male
cafe-male vacuum. There is no Belgian or Zairean space-time. Inhabiting this
universe is not a cultural prerogative, or a lifestyle decision. And I
don't have to forgive or forget a single act of enslavement, theft,
imperialism, or patriarchy, in order to be a physicist-or to approach the
subject with whatever intellectual tools I need. Every scientist sees further
by standing on a pile of corpses-and frankly, I don't care what kind of
genitals they had, what language they spoke, or what the color of their skin
was."
I tried not to smile; this was all highly usable. I had no idea which of these
slogans were sincere, and which were conscious theatrics-where the telegenic
sugar-coating I'd asked for ended, and Mosala's real passions began-but then,
she may not have been entirely clear about the borders, herself.
I hesitated. My next note read: Emigration rumors7 Now was the logical time to
raise the issue-but that progression could be reconstructed during editing. I
wasn't going to risk blowing the interview until I had a lot more material
safely in the can.
I skipped ahead to safer ground. "I know you don't want to reveal the full
details of your TOE
before your lecture on the eighteenth-but maybe you could give me a rough
sketch of the theory, in terms of what's already been published?"
Mosala relaxed visibly. "Of course. Though the main reason I can't
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give you all the details is that I don't even know them myself." She
explained, "I've chosen the complete mathematical framework. All the general
equations are fixed. But getting the specific results I need involves a lot of
supercomputer calculations, which are in progress even as we speak. They
should be completed a few days before the eighteenth, though-barring
unforeseen disasters."
"Okay. So tell me about the framework."
"That part is extremely simple. Unlike Henry Buzzo and Yasuko Nishide, I'm not
looking for a way to make 'our' Big Bang seem like less of a 'coincidence.'
Buzzo and Nishide both take the view that an infinite number of universes must
have arisen out of pre-space-freezing out of that perfect symmetry with
different sets of physical laws. And they both aim to re-evaluate the
probability of a universe 'more-or-less like our own' being included in that
infinite set. It's relatively easy to find a TOE in which our universe is
possible, but freakishly unlikely. Buzzo and Nishide define a successful TOE
as one which guarantees that there are 50 many universes similar to our own
that we're not unlikely at all-that we're not some kind of miraculous, perfect
bull's-eye on a meta-cosmic dartboard, but just one unexceptional point on a
much larger target."
I said, "A bit like proving-from basic astrophysical principles-that thousands
of planets in the galaxy should have carbon-and-water-based life, and not just
Earth."
"Yes and no. Because . . . yes, the probability of other Earth-like planets
can be computed from theory, alone-but it can also be validated by
observation. We can observe billions of stars, we've already deduced the
existence of a few thousand extrasolar planets-and eventually, we'll visit
some of them, and find other carbon-and-water-based life. But although there
are no end of elegant frameworks for assigning probabilities to hypothetical
other universes .. . there is no prospect of observing or visiting them, no
conceivable method for checking the theory. So I don't believe we should
choose a TOE on that basis.
"The whole point of moving beyond the Standard Unified Field Theory is that,
one, it's an ugly mess, and two, you have to feed ten completely arbitrary
parameters into the equations to make
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file:///F|/rah/Greg%20Egan/Egan,%20Greg%20-%20Distress.txt them work. Melting
total space into pre-space-moving to an All-Topologies Model-gets rid of the
ugliness and the arbitrary nature of the SUET. But following that step by
tinkering with the way you integrate across all the topologies of
pre-space-excluding certain topologies for no good
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reason, throwing out one measure and adopting a new one whenever you don't
like the answers you're getting-seems like a retrograde step to me. And
instead of 'setting the dials' of the SUFT
machine to ten arbitrary numbers, you now have a sleek black box with no
visible controls, apparently self-contained-but in reality, you're just [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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