'You used to travel by plane,' said Perny. 'Why did you
give up?'
They were sitting on a hillside watching a British Airways
flight coming in low to land. Strange how you could tell where the plane
was going, but had no means of knowing where it had come from.
'B.A. always sat me next to Mr. Frank Muir, who
whispered jokes and imitated others making jokes in my ear non stop.
After about an hour he would start repeating himself. An hour later, I'm
blessed if he didn't start again. On the fourth run, I knew the whole
thing off by heart, so I would try to get the joke in first. But that
didn't stop him.'
Wizard Prang shook his head sadly.
'You always told me never to use extraordinary means if
ordinary means would do. You even told me off for boiling an egg without
lighting the gas. And you have the nerve to travel without transport.'
'I know, Shishya,' the wizard accepted. 'The fact is that a jet engine
concentrates power in a way I find obscene. Power, which I have taught
you is love, becomes brutalized when it is channeled into a force. There
are no forces in nature, only fields and we transform power for
meretricious ends.' 'I've been meaning to ask you
about Einstein again. He didn't mind talking about energy as if it were
a force. Then he says that energy can be transformed into mass. It all
seems to work, and people talk quite happily about force fields.'
'Misled by sprinkling iron filings onto a sheet of paper with a bar
magnet underneath,' grumbled Wizard Prang. 'Why do you think that
Einstein's search for a unified field theory was in vain?'
Perny didn't know, and the wizard said he had been seeking
a chimaera.
'There is a unified field: I describe it as power and
know it as love. Einstein knew that the cosmos runs on love, but he
didn't make the right connexion. He was trying to describe the power
field as an amalgamation of forces the electromagnetic, the
gravitational but the forces were abstractions in the first place.'
'Hell,' said Perny. 'How can a force be an abstraction?'
'It's just a way of describing things. You said that energy and mass are
transformable, but you couldn't end up with all energy not reified in
any mass at all, or vice versa, because the abstractions are defined in
terms of each other.'
The grass on which they sat was sparse, and Wizard Prang
drew a line in the dusty earth with the end of his staff.
'Put the abstraction "energy" at one end,' he said, 'and
the abstraction "mass" at the other. The point about transformations is
that they converge on a limit.'
He marked the middle of his line, and then scratched an
arrow leading down to it from the "energy" end, and another arrow leading
up to it from the "mass" end. He dabbed the end of his staff on the
central limit, and looked at her with an eyebrow raised.
'The speed of light,' answered Perny. 'Constraint. E =
mc2.' 'Precisely. Well,' said the Wizard, 'we've got
two of the magical three abstractions why not put in the third?'
'I don't know what it is.' 'Oh, of course you do.
What do you need to impart structure to any combination of energy and
mass?' 'There's some shift of entropy.' Perny spoke
uncertainly. 'Change the sign.'
'Negentropy. That's information.'
Wizard Prang drew another line with his staff in the dust.
It started from the "energy" point, so what he had drawn looked like a
pair of dividers. He put in the pair of converging arrows, and marked the
central point.
'Energy, the abstraction, now relating to information,
the abstraction,' he said. 'What's the constraint this time?'
'I'm still having trouble with the "abstractions" idea. You obviously
need energy to generate information. But why do you need Information to
speak about energy?' 'Give me a practical example of
energy,' demanded the wizard.
Perny looked round, and pointed to the small stream that
was tumbling down the hill to join the river below.
'Will that do?'
He leaned back on the hillside, his hands clasped behind
his head, and closed his eyes.
'Sure. How much energy is there?'
'How am I supposed to measure that?' 'Dunno,' said
the wizard. 'You chose the example.'
Perny got up, and walked across to the stream to review
the problem. Wizard Prang half opened one eye to follow her. She was
wearing a miniskirt today. Five more planes landed
before she came back.
'Do you know what an anastomotic reticulum is?' he asked
her. 'A reticulum is a net,' she said definitively.
'Dr. Johnson's dictionary says that a net is a reticulated fabric,
decussated at regular intervals ...' 'Indeed it does.
What an old fraud he is. Was.' the wizard corrected himself hastily.
'I've been watching these planes landing,' he went on, without so much
as mentioning her legs. 'All those flight paths from all over the world
constitute a reticulum, a net or British Airways would call it a
network.' 'So what's with anas... what you said?'
'Anastomotic. The network branches and reunites, and all these planes
arrive here. But there's no way of knowing where any of them originated'
'You could ask the pilots,' Perny said helpfully.
'You could ask the bucket of water you could take out of that river.'
The wizard was pointing downhill. 'Did the water come out of this
stream, the one you were just looking at, or some other?'
Perny thought for a bit, gathering her knees up under her
chin and clasping her arms round her legs.
'You could make a probability equation' she said at
last. 'The proportion of water from each tributary stream likely to
arrive in the bucket would be a function of the connectivity of the
reticulum. And, of course, of the energy in each stream.'
The last bit was added as if she had borne the point in
mind from the start, which she had not.
'Energy, did you say?' Wizard Prang spoke quizzically,
without emphasis. 'Sure.' She was warming up. 'The
anastomotic reticulum is the network of interlacing stream flowing into
the river, as if seen from the air. The energetics of the system is
provided by the third dimension, don't you see? Some of these hills are
higher than others. The force of the fall of the water will affect the
proportion of each stream that ends up in the bucket.'
'Ah,' said the wizard. 'I have seen only one Japanese jet land here all
afternoon. Four KLM. Two Air Canada ...'
Perny made the connexion.
'We may not know where they all came from, but we know
something about the relative weights of the contributing airlines as
well as being able to plot the reticular structure.'
'Didn't quite get the last word,' the wizard said mendaciously.
'Structure.' 'Ah,' said the wizard.
There was a long pause. Birds began evensong.
'What did you find out about energy in the stream?'
'Oh.' Perny thought back. 'Well, it's not about structure,' she said.
'The force of the water clearly depends on the drop over a given
distance. You could drive a small water wheel from this stream, and
generate enough juice to light our tent.' 'More from
a proper waterfall,' the wizard mused. 'Structure"
yelped Perny. 'It's structure up and down. I told you that the
energetics are three dimensional.' 'Yes, you did. But
you didn't say the energetics were a function of structure.'
'Well, I mean, you know, that's kinda obvious.' 'So.
A three dimensional structure determines the energetics of our watery
system. Or our airport, for that matter. Or any system that involves
potential difference, as in an electrical circuit. Want to include the
brain? The universe?' 'Hang on,' Perny said. 'Let me
back off,' she said. Were both injunctions capable of simultaneous
fulfilment?'
They were in her language, anyway, he reflected, brushing
a fly off his nose. He waited.
'We need a whole bunch of parameters and associated
variables to specify the three dimensional structure that will determine
the system's energetics.' 'And the collective noun
for the bunch of parameters and variables is ... ?'
'Information.'
They started to walk back up the hill to where the tent
was pitched. Colour was draining from the landscape, and the country
sounds were altering pitch.
'You're a rotten old devil.' Perny huddled close and put
her arm around him.
They turned and stood looking down to the river and the
airport, each fed by its own anastomotic reticulum.
'Mass is transformable into energy, but never totally or
vice versa.' Perny was recapitulating. 'The constraint is the speed of
light. Now we say that energy is transformable into information and vice
versa?'
The wizard laughed.
'Demolish all that reticular structure, and just watch
the release of energy,' he said. 'It would be like taking all the
crawling traffic out of a city's infrastructure of small roads, lanes
and byways, and letting It loose without let or hindrance on a
throughway. Whoosh.' 'So where's the constraint?'
He wheeled her into the tent. The constraint was a certain
dryness of the larynx. The water and wine had an ice cooled transit home.
'No, really,' she said: 'the constraint?'
'Imagine,' the wizard sipped his evening beverage, 'that I am sitting in
my accustomed chair in the cottage. What is written on the wall over my
right shoulder?'
She got it at once.
'It's your
translation of the forty seventh psalm. "Be still and know that I am
God."
'But you wrote:'
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He did not need to say anything. After a pause, Perny
spoke again.
'It's entropy. I think I said something of the kind when
all this began,' she added bravely. 'You did, Shishya.
Entropy is the amount of latent energy available for useful work and in
this case being turned into information. When all the energy is
Information again, this is only an abstract possibility everything is
structure. And, as usual, vice versa.' 'I remember
what you told me now: God is the store of the negative entropy of the
universe.' 'Which is to say, God is the Information
that holds the structure up to express energy. Or, of course, the energy
that infuses the structure to Inform It, to hold it down in place.'
'Nice balance,' sald Perny.
Burning incense in a tent can be a trifle overwhelming,
but it keeps the bugs at bay. They did a little tantric meditation by
candlelight. Burning candies in a tent is quite risky, but no more so than
doing tantric yoga. They reflected on the circularity
of things. Perny was tired, but unremitting.
'We are in a tiny universe.' She looked round at the
bits and pieces that made up life in a tent, and accepted its canvas
boundaries. 'I could describe it all for my diary
that would constitute pure information. But outside my diary, the
structure I defined is the real structure of our tiny universe. It
exists. It's here. You say that structure is an interplay between the
abstractions of pure energy and pure information. But, if I now go to
sleep ... ?' 'That's why I say that pure information
is an abstraction. Relax. The structure will remain in place while
you're asleep.' 'What about the abstraction of energy
that informs the structure?'
Perny, though tired, was pretty nimble.
Wizard Prang turned slightly on his side and blew the candle out. |