The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

Chapter 48

“A quantum mirror—” he began.

“Phooey,” I replied.

“A quantum mirror—”

“Claptrap.”

“A quantum mirror!” Vincent was getting annoyed, worked up, the way he so often did during our talks.

Cambridge again.

Memories again.

It seems to me that in the course of my knowing Vincent my mind always turns back to the good times, to the days before complexity, before the end of the world.

“Are you quite ready to listen?” he demanded.

“Pass me another slice of chicken and some mashed potato, and I’ll sit in silence and even prepare my best expression of interest for the moment,” I replied.

He duly topped up my plate with a healthy portion of chicken and an obscene quantity of mash. “A quantum mirror,” he tried again, “being a theoretical device for the extrapolation of matter.”

“When you say extrapolation—”

“I thought you were going to be silent? Eat your food.”

“I’m eating,” I replied, pointedly forking in a mouthful of potato.

“Consider Darwin.” I managed not to make a spluttering sound, and my effort itself earned me a glare. “He journeys to islands cut off from the rest of the planet and observes creatures and their patterns of living. These sights have been seen before, these sights will be seen again, but for Darwin, observing the world around him, they are the beginnings of a logical extrapolation. Observe, he says, how creatures adapt to their environments. Marvel at the bird which dives so perfectly off the rock to fish for its prey; see how similar it is to another animal thousands of miles away which could well be of the same species, except that its prey lives in caves and so it develops a long beak. Observe a worm, observe an insect, observe the crawling of a crab along an ocean floor, and from all this–”

“Pass the gravy,” I grunted.

The gravy was passed without missing a beat. “–and from all this there comes the most marvellous of theories–a theory of evolution. Extrapolation, Harry. From the smallest thing, great wonders are exposed. Now we as physicists—”

“I’m a physicist; you’re still a student, and I don’t know why I tolerate your company.”

“As physicists,” he ploughed on, “we–my recipe for gravy is superior to yours–aren’t looking at animals or the behaviour of birds; our material, the matter we observe, is in the atom itself. What if we can take this single, simplest of things, and put it to the same process that Darwin did? From a proton, a neutron and an electron we can deduce the forces which bind them together, which must therefore bind the universe together, bind space together, bind time together, and hold up a mirror, as it were, to the nature of existence itself…”

“A quantum mirror!” I concluded, waggling my fork melodramatically. “Vincent,” I added, before his indignation could overwhelm mine, “that’s precisely what science does.”

“It’s what it aims to achieve,” he corrected, “but the tools we’re limited to–three-dimensional objects which we can perceive within the visible spectrum, the human brain itself–are utterly insufficient to the task. What we need is an entirely different tool for the understanding of matter, an entirely different way of comprehending the very building blocks of reality, from which comprehension the whole universe may unfold. What do you think?”

I thought about it.

“I think it’s claptrap,” I said at last.

“Harry—”

“No, wait, stick with me. Leaving aside the theoretical complications, the economic difficulties, the scientific problems, I think it’s claptrap from an entirely philosophical point of view, one which will make you suitably angry because of its unscientific nature. I don’t think, Vincent, that the human race has the capacity to fully comprehend the whole universe.”

“Oh, but please—”

“Wait, wait just a moment! I think what you describe–this entirely impossible device, may I add–which will, through some method I cannot begin to guess at, explode our understanding of the universe and create a theory of everything capable of answering every question starting with how and finishing up with the far more difficult why, this… miraculous device, is nothing more and nothing less than a do-it-yourself deity. You want to build yourself a machine for omnipotence, Vincent? You want to make yourself God?”

“Not me, God, not me…”

“To know all that is, all that was, all that could be—”

“The purpose of science! A gun is only a gun, it’s men who misuse it…”

“That’s all right then. Bring on omnipotence for the human race!”

“ ‘God’ is such a weighted term…”

“You’re right,” I snapped, harder than I’d meant. “Call it a quantum mirror and no one will even begin to suspect the scale of your ambition.”

“Maybe that’s it,” he replied with a shrug. “Maybe all God ever was was a quantum mirror.”