He needed to get out of this prison, take a walk maybe— not too far. Timidly he left the tiny apartment. Out in the city corridor he felt bolder and began a quick-paced exploration romp.
Eron spent the next terrifying interim trying to relocate his hotel. Had he gone down a level? Up? One clothing shop seemed familiar until he discovered that it was a common franchise in this neighborhood. He had completely lost his sense of orientation. The discreet signs seemed mostly to be of the fam-readable kind, where information was overlaid in tri-D on the visual cortex when needed—and he wore no fam. He asked directions and got answers in the off-planet dialect of some recent immigrant. Perhaps a fam could have deciphered the well-intentioned garble of sounds and gestures.
In the whole of this vertical neighborhood, there were no multilevel spaces that he could find, no reckless use of vegetation. Not everybody was working. Some residents were old and vacant and even sat in the corridors or the levitator lounges to watch the world flow by. Two tough youths assessed his wealth. Or maybe it only seemed that way because here was a class of people of whom he had been oblivious in his previous life. Maybe, just maybe, they were all right. Maybe they were dangerous only to strangers. Maybe they weren’t dangerous at all. Still, he fled from them in a kind of childish panic that took him down corridors and zigzagging commercial alleys and well-lit levita-tors that lost him completely but miraculously delivered him “home” again. The surprise of finding himself in front of his hotel astonished him into a burst of tearful thanks.
After awakening from a restless sleep, he remembered— and chose safety over adventure, spending the next multiple watches alone in his apartment—doors sealed, averse even to a brief restocking excursion—while he continued to struggle with the Founder’s first essay, polishing his painful reading skills. His troubles did not stem only from a lack of the utilities usually provided by a fam—he didn’t even command all of his organically based faculties. His mind was used to the brain/fam dialog, and some critical areas of his wetware seemed to be accessible only by key stimulation via fam-cue. The mental paths leading into these sepulchers were effectively blocked by his famlessness—and, to find their barricaded treasures, he had to guess his way blindly through neural codes. Being a moron was hard labor. Well, back to his studies!
Determinism. And more determinism. He reread the opening of the Founder’s “Eighth Speech” many times. Psychohistory was a science of prediction. Did an ability to predict imply determinism? In this Galaxy where an elite controlled the future in which the society was destined to live, people were apt to debate such philosophical points. Did it matter?
To distract himself from the reading, Eron sniffed the pages of this book that had been shaped into pocket size for carrying close to the heart by someone who loved to read. It smelled as if it had been printed a thousand years ago, and the title page said so. That spoke of a time well after the Founder had been reduced to a holographic glimmer in some vault and well past the farthest reach of that great man’s primitive mathematical vision—yet still centuries before the birth of anyone presently alive.
Enough sniffing. Keep the book open and try to read. Eron did his best to imagine the ancient debate between Thanelord Remendian and the Founder. There would be flamboyant clothes, snuff, perfume, gestures, and admonitions—but without his fam’s visualizers he saw only ghosts on a darkened stage. He plodded on.
The essay began its demolition of Thanelord Remendian’s thesis by fielding a clear definition of determinism, one that struck Eron as weirdly familiar. At the same time, it startled him—the way things do that have been around for a long time, unnoticed. He concentrated. He was still enough of a mathematician to realize that definitions are the framework of sound argument. They must be understood. He tried.
A deterministic universe requires One Future and One Past, immutable. It requires that every governing equation of motion have a Unique Solution whether worked forward or backward in time—even if we can only approximate that Solution in ever refinable steps. Choices become illusions. Determinism allows no branches, no random events, no errors, no noise. In such a universe even an omnipotent god is powerless to intervene. A universe cannot, by definition, be deterministic when man or god has choice, or if the guiding equations, given the same initial conditions, can be made to yield more than one result through branching, randomities, quantum superposition, error, or noise.
Remendian is mistaken to tar us as determinists. Psychohistory fails as a deterministic system simply because NONE of its probabilistic equations have unique solutions. This should not surprise us. After all, even the most rigorous equations of physics have long been framed in such a way that two identical initial states will not lead to exactly the same outcome. The neomystic philosopher Bohr...
At this point in his discourse the Founder went off into a technical discussion of the mathematical underpinnings that a deterministic physics would require. Eron had the comfortable illusion that he understood all the symbols and how the meanings were related, but when he actually got excited and tried to manipulate the dynamic symbols...he could do nothing. It was humiliating. Not to be able to follow the Founder when he was glossing over the easiest of the conundrums of primordial physics! Eron summarized the Founder’s points for himself to get a grip on them, using the apartment’s decrepit console as a doodle-pad.
All viable physical descriptions of our universe seem to require:
1] Time-symmetry. The physical equations determining state change are unaltered by the substitution of negative-t for t, where t is time. (The laws of our physics cannot be modified by a time reversal.)
Imposing determinism as an additional constraint then implies:
2] Reversibility. The physical equations determining state change cannot contain traps. (The system will not be determinable if it can dispatch information to conveniently inaccessible states like alternate worlds or black holes.)
The (perhaps apocryphal) father of physics, Newton, had been claimed by no less than eighteen worlds of the Sirius Sector. The great synthesis of the ancient newtonian theur-gists was deterministic because it naively contained no information traps. Being that, newtonianism failed to derive entropy from first principles; thermodynamics requires a built-in mechanism for lossy information compression. Even after careful experimentation by the mystical heisen-bergians had established the uncertainty of position/momentum, many of these dawn theurgists still clung to theological dogma that all information about the past was somehow retained in the positions and momenta of the current superposed states of the universe; nothing could be forgotten. The universe has mostly forgotten these men.
The Founder speculated that this stubborn conception of the universe as an all-remembering entity had been inherited from a then-common belief in an all-knowing God whose eye saw the whole of eternity. The tacit (and false) assumption that the underlying fabric of the universe was described by the artificial mathematical entity called a manifold fostered the illusion because a manifold has no upper limit on the amount of information that can be impressed upon it.
Gripped by a fit of industry, Eron confirmed the Founder’s careful proof that a deterministic universe requires more info storage space than the physical nature of die universe allows—using a marker on the cleanable wall because his holopad was down. Neat. He left it there as wallpaper.