The Hollow Man

EYES

A few weeks before Gail’s headaches are diagnosed as a brain tumor, Jeremy receives this letter from Jacob Goldmann:

My dearest Jeremy:

I am still trying to get over your and Gail’s most recent visit and the results of your offer to “be guinea pigs” for the deep-cortical mapping. The results continue to be—as we discussed in person and on the phone last Thursday—astounding. There is no other word.

I respect your privacy, and your wishes, and will make no more attempts to convince you to join me in a study of this so-called mindtouch that the two of you say you have experienced since puberty. If your simple exhibitions of this telepathy had not been convincing enough, the DCM data that continues to flow in would be enough to turn anyone into a believer. I certainly am. In a way, I am relieved that we will not be going down this particular detour in our research, although you must see what a bombshell this revelation has been for one elderly physicist-turned-neural-researcher.

Meanwhile, your most recent mailing of mathematical analysis, while largely beyond me, has turned out to be an even more explosive bombshell. This one may well make the Manhattan Project seem like very small potatoes indeed.

If I understand your fractal and chaos analysis correctly (and, as you say, the data hardly leaves room for an alternative hypothesis) then the human mind goes far beyond our wildest dreams of complexity.

If your two-dimensional plot of human holographic consciousness via the Packard-Takens method is reliable—and again, I have confidence that it is—then the mind is not merely the self-consciousness organ of the universe, but (excuse the oversimplification) its ultimate arbiter. I understand your use of the chaos term “strange attractor” as a description of the mind’s role in creating fractal “resonance islands” within the chaotic sea of collapsing probability waves, but it is still difficult to conceive of a universe largely without form except that imposed upon it by human observation.

It is the alternate-probability scenario which you broach at the end of your letter which gives me pause. (So much so, in fact, that I have interrupted the deep cortical mapping experiments until I have thought through the tautological implications of this very possible plausibility.)

Jeremy, I wonder at the ability you and Gail share: how frequent it is, how many gradations of it there are, how basic to the human experience it must be.

You remember when we were drinking my twenty-year-old scotch after the first results of your and Gail’s DC-mapping came in and you had explained the basis for the anomalies: I suggested—not after the first drink, if I remember correctly—that perhaps some of the great minds in human history had shared such a “universal interferometer” type of mind. Thus Gandhi and Einstein, Jesus and Newton, Galileo and my old friend Jonny von Neumann possessed a similar (but obviously slightly different!) form of “mindtouch” where they could resonate to different aspects of existence—the physical underpinnings of the universe, the psychological and moral underpinnings of our small human part of the universe—whatever.

I remember you were embarrassed. That was not my goal in suggesting this possibility and it is not my goal now that I repeat the hypothesis.

We are—all of us—the universe’s eyes. Those of you with this incredible ability, whether blessed to see into the heart of the human soul or the heart of the universe itself, are the mechanism by which we focus those eyes and direct our gaze.

Think, Jeremy: Einstein performed his “Gendanken Experimenten” and the universe created a new probability branch to suit our improved vision. Probability waves crashing on the dry beach of eternity.

Moses and Jesus perceived new motions of those stars which govern our moral life, and the universe grows alternative realities to validate the observation. Probability waves collapsing. Neither particle nor wave until the observer enters the equation.

Incredible. And even more incredible is your interpretation of Everett’s, Wheeler’s, and DeWitt’s work. Each moment of such “deep gazing” creating separate and equal probability universes. Ones which we can never visit, but can bring into actual existence at moments of great decision in our own lives on this continuum.

Somewhere, Jeremy, the Holocaust did not exist. Somewhere my first wife and family possibly still live.

I must think about this. I will be in touch with you and Gail very soon. I must think about this.

Most sincerely yours,

Jacob

Five days after the letter arrives, Jeremy and Gail receive a late-night call from Rebecca, Jacob’s daughter. Jacob Goldmann had eaten dinner with her earlier that evening and then retired to his office “to finish some work on the data.” Rebecca had run some errands and returned to the office around midnight.

Jacob Goldmann had committed suicide with a Luger that he had kept in the bottom drawer of his desk.