The Portable Atheist

JOHN UPDIKE From Roger’s Version

“You go, sweetheart. O.K., young fella, hit me with those theories of yours.”

To Dale at the moment these theories are as hatefully irrelevant and obscure as the exact words being exchanged in the cheerful cacophony of these many rooms of mine, where the word “Bitburg” keeps sounding like a bird chirp. Esther’s closeness, and the ambiguity of their conversation, have tantalized him; his renewed glimpse and scent of the woman-lover, that radiant animal who waits crouching at the head of the stairs, at the end of all these crooked, noisy, obstructed social corridors, have left him dazed. His mind aches like an overexercised body. Yet he politely offers, as on the other side of the world priests peddle candles in the clamor of the weary holy places, the cosmic arguments: the hugely long odds against the big bang’s having worked out so well, the horizon, smoothness, and flatness problems, the incredible necessary precision of the weak-and strong-force constants, not to mention that of the gravitational-coupling constant and the neutron mass, were any of which different by even a few ten-thousandths the universe would have been too explosive or diffuse, too short-lived or too utterly homogenous to contain galaxies, stars, planets, life, and Man.

Kriegman hears all this out with bursts of rapid nodding that bounce his chins on the knot of his necktie and wag the blossoms of the azalea garland he still wears. As if better to understand, he has put on large squarish horn-rims, trifocals; behind their lenses, between sips from his flexible plastic glass of white wine (Almaden Mountain Rhine, $8.87 per three-liter jug at Boulevard Bottle), his small eyes jump and change size as they jiggle among the three levels of focal length. “Well,” he says at last, smiling like a man who even as he talks is listening to a background music with sentimental associations, “nobody denies the big bang has a few wrinkles we don’t comprehend yet, we may never comprehend for that matter; for example, I was reading the other day that even the oldest star clusters show traces of the heavy elements, which is strange because there’s no older generation of stars to have cooked them up and as you know the particle mechanics of the big bang could only have supplied helium and hydrogen, right?”

Dale wonders if he’s supposed to say, “Right.” He foresees that he will not have to say very much.

“Listen, there’s always going to be wrinkles,” Kriegman is telling him with a fatherly gruffness. “This primal fireball et cetera, and all this field theory in those first fractions of a second, we’re talking about virtually incomprehensible events, ridiculously long ago. These astrophysicists are just whistling ‘Dixie’ three-quarters of the time.”

“Right,” Dale says. “That’s what I say.”

“Yeah, but no need to go all obscurantist either. Let me give you a homework assignment. Want a homework assignment?”

Dale nods, feeling weak, with a child’s grateful weakness when he is told he is sick and must be put to bed.

“Look up in Sky and Telescope, one of last summer’s issues I think it was, a helluva funny piece in this connection they reprinted from some book in which a bunch of rotifers—you know what rotifers are, don’t you?—microscopic aquatic doohickeys with an anterior retractile disc of cilia that makes them look like their heads are spinning—of course they aren’t really, any more than owls can turn their heads clear around, it just gives that impression—anyway, a bunch of these rotifers are imagined in learned conversation concerning why their puddle had to be exactly the way it was—temperature, alkalinity, mud at the bottom sheltering methane-producing bacteria, all the rest of it—it was clever as hell like I said—and from the fact that if any of these things were even a little bit different—if the heat necessary to vaporize water was any lower, for example, or the freezing temperature of water any higher—this Little Puddlian Philosophical Society, I think it was called, but you can check that when you look it up, deduced that the whole operation was providential and obviously the universe existed to produce their little puddle and them! That’s more or less what you’re trying to tell me, young fella, except you ain’t no rotifer!”

Kriegman’s constant benign smile widens into an audible chuckle. His lips are curious in being the exact same shade of swarthiness as his face, like muscles in a sepia anatomy print. As he raises his glass to these exemplary lips Dale intervenes with “I think, sir—”

“Fuck the ‘sir’ stuff. Name’s Myron. Not Ron, mind you. Myron.”

“I think it’s a little more than that, what I’m trying to say; the puddle analogy is as if the anthropic principle were being argued from the Earth as opposed to the other planets, which of course we can now see, if we ever doubted it, aren’t suitable for life. In that sense, yes, we’re here because we’re here. But in the case of the universe, where you have only one, why should, say, the observed recessional velocity so exactly equal the necessary escape velocity?”

“How do you know there’s only one universe? There might be zillions. There’s no logical reason to say the universe we can observe is the only one.”

“I know there’s no logical reason—”

“Are we talking logic or not? Don’t start getting all intuitive and subjective on me, my pal, because I’m pretty much a pragmatist myself on some scores. If it helps you through the night to believe the moon is green cheese—”

“I don’t—”

“Don’t believe it is? Good for you. I don’t either. Those rocks they brought back didn’t test out as green cheese. But my daughter Florence does; some zonked-out punk with purple hair tells her it is when she’s as stoned as he is. She thinks she’s a Tibetan Buddhist, except on weekends. Her sister Miriam talks about joining some Sufi commune over in New York State. I don’t let it get to me, it’s their lives. But you, if I size you up right, young fella, you’re pulling my leg.”

“I—”

“You really give a damn about cosmology, I’ll tell you where the interesting work is being done right now: it’s the explanation of how things popped up out of nothing. The picture’s filling in from a number of directions, as clear as the hand in front of your face.” He tipped his head back to see Dale better and his eyes seemed to multiply in the trifocals. “As you know,” he said, “inside the Planck length and the Planck duration you have this space-time foam where the quantum fluctuations from matter to non-matter really have very little meaning, mathematically speaking. You have a Higgs field tunneling in a quantum fluctuation through the energy barrier in a false-vacuum state, and you get this bubble of broken symmetry that by negative pressure expands exponentially, and in a couple of microseconds you can have something go from next to nothing to the size and mass of the observable present universe. How about a drink? You look pretty dry, standing there.”

Kriegman takes another plastic glass of white wine from the tray one of the Irish girls is reluctantly passing, and Dale shakes his head, refusing. His stomach has been nervous all this spring. Pastrami and milk don’t mix.

My dear friend and neighbor Myron Kriegman takes a lusty swallow, licks his smiling lips, and continues in his rapid rasping voice. “O.K.; still, you say, you have to begin with something before you have a Higgs field; how do you get to almost nothing from absolutely nothing? Well, the answer turns out to be good old simple geometry. You’re a mathematician, you’ll dig this. What do we know about the simplest structures yet, the quarks? We know—come on, fella, think.”

Dale gropes. The party noise has increased, a corner high in his stomach hurts, Esther is laughing on the other side of the living room, beneath the knob-and-spindle header of the archway, exhaling smoke in a plume, her little face tipped back jauntily. “They come in colors and flavors,” he says, “and carry positive or negative charges in increments of a third—”

Kriegman pounces: “You’ve got it! They invariably occur in threes, and cannot be pried apart. Now what does that suggest to you? Think. Three things, inseparable.”

Father, Son, and Holy Ghost floats across Dale’s field of inner vision but does not make it to his lips. Nor does Id, Ego, and Superego. Nor Kriegman’s three daughters.

“The three dimensions of space!” Kriegman proclaims. “They can’t be pried apart, either. Now, let’s ask ourselves, what’s so hot about three dimensions? Why don’t we live in two, or four, or twenty-four?”

Odd that the man would mention those almost-magic, almost-revelatory numbers that Dale used to circle painstakingly in red; he now sees them to have been illusions, ripples in nothingness such as Kriegman is rhapsodizing about.

“You’re not thinking. Because,” the answer gleefully runs, “you need no more or less than three dimensions to make a knot, a knot that tightens on itself and won’t pull apart, and that’s what the ultimate particles are—knots in space-time. You can’t make a knot in two dimensions because there’s no over or under, and—here’s the fascinating thing, see if you can picture it—you can make a ravelling in four dimensions but it isn’t a knot, it won’t hold, it will just pull apart, it won’t persist. Hey, you’re going to ask me—I can see it in your face—what’s this concept, persistence? For persistence you need time, right? And that’s the key right there: without time you don’t have anything, and if time was two-dimensional instead of one, you wouldn’t have anything either, since you could turn around in it and there wouldn’t be any causality. Without causality, there wouldn’t be a universe, it would keep reversing itself. I know this stuff must be pretty elementary to you, I can see from the way you keep looking over my shoulder.”

“No, I just—”

“If you’ve changed your mind about wanting a drink, it’s not Esther’s going to get it for you, you should ask one of the girls.”

Dale blushes, and tries to focus on this tireless exposition, though he feels like a knot in four dimensions, unravelling. “I beg your pardon,” he says, “how did you say we get from nothing to something?”

Kriegman lightly pats himself on the top of his head to make sure the garland is still in place. “O.K. Good question. I was just filling in the geometry so you can see the necessity behind space-time as it is and don’t go getting all teleological on me. A lesser number of spatial dimensions, it just so happens, couldn’t provide enough juxtapositions to get molecules of any complexity, let alone, say, brain cells. More than four, which is what you have with space-time, the complexity increases but not significantly: four is plenty, sufficient. O.K.?”

Dale nods, thinking of Esther and myself, himself and Verna. Juxtapositions.

“So,” says Kriegman. “Imagine nothing, a total vacuum. But wait! There’s something in it! Points, potential geometry. A kind of dust of structureless points. Or, if that’s too woolly for you, try ‘a Borel set of points not yet assembled into a manifold of any particular dimensionality.’ Think of this dust as swirling; since there’s no dimension yet, no nearness or farness, it’s not exactly swirling as you and I know swirling but, anyway, some of them blow into straight lines and then vanish, because there’s nothing to hold the structure. Same thing if they happen, by chance—all this is chance, blind chance it has to be, Jesus”—Kriegman is shrinking, growing stooped; his chins are melting more solidly into his chest; he bobs like a man being given repeated blows on the back of his head—“if they configurate into two dimensions, into three, even into four where the fourth isn’t time; they all vanish, just accidents in this dust of points, nothing could be said to exist, until—even the word ‘until’ is deceptive, implying duration, which doesn’t exist yet—until bingo! Space-time. Three spatial dimensions, plus time. It knots. It freezes. The seed of the universe has come into being. Out of nothing. Out of nothing and brute geometry, laws that can’t be otherwise, nobody handed them to Moses, nobody had to. Once you’ve got that seed, that little itty-bitty mustard seed—ka-boom! Big Bang is right around the corner.”

“But—” Dale is awed not so much by what this man says as by his fervor, the light of faith in his little tripartite spectacles, the tan monotone of his face and its cascading folds, his receding springy hair, his thick eyebrows thrust outward and up like tiny rhinoceros horns. This man is living, he is on top of his life, life is no burden to him. Dale feels crushed beneath his beady, shuttling, joyful, and unembarrassed gaze. “But,” he weakly argues, “‘dust of points,’ ‘freezes,’ ‘seed’—this is all metaphor.”

“What isn’t?” Kriegman says. “Like Plato says, shadows at the back of the cave. Still, you can’t quit on reason; next thing you’ll get somebody like Hitler or Bonzo’s pal running things. Look. You know computers. Think binary. When matter meets antimatter, both vanish, into pure energy. But both existed; I mean, there was a condition we’ll call ‘existence.’ Think of one and minus one. Together they add up to zero, nothing, nada, niente, right? Picture them together, then picture them separating—peeling apart.” He hands Dale his drink and demonstrates separating with his thick hairy hands palm to palm, then gliding upward and apart. “Get it?” He makes two fists at the level of his shoulders. “Now you have something, you have two somethings, where once you had nothing.”

“But in the binary system,” Dale points out, handing back the squeezable glass, “the alternative to one isn’t minus one, it’s zero. That’s the beauty of it, mechanically.”

“O.K. Gotcha. You’re asking me, What’s this minus one? I’ll tell you. It’s a plus one moving backward in time. This is all in the space-time foam, inside the Planck duration, don’t forget. The dust of points gives birth to time, and time gives birth to the dust of points. Elegant, huh? It has to be. It’s blind chance, plus pure math. They’re proving it, every day. Astronomy, particle physics, it’s all coming together. Relax into it, young fella. It feels great. Space-time foam.”

Kriegman is joking; Dale prefers him zealous, evangelical on behalf of nonbelief. Esther has vanished from the archway. New guests keep arriving: Noreen Davis, the black receptionist who so smilingly gave him those forms seven months ago, with her bald co-worker in the Divinity School front office, and somebody who looks like Amy Eubank but can’t be, his recognition apparatus must be out of whack. He masochistically asks Kriegman, “How about the origin of life? Those odds are pretty impossible, too. I mean, to get a self-replicating organism with its own energy system.”

Kriegman snorts; he twists his face downward as if suddenly very shy; his whole body beneath its garland, in its dirty corduroy jacket with patched elbows and loose buttons, appears to melt and then to straighten again into a bearing almost military. “Now that just happens to be right up my alley,” he tells Dale. “That other stuff was just glorified bullshit, way out of my field, I don’t know what the hell a Borel set of points are. But I happen to know exactly how life arose; it’s brand-new news, at least to the average layman like yourself. Clay. Clay is the answer. Crystal formation in fine clays provided the template, the scaffolding, for the organic compounds and the primitive forms of life. All life did, you see, was take over the phenotype that crystalline clays had evolved on their own, the genetic pass-down factor being entirely controlled by the crystal growth and epitaxy, and the mutation factor deriving from crystal defects, which supply, you don’t need me to tell you, the stable alternative configurations you need for information storage. So, you’re going to ask, where’s the evolution? Picture the pore space of a sandstone, young fella. Every rainstorm, all sorts of mineral solutions are percolating through. Various types of replicating crystals are present, each reproducing its characteristic defects. Some fit together so tightly they form an impervious plug: this is no good. Others are so loose they’re washed away when the rains come: this is no good either. But a third type both hangs in there and lets the geochemical solutions, let’s even call them nutrients, wash through: this is good. This type of crystal multiplies and grows. It grows. Now in that sandstone pore you have a sticky, permeable paste that replicates itself. You have a prototype of life.” Kriegman takes a long swallow of my Almaden and smacks his lips. A half-empty glass sits abandoned on the walnut end table beside the red settee, and my beloved neighbor deftly swaps it with his own, emptied glass.

“But—” Dale says, expecting to be interrupted. “But, you’re going to say, how about us? How were the organic molecules introduced? And why? Well, not to get too technical, some of the amino acids, di- and tricarboxylic acids, make some metal ions, like aluminum, more soluble. This gives us a proto-enzyme. Others, like the polyphosphates, are especially adhesive, which, like I say, has survival value in this prezoic world we’re trying to picture. Heterocyclic bases like adenine have a tendency to stick between the layers of clay; pretty soon, relatively speaking, you’re going to get some RNA-like polymer, with its negatively charged backbone, interacting with the edges of clay particles, which tend to bear a positive charge. Then—listen, I know I’m boring the pants off you, I can see from your eyes you’re dying to mix it up with somebody over my shoulder, maybe one of my girls. Miriam’s the one you might take a shine to, if you don’t mind a little Sufi propaganda; it’s the no-alcohol part of it that I couldn’t hack. Then, as I was saying, once you’ve got something like RNA in not the primordial soup this time—nobody in the know ever was too comfortable with that crackbrained theory: too—what’s the word?—soupy—but a nice crisp paste of clay genes, organic replication is right around the corner, first as a subsystem, a kind of optional extra parallel with the crystal growth, and then taking over with that gene swap I mentioned earlier, and the clay genes falling away, since the organic molecules, mostly carbon, can do the job better, once they’re established. Believe me, pal, it fills a lot of theoretical holes. Nothing to matter, dead matter to life, smooth as silk. God? Forget the old bluffer.”