And finally, of course, it comes back to religion. Despite my protestations of cheerful tolerance, I took a secret, perverse pleasure in undertaking the Jerusalem Project merely for the opportunity to be there when it failed.
And that’s why I hesitated to hire Phil. What if he disproved the existence of Jesus and refused to admit it? What if he refused to certify the results, or insisted on rerunning the experiment until he succeeded? What if he tried to falsify the results, to cook the books in order to avoid facing up to the fact that the religion which had saved his life was a hollow he?
I never seriously contemplated his actually succeeding. I had long regarded Christian dogma as a mishmash of romanticized fraud, improbable fantasy and maudlin sentimentality. It was a two thousand-year-old con game designed to keep the priestly class in wine and women without forcing them to soil their hands performing real work. The idea that such Luddite absurdities as “scientific creationism” drew their inspiration from fact was something I considered beyond the realm of possibility.
Unable to resolve this mental conundrum, I finally decided to meet Phil in person. That way I could see if he acted as bright as his papers or as dumb as his reputation.
When I stepped into the lab, the holotank depicted a single man standing on a stone ledge, stunted bushes and trees peeking up through the rocks behind him. In front a small crowd, perhaps as many as a hundred, stood watching him speak.
“There,” said Phil softly, pointing, his smile still wide.
He looked little like standard portraits of Jesus. His skin and hair were darker than usually depicted, the later unkempt save where it was bound by two metal bands. His face had a definite Semitic cast to it, close to that of modern Arabs, but with distinctly African lips. His clothes more closely resembled Roman tunics of the period than the flowing robes he was usually shown in. But the eyes…
The eyes were intense, mesmeric—more like the eyes of a charismatic demagogue, an Adolf Hitler or Charles Manson, than a beatific messiah. But they were the eyes of an extraordinary man, and for the first time I began to consider the possibility that Phil might actually have succeeded.
“How do you know?”
“Listen. Ruth, continue tracing this wave, but skip back about fifteen minutes and run the image on the tank.”
At Phil’s command, the scene flickered, then came to life. The man on the ledge spoke with great power and conviction in a strange language I didn’t understand. Every now and then a wash of static would break up the image, but Phil’s phase-change algorithms had reduced interference far below that of any other first-century re-creation I had ever witnessed.
“What’s he saying?”
“That’s Aramaic. Ruth, bring up Dr. Silver’s program and run a concurrent translation.” At Phil’s command, the Aramaic speech faded to a whisper and an English translation came up in its stead.
“…insult you, beat you, despise you, and libel you because of me, you should rejoice! Because your reward isn’t here, not in this barren desert, not this world of dirt and stone. Like the prophets that came before and foretold my coming, your reward is in the kingdom of Heaven!”
“The Sermon on the Mount,” whispered Phil, his voice filled with awe. I turned from the holotank to stare at him, and saw tears—I could only assume of joy—running down his face.
“I guess we should tell the sponsors,” I said.
“No, not yet. I want to track the wave phase through to the end. Within the month we should be able to hand them everything.”
We were silent a long moment. “Well, Phil, I guess you’ve done it,” I offered lamely, feehng numb. “I guess I should buy you a drink.”
At that Phil laughed uproariously, as though trying to release all the joy in his body at once. Then he did something he’d never done before—gripped me in a bear hug so strong it lifted me off the floor, his tears wetting my cheek.
“Make it a Diet Coke, buddy,” he said, laughing and weeping at the same time, “make it a Diet Coke.”
How and why sub-quark wave events are captured and read, how they let us view the past, and why they show us only possible pasts, is difficult to explain. So instead of a technical lecture, I’m going to engage in what popular-science journalists call “oversimplification.” In academia, we call this “lying.”
In the menagerie of sub-quark beasties discovered by Daniels and Chung in 2007, E-particles are the ones of immediate concern. Like their more exotic brethren, E-particles are hellishly difficult to create from scratch (at least for those of us without a hundred-trillion-electron-volt supercollider in our basement), but very easy to “breed” once you’ve created them. Because they’re among the most basic and ubiquitous of subquark particles, in theory (and here’s where the lying comes in) every E-particle is not only connected to every other E-particle, but with every other sub-quark particle as well.
That connection exists not only in the here and now, but also throughout the entire length of an E-particle’s existence. Since the amount of sub-quantum “energy” carried by an E-particle declines very, very slowly over a long period of time, we use a process based on complex energy-transfer models to trace E-particle energy loss back through history, and once you’ve learned how to properly model, manipulate, and record E-particle energy states at that specified time, it is possible to “see” the past via a computer re-creation based on E-particle positions.
Or, rather, a possible past.
Now, here’s where it gets tricky. Because event waves are extracted using huge amounts of computer processing power, and because quantum effects make it impossible to eliminate every last variant in event wave re-creations, there is no guarantee that the event recorded actually occurred as depicted in the computer simulation. This inability to distinguish between “true” and “false” pasts is both unavoidable and gets worse the closer to the present you get, where the signal-to-noise ratio goes so overwhelmingly negative that no amount of processing power is capable of resolving event waves into a coherent picture. The technical word we use for this noise is “fuzzing,” and once you get past the thirteenth century or so AD, everything is pretty much hopelessly fuzzed out.
Irving Weintraub explains how and why this is true (in layman’s terms) in his book The Disappearing Greek: Sub-Quantum Event Waves and the Recording of History. In the book’s title case, a physics team resolved an event wave depicting a minor skirmish from the Peloponnesian War. The computer re-creation showed two soldiers being killed, then buried, next to a prominent rock outcropping about forty miles inland of the Aegean coast. Well, it so happens that this outcropping still exists, and when an archaeological expedition was sent out to examine the site—voila!—the remains of a Greek soldier, one of the two depicted by the computer (down to his good-luck necklace and the dents in his armor) were dug up. But, here’s the kicker: despite the event wave depiction showing both of them being buried side by side in the same grave, there was absolutely no sign of his companion, or of the site being disturbed since the original interment. The computer re-creation had displayed a previously unknown and verifiable historical event, but one that had not occurred as the computer had depicted it.
Well, these results were strange enough that they ran the event wave resolution again, and this time, three soldiers died. Further runs produced variations on the same results: the same event was depicted over and over again, but the details varied every time, a pattern that has surfaced in every multi-run event wave resolution. The reasons for this are still hotly debated, the most popular viewpoint being the “many worlds” theory of sub-quantum division, that every wave event depicts history as it occurred in an “alternate reality” that split off from our own at the instant of the event’s occurrence. A few theorists (with a tip of the hat to Heisenberg, Von Neumann, and Schrödinger) have even gone so far as to postulate a new sub-quark uncertainty principle for event waves. According to them, we’ll never be able to resolve an event wave that truly depicts our own past, since any “true” event is altered by its very viewing.