Schild’s Ladder

Sophus cleared his throat, and the audience fell silent almost immediately. Tchicaya was impressed; even if he’d known everyone on the ship personally, he would probably have asked his Mediator to plead on his behalf for their attention.

Sophus began. "We’ve been scribing probes and gathering data now for more than two hundred and fifty years, trying to understand what’s going on behind that wall." He motioned with a raised fist, as if pounding against the border. "The results are there for everyone to see. Theories come and go, and all we have gained is the ability to rule out ninety-nine percent of new models without performing a single new experiment, because we already have enough data to kill off most of our ideas at birth.

"To some people, it’s beginning to look hopeless. How can the laws we’ve failed to understand be so difficult to grasp? It only took three and a half centuries to get from Newton to Sarumpaet. What’s wrong with us? We have the mathematical tools to model systems far more arcane than anything nature has ever actually thrown at us, before. The acorporeals grew bored with physics ten thousand years ago; expecting them to live with such meager intellectual stimulation was like asking an adult to spend eternity playing with a child’s numbered blocks. But even their boundlessly flexible minds can’t make sense of the new toy they’ve come here to admire."

Tchicaya glanced at Yann, who whispered plaintively, "Maybe I should be grateful whenever it slips someone’s mind that acorporeals were running the Quietener."

"The Sarumpaet rules survived twenty thousand years of scrutiny!" Sophus marveled. "How flawed, how misguided, could they possibly be? So we began with the sensible, conservative approach: we’d find a new set of rules that extended the old ones, very slightly. The smallest change we could possibly make, the tiniest correction, or expansion, that would encompass all their past successes — but also explain what happened at Mimosa.

"Fine. That’s a simple enough piece of mathematics; people solved the equations within days of hearing the news. Then we built the Rindler…and that minimal extension didn’t quite fit what we found. So we tweaked the rules a little more. And a little more.

"In essence — and I know this is unfair to some of you, but I’m going to say it anyway — most of what’s been done here has consisted of repeating that process, over and over, for a quarter of a millennium. We’ve raised ever more elaborate theoretical towers on the same foundations, and most of them have been toppled by the very first prediction they made."

Sophus paused, frowning slightly. He looked almost apologetic, as if he’d been surprised by the tone of his own rhetoric. When he’d spoken to Tchicaya earlier, he’d appeared casually optimistic, but now his frustration was showing through. That sentiment was understandable, but it risked undermining the reception of whatever he said next: to claim any kind of fundamental new insight now would sound like arrogance, after so many people before him had struggled and failed. Still, if he honestly believed that they’d all been misguided, and that progress would come not from standing on their shoulders but from digging in the opposite direction entirely, there was a limit to how graciously that opinion could be expressed.

He collected himself and continued, loosening his posture, visibly striving to make light of his subject, however many worlds, and egos, were at stake.

"Sarumpaet was right about everything that happened before Mimosa. We have to hold on to that fact! And in one sense, we were right, to aim to tamper with his work as little as possible. But what we shouldn’t have done was paint ourselves into a corner where we just kept building ever more baroque and elaborate refinements of the original rules.

"What do the Sarumpaet rules really say?" Sophus looked around the theater, as if expecting volunteers, but he’d caught everyone off-balance, and there were no takers. "We can write them half a dozen ways, and they’re all equally elegant and compelling. A combinatorial recipe for transition amplitudes between quantum graphs. A Hamiltonian we exponentiate to compute the way a state vector evolves with time. There’s a Lagrangian formulation, a category-theoretic formulation, a qubit-processing formulation, and probably a hundred more versions cherished by various enthusiasts, who’ll never forgive me for leaving out their favorite one.