Adam A2A: You Can’t Get There From Here
Adam read the paper through, sat back in his chair, and harrumphed.
“Well. This one doesn’t say anything controversial at all.” He harrumphed a second time, as though it might correct the first, and found that it did not.
That was the trouble with it. The first paper had reached for the foundation, and he had gone in hoping to catch it overreaching. The second had set the name God on the structure, and he had refused the name and slept soundly. This one did neither. It was a survey — the hot dense beginning, the background glow, the light elements, the long cooling out into stars and rock and water — laid down in order, the well-understood marked well-understood and the unknown marked unknown, and not one inch claimed past the evidence. He had taught from worse. He had taught from a great deal worse. In the whole of it there was nothing to grade. A man cannot find the seam in a wall that tells him, freely and in advance, exactly where its own stones leave off.
It sat with him some days. He did not know what to make of a paper that wanted nothing from him.
Joe let himself in that afternoon, the way he always had, and brought the morning’s milk in off the step with him because Adam plainly hadn’t — two bottles gone tepid that he set on the kitchen counter on his way through. He crossed to the worn armchair that had been his side of the room for thirty years and settled into it.
“Joe. Read this.”
Joe took the pages without comment. He read the way he did everything, unhurried and without pretending — he did not skim, and he did not nod along at the parts he had not got. It took a while. Adam watched the steam come off his own cup and let him have the time.
“Alright,” Joe said at last, squaring the pages on his knee. “I didn’t get all of that. But I got most of it.” He thumbed back a page, checked something, let it fall. “That’s a neat thing, though, isn’t it. That we’ve worked out what the whole universe was like down to — what — fractions of a fraction of the first second. Off of light that’s been on its way to us the entire time since.” He looked up. “Why’d you want me to read it?”
“Precisely that,” Adam said. “Because you got most of it.”
Joe waited, the way he knew to.
“It isn’t trying to fool either of us. There’s no trick anywhere in it. That is the cleverest thing they have done yet.” He set his cup down in its saucer. “I can see the shape of the thing now, Joe. The directions they’re coming from. Three papers. The first lays the floor — the structure under everything, very clean, very beautiful. The second sets the old names down on the floor — Father, Son, the rest of it. And this one walks you the whole length of real, sober, hard-won physics, right up the corridor to the one door physics has and keeps shut. The beginning. As far back as the evidence reaches.”
“And then?”
“And then they’ll want the door open. The next one will ask what came before. And from before they will step to God, and from God back to that beautiful floor in the first paper, and the ring closes.” He said it without heat — with something nearer to admiration, which was worse than heat. “They’re walking me into the middle of my own subject to stand me in front of the one wall I have spent sixty years telling students not to put their weight on.”
Joe scratched his jaw. “So — is there? Something before the Big Bang?”
“That is exactly the question, and the answer is the entire point: you can’t get there from here.” He leaned forward, forearms on his knees. “It isn’t that we haven’t looked hard enough. The methods themselves give out. Space and time are in the thing; they begin when it begins; before may not even be a word that means anything on the far side of it. That’s not a gap in the physics, Joe. It’s the edge of what physics is. That’s why the science stops there — not out of modesty. Out of honesty.”
“Huh.” Joe turned the cup a slow quarter-turn on the saucer. “But they’re going to try anyway.”
“They are going to try anyway.”
“And you’re going to read it.”
“Read it?” Something lit in him that he would have let no one but Joe see. He reached over and took the pages back off Joe’s knee. “Joe, I am going to relish it. That’s just it — they think they have me hemmed in. Three papers, closing from three sides. But you can’t get there from here, and that is the very thing they have forgotten. The mathematics alone does not reach it. The theology alone does not reach it. The science does not reach it. Not one of the three crosses that wall on its own — and the moment they try to bind the three together into a single proof, into something that stands outside all of it and points back at the ground of all of it —” he turned his free hand over, palm up ”— Gödel. Again. You cannot establish the foundation from inside the system, and there is no outside to stand on. So they cannot hand me a proof. They can hand me a guess, or they can hand me a metaphor, and the instant they pretend it is one inch more than that —” the words were coming quicker now ”— that is where we have them, Joe. That is where we have them.”
Joe said nothing for a moment. He had seen that light come up in Adam’s eye perhaps three or four times in fifty years, and he had learned not to put a hand near it. It was the look of a hunted man who has concluded, on what seems to him like sound evidence, that he is the one doing the hunting. He did not mention it. He drank off the last of his coffee, said he’d see himself out, and left Adam alone with the pages — the late light laid long and level across the floorboards, the two tepid bottles still standing where he’d set them.
The next paper arrived with the same indistinctness as the rest — a weekday morning, in among the post. He took it off the pile as though it were the most natural thing in the world, carried it to the desk, and sat down to read. He had to work to keep the self-contentment off his face. He was about to win. They were about to lose.
It was not the next paper. It was a previous one, come back marked with a correction — his correction. The authors had taken it back. They wrote that they had been wrong; that it had most likely been their own bias, the wish to have the mathematics flatter the tradition they had come from. They thanked a reviewer. They thanked him — for notes he had made only to himself, in the margin of a copy that was, at that moment, lying face-down in the drawer beside his knee.
He spent the next hour going through the house for a camera. He looked at the lamps and the spines of the books and the corners of the ceiling where a man would put one. He found none. He could not explain it, and he did not like things he could not explain; he had spent a lifetime not liking them, and the not-liking was most of what had made him good at his work.
He kept coming back to the correction, because it troubled him in the wrong direction — men who are hiding something do not hand you the place they were caught; they bury it, and these had gone and printed it. He turned that over for a while. And then, with something close to relief, he had it: the trick. They were softening him up — get the knife back in the drawer, get him grateful, get him onto their side of the table before they asked him to swallow the proof they cannot prove. Cheap. But clever. The old Adam was back all at once, the knife up out of the drawer where he had laid it, ready for the next paper.
He didn’t have to wait long. It arrived the next day.
Paper A2A: The Constraint Cascade: The Algebra and Its Author →