We sit quietly for a minute, allowing the guest to absorb this rather dense helping of quantum theory. In a corner of the ceiling, a fluorescent light flickers and goes out. Applying the First Law of Thermodynamics, we know that elsewhere in the universe, an unattractive though cost-efficient glow has just appeared.
Though Gerry Nahum has long been consumed by matters of the soul, he is not a religious man. However, he has had some interesting encounters with the Catholic Church. “I approached them, naively, years ago. To get funding. I outlined it like I just did for you.” I picture the bishops in their high-backed chairs, Nahum tucking “Your Excellency” here and there in his warp-speed, single-spaced prose.
The monsignors didn’t understand the specifics of Nahum’s proposal, but they understood enough to know that it made them nervous. “They have a system of belief where they know what the answer is. They don’t need quote-unquote proof. And if [the results don’t] agree with what they know, it’s a disaster. They don’t want to take that risk.” After Nahum’s first audience, he was invited back. Now the mood had grown solemn. Outside experts had been called in, theologians with backgrounds in cosmology and physics. Not only did they not offer to fund Nahum’s project, they did their best to talk him out of it. They spoke of a “divine design” for the division of the worlds, and tried to make the case that Nahum’s experiment threatened a breach of that division. The consequences, they warned, could be dire and unfathomable. “They envisioned that there was a potential for opening a dark ‘schism’ that might unleash some type of heretofore unknown ‘power’ into our traditionally protected world.” The window metaphor made an appearance. Nahum was accused of trying to “open a window that might not be closed after opening.”
But the window presumably opens by itself, whenever something dies. Why would they think Nahum is trying to pry it open? Why would his experiment keep the window from closing? Why can’t souls use doors like the rest of us?
At the last meeting, the bishops tried to open a window of the stained-glass variety. “They suggested I might seriously consider converting to Catholicism, so that I’d get over the whole idea. In the end, I had to take a ‘just kidding’ stance and essentially feign that I had no further interest in pursuing it.”
These days, Nahum trolls for funding at physics departments and institutes like the University of Arizona’s Human Energy Systems Laboratory. He goes to science-of-consciousness and quantum theory gatherings whenever he can, hoping to hook up with potential partners. It is going slowly. “Most people don’t listen nearly as long as you have.” Yes, I say, but they probably listen better. Yes and no, replies Nahum: “It’s a multidisciplinary idea, so it’s a tough sell. The engineering and information specialists know nothing about biology. The physicians and the biologists and the neuroscientists know nothing about information theory. And none of them know anything about cosmology or… the physics of multidimensional universes. They’re very smart people, but they don’t have the breadth of background to incorporate it all into one.” Nahum is like the discombobulated animals in those children’s books where the pages are split into thirds and the ostrich has a kangaroo’s legs and the hippo is part giraffe. He’s a little of everything, and there’s no one for him to play with.
The closest he’s come to a soul mate is Patrick Lui, who manages R&D collaborations at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and studied thermodynamics in graduate school. I spoke to Lui after I got back from Duke. Lui told me he tried to get other physicists at Stanford, including the former chair of theoretical physics, to “think along with Gerry.” Both Lui and his colleagues felt that although the concepts were valid and the project made sense intellectually, the experiment would be difficult or even impossible because of the challenges of measuring such extremely small amounts of energy. “That doesn’t mean that one should not pursue this kind of work,” Lui was quick to add. “This is a curveball, but nonetheless it is a real ball.”
Nahum’s idea is also a tough sell among nonacademics. Because, as he puts it, “People either think they already know the answer and don’t want any external validation, or they think it’s impossible to know the answer. They don’t have enough of a background to understand that they can know.”
And then there are budget constraints. Nahum estimates he’d need at least $100,000 in funding. “People have said to me, ‘We’re going to take this up the ladder, see what we can do.’ But it’s not a mainstream, high-priority enough idea that anyone says, ‘Here, let’s commit the money.’”
What about the physics department here at Duke? “I get blank stares.”
I begin to feel sad for this misunderstood man with his grand and misunderstood—or just not understood—vision.
“Does your wife understand your project?”
“Ex-wife. Not even a little.”
Nahum takes a phone call from a business partner named Al. “You’re wrong, Al!” he is yelling good-naturedly into the phone. “Al… AL! You’re all wet, Al!”
I put away my gauzy pastoral of the lonely philosopher. Gerry Nahum is a tall, charming, pedigreed gynecologist with healthy self-esteem. One day he’ll get the support he needs to carry out his plan, and possibly the respect of the Duke physicists, and maybe even a wife who knows quantum theory. I The giddy, revolting heyday of ectoplasm hope so.
IT IS 2 P.M. before Nahum’s stomach makes itself heard over his brain and we break for lunch. With the equations put away and at least a few picograms of Nahum’s informational content devoted to his ravioli, I feel more comfortable asking the dimwit questions I’ve wanted to ask all morning.
What do you think it would feel like to be a free-floating soul, a fart of energy in some god-knows-where-or-what dimension? Nahum makes the analogy of the computer: Your basic core of consciousness, he imagines, would be like the operating system. On top of that you have various overlays: word processing and spreadsheet programs and such if you’re a computer; if you’re a human being, perception, language, reason, memory. When you die and the brain shuts down, the overlays fritz out. You’re left with the operating system: a sort of a primitive, free-floating awareness. Nahum imagines existence would be “like what it is for us now, minus all the superficial trappings.”
It’s that minus-all-the-trappings bit that gets me. If you can’t think in words or see or hear, what are you like? Coma victim? Lichen? Nahum shrugs. It’s just an analogy, just a guess. I posed this question to Lui later in the week. He was dubious about the possibility of the informational content of a person’s consciousness leaving the body in any sort of organized form. “Decay heat is not ordered information,” he said. Meaning, I think, that the blip of energy that was your personality may indeed continue to exist after you die, but not in the form of your personality. Not in the form of something you can be or use.
I later relayed to Nahum what Lui said and asked him to comment. “Remember,” I wrote, “in replying to me, pretend you are talking to a seventh-grader.” Nahum disagreed with Lui. His reply ran to a thousand words and would have been understandable to any seventh-grader familiar with Kant, Locke, negentropy as the measure of nonrandomness, and the Enigma encryption machine. Here is the part I understood: “This energy is freely malleable in terms of the physical form it might take… and it is not necessarily the case that any one of them would be ‘preferred.’”
Well, “preferred” in the sense that it would be more fun to be a spirit that can think thoughts and remember memories than to be, say, a black hole or a piece of static electricity. But I decided to leave it be.