She hoped that would be enough time for Adikor to accomplish what he was trying to do.
Mary went to Laurentian University the next morning, having finally managed to get rid of the reporters waiting in the lobby of the Ramada. They’d been disappointed that Ponter hadn’t turned out to be staying there, as well. Apparently Reuben had implied to the journalists that he might be—presumably as a way of putting them off Ponter’s trail; Mary had returned him to Reuben’s house last night, which, as far as she knew, was where he’d stayed.
At 10:30 A.M., Mary was surprised to run into Louise Benoit in the corridor outside the Laurentian genetics lab. Louise was wearing tight-fitting denim cutoffs and a white T-shirt tied in a knot over her flat midriff. Well, thought Mary, it was blisteringly hot today, but really–she looks like she’s asking for it …
No.
Mary cursed herself; she knew better than that. No matter how a woman dressed, she was entitled to safety, entitled to be able to walk around without being molested.
Mary decided to be friendly and trotted out her few words of French. “Bonjour,” she said, as she got closer to Louise. “Comment sa va?”
“I’m fine,” replied Louise. “And you?”
“Fine. What brings you here?”
Louise pointed down the hall. “I was visiting some guys I know in the physics department. There’s not much for me to do at SNO right now. They’ve finished draining the detector chamber, and a team from the original manufacturer is just beginning work on reassembling the sphere, although that will take weeks. So I thought I’d talk over an idea with a couple of the people here—see if they could shoot any holes in it.”
Mary was heading toward the vending machines, looking to get a bag of Miss Vickie’s sea-salt-and-malt-vinegar kettle chips—an indulgence she could only afford in a monetary sense, but it had long been traditional for her to start each work week with a 43-gram bag.
“And did they?” Mary asked. “Shoot any holes in it, I mean?”
Louise shook her head and fell in beside Mary as she continued on down to the lounge.
“Well, that’s the best kind of idea, isn’t it?” Mary said.
“I suppose,” said Louise. Once they reached the lounge, Mary fished in her purse for some change. She pulled out a loonie and a quarter, and fed them into one of the vending machines. Louise, meanwhile, got herself a cup of coffee from another machine.
“Remember that meeting we had in the Inco conference room?” said Louise. “Well, as I said then, the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics states that whenever a quantum event can go two ways, it does go two ways.”
“A splitting of the timeline,” said Mary, leaning her bum against the arm of a vinyl-padded chair in the lounge.
“Oui,” said Louise. “Well, I spent some time talking to Ponter about this.”
“Ponter mentioned that,” said Mary. “I must have missed it.”
“It was late at night, and—”
“You went into Ponter’s room again after we’d finished the language lessons?” Mary was astonished by the rush of—of, my God, of jealousy–she felt.
“Sure. I like to be up at night; you know that. I wanted to learn more about the Neanderthal view of physics.”
“And?” said Mary, trying to keep her tone even.
“Well, it’s interesting,” said Louise. She took a sip of her coffee. “Here in this world, we’ve got two major interpretations for quantum mechanics: the Copenhagen interpretation and Everett’s Many-Worlds interpretation. The former postulates a special role for the observer—that consciousness actually influences reality. Well, that idea makes some physicists very uncomfortable; it’s seen as a return to vitalism. Everett’s Many-Worlds interpretation was an attempt to work around that. It says that quantum phenomena cause new universes to split off constantly, with each possible outcome of a quantum interaction occurring, but in a separate universe. No observers are required to shape reality; instead, every reality that can conceivably exist is automatically created.”
“Okay,” said Mary, not because she really understood, but because the alternative seemed to be an even longer lecture.
“Well, Ponter’s people have a single theory of quantum mechanics that’s sort of a synthesis of our two theories. It allows for many worlds—that is, for parallel universes—but the creation of such universes doesn’t result from random quantum events. Rather, it only happens through the actions of conscious observers.”
“Why don’t we have the same single theory, then?” asked Mary, munching on a particularly large chip.
“Partly because there’s a lot of math that seems irreconcilable between the two interpretations,” said Louise. “And, of course, there’s that old problem of politics in science: those physicists who favor the Copenhagen interpretation have devoted their careers to proving that it’s right; same thing for the guys on Everett’s side. For them all to sit down and say, ‘Maybe we’re both partly right—and both partly wrong’ just isn’t going to happen.”
“Ah,” said Mary. “It’s like the Regional Continuity versus Replacement debate in anthropology.”
Louise nodded. “If you say so. But suppose the Neanderthal synthesis of quantum physics is actually correct. It implies that consciousness—human volition—has the power to spin off new universes. Well, that raises a significant question. Presumably in the beginning, at the moment of the big bang, there must have been only one universe. Sometime later, it started splitting.”
“I thought Ponter didn’t believe in the big bang?” said Mary.
“Yes, apparently Neanderthal scientists think the universe has always existed. They believe that on large scales, redshifts—which are our principal evidence for an expanding universe—are proportional to age, rather than distance; that is, that mass varies over time. And they think the gross structure of galaxies and galactic clusters are caused by monopoles and plasma-pinching magnetic vortex filaments. Ponter says the cosmic microwave background—which we take as the residue of the big-bang fireball—is really the result of electrons trapped in these strong magnetic fields absorbing and emitting microwaves. Repeated absorption and emission by billions of galaxies smoothed out the effect, he says, producing the uniform background we detect now.”
“Does that seem possible to you?” asked Mary.
Louise shrugged. “I’m going to have to look into it.” She took another sip of coffee. “But, you know, after telling me all that, Ponter said the most astonishing thing.”
“What?” asked Mary.
“I guess you showed him a church service, right?”
“Yes. On TV.”
Louise took a seat on one of the other vinyl-covered chairs. “Well,” she said, “apparently he spent some time that night watching Vision TV, soaking up more religious thought. He said our story of the universe having an origin is just a creation myth, like from the Bible. ‘In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth …’ and all that. ‘Even your science,’ Ponter said, ‘is contaminated by this error of religion.’”
Mary sat down properly as well. “You know … I mean, physics is your field, not mine, but maybe he’s right. I mentioned Regional Continuity versus Replacement a moment ago; sometimes that’s called Multiregionalism versus Out-of-Africa. Anyway, there are those who’ve observed that Replacement, which is what I and other geneticists favor, is also basically a biblical position: humanity came full-blown out of Africa, ejected from a garden, and there’s a hard-and-fast line between us and everything else in the animal kingdom, including even other contemporaneous members of the genus Homo.”