Part 24 (2/2)
”Any danger to us?” one of the incisive, investigative types asked.
”None I can see,” the Astronomer Royal deflected this mildly. ”No panic headlines needed.”
”What caused it?” a woman's voice called from the media thicket.
”We can see no object nearby, no apparent agency,” the Astronomer Royal admitted.
”Using what?”
”We are scanning the region on all wavelengths, from radio to gamma rays.” An extravagant waste, very probably, but the Astronomer Royal knew the price of not appearing properly concerned. Hand-wringing was called for at all stages.
”Has this happened before?” a voice sharply asked. ”Maybe we just weren't told?”
”There are no records of any such event,” the Astronomer Royal said. ”Of course, a thousand years ago, who would have noticed? The supernova that left us the Crab nebula went unreported in Europe, though not in China, though it was plainly visible here.”
”What do you think, Mr. Carlisle?” a reporter probed. ”As a non-specialist?”
Geoffrey had hung back at the press conference, which the crowds had forced the Inst.i.tuteto hold on the lush green lawn outside the old Observatory Building. ”I was just the first to notice it,” he said. ”That far off, pretty d.a.m.ned hard not to.”
The media mavens liked this and coaxed him further. ”Well, I dunno about any new force needed to explain it. Seems to me, might as well say its supernatural, when you don't know anything.”
This the crowd loved. super amateur says moon is supernatural soon appeared on a tabloid.
They made a hero of Geoffrey. ”AS OBVIOUS AS YOUR FACE” SAYS GEOFF. The London Times ran a full-page reproduction of his log book, from which he and the Astronomer Royal had worked out that the acceleration had to have happened in a narrow window around ten P.M., since no observer to the east had noticed any oddity before that.
Most of Europe had been clouded over that night anyway, so Geoffrey was among the first who could have gotten a clear view after what the newspapers promptly termed the ”Anomaly,” as in ANOMALY MAN STUNS ASTROS.
Of the several thousand working astronomers in the world, few concerned themselves with ”local” events, especially not with anything the eye could make out. But now hundreds threw themselves upon the Anomaly and, coordinated out of Cambridge by the Astronomer Royal swiftly outlined its aspects. So came the second discovery.
In a circle around where the moon had been, about two degrees wide, the stars were wrong. Their positions had jiggled randomly, as though irregularly refracted by some vast, unseen lens.
Modern astronomy is a hot compet.i.tion between the quick and the dead-who soon become the untenured.
Five of the particularly quick discovered this Second Anomaly. They had only to search all ongoing observing campaigns and find any that chanced to be looking at that portion of the sky the night before. The media, now in full bay, headlined their comparison photos. Utterly obscure dots of light became famous when blink-comparisons showed them jumping a finger's width in the night sky, within an hour of the ten P.M. Anomaly Moment.
”Does this check with your observations?” a firm-jawed commentator had demanded of Geoffrey at a hastily called meeting one day later, in the auditorium at the Inst.i.tute for Astronomy. They called upon him first, always-he served as an anchor amid the swift currents of astronomical detail.
Hooting from the traffic jam on Madingley Road nearby nearly drowned out Geoffrey's plaintive, ”I dunno. I'm a planetary man, myself.”
By this time even the nightly news broadcasts had caught on to the fact that having a patch of sky behave badly implied something of a wrenching mystery. And no astronomer, however bold, stepped forward with an explanation. An old joke with not a little truth in it-that a theorist could explain the outcome of any experiment, as long as he knew it in advance-rang true, and got repeated. The chattering cla.s.s ran rife with speculation.
But there was still nothing unusual visible there. Days of intense observation in all frequencies yielded nothing.
Meanwhile the moon glided on in its ethereal ellipse, following precisely the equations first written down by Newton, only a mile from where the Astronomer Royal now sat, vexed, with Geoffey. ”A don at Jesus College called, fellow I know,” the Astronomer Royal said.”He wants to see us both.”
Geoffrey frowned. ”Me? I've been out of my depth from the start.”
”He seems to have an idea, however. A testable one, he says.”
They had to take special measures to escape the media hounds. The inst.i.tute enjoys broad lawns and ample shrubbery, now being trampled by the crowds. Taking a car would guarantee being followed. The Astronomer Royal had chosen his offices here, rather than in his college, out of a desire to escape the busyness of the central town. Now he found himself trapped.
Geoffrey had the solution. The inst.i.tute kept bicycles for visitors, and upon two of these the men took a narrow, tree-lined path out the back of the inst.i.tute, toward town. Slipping down the cobbled streets between ancient, elegant college buildings, they went ignored by students and shoppers alike. Jesus College was a famously well-appointed college along the Cam River, approachable across its ample playing fields. The Astronomer Royal felt rather absurd to be pedaling like an undergraduate, but the exercise helped clear his head. When they arrived at the rooms of Professor Wright, holder of the Wittgenstein Chair, he was grateful for tea and small sandwiches with the crusts cut off, one of his favorites.
Wright was a post-postmodern philosopher, reedy and intense. He explained in a compact, energetic way that in some sense, the modern view was that reality could be profitably regarded as a computation.
Geoffrey bridled at this straightaway, scowling with his heavy eyebrows. ”It's real, not a bunch of arithmetic.”
Wright pointedly ignored him, turning to the Astronomer Royal. ”Martin, surely you would agree with the view that when you fellows search for a Theory of Everything, you are pursuing a belief that there is an abbreviated way to express the logic of the universe, one that can be written down by human beings?”
”Of course,” the Astronomer Royal admitted uncomfortably, but then said out of loyalty to Geoffrey, ”All the same, I do not subscribe to the belief that reality can profitably be seen as some kind of cellular automata, carrying out a program.”
Wright smiled without mirth. ”One might say you are revolted not by the notion that the universe is a computer, but by the evident fact that someone else is using it.”
”You gents have got way beyond me,” Geoffrey said.
”The idea is, how do physical laws act themselves out?” Wright asked in his lecturer voice. ”Of course, atoms do not know their own differential equations.” A polite chuckle. ”But to find where the moon should be in the next instant, in some fas.h.i.+on the universe must calculate where it must go. We can do that, thanks to Newton.”
The Astronomer Royal saw that Wright was humoring Geoffrey with this simplification, and suspected that it would not go down well. To hurry Wright along he said, ”To make it happen, to move the moon-”
”Right, that we do not know. Not a clue. How to breathe fire into the equations, as that Hawking fellow put it-”
”But look, nature doesn't know maths,” Geoffrey said adamantly. ”No more than I do.”
”But something must, you see,” Professor Wright said earnestly, offering them another plate of the little cut sandwiches and deftly opening-a bottle of sherry. ”Of course, I am using our human way of formulating this, the problem of natural order. The world is usefully describedby mathematics, so in our sense the world must have some mathematics embedded in it.”
”G.o.d's a b.l.o.o.d.y mathematician?” Geoffrey scowled.
The Astronomer Royal leaned forward over the antique oak table. ”Merely an expression.”
”Only way the stars could get out of whack,” Geoffrey said, glancing back and forth between the experts, ”is if whatever caused it came from there, I'd say.”
”Quite right.” The Astronomer Royal pursed his lips. ”Unless the speed of light has gone off, as well, no signal could have rearranged the stars straight after doing the moon.”
”So we're at the tail end of something from out there, far away,” Geoffrey observed.
”A long, thin disturbance propagating from distant stars. A very tight beam of ... well, error. But from what?” The Astronomer Royal had gotten little sleep since Geoffrey's appearance, and showed it.
”The circle of distorted stars,” Professor Wright said slowly, ”remains where it was, correct?”
The Astronomer Royal nodded. ”We've not announced it, but anyone with a cheap telescope-sorry, Geoffrey, not you, of course-can see the moon's left the disturbance behind, as it follows its...o...b..t.”
Wright said, ”Confirming Geoffrey's notion that the disturbance is a long, thin line of-well, I should call it an error.”
”Is that what you meant by a checkable idea?” the Astronomer Royal asked irritably.
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