Chapter 5 Duoverse #3
Bhattacharya: Well, during sleep, the mind is actually quite active.
We have all these connected regions, and they’re talking to each other: information is integrated, memories are processed.
Whereas anesthesia—what we call going under—is characterized by a loss of connectivity.
The brain stops working as a collective, as a whole.
What anesthesia also does is that it suppresses electricity. You can think of it like turning off a light switch. The brain goes dark.
In the carrel, Laurel looked up.
Meiller: Now, let’s backtrack for a second. When we say “consciousness,” what does that mean? Is there any kind of consensus?
Bhattacharya: Absolutely not.
(laughter)
Bhattacharya: But we know that it has to do with individual experience. It has to do with feeling and, somehow, with tone. My internal monologue is different from yours.
Meiller: So what creates consciousness? What triggers it?
Bhattacharya: Well, no one agrees on that, either. But most of us do agree about why consciousness is so baffling. The question is: How does something ephemeral, like thought, emerge from a physical system? Because the brain is physical, right? I mean, what’s it made of?
Meiller: Oh, I don’t—blood vessels? Gray matter? You’re sending me back to seventh grade biology here…
Bhattacharya: No, you’re exactly right. Blood. Tissue. Water. The brain is actually 60 percent fat. It’s three pounds of physical matter, and from that comes—what? Emotions. Thoughts.
Consciousness seems to be tied to complexity. For instance, so far as we know, a single neuron isn’t conscious, doesn’t create consciousness. So what does? Do you need five neurons? Five thousand? Five million?
And that brings us back to anesthesia—because anesthesia inhibits collectivity. It inhibits electricity, and it inhibits collectivity.
Meiller: Now, speaking of electricity, do we have a sound bite? Let’s go ahead and queue that up. Dr. Bhattacharya, can you describe what we’re going to be hearing?
Bhattacharya: Okay, so this is a clip from brain surgery. And what we can do in neurosurgery, crazy as it sounds, is to insert a piece of wire and listen to the signaling.
(faint crackling)
Bhattacharya: So what you hear are these little crackles, like a fire. Every crackle is a message, sent by one neuron to thousands of others. In our parlance, the neurons are talking. And although we don’t know how, it’s from this chatter that selfhood is born.
“That’s what got me,” said Laurel. “The crackle.”
“The crackle,” said Eli.
The side door opened. Attendees emerged in clumps; their shiny conference badges flickered in the wind.
Laurel steeled herself. “You probably have to get going.”
“Actually,” said Eli, “do you want to take a walk?”
—
They looped through Golden Gate Park, where bison shouldered coolly through the mist, as if transferred from prehistoric times unfazed.
In the Haight, Painted Ladies wore their gingerbread trim like jewelry, and Laurel and Eli selected their favorites as she told him about life in Madison.
Eli described Palo Alto, where researchers were celebrities and winter weather rarely dipped below the fifties.
When she voiced surprise that he’d gone into physics—not engineering, as he’d planned—he looked sheepish.
“I realized I was better at thinking,” he said, “than doing,” with an expression that discouraged her from probing further.
Laurel was acutely aware of their bodies in space.
Crossing the street, they walked a foot apart; on the sidewalk, there were six or eight inches between them, and then, as a woman with a stroller passed, just two…
their shoulders brushed. They ebbed apart.
Laurel’s heart thumped. By the time they reached the Mission, it was five o’clock, and drizzle had given way to steady rain.
They ran, holding their jackets like umbrellas, and laughed beneath the awning of a tapas restaurant on Valencia, as if they’d gotten away with something.
The door opened; a host emerged, who told them they had better get their names on the list if they wanted a chance at a table.
Laurel looked at Eli. The only answer was yes.
They waited twenty minutes for a corner nook.
A potted plant pressed against one side, so they had to sit diagonally instead of across from each other.
Of course, the host had assumed. All around them were couples, leaning forward over candles, eating with their hands.
Laurel felt torn between guilt—why was she having dinner with someone else’s fiancé?
—and wary hope: for Eli, this could be nothing but a whim before marriage.
Then her reason did a wild death leap and she sank into the music, the scent of saffron and lime, the proximity to him.
“Well, we have to get the mushrooms,” Eli said. “Do you want to share something? Paella?”
“Yes,” said Laurel. “And wine?”
“Good.” He grinned. “You pick.”
When the waiter came, she chose a Tempranillo.
They ordered warm green olives, too, and grilled artichokes, because Laurel had never tried one.
Food arrived at a neighboring table: crimped empanadas, Manchego cheese that trembled on its base of stewed tomatoes.
You’re having dinner with a friend, she told herself.
You saw him at a conference, and you took a walk.
It was true, so why didn’t she believe a word?
A drop of rain slid into her eye. Under the table, their shins performed a complicated dance of avoidance.
At one point, a guitar player began to walk through the restaurant, stopping to play and collect tips at each table.
The noise was impossible to speak over, but to sit together silently was intolerable, an intimacy greater than conversation. Laurel averted her eyes.
It seemed safest to talk about work, so she asked Eli why he’d come to the conference.
He had presented the morning of Seymour’s party, he said; later she learned that the National Science Foundation had granted him a rare graduate fellowship, and that his audience that week had numbered in the hundreds.
“What was it about?” asked Laurel.
“Do you remember much from high school physics?” Eli asked, as the paella arrived. “I don’t want to talk your ear off.”
“A little,” she said. “But you wouldn’t be. Start at the beginning.”
Eli pointed at the skillet.
“This pan,” he said. “It’s hot. By the time we leave, it will have cooled. That’s because heat—like time—only moves in one direction. A cold plate will never get hotter, microwaves and ovens notwithstanding. And we wake up to tomorrow, never yesterday.”
“Right,” said Laurel.
“The problem is that physicists like symmetry. Mainly we like it because the universe seems to like it, too. The laws of physics are supposed to hold even if you turn a particle into an antiparticle, or you reverse the direction of its spin, or you find a way to send it back in time instead of forward. A mirror universe, in other words, should look and feel like ours.”
Eli gestured for Laurel to serve herself first.
“But if the universe likes symmetry,” she said, spooning paella onto her plate, “then why doesn’t time move in both directions?”
“Exactly,” Eli said, and Laurel felt a little thrill. She had been worried that she wouldn’t be able to follow him—not like Angela could.
“We don’t know,” he continued. “There are lots of interesting theories. Maybe time does move in two directions, but the human mind can only perceive one of them. On the other hand, the closer you look at the universe, the more asymmetry you see. Take matter, for example.” Eli raised the saltshaker.
“Everything we touch, even air, is made of matter, and matter is made of particles. But the universe also contains something called antimatter, made of antiparticles. You can think of these as partners to their particle companions, with the opposite charge and the opposite spin.” He lifted the pepper shaker now, holding it next to the salt.
“Matter and antimatter are created together. When they meet, they destroy each other. The Big Bang should have produced them in equal quantities. But if that had happened, both matter and antimatter would have been annihilated, and our universe would contain nothing but energy.”
Eli put the pepper shaker back down, holding only the salt.
“We know that didn’t happen. I’m here, and so are you,” he said. “For some reason, an infinitesimal amount of matter survived—one particle per million—and this became the universe we know.”
“Why?”
“We aren’t sure. And for a physicist, that’s the worst kind of nails on a chalkboard. We hate things that can’t be reconciled: rules that apply here but not there, then but not now,” said Eli. “The asymmetry got me thinking. What if we don’t live in a universe? What if we live in a Duoverse?”
Laurel heard the word not whole but split: duo verse, a conversation between two people, as they were having now.
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“It makes more sense with pictures.” Eli took a paper napkin and pulled his ballpoint pen out of one pocket.
“The Standard Model imagines the structure of the universe like this. Space and time begin with the Big Bang”—he made a dot—“and from there, they expand. Time moves forward, and matter reigns.”
Extending from the bubble, to the right, Eli drew a sideways cone.
“But it’s asymmetrical,” said Laurel.
“Unless we aren’t seeing the full picture.”
Eli handed her the pen. Laurel mirrored his drawing, adding a second cone, moving left.
“There’s still an asymmetry, though,” said Eli.
He waited for her to find it. Laurel put her finger on the dot.
“Two universes,” she said. “One big bang.”
“There you go,” said Eli.