The Passenger (The Passenger, #1)(45)

No. He thought he was a lunatic.

Your father never went to Pugwash.

No. Some people called it Pigwash. A slightly lesser form of hogwash.

Asher crossed his boots in the empty chair. He was thin and rawboned and had sandy red hair. In his scuffed leather jacket and boots Western always thought he looked more like an oilfield geologist. He thumbed through some pages in his notebook. He tapped his chin with his pencil and looked at Western. How are you doing, Bobby?

Not so good. I’ve got pancreatic cancer. I’ve got maybe six months.

Asher sat upright. Jesus, he said. What?

I’m just jacking with you.

Christ, Western. That’s not funny.

I guess not.

You’ve got a fucked up sense of humor. Did you know that?

I’ve been told that. Maybe I just wanted to see if you were listening.

I listen.

Maybe we should just move it along.

Christ. All right. Let’s get back to Chew.

All right.

He was at Chicago.

Yes. Then Berkeley.

You said that he was the pied piper that your father followed. Into oblivion? Do I have that right?

I dont know. Probably a bit strong. My father was a free agent. A lot of people thought that S-Matrix theory was a reasonable theory. Promising, even. It was just superseded by chromodynamics. Ultimately by string theory. Supposedly.

We’re still in the early sixties.

Yes.

String theory is beginning to look like endless mathematics.

That’s the principal complaint I suppose. One of the first things that showed up in the equations was a particle of zero mass, zero charge, and spin two. Pretty promising.

A graviton.

Yes. A creature imagined but never seen. I dont know that much about string theory but it’s a physical theory, not a mathematical one. It keeps getting assigned a different number of dimensions. It’s enjoyed a good deal of support but not from everybody. If the subject comes up in Glashow’s presence he’s likely to leave the room. Witten says that we’ll know something in twenty years.

That’s Glashow’s poem? The last word is not Witten?

Yes. Or I think so. Are the mini-biographies still a part of the project?

They are. I’m just not all that sure where to put them. Did Russell know any physics?

No.

Is that why your father was dismissive of him?

No.

It’s all right to say that the reason we cant fully grasp the quantum world is because we didnt evolve in that world. But the real mystery is the one that plagued Darwin. How we can come to know difficult things that have no survival value. The founders of quantum mechanics—Dirac, Pauli, Heisenberg—had nothing to guide them but an intuition about how the world should be. Beginning at a scale hardly known to even exist. Some spectral anomalies. What is that? Oh, that’s an anomaly. An anomaly. Yes. Well. The fuck you say. Did Einstein work with Boltzmann?

I dont know. What he got from Boltzmann was a common suspicion that the laws of thermodynamics at some scale might not be fixed. Ehrenfest had the same idea. A very destructive idea.

Did Ehrenfest work with Boltzmann?

I would say no.

What did they share?

They both committed suicide?

Jesus, Western.

It wasnt just the quantum dice that disturbed Einstein. It was the whole underlying notion. The indeterminacy of reality itself. He’d read Schopenhauer when he was young but he felt that he’d outgrown him. Now here he was back—or so some would say—in the form of an inarguable physical theory.

Didnt keep him from arguing, though. Did it?

No.

What else?

The road to infinity may well unravel fresh rules as it goes.

Do you have your father’s papers?

No.

They’re not at Princeton?

Not all of them.

Where are they?

There were some at my grandmother’s house in Tennessee. Mostly the papers from Lake Tahoe.

There were.

Yes. They were stolen.

They were stolen?

Yes.

From your grandmother’s house.

Yes.

Who would steal them?

No idea. They didnt leave a note.

Had you read them?

Some. I looked through them. They were in a tin breadbox. When he left Teller’s program and went back to particle physics he found that things had moved along a bit.

S-Matrix theory.

Western shrugged.

Asher recrossed his legs and tapped his chin with the eraser again. A breakthrough.

Dangerous word. Witten said that string theory could be a half century ahead of itself.

I suppose the hope is that it will turn out to be some sort of theory of everything.

Who knows? Feynman once said that we were now discovering the fundamental laws of nature and that day will never come again. Feynman is a bright guy but I think that’s a somewhat questionable thing to say. Should science by some miracle forge on into the future it will uncover not only new laws of nature but new natures to have laws about. The last lines of Dirac’s book are: “It seems that some essentially new physical ideas are here needed.” Well. There always will be.

What happened to Kaluza-Klein?

It’s still around. It’s reappeared in modern unification theories. The question of course is whether these in turn have any value. The original theory was a pretty elegant edifice. Einstein was taken with it. He wrote a rather neat paper on the subject. It had drawings and everything. But he came to see most of the problems and eventually he dropped the whole thing. I know that my father dug up Kaluza’s 1921 paper. There was a five dimensional field theory that went with it and it was quite a piece of work. It included a general relativistic theory of gravitation. It was what got Klein interested and when the Kaluza-Klein version came out it incorporated quantum mechanics. De Broglie was interested. These were interesting times in physics.