White mars by Brian W. Aldiss & Roger Penrose. Chapter 10, 11

‘So we hope. When the ships come back and we can obtain more material, we expect to build a superfluid ring right around the planet. Then we’ll see.’

‘Now we see through a glass darkly…’ said Helen, admiringly.

‘We don’t quote the Bible much here but, yes, more or less.’

A man who had already asked a question enquired rather sneeringly, ‘What exactly is this key between the large and small you mention? Isn’t human consciousness just a manifestation of the action of the quantputers in our heads?’

‘That may well be true in principle, but we can’t proceed without knowing some important physical parameters more exactly, most particularly what’s labelled the HIGMO g-factor, whose value is completely unknown at present – let’s call it “the missing-link of physics”.’

‘So what happens when you find it? Will the universe come to an end?’

Jon Thorgeson laughed to the extent of exciting the deep lines in his cheeks. He said that life for the majority of people might go on as usual. But even if the universe did end – well, he said, to make a wild guess, the probability was that there were plenty of other universes growing, as he put it, on the same stem. Mathematics indicated as much.

He came to a halt in the middle of a corridor, and our group halted with him and gathered round as he talked.

‘As you know, stars keep going by exothermic fusion of hydrogen into helium-4. When the core hydrogen is almost used up, gravitational contraction starts. The consequent rise in temperature permits the burning of helium. In our universe, nucleosynthesis of all the heavier elements is achieved by this continued process of fuel exhaustion, leading to contraction, leading to higher central temperatures, leading to a new source of fuel for the sustaining nuclear energy.

‘But in our universe there are what in lay terms we may call strange anomalies in this process. For instance, unless nucleosynthesis proceeded resonantly, the yield of carbon would be negligible. By a further anomaly, it happens that the carbon produced is not consumed in a further reaction. So we live in a universe with plentiful carbon and, as you know, carbon is a basic element for our kind of life.

‘I wouldn’t like my boss to hear me saying this, but -who knows? – in a neighbouring universe, these strange anomalies may not occur. It might be entirely life-free, without observers. Or maybe life takes another course and is, say, silicon-based. Such possibilities will become clearer if we can get the tabs on our Smudge.’

One of our group asked if it would be possible for us to enter another universe, or for something from another universe to enter ours.

The lines on Thorgeson’s face deepened in amusement. ‘There we venture into the realms of science fiction. I can’t comment on that.’

At the end of our tour, I managed to speak to Thorgeson face to face. I told him that many of the people in the domes, particularly the YEAs, were interested in science but did not understand what the particle physicists were working at. Indeed, the scientific team were regarded as being rather secretive.

Lowering his voice, he said that there was dissension in the scientific ranks. The issues were complex. Many men and women on the team did not see the Omega Smudge as worth pursuing, and favoured more practical concerns, such as establishing a really efficient comet- and meteor-surveillance system. On the other hand… Here he paused.

When I prompted him to continue, he said that practical goals were for people without vision – clever people, but those without vision.

‘Was Kepler being practical when, in the middle of a war, he sat down and computed the orbits of planets? Certainly not. Yet those planetary laws of his have eventually brought us here. That’s pure science. The Smudge is pure science. I’m not very pure myself – said with a sly laughing glance at me – ‘but I support pure science.’

Since I understood those sly glances, I asked him boldly if he would visit the domes and lecture us on the subject?

‘Want to come and have a drink with me and talk it over?’

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