Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn (13 page)

No observer-independent history
, I scrawled in my notebook, and on further contemplation underlined it. I wasn't sure exactly what it meant, but I had a hunch that it was going to be important.

That evening I boarded the bus headed for the banquet. I took a seat next to a man who was also wearing a press badge.

“Michael Brooks, editor at
New Scientist
,” he introduced himself with a charming British accent.

I recognized the name immediately. I was an avid
New Scientist
reader and a recent article,
“Life's a Sim and Then You're Deleted,” had made such an impression on me that I had torn it out of the magazine and pinned it to the wall above my computer. Written by one Michael Brooks, the article had discussed a paper by the philosopher Nick Bostrom, who argued that in all likelihood we are living inside a Matrixstyle computer simulation. Bostrom's idea was that eventually our computers will be powerful enough to simulate conscious creatures, like humans. When that day comes, future programmers will be able to simulate entire societies, even entire universes, and watch how various scenarios play out, either for research purposes or as some kind of
hyperreality TV. Once one simulated reality is created, hundreds, thousands, millions will follow. So given the inevitable existence of millions of simulated worlds, the odds that we are living in the one true original reality are pretty close to zero.

In the article, Brooks had wondered if there would be any way to tell whether this was in fact a simulated world. Programmers, he reasoned, wouldn't bother wasting resources designing every last microscopic feature of the fake reality. If the simulated observers start poking around, the programmers could always fill in the gaps on the fly. Thus, he argued, the microscopic realm of a simulated world might look a little nonsensical. “If you've ever wrestled with the weird nature of quantum mechanics, alarm bells may just be starting to ring,” Brooks wrote.

I told Brooks that I was a freelance writer; we chatted about cosmology and the lectures we had seen so far.

“Pitch me some articles,” he said as the bus pulled up to the Railroad Museum. “I reject ninety percent of the pitches I get, so don't be discouraged, just keep pitching.”

“I will!” I promised.

As I stepped off the bus into the warm California evening, I couldn't help thinking it was all too good to be true. That this probably
was
a simulation. Then I remembered how Brooks's article had ended. The best chance for this to be the true reality, he had said, is if humanity should destroy itself before our computers grow sufficiently powerful to simulate complex societies and conscious minds. I thought back to yesterday's lunch, and Rees's laundry list of doomsday scenarios. Maybe Sir Buzzkill had the answer to reality after all.

Nervous at the thought of having to socialize with the world's most eminent physicists, I quickly downed two glasses of wine. Big mistake. My tolerance for alcohol was embarrassingly low. Two glasses of wine—I might as well have been doing shots of tequila.

Eventually everyone began sitting down for dinner, quickly filling up the round, linen-clad tables that had been set for the occasion. I grabbed the first empty seat I could find. I smiled politely, but the
physicists talked amongst themselves as the waiters topped off our wineglasses and then left to fetch the salads.

Emboldened by the wine, I decided to strike up some conversation. “Did any of you read the profile of João Magueijo in
Discover
magazine?” I asked. I had read the piece on the plane ride over. It was the first thing I could think of. The article had discussed Magueijo's theory that the speed of light had been much faster in the very early universe. He had proposed the idea as an alternative to inflation, though I couldn't figure out the difference between the two. Speed up light but keep spacetime expanding at subluminal speeds, or keep the speed of light the same and speed up the expansion of spacetime—they seemed to be two ways of looking at the same thing, so why muck with Einstein? “Is his variable speed of light theory just bogus?”

The physicist directly across from me gave me a stern look. “I hope not, since I was his collaborator on that theory.”

No one said a word.

Oh, dear God. Where were people's name tags when you needed them? The physicist, I now realized, was Andy Albrecht, the second man behind the variable speed of light. Had I really just suggested that his theory was bogus? I frantically searched my mind for some way to recover. Why did the magazine have to showcase a giant photo of Magueijo's face without ever showing Albrecht? I wanted to apologize. I wanted to explain that I was just trying to make conversation, that I had some brute allegiance to Einstein, that I didn't really think his theory was bogus, that perhaps I was having some kind of stroke. Instead I said this: “Wow, he really stole your spotlight.”

Had that seriously just come out of my mouth? What the hell was I doing?
Just shut up
, I urged myself.
Just stop saying words.

“Like I really care,” Albrecht said, annoyed.

I nodded and smiled. I wanted to crawl underneath the table and hide. I scanned the room, pathetically searching for an escape route.

And that's when a telepathic miracle occurred. From across the expansive room, through a sea of physicists I had yet to accidentally insult, I locked eyes with Timothy Ferris.

Ferris stood up, looked directly at me, and gave a little nod toward the back door. Without saying a word, I stood up from the table, walked
quickly to the back of the room, and quietly slipped through the glass door. He was outside waiting. “My car is around the corner,” he said.

Okay, I thought, this has to be a simulation.

We walked together down the empty street. Ferris asked me whom I was writing for. “Well, I wrote my last article for
Scientific American
,” I said. I didn't mention that it had also been my first. “How about you?”

“I'm doing a piece for
The New Yorker
,” he said.

I felt unworthy just sharing the sidewalk.

We rounded the corner and parked there on the otherwise deserted cobblestone street was a small, shiny Porsche. I looked around, searching for some other car, the kind that would belong to a writer. But Ferris pushed a button on his keychain and the Porsche beeped a friendly greeting in reply. Seriously? I thought. A writer? This pretend career was looking better by the minute.

I climbed into the passenger seat and buckled my seatbelt. Ferris revved the engine and turned on the stereo, cranking the volume. The car filled with the pounding of a snare drum, the wailing verve of an electric guitar.

“Is this Bowie?”

Ferris smiled, grabbed hold of the stick shift, and peeled out onto the street. The force of acceleration pinned me to my seat, and as he navigated the tiny streets of old Sacramento like a racetrack, Ferris showed no signs of slowing down. Soon we were speeding down the California freeway, weaving in and out of traffic, blazing through the warm night air, a blur of palm trees passing by my window.

Five minutes later, we arrived back in Davis. Ferris dropped me off at my hotel and told me to keep in touch. I stepped out onto the sidewalk, unsteady on my feet, bummed that the party was over but happy to be alive and on solid ground.

I pulled my cell phone from my purse and hit the speed dial to call my father.

It was the last day of the conference. I didn't want it to end. I had learned so much I thought my brain might overflow, but I wanted to
keep going, push further. I couldn't help thinking that something was missing in the way everyone was talking about the universe. Something … quantum.

“Any satisfactory theory of quantum cosmology has to refer to observations that can be made by observers inside the universe,” Markopoulou had told me. But inflation referred to spacetime regions beyond our observable universe, and worse, eternal inflation conjured an entire multiverse that no one, not even in principle, could ever observe. The fact was, the standard model of cosmology was not a quantum cosmology. Sure, the inflaton's descent from the false vacuum was a quantum process, but otherwise the whole thing had a distinctly classical feel. That had been Hawking's point: “The bottom-up approach to cosmology is basically classical [but] the origin of the universe was a quantum event.” I needed to find out more. What was his “top-down” cosmology all about? And how did it account for the fact that we're stuck inside the universe?

I also couldn't stop thinking about my conversation with Guth. All signs pointed to a universe that came from nothing, he had said. A universe that
is
nothing. And the most exciting part was that he presented it as a falsifiable claim: find one nonzero conserved quantity and nothing goes out the window. If the universe is nothing, I thought, then everyone's been walking around asking the wrong question. The question isn't how you get something from nothing. The question is, why does nothing
look
like something?

With so many legendary thinkers in one room, the monumental weight of the dawning of cosmology's golden age had inspired the conference organizers to hire a photographer to take a group photo, one sure to go down in the annals of science history.

“At the break, we're going to ask everyone to go outside and assemble on the steps for the photo,” Albrecht announced from the stage.

While the physicists slowly gathered on the steps, I snuck away from the crowd to call my father.

“What's the scoop?” he asked.

“They're all worried about this low quadrupole thing,” I said, speaking just above a whisper like a spy reporting back to Reality Headquarters. “This lack of fluctuation power at large angular scales in the CMB. It's almost as if the universe isn't big enough to hold them.”

“How big would it have to be?” he asked.

“That's just the thing. It's looking like it's only the size of the observable universe.”

“Well, that would be rather suspicious,” he said.

“Exactly! It's crazy.… Shit, I gotta go. They're taking this group photo of all the physicists and I want to snap a few pictures of my own.”

“Get in the picture!”

“Mom?”

“Get in it!” she repeated, half Jewish mother, half weirdly bossy cheerleader.

“Okay, okay,” I said, humoring her as I rolled my eyes.

But as I stood off to the side with the other journalists watching the physicists assume their positions, I couldn't get my mother's voice out of my head. Why couldn't I be in the picture? There were no physics bodyguards milling around—who was going to stop me? Frankly, who was even going to notice?

I looked over at the photographer; he was still fiddling with his camera. As inconspicuously as possible, staring down at my feet so that no one's eyes would catch mine, I slunk along the side of the steps and quickly made my way to the back corner of the crowd. I was sure no one would notice, and that even though I'd barely be visible in the photo, I'd be able to point to a tiny bit of shoulder peeking out from behind someone important and say, “Look, that was me.”

The photographer finally looked up and put his eye to the camera. Everyone held a collective breath and smiled. But then he paused, lowered the camera and scanned the crowd looking for … Jesus,
me
?

“You there!” he shouted, pointing toward me. If there had been a record playing, it would have come to a screeching halt. I felt my face growing hot. Was he going to out me as a fraud right here in front of everyone? Announce that not only was I not a physicist, I wasn't really even a journalist? That I was on a covert mission to figure out the nature
of reality, and that I was willing to go to any lengths necessary to do it? How did he know? And where the hell was Timothy Ferris with the getaway car?

“You! You're too short,” he shouted. “Get down in front.”

Avoiding all eye contact once again, I shuffled down toward the front, where he promptly grabbed me by the shoulder and inserted me into the spot of his choosing—front row and nearly center. To my right was Guth, and one over to his right was Hawking. Why not just have me sit right on Hawking's lap? I thought. “You there,” Guth muttered to me, imitating the photographer, “Your nose is crooked—get that fixed!” I laughed gratefully.

“Okay, people, here we go!” the photographer shouted. And with that, there was nothing left to do but smile.

Not so sly
,
at the Davis Meeting on Cosmic Inflation
,
2003
Debbie Aldridge, UC Davis

Back in my apartment, I couldn't get Nick Bostrom's simulation argument out of my mind. If the world around us really was a virtual reality simulation on a computer living in some higher reality, could we ever find out? Would it even matter?