“Which is the kind of thing you’d expect,” Duncan observed.
“Exactly. So, if the traffic being supported on the right-hand side, say, of a given cell were heavier than that on the left, but the opposite was true of its neighbor to the right, then an improvement would be achieved if the two cells were to exchange identities. In effect, each of them could be thought of as having moved one space-quantum through the matrix.”
“A kind of Planck length,” Duncan murmured.
Hunt nodded again and went on. “Or, to take another example, if an isolated cell was communicating at different rates in different directions, it would move around in such a way as to minimize the traffic-times-distance total until it balanced all the competing ‘pulls.’ In other words, if the information-exchange process plays the part of force-carrying vector particles, then this optimization rule defines minimum-action paths: natural geodesics. I’ve played through simulations of it with ZORAC. The dynamics of gravitation follows automatically.”
Shilohin was staring fixedly at Hunt. “You’re postulating a void populated by particles capable of exerting mutual attraction,” she said slowly. “The conditions of a primordial universe.”
“Yes.”
“What about repulsions? Is there an analog of charge?” Duncan asked.
Hunt inclined his head in the direction of Danchekker, who was still on his feet. The life—sciences specialist had not yet given his blessing; but he was no longer vehemently protesting, either. “Chris has a good point: We shouldn’t get too carried away by analogies,” he said. “But I can offer a few speculations. For example, if everything were allowed to collapse to its minimum ‘energy’ state purely on the basis of attraction, it would all end up as one solid lump, with nowhere left for through traffic. Everything would be optimally close to everything, but unable to function. The system would have stifled itself. So one optimization criterion isn’t enough. You need to introduce another that competes with it—say, one that tries to maximize free space for traffic. When the two trends interact, maybe the kind of organization that emerges is a collection of ‘clumps,’ where similar kinds of processing with little to say to the outside world can get together, separated by voids in which other things happen.”
“Fascinating!” Shilohin whispered.
“It gets more interesting,” Hunt said. “The cells must have a finite switching time. So larger aggregates of cells that have accreted together will move more sluggishly than smaller ones. Hence, we have a resistance to motion, proportional to the number of cells.”
The parallel to mass was too obvious to need spelling out.
Hunt continued. “But once the mass is moving, a plausible way of improving efficiency would be to change to a pattern-switching algorithm instead of having to operate on all the constituent cells individually; so the pattern would be reluctant to slow down again.”
Inertia.
“But the propagation rate through the matrix of even a single cell would ultimately be limited by the switching speed.”
Velocities in Hunt’s universe had a relativistic limit.
“We are speaking in terms of pure conjecture, I take it?” Danchekker said. His voice still had something of a rasp, but it had mollified itself noticeably. Exhibiting another kind of inertia, he was starting to come around in his own way. “We’re not talking about established fact? This isn’t science?”
“Of course not,” Hunt agreed. “But we’re getting an idea of what to look for, maybe.”
Duncan snorted. “Look where? We can’t even find where JEVEX is, let alone look inside it.”
Shilohin looked up, at last digesting the full message of what Hunt was saying. “Our physical universe evolved from huge numbers of elementary particles in space, and laws of physics and probability that contained implicit mechanisms for the self-organization of complex structures,” she said. “And out of it there emerged not only complexity sufficient to manifest intelligence, but the whole world of impressions and experiences—all far removed from the underlying quantum reality—which intelligence perceives. So, is it so inconceivable for comparable levels of complexity to have arisen in this . . . ‘matrix universe’? That’s what you’re saying.”
“Why not?” Hunt said. “We’re pretty sure that Nixie’s world can’t exist anywhere in the universe we know. Yet I’m convinced that it exists somewhere. And perhaps this sheds some light on how its magical properties could have arisen. Although there might be some parallels to our own universe in the kind of way I’ve suggested, which would at least give us the basis of objects moving in space as something they share in common, the ‘laws’ expressing the physics of the underlying reality will derive not from the quantum rules of our universe, but from the directive imposed by the system programmers. Therefore, there’s no reason why our notions of normality and causality should apply there at all. Which fits with all the things that Nixie has been telling us.”