He put all this much more exactly, of course, supporting it, when possible, with calculations. During the lecture it grew very quiet in the hall; when he finished, the attacks began.
Questions were thrown at him: How did he explain the “life-causing” property of the signal? How did it originate? Was it, according to him, a “pure accident”? And, most of all — where did we get Frog Eggs from?
“Yes, I’ve thought about this,” Lerner replied. “You ask me who planned it, composed it, and sent it. If not for that life-causing side of the emission, life in the Galaxy would have been an extraordinarily rare phanomenon! But now I ask in turn: What about the physical properties of water? Had water at a temperature of four degrees Celsius been lighter than water at zero, and had ice not floated, all bodies of water on Earth would have frozen bottom-to-top, and no aquatic creatures would have been able to survive outside the equatorial zone. And had water had a different dielectric constant, not as high, protein molecules would not have been able to form in it, and therefore there could not have been protein-based life. Yet does anyone ask, in science, whose helping hand intervened here, and who gave water its dielectric constant or provided for the relative lightness of its ice? No one asks, because we consider such questions to be meaningless. Had water had other properties, either a nonprotein form of life would have arisen or else no life at all. By the same token, one cannot ask who sent the biophilic emission. It increases the probability of survival for macromolecular bodies, and this is either the same sort of accident, if you like, or the same sort of inevitability that has made water a substance ‘favoring life.’ The whole problem should be turned around, set right side up, and then it will read as follows: Thanks to the fact that water possesses these properties, and thanks to the fact that in the Universe there exists a radiation that stabilizes biogenesis, life can arise and oppose the growth of entropy more effectively than it would otherwise. . .”
“Frog Eggs!” came shouts. “Frog Eggs!”
I was afraid that at any minute a chant would start. The auditorium already had reached the heat of a boxing match.
“Frog Eggs? You know better than I that there was no success in reading the so-called letter as a whole, but only its ‘fragments’ — from which Frog Eggs came into being. This shows that as a meaningful whole the letter does not exist outside your imagination, and that Frog Eggs was simply the result of an extraction of information inherent in the neutrino stream, information that something could be done with. Through the ‘fissure between the worlds,’ between the one dying and the one being born, burst a ball of neutrino radiation, expanding like a soap bubble; this wave had sufficient energy to ‘inflate’ the next Universe, and the front of the wave is impregnated with information inherited, as it were, from the phase that has ended. Now, in this wave lies the information that created the atoms, as I already said, and the information that ‘favors’ biogenesis, and in addition it has segments that from our standpoint ‘serve no purpose,’ that are ‘worthless.’ Water possesses properties like those I mentioned, that ‘favor’ life, and properties that are indifferent to life, as for example transparency; water could have been nontransparent, and this would have had no significance for the emergence of life. Just as one cannot ask, ‘And who made water transparent?’ one cannot ask, ‘Who wrote the program for Frog Eggs?’ It is one of the properties of the given Universe, a property that we may study — like the transparency of water — but that has no ‘extraphysical’ meaning.”
There was an uproar in the hall. Finally Baloyne asked how, then, Lerner explained the circular repetition of the signal, and the fact that all the rest of the emission spectrum for neutrino radiation in the sky was ordinary noise, while in that single, solitary band lay so much information.
“But that is simple,” replied the cosmogonist, who seemed to be deriving pleasure from the general stir. “Initially the entire emission was concentrated precisely in that band, since it was precisely at that point on the spectrum that it was ‘sharpened’ by the ‘fissure between the worlds,’ and compressed, and modulated, like a stream of water in a narrow opening. At the beginning there was a needle-band, nothing more! Then, as a result of dispersion, scattering, desynchronization, diffraction, deflection, interference — a greater and greater amount became diffused, blurred, until finally, after billions of years of the existence of our Universe, from that primal information there resulted noise; and from the sharp focus there resulted a broad energy spectrum, because in the meantime the ‘secondary’ noise generators of neutrinos — the stars — had become activated. What we are receiving, as the letter, is the remainder of the ‘umbilicus,’ the remnant that has not yet undergone dissolution, that has not altogether merged with the countless reflections and currents that go from corner to corner of the Metagalaxy. The present (and omnipresent) norm is noise — not information. But at the moment of the creation of our Universe, at its violent birth, the neutrino bubble contained within it full information about all that physically was to arise from it; and precisely because it represents a relic of an epoch that has left no discernible trace of itself other than this, it seems to us astoundingly different from the phenomena of ‘ordinary’ matter and radiation.”
It was clever, all right, the pretty, logically coherent construction that he put before us. Then followed the mathematical portion; he showed what features the “fissure between the worlds” would need to have in order to correspond exactly, as a “matrix,” to the place in the neutrino spectrum where the emission, or what we called the “stellar code,” was situated. It was a nice piece of work; he brought in resonance theory, and was even able to provide an explanation in his lecture for the constant repetition of the signal, and for the location — that radiant of Canis Minor — from which the alleged letter came.
I took the floor then and said that actually it was he who had stood the matter on its head, because he refashioned the whole Universe to fit the letter, simply making the “dimensions” of this fissure of his such that they would correspond to the given energetics of the signal, and he even altered the geometry of his made-to-order, ad hoc cosmos so that the direction from which the “signal” came would turn out to be a thing of chance.
Lerner, smiling, admitted that to a certain extent I was right. But, he added, if not for his “fissure” the successive worlds would come and go with no connection between them; each would be different — that is, might be different; or the Universe might remain permanently in the “antiworld,” null-energy phase, and that would be the end of all creation, of all possible worlds — we would not exist, nor the stars above us, and there would be no one to rack his brains over what did not take place. . . But it had, after all, taken place. The monstrous complexity of the letter was explained in this way: the unimaginable concentration of the “death throes” caused the dying world, just as a man gave up the ghost, to “give up” its information; this information did not suffer destruction; instead — owing to laws unknown to us, because physics must have ceased in that compression, that discontinuity — dissociation of space — it fused with what still existed: with the neutrino node within the very “fissure.”
Baloyne, who chaired the meeting, asked us if we wished to begin a discussion then and there, or first hear Sylvester. We voted for the second, out of curiosity, of course. Lerner I knew a little, having met him once or twice at Hayakawa’s, but Sylvester I had never even heard of. He was a small young man with a pasty face — which is of absolutely no importance.
He began in a vein surprisingly similar to Lerner’s. The Universe was a pulsing entity, with alternating phases of blue contractions and red expansions. Each phase took around thirty billion years. In the red phase, that of the retreating nebulae, after a sufficient dispersal of matter and the cooling of planetary bodies, life formed on them and sometimes gave rise to intelligent species. When the dilation ended and the Universe began to converge centripetally, gradually, in that blue phase, there resulted enormous temperatures and increasingly hard radiation, which destroyed all the living matter that in the course of the preceding two billion-years had succeeded in covering the planets. Obviously, in the red phase — as in this one in which we have come into being — there existed civilizations at varying levels of development. And there must have existed those that excelled technologically; those that, with their advanced sciences, including cosmogony, were cognizant of their own future — and the future of the Universe. Such civilizations — or, for convenience, let us say such a civilization — situated in some particular nebula, therefore knew that the process of organization would pass its peak and the process of universal destruction would commence, in growing heat. If the civilization possessed far more knowledge than we, it would also be able, to some extent, to foresee the continuation of events after the “blue end of the world,” and if it enriched its knowledge even more, then it would be able to affect that future state. . .