She improvised fluently, churning out my life as a soundbite without a trace of detectable irony. “My mother gave me an education. By which I don’t mean school. She plugged me into the nets, she had me using an adult’s knowledge miner by the time I was seven or eight. She opened up… the whole planet to me. I was lucky: we could afford it, and she knew exactly what she was doing. But she didn’t steer me toward science. She gave me the keys to this giant playground, and let me loose. I might just as easily have headed toward music, art, history… anything. I wasn’t pushed in any direction. I was just set free.”
“And your father?”
“My father was in the police force. He was killed when I was four.”
“That must have been traumatic. But… do you think that early loss might have given you the drive, the independence… ?”
Mosala flashed me a look more of pity than anger. “My father was shot in the head by a sniper at a political rally, where he was helping to protect twenty thousand people whose views he found completely repugnant. And—this is now off the record, by the way, whatever it means for your timeslot—he was someone I loved, and who I still love; he was not an assembly of missing gears in my psychodynamic clock-work. He was not an absence to be compensated for.”
I felt myself flush with shame. I glanced down at my notepad, and skipped over several equally fatuous questions. I could always pad out the interview material with reminiscences from childhood friends… stock footage of Cape Town schools in the thirties… whatever.
“You’ve said elsewhere that you were hooked on physics by the time you were ten: you knew it was what you wanted to do for the rest of your life—for purely personal reasons, to satisfy your own curiosity. But… when do you think you began to consider the wider arena in which science operates? When did you start to become aware of the economic, social, and political factors?”
Mosala responded calmly, perfectly composed again. “About two years later, I suppose. That was when I started reading Muteba Kazadi.”
She hadn’t mentioned this in any of the earlier interviews I’d seen—and it was lucky I’d stumbled on the name when researching PACDF, or I would have looked extremely foolish at this point. Muteba who?
“So you were influenced by technoliberation?”
“Of course.” She frowned slightly, bemused—as if I’d just asked her if she’d ever heard of Albert Einstein. I wasn’t even sure if she was being honest, or whether she was still just helpfully, cynically, trying to accommodate SeeNet’s demand for clichés—but then, that was the price I paid for asking her to play the game.
She said, “Muteba spelled out the role of science more clearly than anyone else at the time. And in a couple of sentences, he could… incinerate any doubts I might have had about ransacking the entire planetary storehouse of culture and science, and taking exactly what I wanted.” She hesitated, then recited:
“When Leopold the Second rises from the grave Saying, ‘My conscience plagues me, take back This un-Belgian ivory and rubber and gold!’ Then I will renounce my ill-gotten un-African gains And piously abandon the calculus and all its offspring To… I know not whom, for Newton and Leibniz both Died childless.”
I laughed. Mosala said soberly, “You’ve no idea what it was like though, to have that one sane voice cutting through all the noise. The anti-science, traditionalist backlash didn’t really hit South Africa until the forties—but when it did, so many people in public life who’d spoken perfect sense until then seemed to cave in, one way or another… until science was somehow either the rightful ‘property’ of ’the West'—which Africa didn’t need or want anyway—or it was nothing but a weapon of cultural assimilation and genocide.”
“It has been used as exactly that.”
Mosala eyed me balefully. “No shit. Science has been abused for every conceivable purpose under the sun. Which is all the more reason to deliver the power it grants to as many people as possible, as rapidly as possible, instead of leaving it in the hands of a few. It is not a reason to retreat into fantasy—to declare: knowledge is a cultural artifact, nothing is universally true, only mysticism and obfuscation and ignorance will save us.” She reached out and mimed taking hold of a handful of space, saying, “There is no male or female vacuum. There is no Belgian or Zairean space-time. Inhabiting this universe is not a cultural prerogative, or a lifestyle decision. And I don’t have to forgive or forget a single act of enslavement, theft, imperialism, or patriarchy, in order to be a physicist—or to approach the subject with whatever intellectual tools I need. Every scientist sees further by standing on a pile of corpses—and frankly, I don’t care what kind of genitals they had, what language they spoke, or what the color of their skin was.”
I tried not to smile; this was all highly usable. I had no idea which of these slogans were sincere, and which were conscious theatrics—where the telegenic sugar-coating I’d asked for ended, and Mosala’s real passions began—but then, she may not have been entirely clear about the borders, herself.
I hesitated. My next note read: Emigration rumors? Now was the logical time to raise the issue—but that progression could be reconstructed during editing. I wasn’t going to risk blowing the interview until I had a lot more material safely in the can.
I skipped ahead to safer ground. “I know you don’t want to reveal the full details of your TOE before your lecture on the eighteenth—but maybe you could give me a rough sketch of the theory, in terms of what’s already been published?”
Mosala relaxed visibly. “Of course. Though the main reason I can’t give you all the details is that I don’t even know them myself.” She explained, “I’ve chosen the complete mathematical framework. All the general equations are fixed. But getting the specific results I need involves a lot of supercomputer calculations, which are in progress even as we speak. They should be completed a few days before the eighteenth, though—barring unforeseen disasters.”
“Okay. So tell me about the framework.”
“That part is extremely simple. Unlike Henry Buzzo and Yasuko Nishide, I'm not looking for a way to make ‘our’ Big Bang seem like less of a ‘coincidence.’ Buzzo and Nishide both take the view that an infinite number of universes must have arisen out of pre-space—freezing out of that perfect symmetry with different sets of physical laws. And they both aim to re-evaluate the probability of a universe ‘more-or-less like our own’ being included in that infinite set. It’s relatively easy to find a TOE in which our universe is possible, but freakishly unlikely. Buzzo and Nishide define a successful TOE as one which guarantees that there are so many universes similar to our own that we’re not unlikely at all—that we’re not some kind of miraculous, perfect bull’s-eye on a meta-cosmic dartboard, but just one unexceptional point on a much larger target.”
I said, “A bit like proving—from basic astrophysical principles—that thousands of planets in the galaxy should have carbon-and-water-based life, and not just Earth.”
“Yes and no. Because… yes, the probability of other Earth-like planets can be computed from theory, alone—but it can also be validated by observation. We can observe billions of stars, we’ve already deduced the existence of a few thousand extrasolar planets—and eventually, we’ll visit some of them, and find other carbon-and-water-based life. But although there are no end of elegant frameworks for assigning probabilities to hypothetical other universes… there is no prospect of observing or visiting them, no conceivable method for checking the theory. So I don’t believe we should choose a TOE on that basis.