Read The Island Page 13

needle in a haystack method - based on the principle that, if there were enough people like me, then sometime a small pin might be found. The problem with my approach was that I was not even looking for a needle or a pin. I didn't know what I was searching for. I was a blind man searching for sight. The sight would allow me dig deeper than my physical eyes could reveal. Not a metaphysical revelation but a brief glimpse of a forbidden Eden. So, where to begin, was for me a critical take off point, as to date I had no preferred point of departure. I just had to dive in.

  Lots of people would start by jumping back in time - say to 400 BC and the incredible energy of Greek thought in both science and philosophy. But I see that as going over old ground that, while of interest to the historian, is of no benefit to present considerations. True, one must understand and know about the past, but here one must leave it. Otherwise it becomes a distraction, that wastes time in proving its error. Perhaps error may seem too strong a word but, in the case of science, all theories to date have been in error. Progress has been in refining the error to smaller and smaller extents. One by one, the ancients have fallen by the wayside. 'So let's not go there,' I entreated my small select audience.

  'Start at the end and don't look back, that's my way of approaching such large questions. So let's talk of the end of science and perhaps philosophy.' I knew the statement was confrontational, but I wanted total engagement, and I knew, from their eyes, that they felt I could not justify such broad and sweeping announcements.

  'The end of science maybe, but the end of philosophy?' Jan was struggling to keep from sneering at the effrontery of my prognostication.

  I realised that I had set myself an impossible task but had to continue. Hadn't people recently talked about the end of history? Wasn't history just our accumulated knowledge store? If there was a theory of everything then this store would be complete. Therefore the quest for a theory of everything, and its attainment, signals the end not only of history and science but also of philosophy. Philosophy seeks knowledge and understanding of the world and our place in it. This will eventually be seen as a subset of a theory of everything.

  But first I had to explain what I meant by a theory of everything. How could there be such a wide and all encompassing theory? It had to cover the microscopic world, down to the Planck length of ten to the power of minus thirty five metres! This is so tiny that the mind can't even envisage it. Does such a small length exist, the sceptic might ask. The eye struggles to see a hair's breadth and this is billions and trillions of time smaller. Until relatively recently, this hair's breadth was the limit of our reality, but then the microscope and later the electron microscope allowed us see deeper in the microworld. We have deconstructed this microworld from the initial Bohr view of the atom, as a mini-planetary system of finite particles, to the current view, of a hazy coexistence of particles and waves - not only at the level of the electron but also in the nucleus, where the former distinct protons and neutrons are replaced by mysterious, hued quarks, exhibiting an equally strange waviness.

  The world at this level is a weird and wonderful place. Mass and energy are interchangeable, depending on what is measured. If you look for a particle, the world knows you want to see a particle and, hey presto, a particle is what you get. Yet if you look for a wave, guess what pops up - a wave. Quantum theory tries to decipher this world for us. It defines the laws that govern this hazy world. But what does this world actually look like - can we imagine being in it - at its level. The first thing we would notice is that is effectively empty. If we sit on an electron - if we are looking for an electron - then it appears that the nucleus is a distant tiny ball in the sky. I we sit on a wave - if it is a wave we are seeking- then we have a roller coaster ride through space, being buffeted here and there by the electromagnetic force field. Nothing is certain in this world. Our position is never defined, but is an infinite superposition of all places where we can exist - the wave function. This is in effect a very extreme view of reality, as it postulates that we exist in all positions simultaneously, but perhaps in different worlds. In each such world we have our past, present and future, evolving according to explicit laws. What are the laws, you may ask. Evolution is governed by the Schr?dinger equation, which at the micro level relates the time evolution of the wave function to the total energy from both movement and interaction from any force fields.

  So at this level, reality is an oscillating flux of energy, whose concentration climaxes can be thought of, as instantaneous positions of matter, but which then spread out to take on the wave form that is its complementary form. It is holistic in the sense that while being spread out through space - once we look for it and find its position in a local sense -the entire wave collapses into this locality.

  So reality is energy. The outlines of reality are how this energy oscillates and evolves. Left to itself it follows the Schr?dinger law and spreads out endlessly throughout the void. If we try to pin it down, it gathers in all its spread, and localises instantly for us to take on a value - becoming an electron or photon or whatever. The collapse doesn't create the particle - it was always intrinsically there, perhaps from an initial Big Bang event. But where is there? The particle is continuously in frantic motion, travelling at speeds near that of light. So sitting on it is like Einstein's famous daydream of being transported on a light beam. Because nothing in this universe travels faster than light, nothing can overtake you and time as a result loses meaning. It virtually stands still. So the closer we get to reality the smaller we get, the faster we travel and time begins to stop. What a strange reality!

  I could see from the glazed look on Maria's eyes that she was struggling to keep up with my words. She had not the level of understanding that made, what I was outlining, so transparent to my own reasoning. Jan too had given up and was looking edgy - wanting to leave. My words had come in a torrent of externalisation of thoughts that had developed over several years. This was their first synthesis and I knew that these two young people could not be expected to follow their train. I had followed my own train, and the uttering of the sentences had been a purgative experience, of more benefit to myself than to increasing the understanding of others. I needed to set out the many difficult thoughts and ideas that plagued my understanding of the new reality. I wanted to explore these ideas to the extreme. I knew that from them, some new thoughts on existence must emanate at some juncture. Nowhere had I read of significant findings as yet. The learned books were either too mathematically focused, or too steeped in a philosophical mode that struggled to understand the quantum world.

  The quantum theory sapped your energy. It sucked you in and took away all your real-world rationale. It appeared that you were a quantum theorist or a philosopher, but could not be both. The metaphysical and quantum worlds were mutually exclusive.

  But I still hadn't outlined what I meant by a theory of everything. I had briefly introduced the micro world and now I had to look upwards into the cosmos.

  'If the Big Bang theory is correct, then all this,' I gestured towards the blue sky with a wide sweep of my hands, 'has emanated from a small area of space-time, where the laws of science as we know them break down. The mathematicians call this odd area, a singularity.'

  I knew I was stretching their patience by continuing my story but I had to persist.

  The huge size of the universe as is currently revealed to us could not be further away from the microworld of quantum theory. There, we were dealing with tiny distances, of about ten to the power of minus fourteen or less metres - whereas the known edge of our universe goes out to some ten to the power of plus twenty six metres and increasing. The difference in scale cannot be really comprehended by the human mind. To get a brief glimpse of this magnitude, one could think that it takes light three million years travelling at 300,000 kilometres per second to reach us from our nearest companion galaxy - Andromeda. There are billions of galaxies further out in the cosmos, at even more incredible distances!

  That great expanse again is virtually e
mpty. The stars seem like a multitude on a clear frosty night, but in reality, they are lonely dots of light in an otherwise cold void of almost infinite space. The laws that govern the energy in this space were, classically, thought to be fully determined according to express Newtonian equations. Einstein overturned this what, for several hundred years, seemed a perfectly adequate model, that had even been sufficient to guide man to the first moon landing. In his Theory of Special Relativity, he saw that the speed of light was fundamental, in that nothing could travel faster than it. That meant that in the vastness of the cosmos, it was light that first communicated between the particles of matter. It defined what time was in our universe, and once time was defined it led back to a potential beginning. The seeds of Big Bang were sown.

  But another feature of our universe was special also - that was gravitation. It, too, seemed to act almost instantaneously. It was the genius of Einstein to see that gravity was embedded in space-time, as a space curvature caused, locally, by massive objects. Our view of reality is now even stranger at this cosmic level, but the