05-02-2018, 06:12 PM
Harmony was. In twenty years, she was the first thing that required no definition.
She worked part time as a tour guide for the Seattle Underground. The rest of the time she spent reading plays and ‘discovering what life had to offer.’ If a crowd of people was running away from something, Harmony said, she would run against the crowd to see what it was. Dexter suspected Harmony’s flowchart was a lot less linear than his own.
One night, the stars were set deep in the woolly wrinkles of the sky. Dexter and Harmony sat against a cherry tree at the edge of the quad—a rectangle of grass crosshatched with brick paths, near the center of campus. The tree’s branches were bare, and through them Dexter stared at the sky.
It reminded him of a physics lecture from last quarter. The chalkboard had been thick with the ghosts of past equations, and the professor had been expounding on the rules of Einstein’s relativity. It was sixth grade stuff to Dexter, but he always loved listening to people talk about Einstein. Every modern physicist used Einstein’s laws as a stepping stone to their own understanding of the universe. He took Newton’s basic laws and pushed physics closer to a unified theory than any other man. As Jesus Christ to a Christian, Einstein was to Dexter.
Looking at the sky now, Dexter thought he understood. The shape of the universe was a bowl. Four-five-six… n-dimensional. Time, synonymous with light, flowed down its sides like water. It was not a smooth bowl. It was like Harmony’s diligent creations from her pottery class: rough-hewn and full of life. The stars, the planets, and the black holes were warps in its sides, but somewhere at the center, at the bottom of the bowl, there was a place that everything revolved around, where time settled and came to rest.
Dexter explained this to Harmony, who listened attentively. He finished with how humans should be able to define the universe in terms of things they could come to grips with—how all of science was working toward this simple understanding. He even drew up a diagram on his laptop of man’s asymptotic progression toward a cohesive, unified theory over the course of time.
“So the point is generalizing everything?” Harmony asked at last.
“Not generalizing. Unifying.”
“But it’s putting it all into one equation?”
“Yes, one theory,” Dexter agreed.
Harmony thought about that. “It seems shallow.”
Dexter stared at her, confused.
“I mean, where’s the creativity? Am I supposed to assume all my thoughts just come from some giant physics equation? That—I don’t know—Shakespeare, or you mentioned Einstein earlier, or someone like that—that all their work can be written up, summed up… you know, produced by a formula?”
“On some level…”
“But—”
“Wait,” Dexter said, “I’ll explain. You know statistics, right? Statisticians, they rely on human beings being predictable. You take a handful of particles, a handful of humans, it’s the same thing… they’ll organize themselves into a system with specific rules. They’re predictable. Get enough of any one thing and it becomes predictable. And all the sciences: physics, psychology, and so on, can be combined by the fact that predictability in humans has its foundations in predictability in nature. That everything has a common root. It’s the same with thoughts: all a thought is, is a number of particles lining up the right way and creating an electrical signal, it’s—”
“But you’re—” Harmony interjected.
Dexter plowed on. “It’s predictable. All we are is particles.”
“But you’re talking about groups of things, not individuals.”
“Each individual is made up of groups of many smaller things, like atoms and electrons, which are predictable in large numbers.”
“And each of those smaller things?”
“Even smaller things. It’s all about levels, I guess. We have the universe; then we have us, and the visible matter which makes up the universe; then we have atoms and the subatomic stuff that makes us up; and then we get down into quantum mechanics, which no one really understands, but it doesn’t matter. Once you find the right theory for one or two of the upper levels, it should generalize to theories for all the levels. It’s like, I don’t know, an inductive proof or something.”
Harmony smiled. “And if it turns out none of it is real? What if all of this is just your imagination: me, the universe, the quad, all of it? And you’re just off on some fruitless quest for a holy grail?”
“I—of course it’s real.”
“Is it? Prove it!”
There was no sound in the quad, and Dexter felt temporarily blind as something intangible floated between him and the stars.
Harmony grinned and shook her head as he walked away.
She worked part time as a tour guide for the Seattle Underground. The rest of the time she spent reading plays and ‘discovering what life had to offer.’ If a crowd of people was running away from something, Harmony said, she would run against the crowd to see what it was. Dexter suspected Harmony’s flowchart was a lot less linear than his own.
One night, the stars were set deep in the woolly wrinkles of the sky. Dexter and Harmony sat against a cherry tree at the edge of the quad—a rectangle of grass crosshatched with brick paths, near the center of campus. The tree’s branches were bare, and through them Dexter stared at the sky.
It reminded him of a physics lecture from last quarter. The chalkboard had been thick with the ghosts of past equations, and the professor had been expounding on the rules of Einstein’s relativity. It was sixth grade stuff to Dexter, but he always loved listening to people talk about Einstein. Every modern physicist used Einstein’s laws as a stepping stone to their own understanding of the universe. He took Newton’s basic laws and pushed physics closer to a unified theory than any other man. As Jesus Christ to a Christian, Einstein was to Dexter.
Looking at the sky now, Dexter thought he understood. The shape of the universe was a bowl. Four-five-six… n-dimensional. Time, synonymous with light, flowed down its sides like water. It was not a smooth bowl. It was like Harmony’s diligent creations from her pottery class: rough-hewn and full of life. The stars, the planets, and the black holes were warps in its sides, but somewhere at the center, at the bottom of the bowl, there was a place that everything revolved around, where time settled and came to rest.
Dexter explained this to Harmony, who listened attentively. He finished with how humans should be able to define the universe in terms of things they could come to grips with—how all of science was working toward this simple understanding. He even drew up a diagram on his laptop of man’s asymptotic progression toward a cohesive, unified theory over the course of time.
“So the point is generalizing everything?” Harmony asked at last.
“Not generalizing. Unifying.”
“But it’s putting it all into one equation?”
“Yes, one theory,” Dexter agreed.
Harmony thought about that. “It seems shallow.”
Dexter stared at her, confused.
“I mean, where’s the creativity? Am I supposed to assume all my thoughts just come from some giant physics equation? That—I don’t know—Shakespeare, or you mentioned Einstein earlier, or someone like that—that all their work can be written up, summed up… you know, produced by a formula?”
“On some level…”
“But—”
“Wait,” Dexter said, “I’ll explain. You know statistics, right? Statisticians, they rely on human beings being predictable. You take a handful of particles, a handful of humans, it’s the same thing… they’ll organize themselves into a system with specific rules. They’re predictable. Get enough of any one thing and it becomes predictable. And all the sciences: physics, psychology, and so on, can be combined by the fact that predictability in humans has its foundations in predictability in nature. That everything has a common root. It’s the same with thoughts: all a thought is, is a number of particles lining up the right way and creating an electrical signal, it’s—”
“But you’re—” Harmony interjected.
Dexter plowed on. “It’s predictable. All we are is particles.”
“But you’re talking about groups of things, not individuals.”
“Each individual is made up of groups of many smaller things, like atoms and electrons, which are predictable in large numbers.”
“And each of those smaller things?”
“Even smaller things. It’s all about levels, I guess. We have the universe; then we have us, and the visible matter which makes up the universe; then we have atoms and the subatomic stuff that makes us up; and then we get down into quantum mechanics, which no one really understands, but it doesn’t matter. Once you find the right theory for one or two of the upper levels, it should generalize to theories for all the levels. It’s like, I don’t know, an inductive proof or something.”
Harmony smiled. “And if it turns out none of it is real? What if all of this is just your imagination: me, the universe, the quad, all of it? And you’re just off on some fruitless quest for a holy grail?”
“I—of course it’s real.”
“Is it? Prove it!”
There was no sound in the quad, and Dexter felt temporarily blind as something intangible floated between him and the stars.
Harmony grinned and shook her head as he walked away.