Cartel: In this interview it seems I stand for the general scientific establishment which is of the opinion, namely, that the Theory of Relativity is what physically governs the cosmos. You, I believe, are at odds in this respect. Am I correct?
Boam: Only in so far as the scientific establishment hasn't yet been convinced by what I say. It will be convinced once it finally realizes that, in respect of the calculations based on the general theory of relativity, it is running into severe trouble.
Cartel: You think Relativity is false?
Boam: No, I don't believe it is false, simply that it is too inadequate to explain the motions of the stars. As inadequate, in fact, as the study of ballistics is for predicting the flight path of a sparrow, or the law of conservation of momentum is for working out which direction you will walk when you depart from this room.
Cartel: The accepted theory is that stars are hot, fusing balls of compressed plasma radiating heat in all directions and drifting through space under the influence of gravity. Their motion is not in any way analogous to a person walking in a building. Where did you get this idea?
Boam: There is currently a project among stellar astronomers to construct a complete map of our home galaxy.
Cartel: A similar undertaking to that made by microbiologists 20 years ago of mapping the human genome.
Boam: Yes, and look at how much they got out of it. Anyway, I was studying quasars at the time of its conception when I couldn't help noticing the commotion going on in the academic journals as they tackled their project. At first there were hundreds of articles discussing the accuracy of astronomical distance, direction and velocity measurements; it's a complicated subject, there are so many methods, some of which are extremely difficult to use. That episode began ten years ago - the University of Utah gathered all the information known up till then about star positions into one big computer and put a note round saying that they would be grateful to anyone who had anything further to add.
Cartel: The record includes data about dust clouds, white dwarfs, red giants, neutron stars, black holes and planets. It's quite sophisticated.
Boam: On the subject of planets: apart from the nine in our solar system, all the others have been worked out from minute wobblings in the motions of faraway stars. We guess that these are due to the presence of planets. And it's this sort of guesswork I am objecting to because I can see it is running into deep trouble. Particularly when it is applied to movements other than wobbles. Those astronomers have been using Max Korn's algorithm too freely.
Cartel: Dr. Korn's algorithm as I understand is the one which can detect missing stars.
Boam: Yes. It's an incredibly clever program. If, say, you consider ten stars reasonably close to each other, moving around under the influence of gravity in complicated orbits, then you blot out everything except a small section of the orbit of one of the stars, Korn's algorithm will compute to a degree of accuracy the motions of the other nine stars.
Cartel: So, theoretically, it's possible to compute the position of all the clumps of matter in the galaxy just by tracking the motion of the sun.
Boam: It's possible, but you would have to track it to a heck of an accuracy for a heck of a long time and use a heck of a lot of computing power.
Cartel: This is where you come in, I take it.
Boam: After gathering precise data on the positions of stars into one place for ten years, the astronomers in Utah University found out that it wasn't, celestially speaking, adding up; the stars and gas clouds and nebuli weren't drifting to the places they were meant to be drifting, as predicted by the laws of gravitation over these ten years. Time and time again they saw individual stars moving in unexpected directions, as if acted upon by some external force. Ah, they said, this force must be gravity. There must be some massive objects we haven't spotted yet. So they fed what they knew into the Max Korn algorithm, ran it on the computer for thousands of hours and worked out exactly where these massive objects must be. Then they booked a quick session with their telescopes.
Cartel: And the result?
Boam: There have been one or two successes in the cases when they hadn't spotted a dim star which had actually been there, but most of the time they drew a blank. So they said, Well, it must be a black hole we're experiencing, and we can't see them anyway.
Cartel: This is what roused your suspicions. I hear you have condemned it as "unscientific".
Boam: I am a quasar scientist. I study the early universe and have to account for every black hole I claim I see because, obviously, there hasn't been so much time for them to form. But, even so, no way are there - I think at last count - six thousand medium-sized black holes floating around this part of the galaxy. It's a disgrace the way these people are getting away with it. The situation is becoming as bad as when we believed in the Platonic model of the universe: Our predictions don't quite match what we see, oh well, stick another odd-shaped epicycle into the machine to make it match and everything will be fine. Why not get the earth spinning around the right object first! that's what I say.
Cartel: Black holes seem to be the only answer to the problem, I'm afraid. They are invisible sources of gravitation and since gravity is what moves stars around, this is how it must be. But I can see you think differently. What is your solution to the problem?
Boam: One day I obtained some data about the stellar neighbourhood of a bright star inspiringly called G52/11876 and plotted it out on a sheet of graph paper. I drew in the paths the stars should have made according to the laws of gravitation over the past ten years, and on top of that I traced what their actual movements had been over the same time period and saw how it didn't match up. The galactic astronomers were claiming that there were - I mean are - six black holes in this system, not one of which has been found observationally. At the time I was poring over the diagrams I saw my youngest nephew playing a cat-and-mouse video game on his computer and when I looked back at the diagrams again it seemed instantly obvious: two bloated red giants were chasing a yellow hydrogen star, which incidentally was G52/11876, and the yellow star was getting away. It was even taking evasive action from another giant hydrogen-hungry star closing in from above.
Cartel: (laughs) That's quite humorous, Dr. Boam. Very silly.
Boam: Many true things were once considered silly, such as the earth being round and not flat. You may laugh.
Cartel: I'm sorry. I'll take it seriously for the moment and ask you a few questions about it. How do stars chase each other? How can a hot ball of gas formed in a nebula become living? Where have you seen stars eating other stars? and, How intelligent is our sun?
Boam: I want to bring in Dr. Flex at this point if you don't mind. Dr. Flex was a biologist until he took to studying the creation of the universe after posing a naive question which his fellow physicists completely failed to answer.
Flex: Thank you, Dr. Boam. I think I can answer some of these questions by considering the behavior of garden slugs living on a hard ceramic floor. A young slug is liable to travel quickly, particularly if it is afraid, and leave behind it a nutritious trail of mucus on the floor. You can see the advantages for an older, more tired slug following afterwards and mopping up this trail of food.
Cartel: Doesn't the older slug leave a mucus trail behind itself too, just as large as the one it mops up?
Flex: Yes, but we're talking about stars here. An older star is mostly made of helium, which is the stuff it propels itself with. A young star, on the other hand, is almost pure hydrogen and leaves a trail of the same.
Cartel: I'm still very unconvinced by your idea of stars possessing intelligence and self-determination.
Flex: Oh, who cares if you're convinced. If you ever watched a tiny protozoa through a microscope swimming after food and being chased by predators you would not rate this past-time so highly. There are an awful lot of chaotic convection currents and magneto-hydrodynamics that haven't been accounted for.
Cartel: Dr. Boam, how do you see this fitting into your view of the expanding universe?
Flex: The universe is not expanding.
Boam: It makes no odds at this point. I see my theory as an important further step in my career. All I have to do is make a fool of myself so everyone know about me. Let me explain: I recently took the stellar neighborhood of G52 and sketched out the paths I think the stars will follow over the next decade, taking into account their predatory instincts. I fed this data back into the computer, ran Max Korn's algorithm and it eventually estimated the nice round number of 53 invisible black holes should be present in the system to make it function conventionally. You see, all I have to do is sit back and wait for nature to prove me right. The theory of gravitation will fall into shambles of its own accord. Dr. Flex's theory, on the other hand, is not so easy to prove, though it is quite profound.
Cartel: Dr. Flex, you are the one who has pondered for some time on the shrinkage of matter inside a black hole?
Flex: It isn't for me to say that for the past fifty years theoretical astronomers have been consistently applying their minds to problems that aren't there and paying no attention to problems that are there, but I am afraid I have to say so. horribly. One begins: What is a black hole? It is one of those odd features in General Relativity which says, quite rightly, that nothing can travel faster than light. So, if a spherical body is generating so much gravity that all light is being attracted into its surface, then were that body not to be shrinking, its surface would be traveling faster than the speed of light.
Cartel: Eh? The surface isn't going anywhere, it's staying fixed.
Flex: All right, look at it this way: imagine you are clinging onto a vertical wall and you are of course aware that squirrels can climb around on vertical walls a lot better than you can, so if you imagine a ring of squirrels all running as fast as they can away from you, since they can climb better than you, you will always be somewhere inside that ever-expanding ring of squirrels (these squirrels can run down the wall faster than you can fall!) Now if you increase the gravity, the squirrels running upwards will find going that way hard work, and those going down will go even faster. The circle will be distorted. Then if gravity is so high the squirrels are unable to climb upwards, the whole ring is dragged downwards, you must be within that ring, so - logically - you must be going downwards.
Cartel: Very quaint. So all of the matter in a black hole eventually shrinks to a point.
Flex: That's where you're wrong! General Relativity says gravity slows down time and infinite gravity will stop time. So as the matter shrinks, it encounters a greater gravitational field and therefore a greater time distortion; it's like an insect crawling towards a pot of liquid nitrogen: as it gets closer, it's metabolism cools, so it crawls more slowly and never in actual fact reaches it.
Cartel: Singularities in physics are a major source of contention. I'm glad you feel you've sorted them out.
Flex: And now for the problem that everyone's ignored: Even if matter doesn't shrink to a point, how does it shrink to an arbitrarily small size? And the answer to that is the atoms and their elementary particles must be shrinking.
Cartel: So?
Flex: Dr. Cartel, what does atom shrinkage mean to you?!
Boam: Calm down.
Flex: Let me rephrase that. Imagine the universe made up of protons, neutrons and electrons and you shrink each of them down a bit (hence the wavelength of an electron is shorter so atoms themselves are smaller). Now matter, as far as we're concerned, occurs in clumps. You, for example, this chair, or even a yardstick. Each of them is held together by the consistency of being a solid. If a bit of your leg gets shorter then your leg as a whole is a shorter object. Same with a yardstick: if each atom in it shrinks, the yardstick as a whole pulls together and becomes slightly smaller. If you consider two planets, on the other hand, they are not attached to each other by solidity, and as their atoms shrink, each will shrink individually, but the distance between them will remain the same. A man and his yardstick standing on one of the planets will, with his now shortened yardstick, measure that the gap between them that bit larger. Likewise, if you look at light beam created two billion years ago you will measure its wavelength as being much larger than it should be.
Boam: Does it make a difference that this was light which was emitted by atoms two billion years ago and hence of a different size?
Flex: The larger atoms around then made wider wavelengths of light, thus amplifying the effect. Um, I've simplified this a bit.
Cartel: So, from what I have gathered, you believe that the whole universe is inside a great big black hole which is why matter is shrinking due to the gravitational pressure. Why don't I feel I'm being squeezed?
Flex: I'd like to introduce Dr. Quest into the discussion at this point if you don't mind. Dr. Quest, this is Dr. Boam, I don't think you two have met.
Boam: We have. You were my local veterinarian once.
Quest: Yes. Now I'm into Quantum Mechanics. How are the quasars? Dr. Flex predicts that if you look hard enough you ought to see their individual molecules. How is your cat, by the way?
Boam: Fortunately I've given up quasars because they're rubbish. My cat fell out of a tree and broke its neck.
Quest: Right! Back to the question: Are we inside a black hole and shrinking? I don't think it actually matters. It's not something which will kill us. Let's just look at the evidence first. The universe looks as if it is expanding. Also the rate at which it looks as if it is expanding is inconsistent with the size of it now. That's what this missing matter mystery is all about. The universe is of a fixed size dimensionally; everything in it is getting smaller.
Flex: What about the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle? Don't forget the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle.
Quest: I wasn't going to. The Uncertainty principle specifies a level of uncertainty as to the position of every particle.
Cartel: No. It says you can know a particle's position to any level of accuracy at the expense of knowing its velocity. And vice versa.
Quest: It's all the same thing. If you know where it is but you don't know which way it's moving and you wait one microsecond then your measurement is as bad as ever. What I'm saying is that as Planck's constant, which is an expression of the degree of this uncertainty, is fixed relative to space, and as all matter, including us and the machines with which we measure Planck's constant, is shrinking it will look as if Planck's constant is increasing.
Flex: Yes. And even if it grew to the size of one millimeter we'd all be reduced to wobbling piles of jelly.
Boam: In fact it needn't be as large as that to seriously disrupt all the cells in your body by, say, turning them inside out.
Cartel: So we're all going to die.
Quest: Not exactly.
Flex: Your theory can wait till later, Dr. Quest. Essentially my argument is that the galaxies are not getting farther apart, merely the distance between them is growing. Think of the universe as a sponge made of dry ice. Lots of little holes in it. As it evaporates into the air, the holes get bigger and bigger, you begin to see right through the block of dry ice until eventually there's so little of it left the structure collapses under its own weight.
Boam: Hey, I've heard of something like that. Didn't they once plot the positions of the galaxies located in a certain slice of the night sky and find that the distribution was very uneven; there were vast voids of emptiness like the holes in a slice of Swiss cheeze.
Flex: True. I can foresee evidence for my theory suddenly mounting until it gets widely accepted long after my death. Remember me when you are famous, Dr. Boam.
Quest: Don't worry. You'll live to see the day you are vindicated.
Cartel: Dr. Quest, what is the meaning behind these mysterious mutterings of yours? Are you trying to suggest you have discovered the afterlife?
Quest: No. What I have discovered is the "afterdeath": there isn't one.
Cartel: And what is that supposed to mean?
Quest: Well, according to the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle which states that given a proton is here, there is a small but non-zero probability that it will suddenly, without provocation, teleport over to here. By simple algebra you can show that there is also an even smaller, but still non-zero probability that my entire hand, which is made of many neutrons, protons and electrons, will teleport itself into your stomach. Of course the probabilities are so unimaginably small it is much more likely you will bite my hand off whole and swallow it.
Cartel: I've heard of this before from trashy Science Fiction novels about improbability drives and that nonsense. Basically when probabilities get that small you can forget it.
Flex: Plus I always hate how it's things that are easy to describe which are assumed to happen. That hand trick of yours is about as likely to happen as the contents of my stomach leaping out of my throat, merging with a piece of my ribcage and forming a bionic green dove with one wing and a test-tube full of coffee tied to its leg with a beetle swimming in it carrying spores of a particularly virulent strain of retro-virus capable of turning all men into ginea pigs and all women into banana trees!
Boam: Thank you, Flex, for setting the mood.
Cartel: Let's hear what Dr. Quest has to say.
Quest: Well, you have a lot of imagination, Dr. Flex. I hope it serves you well. As to the Uncertainty Principle, there are many metaphysical ways to interpret it. The one I like most is the Many Universes model. Each Quantum Mechanical event, however small it may be, actually happens in some universe branching off from ours. So if you imagine an electron at rest at the tip of my finger, one second from now there will be universes where this electron is at the far side of the moon, but many more in which it is still at the tip of my finger because there is a much higher probability of that happening. And since all matter is made up of elementary particles there are universes where the walls fall down and there are universes where us four are sitting in an environment not unlike heaven.
Cartel: I think it's been proven that even if these alternative universes existed we wouldn't be able to communicate with them, so they might as well not exist, unless you can break the laws of probability and, say, against all likelihood, get us into heaven.
Quest: I just want to lay to rest one thing. I am aware how minutely small these probabilities we're talking about are, but there is a way to amplify them. It is called conditional probability. If a hibernating tortoise wakes up at random on condition that three consecutive warm days have occurred, then he can say, because of this condition and the way the world works between winter and summer, The probability that I wake up on a warm day will be higher than if I had simply woken up at random.
Cartel: So you can get us to sleep until the universe transmogrifies itself into heaven?
Quest: There's another, even more obvious condition to use. It's called death. This is an event which you and I as conscious beings cannot experience. The you's in all these alternative universes exist and are living - so long as they haven't been killed - and they think they are you, just like you do here. I am talking to one of them. All of my duplicates are talking to corresponding duplicates of yourself, except, of course, in universes where something has happened to interrupt us. If I stab you to death now, there will be universes where I haven't stabbed you and are not dead, and the you in those universes will live on.
Cartel: (cough)
Quest: Let me give an illustration. You remember Schrodinger's cat? Schrodinger's cat was put into Schrodinger's box which was a closed contraption containing a radio-active rock, a geiger-counter and a bottle of cyanide which would be broken when the geiger-counter made a click. Since radio-activity is random after the cat has been lying in the box for five minutes you don't know whether the cat is alive or dead. Now, imagine that you build a man-sized model of the Schrodinger box. A scientist and his lab technician come in in the morning and the story goes like this, from the point of view of the scientist: Scientist takes off his coat and steps into the machine, closes the door and activates the geiger-counter which is aimed at a lump of Uranium. The Uranium suddenly ceases its activity. No alpha particles come out of it for, say, the next half hour. The scientist steps out of the machine and greets his extremely surprised lab technician who is sure he should be dead. (Our scientist must have been suicidal to have the guts to attempt this experiment.) The lab technician steps into the Schrodinger box and bang! Three seconds later the scientist sees that he is dead.
Cartel: This is very interesting, Dr. Quest. Where did you get this idea?
Quest: If I told you it would be going off the subject. And I want to be sure you know what it means first. It means, Dr. Cartel, that each of us cannot die. We can come close to it. For example, if a vast block of steel were to be falling towards your head at this instant, it would be impossible for you to experience being squashed by it. You may think that a volume of steel just the right size to accommodate your body would just disintegrate. You'd me mighty lucky of it did. Unfortunately the same basic result, that being that you do not experience non-existence, could be achieved even if a smaller cavity in the steel were to open up, say, just enough to preserve your heart, lungs and part of your skull.
Cartel: That sounds nasty.
Quest: I thought so too, until I discovered it doesn't need to happen that way. The same principle allows perturbations in time as well as space. If you chose an instant at the present time, the probability of a gram of steel leaping one metre is small, but it may be comparable to the probability of microgram of steel jumping one minute into the past. Time and space are the same thing, relativity tells us, it's just that time travels very fast. So fast that you can't keep up with it. If you run very fast you can slow it down. That's special relativity. But a quantum jump can take you anywhere.
Boam: You're not advocating the abandonment of causality, are you? If you are, I think I'll leave. I've heard enough crappy time-travel stories in my lifetime.
Quest: This is not a time travel story, Dr. Boam. I'm looking at this from two points of view. Imagine the vast network of universes starting from now. In one second it has diverged into an infinite number of possible universes, some, such as Dr. Flex's illustration, are very improbable. Another infinite number of universes diverge from each of these universes two seconds hence, and so on. You exist in each one of these universes, except in those you have been killed. It is not possible to experience the lives of each of these duplicates, so what you do is postulate a soul. It doesn't have to necessarily exist, just use it as a counter to point out which particular Dr. Boam or Dr. Cartel in which universe you are going to experience. You move this counter down the universe tree selecting the most likely path. If the proverbial steel block falls on you, you cannot help but to select the most likely path in which you are still alive. This path, from the point of anything else in the universe, may not be likely at all. And what I'm saying is that one set of possible paths is to backtrack up the tree and select a different route. It may be more likely for the little timer set to drop the steel block to break than for you to survive it landing upon you. Or, and this is better, that a little microscopic neuron "misfired" in your head and as a result urged you to stand up and get a cup of coffee before the block of steel fell on your head!
Cartel: Sounds like clairvoyance. I had an aunt left her luggage at home and missed the plane she was meant to be catching when it crashed.
Quest: I'm glad you brought that up, Dr. Cartel, because now it gives us a chance to clear up this last little common misunderstanding. I think you better explain, Dr. Flex.
Flex: This effect we're speaking about doesn't happen in the real world. It's a purely subjective effect, so it couldn't have saved you aunt in this case because she isn't you. If a block of steel were to fall upon her head, it would probably kill her, as far as you are concerned. In the extreme case imagine everyone jumping into private Schrodinger boxes for one hour. You emerge to find everyone else dead. The world is like a Schrodinger box, everyone will be picked off until you are left on your own in your private little universe.
Quest: But don't worry, that won't happen for a long time yet. In the meantime, if you are heading for a lethal catastrophe, you better make it good. If you are falling off a high building make sure to land on your head and hope that does you in good enough to remove you to another universe in which you didn't fall off the building in the first place.
Flex: I think I refuted that example last Wednesday. It is more likely that you will change your decision to land on your head mid-flight, and turn over onto your feet and survive, just.
Quest: Well, I suppose you're right. Reality is one thing and wishful thinking is another.
Joule Heating: You can't think of everything.
Quest: You're right, Joule.
Joule Heating: Tell us about galaxy formation, Dr. Boam.
Boam: Well, stars just like to be together.
Flex: And as matter shrinks and the universe seems to enlarge they have to do a lot of travelling to stay together.
Joule Heating: Think of a herd of buffalo on the prairie. As the animals shrink down to the size of ants, they have to do a lot of running to stay together. Vast spaces will be left between them. Dr. Quest, what does the shrinking of matter mean to you?
Quest: Well, by the time it begins to take effect, each one of us will have undergone quite a few death experiences - my term for an event of extremely low probability which keeps you alive - and will be well on the way to being intensive care ward cases on the very brink of death. Well, as Planck's constant increases, as far as matter is concerned, I see it as a chance to throw us at each death experience further away from the line. It will be a great healing process.
Joule Heating: A greater Planck's constant will enable the universe to look further forward or back in time (the two are the same in this sense). You may, for example, regenerate limbs to propel you out of the path of an oncoming steamroller.
Quest: Unfortunately when Planck's constant becomes too great, life as we know it will no longer be sustainable, as we have earlier discussed, except as a protracted death experience. That's getting very unlikely.
Joule Heating: I think Dr. Boam has something to contribute here.
Boam: I've been wondering what would happen to a star if Planck's constant were raised. Fusion would occur an awful lot faster, but so would spontaneous fission. It might reach a stage similar to the dynamic equilibrium between liquids and their vapors under pressure. With Planck's constant large the fissile products could be thrown far enough away that they didn't recombine immediately. And only on average fusion would occur. I think stars would survive intact, but we could no longer say that they were made of atoms.
Joule Heating: The crux of it is that we will all mutate into stars.
Quest: But we'd be alone. Remember, death experiences are a personal matter. No one else in the universe can have them and survive. You'd evolve into a star through millions and millions of death experiences, and only you would survive them all. No other humans would occupy your universe.
Flex: And don't expect that to be interesting. You'd have no means of moving about. No books to read. You'd die of boredom in an empty universe.
Boam: It's not that empty. There will be other dying stars chasing you.
Quest: Hence you would evolve a form of propulsion to get you out of such trouble, communication to make agreements with other stars on ways to escape danger and ways to catch food.
Joule Heating: Where's Dr. Cartel?
Boam: I think he's gone home.
Flex: I think I saw his wife calling him via his watch.
Boam: Probably just an excuse to get out of here.
Quest: Pah! Just goes to show what he finds most important. He'll think otherwise in a billion years time. Won't have anything else on his mind in a billion years time while he's in pain from his latest death experience.
Flex: Except memories of his wife.
Quest: Don't be too certain. A bit of brain damage could have removed them.
Boam: Come on, I've had enough of this for one day. Do you three want a drink?
Quest: Drinking won't solve it.
Joule Heating: I know what will. Let's just get this stuff into print so that a cleverer person will read it and clear up this matter.
Quest: They'll say, Fine, very interesting, I'll stick with my wife and my secure research job and just ignore you.
Flex: Maybe that drink was a good idea.
Quest: I can't stand how a man can just walk out like that. I can forsee it happening again and again and again whoever we meet. It's as if they're disgusted with us.
Joule Heating: That's what being controversial is all about. In forty years time everybody will be believing you.
Quest: Correction, in a hundred years time everyone will be believing me because they will have suffered death experiences. Unfortunately, as far as I'm concerned they will be dead.
Joule Heating: Now that you've done all you can in Quantum Mechanics, are there any other professions you see yourself going into?
Quest: I think I'll become a tour guide in Malta, or some place like that.
Joule Heating: And you, Dr. Flex?
Flex: A bar tender. Definitely a bar tender. I've always wanted to stay at the bar and this would be a great opportunity.
Joule Heating: And you, Dr. Boam?
Boam: It seems everyone is abandoning science in favor of something with a good social life. I wonder why. As for me, I'll stick with what I got. Like I said, I'll be famous in ten years. I suppose that's a good social life too.
Joule Heating: And as for me, I'll continue to be an expositor and leafleteer. I'm not good enough at inventing things at this level, gentlemen, but I do want answers. I'll just ensure as many minds are applied to it as I can. That's as good as doing my bit. I thank you all.