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Earth can make. We can install it in a standard Solar System liner and zip
around like hornets. Make a planetary tour in months instead of decades. With
a fully equipped engineering plant, we could put it all together in sixty or
seventy days."
"A ship like that would be very bright, visible across the Solar System," I
said. "How about something that won't upset Earth?"
Charles put his elbows on the table. "Of course," he said. "Stephen and I have
been planning a number of demonstrations, with varying degrees of
sophistication. Experts to yahoos. Bring them on."
He was being a shade too flippant, given the nature of our problem, but I had
tired of bringing him up short. "I'm still not well versed on physics," I
said.
"You really should be," he chided. "I don't use one, but I could recommend a
good enhancement. Martian-
made."
"No thank you. Not right now." I made sure the others were still out of
hearing. "But I'm curious. How
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Bear, Greg - Moving Mars UC FR.htm did you manage all this?"
Charles leaned forward, face as bright and eager as a child's, and placed his
hands on the table. "I've always wrestled with stupid problems the really big
problems. It's stupid to wrestle with them, because many of them circle back
to the language used to state them and that's a fool's chase.
"But one problem seemed truly big and truly interesting fundamental.
Mathematics is powerful. We can create equations to use as tools to describe
nature. We can use them to
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predict what will happen. What gives mathematics such power? It took me years
to come to a conclusion, and when I did, I
told nobody because the conclusion was so simple, and I was too young, and
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there was no way to prove anything.
"So I waited. I studied the Ice Pit, all I could find about William Pierce and
his work, his fatal discovery. I knew that my simple solution fit into his
theories explained and supplemented them, in fact. I joined other people who
seemed in tune with me, worked with them and prodded them ... My ideas became
testable.
"Mathematics is made of systems of rules. The universe seems to operate by a
set of rules, as well not so precisely, but then, measurements aren't ever
precise in nature. That in itself should have given everybody a clue.
'The rules of math give it the quality of a computational machine. We can
design computers using mathematical concepts and rules, because math is a
computational system. The computer's operation is not so different from math
itself it's math operating in light and matter. And math is useful in
describing and predicting nature because nature itself uses a set of rules.
Nature behaves as if it is a computational system.
"When we do math in our heads, we store results and the rules themselves in
our heads or on paper, or in other kinds of memory. Our brains become the
computer.
"The universe stores the results of its operations as nature. I do not confuse
nature with reality. At a fundamental level, reality is the set of rules the
results of whose interactions are nature. Part of the problem of reconciling
quantum mechanics with larger-scale phenomena comes from mistaking results for
rules, habit built into our brains, good for survival, but a not for physics.
"The results change if the rules change. Our universe evolved ages ago out of
a chaos of possible rules ... An original foundation or ground that simply
bubbled with possibilities. Sets of rules vanished in the chaos, because they
were not consistent they could not survive against more rigorous, 318
Greg Bear meaningful sets. I don't mean 'survive' in time, either they simply
canceled and negated in a time-free eternity. But sets of rules did come into
existence which were not immediately contradictory, which could work as
free-standing, computational matrixes.
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"Those which strongly contradicted whose rules could not produce long-lived
results were simply not
'recorded.' They vanished. Those whose results could interact and not
contradict, at least for a while, survived.
"The universe we see uses an evolved, self-consistent set of rules, and the
rules of mathematics can be made to more or less agree.
"Mathematics is a computational matrix. Its power to describe and predict is
no puzzle if the observed universe is the result of a computational matrix. No
mystery a fundamental clue."
I listened to him carefully, trying to follow his reasoning. Some of it was
clear enough, but I could not track his leaps of intuition.
Charles squinted up at the ceiling. "I've never told anybody that before," he
said. "You're looking at my theoretical underwear, Casseia."
"I'm not embarrassed," I said. "I hardly know what I'm seeing."
"We've been around and around about responsibility for discovery, about the
problems descriptor theory has caused you and everybody else. I thought I'd
tell you more about my excuses. God is not necessary in all this but that
doesn't mean I haven't been searching for God. I just haven't found the key
yet. Maybe there isn't any. But when I contemplate these things, when I work
on these problems, that is the only time
I feel worthy.
"I've lived my life well enough, and I'm no monster, but I have sufficient
emotional problems for any human. When I work, I transcend those problems. I
am pure. It's like a drug. I can't stop thinking just to become responsible
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and put a halt to change. I need the purity of that kind of thought, that kind
MOVING MARS 319
of discovery. I may never know a redemptive love, I may never have complete
self-understanding, but I
will have this, at the very least: the moments when I've asked questions about
reality and gotten meaningful answers."
"When did you first think your theory was justified?" I asked.
"I put the Olympians together. Stephen was crucial with the politics,
especially when .we went to work for Cailetet. First, we duplicated William
Pierce's experiment. We redesigned his apparatus, improved field damping, used
more efficient force disorder pumps. We used a smaller sample of atoms. And we
brought the atoms down to absolute zero. At zero temperature, the Bell
Continuum becomes coextensive with space-time. They merge. Descriptors within
particles can be changed."
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"That's all?" I asked.
"That's something all by itself," Charles said. "But you're right. It still
wouldn't be enough ... Earth thinks descriptors are simple yes-no switches.
But I decided they couldn't be simple. First, I tried to think of them as
smoothly varying functions. That didn't work, either. They weren't yes-no
toggles, but they weren't smooth waves, either. They were codependent. Each
referred to the others. They networked.
Every particle having mass contains the same number of descriptors. But that
number is not an integer. It isn't even rational. Descriptors obey Quantum
Logic from beginning to end." He looked at me with some concern. "Am I boring
you?"
"Not at all," I said. I found myself attracted by the sound of his voice,
boyishly enthused and powerful at once.
Children playing with matches. The fascination of fire.
"If you want to tweak a descriptor, you must first persuade it to exist,"
Charles said. "You have to separate it out from the cloud of potential
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