The Archive

The Archive is complete. Nothing is missing from it. Its tomes have been catalogued with absolute precision, with meticulous care, and a detailed index has been constructed for all time. There is nothing more to add. To subtract is a capital offence. The task of the Master Archivist is to maintain the order of the Archive; to ensure its completeness; to eternalize its perfection; to preserve its integrity and purity. In fact, his title is misleading. His not truly an Archivist, for he does not archive anything. As said, the Archive is complete. It contains everything that is to be contained. Nothing exists, or is allowed to exist, that is not already there. Therefore, the Archivist is more like a guardian; or a keeper, a watcher, a minder. He exists in order to guarantee that everything remains so forevermore. That nothing will be either lost or added. So that the balance may never be disturbed. If however, as it occasionally happens, a new piece of material is created, by some paradoxical twist of misfortune, then the Archivist must initiate the process of it destruction. He must order a message to be sent to the prefect agent and thereof to the field agents in the area of creation, who in turn will have to make sure the material gets eliminated immediately. You could say that the order of things is incarnated in the watchful preservation of the Archive. The Archive is all there is.

Etherwave Proxima Q

The technology is rather simple, I am told. A square wooden box, big enough for an average sized human to crouch within, painted blue or green on the outside. It is important that water is somehow present, perhaps a glass of water placed nearby; although the word “water”, written in any language, or even insinuated, would also suffice. One does not have to enter the box. It is however imperative to imagine oneself inside: eyes closed, relaxed, without worries or concerns, as if about to depart on a long and pleasant journey. The box is to be placed in an open space, a field of grass or, preferably, a desert. One does not have to be near it. In fact, the most famous virtuosos of Etherwave Proxima Q usually sit hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of miles away from their instruments. Sounds are produced spontaneously by the instrument. Players do not produce sounds and cannot make the instrument produce sounds either. They can only modulate, shape and hopefully re-compose the haphazardly-produced sounds into music. Trained players can force sounds into the natural scale by simply thinking about it. And can control pitch by breathing deep, or shallow, increasing or decreasing respectively. Weather permitting (storms are better than windless days, and hurricane season better still), one can tune the instrument into a full-blown orchestra. Recent reports suggest that sunspot activity may affect tonality and polyphonic spectrum. But it is too early for conclusions. The psychic overhead of monitoring the sun’s chaotic patterns while at the same time imagining sounds is too burdensome and one has yet to come with a full-scale piece of solar etherwave worthy of public performance.

The nomadic texts

It began as a simple translation. The civil servants who still resided idly at the Archives, not having anything better to do with their time, spending their working hours doing no work at all, decided to practice their language skills. They chose a text at random. (No one knows what the initial text was). At first, the text was translated in a language that one of them had a very sketchy, knowledge of. In fact, he had knowledge only of its existence, not of the language itself. Luckily, in the Archives, there was a grammar book written by a dead scholar, a singular world expert in that forgotten language, and the servants used it as a guide. A peculiar characteristic of that language was that verbs migrated. Perhaps because the people who originally spoke that language were migrants too, lost souls wandering the vastness of grassy steppes. Their spoken words travelled up and down their sentences, as if the horizon was nowhere, changing their meaning, as one would have to do if one lived inside an immutable medium. For example, if one intended to say “tomorrow I will meet you at the battlefield,” but changed his mind half way while uttering the sentence, he could simply transpose the verb, and the sentence could read any odd perturbation such as, “the battle is for tomorrow but I will not be there”, or “tomorrow is a fine day to battle”, or “meet me tomorrow and we shall see what happens”, etc.

At first, the civil servants found their game an amusing one. The initial text was made to mean increasingly different things, verbs jumped sentences as if by their own will, and every time they translated back and forth, the text – or should we now set texts – became alive, like a swarm, like a superorganism, a like a nest of nomadic ants seeking a place to entomb their colony. Several days later, the merriness of the civil servants that was to be heard by passers-by, as they played their language game and laughed at the ever more meaningless results, ceased. No one paid attention at the beginning, assuming that the servants had become bored at long last, and had fled the Archives, for there was no reason for them to be there in the first place, the whole Civil Service having been defunct since the island’s disappearance. When they were found, years later, or eons, or tomorrow in the battle, they met.

The Mission Diaries I

The task that befell the High Office was to assemble a mission to conduct a methodical search for the lost island. It was a decision that many in the High Office dreaded. So when the paper with the order arrived - by official post so that the regular excuses for endless delay would not hold the slightest water - dread gave way to exasperation. A committee was put together hastily, leaves were cancelled, lights were switched on for working deep into the hours of night, and they threw themselves into the Archives in search of potential members for such a mission. They studied the tales of Jason and the Argonauts, the Odyssey, the Aineiad; and took notes of a thorough list of skills that a team ought to combine; unmatched mastery in the martial arts, superhuman navigational instinct, indomitable courage, unparalleled engineering genius, and most importantly, formidable psychic powers that could bend space-time at will. The Committee went through the phone book and called a few numbers. In the following days a long line of applicants appeared outside the High Office’s office building, a twisting snake of eagerly-awaiting hopefuls. Centuries later, when word of the island’s whereabouts and the fate of the mission finally reached our world, it became clear that the selection process was erratic, not to put it in any finer words. It was said that among the crew a certain fellow, a borrowed soul from a novel not yet written, a conjurer of dreams, was destined to lead the mission through the most treacherous of waters, and that it was thanks to him that the mission did not lose its way completely, that it managed to circumnavigate the Sea of Emotions and the Spheres of Galactic Apprehension and then ride on the spiral Nebulas of Ignorance, and then…Oh, but their story never ends. And in so far as that dreamer fellow is concerned, the Archives speak mostly of his infamous talent; to enter minds like a worm enters a fruit, to burrow all the way to their nucleus, to see things that no mind could ever see by itself. His name was Cyrus.

1/137.036

This is the alpha constant, a pure number which determines the structure of atoms in our universe. Had it been more than 4% different it would be impossible to have stable carbon atoms, and therefore there would not be carbon-based life-forms writing blogs and pondering about the mystery of this number.

To get the alpha constant you must multiply the square of the electron charge by 2 pi and then divide the product by the product of the speed of light times the Planck constant. So it is a constant of constants, with the difference that is dimensionless, i.e. id does not have measurement units. If an alien civilization used any other different set of measurement units to describe the same physical constants they would arrive at the same, pure, number.

So why this number? Why this universe so fine-tuned for life? During the long debate about the alpha constant some of the most logical, and at the same time crazy, hypotheses, were (a) that there are infinite number of universes and we just happen to inhabit in the life-friendly one – the “multiple universes hypotheses” and (b) that we inhabit a small part of a much, much, much bigger universe where all kinds of variations of nature’s constants occur – “the multiverse hypothesis”.

In a paper just submitted to Physical Review Letters, a team led by John Webb and Julian King from the University of New South Wales in Australia present evidence that the fine-structure constant may not actually be constant after all; evidence in favour of a multiverse. If their observations stand the test of independent duplication, then we can imagine the multiverse as a giant ocean, lifeless for the most part, where nothing happens, and only after travelling for an endless distance the interuniversal explorer of our imagination may come along a tiny coral reef, mostly dead too but still too interesting not to miss.

For our explorer would observe structure and complexity therein, and if she looked deeper still, she would discover the strangest and most wonderful behaviour of matter and energy, how they bonded together to form carbon-based compounds, that became more complex still, they reproduced themselves, they developed into ecosystems, into life, and at some stage, given enough time and vast amounts of luck, into intelligence.

Aristotle in a chip

The reemergence of ancient notions in the modern field of bioinformatics

Aristotle, in his zoological opus Historia Animalium (The history of animals), launches into his analysis of the animal kingdom by observing differences and similarities between the species. For example, he observes that bats and birds both have wings, so he surmises that they must be grouped together; like fish and dolphins should. By examining animal anatomy and by comparing features such as number or shape of legs (or absence of legs), wings, types of skin, habitats, etc., Aristotle put together a logically coherent taxonomy of animal life that remained virtually unchallenged until Linnaeus. This idea of comparative anatomy, as systematized by Aristotle, is essentially the study of homology (from the Greek word “hómoios”: “similar”) – i.e. of similarities. The idea flowed naturally from Aristotelian Logic and in particular his theory of syllogisms: is A equals B and C equals B, then A equals C. If one replaces “equal” with “similar”, then homology is the logical corollary of equality.

Ancient Greek, and by consequence Medieval European, homology was explained by ideal archetypes, by timeless blueprints designed by a heavenly architect, and into which the objects of perceived reality were molded. Darwin’s revolutionary idea was to provide a naturalistic explanation to animal homology, thus ushering in the era of the scientific study of life.

One and a half centuries after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species the modern brethren of his Victorian genius spend much of their time, alas not aboard adventurous sailing yachts roaming the southern seas, but in front of computer monitors applying an ever-expanding arsenal of mathematical and computational techniques in the analysis of living organisms.

One of the most significant application areas of bioinformatics – as this contemporary fusion of biology, computer science and mathematics is termed – is in the study of complex molecules, such as proteins.

Proteins, the building blocks of cells, have structures made up from their particular sequence of aminoacids (which are, in turn, the building blocks of proteins); the way these amino acid molecules unfold in three-dimensional space is what determines the function of a protein. So it is very important for biologists to be able to predict the structure of proteins. What we know is that a protein structure is generally determined by the sequence of the gene that codes for it. And here is where the notion of homology reemerges. It is used to predict the function of a gene. If the function of gene A, whose function is known, is homologous to the sequence of gene B, whose function is unknown, one could infer that B may share A’s function. In a technique called homology modeling, this information is used to predict the structure of a protein once the structure of a homologous protein is known.

Caveat Lector: biologists beware! Meddling with mathematicians who are, secretly, Platonic devotees, may one day lead you to the defense of positivist naturalism against subversive philosophical attacks from the musical spheres of perfect, ideal, proteins-out-there. Ancient ideas, as you should know, are very hard to beat.

The Word Machine of Lagado

Jonathan Swift published the first edition of Gulliver’s Travels in 1726 and since then it has never been out of print. In Book III, Gulliver is abandoned by pirates on the continent of Balnibarbi. After a visit to the flying island of Laputa, he is taken to the Academy of Lagado, where “useless projects” are undertaken. There, he is given a demonstration of a word machine, which is nothing less than a giant mechanical computer used for making sentences and books. The satirical aspect of Swift’s idea is that the machine renders obsolete any study or expertise; an absolute idiot can write a masterpiece by virtue of cranking the machine. In the post-modern context the irony becomes a tenet: all texts are self-produced, they have an transcendental-bibliographical animus which acts like a virus. Human minds are the hosts of this viral propagation and mutation of texts. The writer “thinks” he is the creator but he is merely an empty vessel, a hapless idiot.

The word machine of Lagado has fascinated computer dreamers too. It is the original idea behind Hilbert’s Ur-algorithm – a logical contraption that, should humanity come to an end, can recreate by itself, automatically, the works and knowledge that was lost. The machine that can write any book. The mathematical formula that can prove every theorem. Thanks to Gödel we now know that such a machine, or algorithm, is impossible to construct. But the fascination with the word machine of Lagado is too strong to let go. Like a childhood dream it returns again and again to haunt the adult life with nostalgia. What if there is a way round Godel’s incompleteness theorem? What if there exists, somewhere in an infinite multiverse, a word machine like the one dreamt by Swift? What if our thoughts are written in the pages of its infinite books?