The Martians

Chapter 26 Sax Moments

When Sax was pretending to be Stephen Lindholm, he often asked the lab’s computer to display articles from The Journal of Irreproducible Results, and though most of the articles were silly, some made him laugh. He was still spluttering one day when he came into Claire and Berkina’s lab to describe to them Henry Lewis’s “Data Enrichment Method.”

“Say you do an experiment to see if sounds can be detected at various decibel levels, and you have your data in a table. Then since you want more data but don’t actually want to do more experiments, you assume that if a sound isn’t heard at decibel level a, it wouldn’t be heard at any lower levels either, and so you add the result of test a to all the trials at lower decibels.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Then say you’re trying to prove that coin tosses are more likely to turn up heads the higher the altitude you make the toss at—”

“What?”

“That’s your hypothesis, and you make your trial and arrange your data in the same kind of table, see here” (he had printed it out) “and it looks a little ambiguous, sure, but you just use the data enrichment method as described with the decibels, so that every time you get heads, you add it to all the tests higher up the stairs, and there you have it—the higher on the stairs you toss the coin, the more heads you get! Very convincing!” And he collapsed on a chair, giggling. “It’s exactly how Simons showed that CO

levels were going to drop after they got them to two bar.”

Claire and Berkina stared at him, nonplussed. Claire said, “Stephen likes the reductio ad absurdum.”

“I do,” Sax admitted, “I definitely do.”

“It’s science,” Berkina said. “Science in a nutshell.”

And they all sat there grinning.

“Nobody can get more out of things, including books, than he already knows.”

Sax read that in a book and went out for a walk to think it over.

When he came back he read on. “If one has character one also has one’s typical experience, which recurs repeatedly.”

Sax found this Nietzsche an interesting writer.

The more Sax studied memory, the more worried he got that there would be anything they could ever do to improve it. During one night’s reading early on, the worry turned to cold fear.

He was reviewing the classic Rose papers on memory in chicks whose intermediate medial hyperstriatum ventrales had been burned away before or after training sessions with sweet or bitter pellets of food. Chicks that had been given left-hemisphere IMHV lesions forgot later lessons to avoid a bitter pellet; chicks with right-side lesions remembered. This gave one the impression that it was the left IMHV that was necessary to memory. But if the training was done before the lesions, the chicks needed neither IMHV to recall the lesson. Perhaps, Rose postulated, the memory was actually stored in the lobus parolfactorius, left or right, so that once learned, neither IMHV was needed. Further lesions seemed to confirm this hypothesis, eventually justifying a pathway model, in which lessons are first registered in the left IMHV, then move to the right IMHV, and then move on to both the left and right LPOs. And if this model were correct, then a pretraining right-IMHV lesion, already shown not to be amnestic by itself, would disrupt this flow, and post-training LPO lesions, otherwise amnestic, would no longer be so because the memory would have been stranded in the left IMHV. And that proved to be the case. It followed, then, that a pretraining right-IMHV lesion, followed by a posttraining left-IMHV lesion, would also produce amnesia, for first the transfer path would be blocked, and then the only repository destroyed.

Except it wasn’t so. Right lesion; train chick; recall displayed; left lesion; and the chick still recalled the lesson. The memory had escaped.

Sax left his desk and took a walk down to the corniche to think this over. Also to recover from the stab of fear that had struck him: that they would never understand. Darkness, voices from restaurants, clanking dishes, starlight on the still sea. He couldn’t find Maya, she was in none of her usual haunts.

He sat on one of their benches anyway. The mind was a mystery. Memories were nowhere and everywhere: The brain had a tremendous equipotentiality, it was a hugely complex dynamic system, almost anything was possible.

In theory that should be a cause for hope. Surely with such a flexible, versatile system, they could shore up the failing parts, shunt the memories elsewhere. If that was the right way to state it. Very possibly; but in such an immensity, how could they learn (quickly enough) what to do? Didn’t the very power of the system place it beyond their comprehension? So that the greatness of the human mind actually added to the great unexplainable, rather than lessened it?

Dark sky, dark sea. Sax got up and walked, clutched the railing of the corniche, teeth clenched as he suddenly thought of Michel. Michel would have welcomed this great unexplainable inside them. He had to learn to consider it as Michel had.

A clenching of all one’s muscles did not actually impede or redirect one’s thoughts. He groaned and took off again in search of Maya.

Another time, thinking about aspects of this same problem, he went down to the corniche and found Maya in one of her usual haunts, and they went out to a bench to sit and watch the sunset, bags of food in hand, and Sax announced to her, “The thing that makes us specifically human doesn’t exist.”

“How so?”

“Well, we are just animals, mostly. But we have a consciousness which sets us apart, because we have language and memory.”

“Those exist.”

“True, but the only reason they work is because of the past. We remember the past, we learn from it, and everything we have learned is in the past. And the past, being past, properly speaking does not exist. Its presence in us is an illusion only. So the thing that makes us human does not exist!”

“I’ve always maintained that,” Maya said. “But not for the same reason.”

“Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it.” Sax read that in one of the feral rhapsodies, and went outdoors for a walk.

Down on the corniche he saw that a front had passed. Across the sky black clouds pulled east. The evening sun broke underneath them, dull silver at the storm’s west edge; the air over the city was still and dim, dark air between dark planes of sea and cloud. Looking at reflections of the city across the harbor he noticed that the sea’s surface was rippled in some places, flat in others, and the boundaries between the two were delineated with amazing sharpness, though presumably the wind was the same over both. This was puzzling, until it occurred to him that there could be a thin film of oil damping the ripples in the flat patches. Someone’s boat engine must be leaking. If he could get a sample from the water, and from everyone’s boats, he could probably ascertain which one it was.

In preparation for his sea trip with Ann, Sax did research on the various psychological studies of the personality of the scientist. He discovered that Maslow had divided scientists into cool and warm types, which he characterized as green and red in color—to avoid assigning any unwanted value judgments, he said, which made Sax smile. Green scientists were reductive, lovers of lawful explanation, tough-minded, looking for regularity, explanation, parsimony, simplicity. Red scientists on the other hand were expansive, warm, intuitive, mystical, soft-minded, and in search of peak moments of “suchness understanding.”

“Dear me,” Sax said. He went out for a walk. Up the alleyways above Paradeplatz a row of red roses was in bloom, and he stopped to inspect the perfect petals of one young rose, nose a centimeter from it. Such velvet dark reds, there against a stucco wall. Okay, he said, here I am. I wonder what makes that red.

Cosmology and particle physics had become a single science before Sax was born, and in all the time since the hope of both sides was for the grand unified theory which would reconcile quantum mechanics and gravity, and even time itself. And yet his whole life physics had been getting more and more complicated, with postulated microdimensions taken as fact, and symmetries of fairly simple but scarily small strings invoked as explanations even though they were many magnitudes of size smaller than could ever be observed—the unobservability was itself mathematically provable. Thus the search for a final unifying theory was, as Lindley noted, a kind of religious quest; or the messianic movement in the religion that the scientific worldview had become. Then he met Bao Shuyo.

Over a winter in Da Vinci Bao took him through the latest in superstring theory, step by step. The idea of extra microdimensions was straightforward. There were seven extra dimensions but all very small, and arranged in a thing called the “seven sphere.” Then to describe a point in our conventional four dimensions one had to add coordinates in all of the extra seven dimensions, and various combinations determined what kind of particle it was, muon, top quark, etc. But these points are just the ends of strings, and the basic quantummechanical unit is a vibration in the whole string. Trying to do calculations of these produced many faster-than-light problems unless twenty-six dimensions were invoked, and so they were. But that stage of the theory yielded only bosons and not fermions. A derivative of the twenty-six-dimensional string was invoked which existed in ten dimensions, the other sixteen having become properties of the string itself, and part of the geometry of supersymmetry. But the sixteen string dimensions could be combined in a huge variety of ways, all equally possible, none preferred. Then mathematical considerations had shown that of all the possibilities, only two of them, SO(32) and E⁸XE⁸, exhibited handedness rather than mirror symmetry. And the universe is right-handed. That only two possibilities remained out of the myriad possibilities was startling. But there matters rested, until this winter, when Bao had shown that E⁸×E⁸ was the preferred formulation, and that if you pursued the implications and advanced this formulation, you had quantum mechanics, gravity, and time all explained in a single theory, complex but clear, and powerful throughout.

“So beautiful it must be true,” Bao concluded.

Sax nodded. “But that beauty is its only proof.”

“What do you mean?”

“It is otherwise unconfirmable by experiment. It is the beauty of the mathematics that confirms it.”

“As well as matching all physical observations we can make! That’s more than just math, Sax. That’s everything we’ve ever seen, all conformable to this single theory!”

“True.” He nodded uneasily. It was a good point. And yet. . . . “I think it needs to predict something we have not yet seen, that happens because it and not any other explanation is the right one.”

She shook her head, dismayed by his stubbornness.

“Otherwise it’s just a myth,” he said.

“The Planck realm will never be observable,” she said.

“Well. A very beautiful myth. And valuable, believe me I am quite convinced of that. Perhaps we now say we have reached the end of what physics can explain. And so . . .”

“And so?”

“What next?”

Imbibition is the tendency of granular rock to imbibe a fluid under the force of capillary attraction, in the absence of any pressure. Sax became convinced that this was a quality of mind as well. He would say of someone, “She has great imbibition” and people would say, “Ambition?” and he would reply, “No, imbibition.” “Inhibition?” “No, imbibition.” And because of his stroke people would assume he was just having speech trouble again.

Long walks around Odessa at the end of the day. Aimless, without destination, except perhaps for an evening rendezvous with Maya, down on the corniche. Sauntering through the streets and alleyways. Sax liked Thoreau’s explanation for the word saunter: from à la Saint Terre, describing pilgrims on their way to the Holy Land. There goes a Saint Terrer, a saunterer, a Holy Lander. But it was a false etymology, apparently spread from a book called Country Words, by S. and E. Ray, 1691. Although since the origins of the word were obscure, it might in fact be the true story.

Sax would have liked to be sure about that, one way or the other. It made the word itself a problem to mull over. But as he sauntered Odessa thinking about it, he did not see how the matter could be investigated any further, the etymologists having been thorough. The past was resistant to research.

Automorphism; idiomorphism. These were qualities Sax found underconsidered in Michel’s personality theories. He said to Michel, “We make ourselves.”

Altruistic behavior will tend to be chosen when k> 1/r, where k is the ratio of recipient benefit to altruist’s cost, and r is the coefficient of relationship between altruist and recipient, summed for all recipients. In the classical version of the theory r is the proportion of genes in two individuals that are identical because of common descent. But what if common descent is taken to mean the same phylum or order? What if r is not a function of common descent but of common interest? Sax found the social sciences very interesting.

For a time after he had mostly recovered from his stroke, Sax read quite a lot about strokes and brain damage, trying to learn more about what had happened to him. One case, famous in the literature, concerned a brilliant student at the polytechnic in Moscow, wounded in the head during World War Two. This young Russian, Zasetsky by name, had suffered gross trauma to the left parietal-occipital area (like Sax), and could no longer perceive his right visual field, could not add, knew not the order of the seasons, and so on; his symbolic and conceptual faculties had been crippled. But his frontal lobes had remained intact (as had Sax’s), leaving him his will, his desires, his sensitivity to experience. And so he had spent the rest of his days struggling to write down an account of his mentation, for the benefit of science, also for something to do; it was his life project, at first titled “The Story of a Terrible Injury,” later changed to “I’ll Fight On.” He wrote every day for twenty-five years.

Sax read this journal with immense feeling for Zasetsky, the sentences sometimes causing a terrible stab to the heart, the perceptions in them were so familiar: “I’m in a kind of fog all the time, like a heavy half-sleep. . . . Whatever I do remember is scattered, broken down into disconnected bits and pieces. That is why I react so abnormally to every word and idea, every attempt to understand the meaning of words. . . . I was killed March 2, 1943, but because of some vital power of my organism, I miraculously remained alive.”

That hand on his wrist, how to tell it!

As Ann and Sax were being blown around in the storm, Sax felt an updraft in the thunderhead drawing them up and concluded they had escaped drowning at sea only to be thrown right up out of the sky. The cockpit dome would probably hold even against the vacuum of space, but the cold would kill them. It was too loud to remember anything, but he wanted to remember to say to Ann, We ask Why all our lives and never get past Because. We stop after that word, in disarray. I wish I had spent more time with you.