Cosm

All the way up through the academic world she had spent a lot of energy fending off the blandly patronizing efforts to enter her in what she termed the Oppression Sweepstakes. Now that she had done something worth noting, blackness attached itself to her like a lamprey.

Indeed, high-blown rhetoric plus uncheckable consequences were the two sure signatures of the crank.

But these were mere passing irritants. Deeper were the systemic troubles. She stressed the many unknowns; the media wanted sharp answers to huge questions, preferably in a compact one-liner. She tried to emphasize the progressive questioning of her method and how all answers were provisional, awaiting confirmation; reporters liked zippy adventure and exciting guesses with, of course, striking visuals in primary colors.

To peer through the quick stubble of mathematics and see the wonders lurking behind was to momentarily live in the infinite, beyond the press of the ordinary world where everyone else dwelled in ignorance.

Einstein said that the only incomprehensible thing about the universe was that it was comprehensible. But resorting to God forgets what biology says—that our minds came out of the physical world, y’know, through evolution of early brain stems and neural systems to higher levels of complexity.

The barely awake public, trained to the attention span of a commercial, thought that science had two children: either consumer yummies, served up by the handmaiden of technology, or else awesome wonders like the beauties of astronomy. The unsettling side they largely ignored, unless for the momentary shock value of, say, swollen insects doing disgusting things. But the root promise of science was of a world unshaped by humans. The expanses of time and space that stretched out from the human community were terrifying, and most avoided even thinking of them.

One of the better aspects of aging was that she no longer practiced dragging on cigarettes before the mirror, striving to get the right dissipated look, or tried on sunglasses until she found the kind the latest hip singer wore. Had she really worn those mirrorshades? Perfect holdovers from the Me Decade, because they let the viewer watch himself.

Thing about crazies is, they’re crazy. You can’t even understand them in retrospect.

Physicists had abandoned God long ago and hoped that firing repeated questions at nature would get to the truth. What scientists really believed in was that the think-check-think-again style of scientific method would yield some species of Truth.

“I’ll be thinking of you as they roll me into a grave marked ‘Nobody Special.’”

“Boy, do I hate these holier-than-thou types.”

“Clerics.”

“Anybody who tries to hem science in, tell it what it can and cannot do. Boundaries are best defined by pushing against them. Expanding our horizons, our sense of wonder.”

She smiled. “There’s nothing holier than wow!?”

There were the usual anxieties, starkly revealing the uneasiness that ordinary intellectuals had with science.

“Sure,” Max said offhand, “there are plenty of archbishops wringing their hands, mumbling philosophers and New Age gab pouring out in the media, but so what?”

She laughed. He said New Age as one word, “newage,” rhyming with “sewage.”

Women lurching around on heels they couldn’t manage (“sexy evening columns” as Frederick’s termed them)—further proof yet again that money can’t buy a clue.

He whispered, “Honey, it’s good ol’ love makes the world go round.”

“Actually, it’s inertia.”

Minds embodies in strange shapes would still find themselves sharpened against evolution’s ceaseless whetstone.

What challenges would they face? In the end the universe as a whole was life’s ultimate opponent.

That mood had persisted when she finally got home and, unable to sleep, watched some TV. It was as usual, a cacophony, which combined with the other audio media gave a disposable pop culture that made every moment but the present seem quaint, bloodless, dead.

As a political commentator of the time put it, most real-world people she knew thought of Washington, D.C., as a whorehouse where every four years ordinary folk got to elect a new piano player.

Well, this was what dads were for: saying the unsayable when you needed it.

Given a choice between existential despair and rapt religious fervor, her crowd chose marijuana.

Government doesn’t often move quickly, but when they do, it’s like an elephant stampede.

Science’s success did not need a God to explain it; the world was enough.

He watched her putting away bacon and toast.

“I remember breakfasts like that.”

“First Law of Thermodynamics still applies. If you eat it, and you don’t burn it off, you sit on it.”

“You burn it, looks like. Exercise?

“Worry. Saves time and you don’t have to shower.”

Teaching was all very fine, but research made the heart sing.

A damned big clue, but pointing at what? When in doubt, get some numbers.

Prolonged exposure to journalists made her distrust any news report; they got matters wrong so casually, even the simple ones.

Inside, the place had enough bare concrete and ribbed ducts and stark lighting to be a surrealist theme bar. Very hip but still just another joint where luncheon was lunch for six bucks extra.

Only senators and simpletons thought science took place in neatly drawn boxes.

She had changed her name from the African Aleix to Alicia when she went away to college, fresh beginnings and all. Her parents had been into black roots and the rest of it when she was born, then had rapidly backed away. Her father’s political evolution had followed a trajectory away from what he termed in one of his op-ed pieces “the narcissism of minor differences.” He had approved her abandoning the Africa-nodding of Aleix, remarking only that his thinking in those days had been mere mulling over food and folktales.

She had been surprised when he wrote a series of columns on his emergence, his recovery from her mother’s death in an auto accident, and one entirely about her. This was on his long march abandoning, in his phrase, “obligatory blackitude,” so he had folded it into a thesis about the hollowness of hauling out costumes and traditional foods from lands you had never even visited. He had taken a stand against a black group insisting on carrying their “cultural weapons” to political rallies, on grounds that they stood for a precious cultural inheritance which should be beyond criticism. Tom Butterworth (“Uncle Tom” to his enemies, of course) then argued that a ban on spears was scarcely an attack on their culture, since none of them knew much more about real spears than which was the business end.

Ours is not to reason why, ours is to measure and report—the experimenter’s credo.

“Diversity” had come to mean Balkanization.

She needed some fresh illumination, all right, but not the kind that comes through the west window of a church.

She sighed. “We’re just guessing.”

“When you have a Ph. D., you call them hypotheses, not guesses.”

“Ummm,” Alicia said, trying to be polite. “Still sounds like we’re just making this up as we go along.”

“We are.” Max grinned. “Invent, then check. It’s really the only way to make progress.”

I like Orange County, though. It’s like L.A. without caffeine.

She felt a tingling, curiously pleasurable: her “curiosity reflex,” she had called it in high school, when she had first glimpsed the serene certainties of physics, starkly contrasting with the world’s raw hubbub.

A particle detector that ran beautifully was either obsolete or hadn’t been designed close enough to the cutting edge of the technology.

Data always overruled theory.

Orange County, with its signature long lines of tall palm trees, was working toward being “max-frilled,” as the slang had it, but at least it didn’t have the touches of L.A. The post office didn’t offer valet parking yet. On rainy days parking tickets weren’t slipped inside protective envelopes, as in Beverly Hills. There were no water bars, with fifty chilled varieties at two bucks a glass, with no ice because it would erase the regional subtleties. And when you called the police department and got put on hold, no classical music played.

Outside the Sea Lounge were ranks of motorcycles, mostly Harleys. Through the open windows she could see a jammed crowd raising beer glasses to the monotonous thump of the live band. Being Harley guys, they were of course rebels, rugged lone wolves, individual spirits, as was obvious because they were all wearing the same jackets and jeans, bandannas and sunglasses, big brass belt buckles and tattoos, probably even the same underwear.

“Law of the universe,” she said. “The longer the menu description, the worse the food.”

“So he looks like a potential Mr. Right?”

“No, just Mr. Right Now.”

The ship of theory could set sail on tides of mathematical grandeur and hope alone, but only data could fill its sails.

To believe anything so far-fetched, I’d have to see a solid calculation.

The desire to find something could provoke what she called “wantum mechanics,” fishing a result out of nothing but noise.

Engineers never liked the unexplained, whereas physicists lived for it.

Information wants to be free—remember that old saw? Some truth to it, only it’s backwards. This isn’t an information economy—we’re drowning in that—it’s an attention economy. That’s what everybody’s vying for.

When in enough doubt, let your subconscious work on the problem.

Indeed, she had tried to follow books and films about science, but they featured rugged, style-conscious folk who transacted their work in ornate bars, atmospheric dens thickly mired in a high-contrast noir underworld future where bizarre ornamentation passed for any sense of newness. She had never known anybody who could design an experiment or do a calculation on table napkins, sipping hip drinks while guitar riffs wailed in the smoky background, but in movies and TV this was standard, apparently to make matters more interesting to a weary public with the attention span of a commercial. Scientists were either aggressively hip, often clad in tight leather, or else pitiful, hopeless nerds, obsessional neurotics nobody would trust for a moment with the discoveries they had, quite implausibly, ushered into the world while anxiously trying to get laid.

The problem with the unknown was its lack of road signs.

She was grateful for something more than smooth, meaningless phrases. Better, the man had not reverted to the hedged-in, minimize-possible-damage style. And the first of all the commandments shall be: Cover Thy Ass.

Her eyes flipped down through the usual scandal, gossip, and politics, noting that there didn’t seem to be much difference between them anymore.

But in the divisions among students lay a deeper strategy. The administration practiced tactics of divide-and-conquer, turning each student faction into a client, supplicants to the ever-expanding executive corps who thought of themselves as “management,” of faculty as workers and students as captive customers. In this they merely mirrored the national political style, a legacy of the Twen Cen.