Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [197]
Sax did not know how to answer that. Michel was still stuffed with his immense nostalgia. Finally Sax said, “Make time to come out into the field.”
• • •
In the mild winters when the winds were gentle, Sax took sailing trips around the south end of Chryse Gulf. The golden gulf. The rest of the year he stayed on the peninsula, and went out from Da Vinci Crater on foot, or in a little car for overnighters. Mostly he did meteorology, though of course he looked at everything. On the water he would sit and feel the wind in the sail as he wandered into one little convolution of the coast after another. On the land he would drive in the mornings, looking at the view until he saw a good spot. Then he would stop the car and go outside.
Pants, shirt, windbreaker, hiking boots, his old hat; all he needed on this day of m-year 65. A fact that never ceased to amaze him. Usually it was in the 280s— bracing, but he liked it. Global averages were bouncing around the mid-270s. A good average, he felt— above freezing— sending a thermal pulse down into the permafrost. On its own this pulse would melt the permafrost in about ten thousand years. But of course it was not on its own.
He wandered over tundra moss and samphire, kedge and grass. Life on Mars. An odd business. Life anywhere, really. Not at all obvious why it should appear. This was something Sax had been thinking about recently. Why was there increasing order in any part of the cosmos, when one might expect nothing but entropy everywhere? This puzzled him greatly. He had been intrigued when Spencer had offered an offhand explanation, over beer one night on the Odessa corniche— in an expanding universe, Spencer had said, order was not really order, but merely the difference between the actual entropy exhibited and the maximum entropy possible. This difference was what humans perceived as order. Sax had been surprised to hear such an interesting cosmological notion from Spencer, but Spencer was a surprising man. Although he drank too much alcohol.
Lying on the grass looking at tundra flowers, one couldn’t help thinking about life. In the sunlight the little flowers stood on their stems glowing with their anthracyins, dense with color. Ideograms of order. They did not look like a mere difference in entropic levels. Such a fine texture to a flower petal; drenched in light, it was almost as if it were visible molecule by molecule: there a white molecule, there lavender, there clematis blue. These pointillist dots were not molecules, of course, which were well below visible resolution. And even if molecules had been visible, the ultimate building blocks of the petal were so much smaller than that that they were hard to imagine— finer than one’s conceptual resolution, one might say. Although recently the theory group at Da Vinci had begun buzzing about developments in superstring theory and quantum gravity they were making; it had even gotten to the point of testable predictions, which historically had been string theory’s great weakness. Intrigued by this reconnection with experiment, Sax had recently started trying to understand what they were doing. It meant foregoing sea cliffs for seminar rooms, but in the rainy seasons he had done it, sitting in on the group’s afternoon meetings, listening to the presentations and the discussions afterward, studying the scrawled math on the screens and spending his mornings working on Riemann surfaces, Lie algebras, Euler numbers, the topologies of compact six-dimensional spaces, differential geometries, Grassmannian variables, Vlad’s emergence operators, and all the rest of the mathematics necessary to follow what the current generation was talking about.
Some of this math concerning superstrings he had looked into before. The theory had existed for almost two centuries now, but it had been proposed speculatively long before there was either the math or the experimental ability to properly investigate it. The theory described the smallest particles of spacetime not as geometrical points but as ultramicroscopic loops, vibrating in ten dimensions,