FAUST’S SHADOW: A Twice-Told Tale Read online

  “What happened yesterday?” She asked.

  I shrugged.

  “Did you eat some candy that made you sick? Did you trip?”

  “I fell backward.”

  “Why?”

  I struggled to answer her, but I still couldn’t explain what I’d seen. I couldn’t explain that I’d felt the universe waking in my mind and my mind waking in the universe. I couldn’t explain that it had been too much all at once. So I gestured toward the holographic galaxy swirling in front of us.

  “What?” Jena asked.

  “I saw this … part of this … more than this,” I began.

  “What do you mean?” Jena asked, a hint of worry returning to her voice.

  Instead of answering her question directly, I picked up my sketch of the cosmic tree and handed it to her. She examined the drawing for a long moment, then she looked back up at the glittering galaxy. I turned my head, looked up into her face and saw the starlight reflected in her eyes.

  “It’s a gift, Johnny,” she whispered. “Don’t ever lose it.”

  “What?” I whispered back.

  “The sense of wonder,” she said.

  I nodded and followed her gaze.

  We sat together in the darkness and watched the swirling stars.

  CHAPTER 4.

  Universal Laws

  The neurologist said I could return to school whenever I felt ready and, the next morning, I did. My sisters and brother walked with me every step of the way and I wondered if Aster had organized the posse to defend me from her imaginary muggers.

  When we turned the corner at the end of our street, I looked up and stopped dead. There it was, the sycamore tree, as huge, and old, and tall as I remembered it. The thin smooth bark, a patchwork of gray and tan, was wrapped so tightly around the bulging trunk and branches that it made the tree seem muscular. And the powerful upper branches seemed to be holding up the sky, along with a vast array of dangling spheres. And yet, despite its intimidating size, age and strength, the sycamore looked entirely different in the morning light, as if it were just another part of the everyday landscape. And I realized I’d seen dozens of these trees all over town. In fact, whole streets in my neighborhood were lined with them. I wondered why I hadn’t noticed the dangling spheres before, and I thought they must have been hidden by the leaves. And even after the leaves fell, I reasoned, I never looked that high up when I was walking.

  I took another few steps forward and stood in the spot where I must have fallen.

  “The criminal always returns to the scene of his crime,” I muttered to myself.

  I studied the ground and spied a small, clear, plastic bag that the EMT’s had left behind. I picked it up and put it in my pocket: proof that my encounter with the cosmic tree hadn’t been a dream. Then I glanced back up at the sycamore and wondered how the exact same tree could seem so different in the morning? How could it seem so plain? And how could I penetrate the everyday appearance of nature and grasp the hidden essence of it? I still felt disoriented in the universe, despite my mother’s detailed maps, and I still felt lost. And even now, so many years later, I mourn that lost boy as I mourn the lost life I could have had if only I hadn’t pursued these questions. And I only wish I could reach out to that boy and divert him from the path he chose.

  I was so caught up in my sidewalk revery that morning that it took me a moment to notice that Aster, Isabel and Michael had doubled back and surrounded me.

  “Is this where you were attacked?” Aster asked quietly.

  “I never said I was attacked,” I replied. “That was your idea.”

  “Then what happened to you?” Michael insisted. “Why did you fall on your butt?”

  “Head,” Isabel corrected him.

  “Same thing … in his case,” Michael stated.

  “Be quiet, Michael,” Isabel snapped. “Let him talk.”

  I remained silent.

  “So …?” Aster encouraged me.

  I gestured to the top of the tree.

  “Yes, Igor,” Michael taunted. “Tree. We see tree. What about tree? Speak, Igor.”

  “It looked different in the dark,” I stated.

  “What are you saying?” Michael wondered. “Is it haunted, possessed? The ancient tree spirit only comes out on Halloween? Is that what scared you?”

  “Did someone jump out at you from behind the tree?” Aster speculated. “Was it Xi Zhu? And you don’t want to get him in trouble?”

  I shook my head and said, “You wouldn’t understand. I don’t understand.”

  “Whatever,” Michael said dismissively. “We’re going to be late.”

  Aster looked closely at me, not wanting to give up so easily. Then she shrugged and we walked the rest of the way to school.

  *************

  The Highbrid School, a large, squat, two story octagon, stood on the grounds of the Genetic Institute, just across from the old Institute for Advanced Studies. Everyone at the Genetic Institute knew from the beginning that if the Highbrid Protocol was going to be a success, they had to do more than just select for the genetics of genius. They also had to nurture the potential and inspire the practice of it. So they built the Highbrid School and staffed it with the best teachers in the world.

  Aster, Isabel, Michael and I entered the front door of the building and went our separate ways. I walked to the Physics Lab where I saw Professor Rampurna, a short, thin, bright-eyed man, leaning over one of the worktables.

  “Welcome back, Fast!” He exclaimed.

  My siblings and I were all, ‘Fasts,’ of course, since all Highbrids were given hybrid combinations of their parents’ last names–otherwise, each new generation would have become entangled in ever longer strands of hyphenations. In our case, Farson and Penast had become, ‘Fast.’ And yet, somehow, my sisters and brother had kept their first names in school, while I had lost mine. Everyone called me, ‘Fast.’

  “You’ll be working with Xi Zhu, Printha and Ryan on the Calabi-Yau manifolds,” Professor Rampurna informed me, gesturing toward the table near the window.

  We’d been studying the physics of the universe since the beginning of the Fall Term, and that week we were focusing on the six-dimensional geometry of one particular version of String Theory. Of course, we didn’t actually do the math. We didn’t understand it. We weren’t prodigies, exactly, we were just a bunch of very bright eight-year-old kids with the potential for genius. So our Lower School teachers focused on the basic principles and narratives of the arts and sciences, and left the details for when we got older.

  Professor Rampurna showed us how to upload the Calabi-Yau formulas into our tablets, then he showed us how to use them to generate a variety of intricate holographic shapes. And when we found a shape that we liked, he asked us to sketch an approximation of it with our colored pencils. Professor Rampurna always combined theory and practice in his classes because, as he liked to say, “The mind teaches the hands and the hands teach the mind.” And while our computer holographs and pencil drawings were, inevitably, three- and two-dimensional reductions of a six-dimensional theory of space-time, nevertheless they gave us a visceral feel for the theory. And as we worked, Professor Rampurna reminded us of the larger context of what we were doing.

  “The universe evolves,” he began. “That is the theme of our course this term. According to the standard cosmological model, our universe started as a singularity, a unique point, a tiny seed so densely curled, wrapped, folded around itself that it finally exploded with a tremendous burst of energy. In the first few milliseconds of time, our universe was a cloud of super hot plasma which expanded in a burst of hyperinflation. The quantum fluctuations within that newly dispersed field caused the energy levels to fall, here and there, below that of the strong nuclear force. And that allowed some of the free-floating protons and neutrons to bond together to form the lightweight nuclei of hydrogen, helium, deuterium and lithium. Then gravity slowly drew these nascent bits of matter together until, perhaps as early as
two hundred million years later, they formed aggregates so large, dense and hot that they ignited. We call these aggregates, ‘stars.’ The heavier atoms, which require more intense amounts of focused energy to bond their nuclei together, were produced in these first stars and the process has continued ever since. As hundreds of millions of more years passed, the varied aggregates of energy and matter formed the various galaxies, nebulae, clusters, walls and bubbles that constitute the macro-structures of our universe.”

  “Wait a minute, Professor Rampurna,” Serrita requested. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of this sooner. How can the universe evolve? I thought plants and animals evolve.”

  “An excellent question,” the Professor replied. “Of course, it’s an analogy, but the analogy works with the inanimate forms of energy and matter as well as with the animate forms. The key idea here is that each factor emerges in dynamic relation to all the other factors and their gathering interrelated complexity defines the nature of our universe. So, from the very first moment of time, the quantum fluctuations of chance and the structural parameters of necessity have been inseparable. In other words, not all possible universes are unfolding from our original singularity, at least not in any way that we can perceive. Instead, as far as we know, our particular universe is emerging with the particular laws of physics that seem to apply everywhere in our space-time. And what are these universal laws, class?”

  “Newton’s Laws!” Danielle said.

  “Einstein’s Relativity!” Joshua said.

  “Bohr’s Mechanics!” Ryan said.

  “Yes, yes and yes!” Professor Rampurna enthused. “Unfortunately, you are all correct! And there’s the rub.”

  “What’s the rub?” Serrita asked.

  “The point of friction, heat, contradiction. And, in this case, we are like Hamlet and cannot decide which path to choose. That is, our so called universal laws are, apparently, not so universal. In fact, they seem to contradict each other on different scales of space-time, as we have discussed many times this term.

  “Isaac Newton realized that the force of gravity ruled the heavens as well as the earth. As a result of this insight, he was able to work out the mathematics of the gravitational forces which determine the elliptical orbits of the planets. Newton imagined the universe as an eternal machine and he thought of gravity as an almost mystical force that works instantaneously across vast distances.

  “In contrast, Albert Einstein argued that gravity is, in effect, a local curvature in the fabric of space-time. The sun, according to the theory of general relativity, sits like a cannon ball on a rubber sheet, creating a huge depression in the plane of the solar system. And the orbiting planets follow the elliptical lines of least resistance around that depression. And when the Russian physicist Alexander Friedmann applied Einstein’s local gravitational formulas to the universe as a whole, he discovered that the universe had to have begun in a state of extreme density and had to be expanding. At first Einstein rejected this idea, but then he accepted it. However, like Newton, Einstein continued to believe in the ultimate logical predictability of the universal laws of physics.

  “Then Niels Bohr and others developed Louis de Broglie and Max Born’s theories of the wave nature of matter. Light and matter are both wave phenomena, these quantum physicists argued. Of course, on the macro-scale of everyday life, the wave nature of matter makes very little difference to us. However, on the quantum scale, the position of, say, an undulating electron can only be described in probabilistic terms. And the same can be said for the other sub-atomic forms of matter as well. As a result of these insights, the rock solid foundation of classical physics suddenly gave way to the probabilistic wave functions of quirky particles.

  “So class, as you said: we have Newton’s Laws, Einstein’s Relativity and Bohr’s Mechanics. Each new theory emerged from, and seemed to overturn, the previous one. And that raises the question: What, finally, is the fundamental nature of the universe? Is it a gigantic machine with fixed gear ratios as Newton thought? Is it an undulating sheet with precise measurements as Einstein thought? Is it a particle flow with probabilistic wave functions as Bohr thought? We are still searching for a way to make sense of these different theories and metaphors. That is, we are still searching for the ultimate theory of everything. A number of solutions are being explored, including String Theory, which is our topic today. Is the universe, at its most basic level, made of incredibly tiny vibrating strings? And are these strings wrapped around themselves in several dimensions? And what would such a multidimensional string look like? These are the questions we are asking today and that is why we are exploring these Calabi-Yau manifolds: we are trying to imagine the nature of strings.”

  As Professor Rampurna finished his introductory comments, I studied the intricate holographic shape floating in front of my screen. And I wondered if the original, super dense seed of the universe had looked something like it. Then I suddenly realized that, with all this talk about cosmic seeds and cosmic strings, it made perfectly good sense that I’d seen a cosmic sycamore tree filled with dangling spheres.

  “At least I’m not totally crazy,” I said to myself.

  And I decided then and there that some day I would become a quantum physicist, and I would discover the ultimate theory of everything.

  CHAPTER 5.

  Hieroglyphs

  We studied all the sciences in Lower and Middle School–from physics to astronomy, from chemistry to biology–and I kept trying to figure out how they all fit together. Why? Because I wanted to decipher the cosmic tree and because I wanted to decipher myself: my origins and my history. I recall, in particular, a warm spring day in April, 2031, when I had just turned eleven. I was leaning forward in my chair in my sixth grade biology class, listening intently to Professor Greenleaf. He was a large barrel of a man, with a thick beard and a deep, resonant voice.

  “As we noted at the beginning of this academic year,” the Professor boomed, ”Darwin and Wallace outlined their theory of evolution in two separate papers that were read at the Linnean Society, in London, on June 30th, 1858. And, on that same auspicious day, Gregor Mendel, the Augustinian monk, was tending his vegetable garden in the Monastery of St. Thomas, in Brünn, the provincial capital of Moravia. Mendel was in the midst of an eight year experiment. From 1856 to 1864, to be exact, Mendel bred and crossbred approximately 30,000 pea plants and worked out the mathematic logic of inheritance, the ratios of dominant and recessive traits passed from one generation to the next.”

  Professor Greenleaf paused, scratched his beard, then plunged ahead.

  “As you know, Mendel announced his discovery in two lectures he delivered in Brünn, in 1865, and in an article he published in a local science journal, in 1866. He distributed several reprints of his article to the wider scientific community, but it seems Darwin never read it. In any case, another forty years passed before the significance of Mendel’s work was recognized.”

  Mendel’s story was, of course, old news to everyone in the class. And yet, as Highbrids, we were acutely aware of how we embodied the genetic logic of inheritance. So when my father came home from work later that day, I asked him yet again about the implications of Mendel’s discovery. In response, André walked me into the library and started handing me books.

  “Darwin and Wallace argued that each new generation of plant and animal expresses a range of variations,” my father began. “And of course the numbers of these variations increase as the population increases. And because some of these variations offer some kind of ecological advantage, they tend to survive better than others that don’t provide any advantage. So they are reproduced, with other and further variations, over and again–which explains why you and I have opposable thumbs. And yet Mendel’s experiment also proved that a rigorous hereditary logic was at work, which seemed to preclude the intergenerational flexibility that was essential to Darwin and Wallace’s theory of evolution. Then, in 1869, Miescher identified the acidic substance in human nuclei
that would later be called DNA, and he speculated it might be the alphabet of heredity. In 1882, Flemming discovered chromosomes. In 1903, Boveri and Sutton recognized that chromosomes possess genes. In 1927, Muller irradiated fruit flies and noted a range of deformities in their offspring. And he arrived at the inevitable conclusion: genes are logical hereditary units, but they can subdivide, recombine, mutate and drift. Evolution occurs, therefore, when some of these intergenerational genetic differences express some physiological variations which sometimes prove to be advantageous in some ecological niches. Add a billion years to that process and, Voila! You get the incredible variety of life on earth, including our own species. However, it wasn’t until 1953 that we understood the basic structure of DNA. Watson and Crick, with the essential participation of Franklin and others, made the breakthrough. You’ve read Watson’s book?”

  I nodded.

  “Good. You should also take a look at these more objective and detailed histories.”

  André handed me three more books.

  “It all comes down to this,” he added. “The expansion of a local population increases the range of local variation which opens up the process of natural selection. And that’s why I’ve focused my research on the statistics of genetic difference in all its different forms: subdivision, recombination, mutation, drift, etc. I’m looking for the phase transitions that lead to the emergence of new traits. Instead of falling back on the speculative theories of cause, progress, design, or goal, and instead of falling forward on the speculative theories of accident, coincidence, luck, or chaos, I’m using all the tools of modern science to see if it’s possible to define the dialectical probabilities of chance and necessity.”

  An hour later I looked up from my father’s books and glanced out the library window. I noticed that the April garden was bursting with green shoots and I was amazed at the profligacy of nature, at the innumerable variations she offers up for sacrifice, generation after generation. In every single moment of time, I realized, nature unfolds the end results and the beginning stages of evolution. And I was born at one of those junctures.