ISBN: 0 7493 0490 1
With humour, with self-irony, he built up around his person such a system of invisible fortifications that even those - like me - who had known him for years could not predict how he would react. I think that he strove particularly for this, and that the things he did, which sometimes indeed bordered on the clownish, he did with secret design, though they seemed perfectly spontaneous.
But it happened instead that the unknown Sender committed a dreadful faux pas, because this letter was without introductions, without a grammar, without a dictionary - an enormous letter, recorded on almost a kilometre of magnetic tape. When I learned of this, my first thought was that either the letter was not meant for us, that by pure chance we lay in the path of its transmission between two 'conversing' civilisations; or else the letter was intended only for those civilisations that, having passed a certain 'knowledge threshold', were able both to detect the cleverly concealed signal and to decode its meaning. According to the first possibility - that of accidental reception - the problem of 'not following the rules' did not exist. According to the second, the letter took on a new, peculiarly enhanced aspect: the information had been in some way (this was how I imagined it) made proof against the 'unqualified'.
To the best of our knowledge, without possessing the code units, or the syntax, or the vocabulary, the only way to decipher a message was by using the trial-and-error method, by sifting frequencies, whereby one might have to wait two hundred years for success, or two million, or a full eternity. When I found out that among the mathematicians in the Project were Baird and Sharon, and that the chief programmer was Radcliffe, I felt uncomfortable, and made no secret of it. It seemed strange - given their august presence - that I had been approached at all. But at the same time this gave me a little courage, because in mathematics there do exist insoluble problems, and they are insoluble for third-rate whizzes and first-order geniuses alike. And therefore there seemed to be a chance - because otherwise Baloyne would have stuck with Sharon and Baird. Apparently Sharon and Baird had concluded that if they could not carry the day in this extraordinary encounter, then someone else might.
The view of many notwithstanding, the conceptual convergence of all the languages of Earth's cultures, however varied they might be, is striking. The telegram GRANDMOTHER DEAD FUNERAL WEDNESDAY can be translated into any language you like - from Latin and Hindustani to the dialects of the apaches, Eskimos, or the tribes of Dobu. We could even do this, no doubt, with the language of the Mousterian period, if we knew it. The reason is that everyone has a mother, who has a mother; that everyone must die; that the ritualisation of the disposing of a corpse is a cultural constant; as is, also, the principle of reckoning time. But beings that are unisexual would not know the distinction between mother and father, and those that divide like amoebas would be unable to form the idea even of a unisexual parent. The meanings of 'grandmother' thus could not be conveyed. Beings that do not die (amoebas, dividing, do not die) would be unacquainted with the notion of death and of funerals. They would therefore have to learn about human anatomy, physiology, evolution, history, and customs before they could begin the translation of this telegram that is so clear to us.
The example is primitive, because it assumes that the one who receives the message will know which signs in it carry information and which constitute their unessential background. With the letter from the stars our position was different. The recorded rhythm could have represented, for example, only marks of punctuation, while the actual 'letters' or ideograms could have failed completely to affect the surface of the tape's magnetic coating, being impulses to which the machine was not sensitive.
A separate problem is the disparity between the levels of civilisation. from the gold death mask of Amenhotep the art historian will read the epoch and its style. From the mask's ornamentation the student of religions will deduce the beliefs of that time. The chemist will be able to show what method was used then to work the gold. The anthropologist will tell whether the specimen of the species from six thousand years ago differs from modern man; and the physician will offer the diagnosis that Amenhotep suffered from a hormonal imbalance, acromegaly, that gave him his deformed jaw. In this way, an object sixty centuries old provides us, in modern times, with far more information than its creators possessed - for what did they know of the chemistry of gold, of acromegaly, of cultural styles? If we turn the procedure around in time and send to the Egyptian of the era of Amenhotep a letter written today, he will not understand it, not only because he does not know our language, but also because he has neither the words nor the concepts to set alongside ours.
Thus were the general deliberations on the subject of the 'letter from the stars'. The information about it was compressed - in keeping with custom - into a sort of standard text and recorded on tape, and was played for the Very Important Persons who came to visit us ...
Psychoanalysis provides truth in an infantile, that is, a schoolboy fashion: we learn from it, roughly and hurriedly, things that scandalise us and thereby command our attention. It sometimes happens, and such is the case here, that a simplification touching upon the truth, but cheaply, is of no more value than a lie. Once again we are shown the demon and the angel, the beast and the god locked in Manichean embrace, and once again man has been pronounced, by himself, not culpable, as he is but the field of combat for forces that have entered him, distended him, and hold sway inside his skin. Thus psychoanalysis is, primarily, sophomoric. Shockers are to explain man to us, and the whole drama of existence is played out between piggishness and the sublimation into which civilised effort can transform it.
... With sufficient imagination a man could write a whole series of versions of his life ...
My evil is isotropic, unbiased and totally disinterested. In places of veneration, such as churches, or in the company of particularly worthy persons, I liked to think forbidden thoughts. That the content of these thoughts was ludicrously peurile does not matter in the least. I was simply conducting experiments on a scale practically accessible to me. I do not remember when I began these experiments. I remember only the deep sense of injury, the anger, and the disappointment that came upon me some years later, when it turned out that a head filled with wickedness would never, not in any place nor in any company, be struck by lightning; that breaking free of and not participating in the Proper brought with it no - absolutely no - punishment.
If one says that everything in us is predetermined, then predetermined also must have been my resistance to my inner meanness, and the difference between me and other, better people is then reduced to nothing but a variation in the localised source of the behaviour.
{Plus mention of Demosthenes and marbles in his mouth ... pebbles actually}
According to determinism, he who desired and was able to be better was no more or less fated beforehand than he who desired but was unable, or than he who did not even attempt to desire.
This incident is so confusing that I can only offer a hypothesis
But this, too, is only conjecture, therefore a self-defensive reflex of the mind.
My reason tells me that a Creator cannot be a petty scoundrel, a conjurer who toys ironically with what he has brought into being.
I lack the ability to tell where the statistical caprice of personality composition leaves off and the rule of the behaviour of the species begins.
I cannot help thinking of that experiment as I write, for is it not possible that social evolution lifted us from the Animal Kingdom in an exponential curve - when we were fundamentally unprepared for the ascent?
... he will accept any theory but the one that says that his deformity is purely accidental.
{I may add 2 these excerpts at some stage ...}
Each of us is, from childhood, fastened to some publicly allowed piece of himself, the part that was selected and schooled, and that has gained the consensus omnium, and now he cultivates that fragment, polishes it, perfects it, breathes on it alone, that it may develop as well as possible; and each of us, being a part, pretends to be a whole - like a stump that claims it is a limb.
My doctrine therefore is not suitable for general application; but I do not see why I have to provide humanity with an ethical panacea.
... I have presented a purely private argument, my own strategy, which, however, has changed nothing in me.
...
Had I truly intended to write my own biography - which would have turned out to be, in comparison with the volumes on my shelf, an antibiography - there would have been no need for me to justify these confessions.
The reading of such publications never fails to weary and annoy me.
...
The writers on HMV who come under the interpretive heading as a rule crammed the information they acquired into the corsets of their convictions; what did not fit they lopped off without ceremony or hesitation.
... it is not surprising, then, that HMV, as a phenomenon completely unprecedented, evoked so violent a ferment among addled minds, a ferment crowned by the appearance of a series of religious sects.
The amount of information that is necessary for even a general grasp of the questions dealt with in the project exceeds, to tell the truth, the brain capacity of a single individual. But ignorance, while it checks the enthusiasm of the sensible, in no way restrains the fools ...
Dr Shapiro is also in possession of precise information regarding the sex life of cosmic civilisations.
I cannot for the life of me understand why, while people without driver's licences are not allowed on public roads, in bookstores one can find any number of books by persons without decency - let alone knowledge. The inflation of the printed word has been caused, no doubt, by the exponential increase in the number of those writing, but in equal degree by editorial policies. In the childhood of our civilisation only select, well-educated individuals were able to read and write, and much the same criterion held after the invention of printing; and even if the works of imbeciles were published (which, I suppose, is impossible to avoid completely), their total number was not astronomical, as it is today. Today, in the flood of garbage, valuable publications must go under, because it is easier to find one worthwhile book among ten worthless than a thousand among a million.
I can have no certainty that what I write is not similar to what already has been written. This is one hazard of an age of population explosion.
... I do not promise to "tell the truth and nothing but the truth" ...
... the voice of truth becomes drowned out in an ungodly din.
Doomed forever to conjecture, having chipped a few flecks from the lock that sealed the gate, we delighted in the glitter that gilded our fingertips. But of what was locked we know nothing.
It has been said that a specialist is a barbarian whose ignorance is not well-rounded. My pessimism is based on personal experience.
Evolution is, as an engineer, an opportunist, not a perfectionist.
It had been tactless of me to prove something on the topic of man - mathematically! At the very best my work was called "interesting".
... We tend to underestimate the inertia of the style of thought in different branches of science.
...
It has been known for forty years now, that the difference between a noble, upright man and a maniacal degenerate can be pinpointed at the site of a few clumps of white matter in the brain, and that the movement of a lancet in the supraorbital area of the brain, if it damages those clumps, can transform a splendid soul into a loathsome creature.
... what is taking place is a certain play of forces perfectly indifferent to man. And because our thinking moves in circles from which it is impossible to leap free ...
Rich lodes of potential discoveries no doubt lie in various libraries, but have gone unnoticed, untapped, by competent people.
Until such an encounter took place, my view might have been judged extreme, the attitude of a crackpot.
... receiving the message from the stars, we did with it no more than a savage, who warming himself by a fire of burning books, the writings of the wisest men, believes that he has drawn tremendous benefit from his find!
I have waited patiently for a book like this one.
Meanwhile, by stealth, it penetrated, permeated my "good intentions, and all the time guided my pen, so that I proceeded like a preacher, who calling fire and brimstone down upon the foulness of man, finds a secret pleasure in at least describing what he dares not participate in actively himself.
Man's quest for knowledge is an expanding series whose limit is infinity, but philosophy seeks to attain that limit at one blow, by a short circuit providing the certainty of complete and inalterable truth.
But somehow it has not occurred to any of our philosophers that to deduce from the patterns of one's own thoughts, laws that hold for the full set of people, from eolithic until the day the sun burns out, might be, to put it mildly, imprudent.
I quickly reach the place where the author's obvious is no longer mine, and thereafter he speaks only to himself, tells only of himself, appeals only to himself, and loses the right to deliver pronouncements that are valid for me, not to mention the rest of the bipeds that populate the planet.
... finds nests of words for itself ...
... we may belong to the same species, but we differ far more than such thinkers could wish.
A mystery and a jungle of guesses. From the mystery we chipped off a few slivers of fact, but when they did not increase, or amount to any solid edifice that could correct our hypotheses, the hypotheses began gradually to assume the upper hand, and in the end we wandered lost in a wilderness of conjectures, of conjectures based upon conjectures.
The reader who has plowed his way to this point and is waiting, with growing impatience, to be led into the inner sanctum of the famous enigma, in the hope that I will regale him with thrills and chills every bit as delightful as those he experiences viewing horror movies, I advise to set my book down now, because he will be disappointed.
... the "letter from the stars" was, for us who attempted to decipher it, a kind of psychological association test, a particularly complex Rorschach test.
... This suspicion hampered my work, and now has compelled me to make confessions I would have preferred not to make.
... the very choice he makes may testify more to what pervades his dreams and unscientific thoughts ...
Misgivings of this kind, when I voiced them, were treated by many of my colleagues as pure drivel.
A physicist never thinks that Someone has set the electrons in their orbits for the express purpose of making him, the physicist, rack his brains over orbital configurations.
When Bladergroen, Norris and Shigubov's team discovered the inversion of the neutrino, a new chapter in astronomy was opened up, in the form of neutrino astrophysics. Overnight it became extremely fashionable; throughout the world people began to study the cosmic emission of these particles.
An interesting individual, nevertheless. He made his living as a supplier, and banker, and even spiritual comforter for the kind of maniacs who in earlier times confined themselves to building perpetual-motion machines and squaring the circle, but who nowadays discover various forms of health-giving energy, think up theories of cosmogenesis, and devise ways of commercially utilising telepathic phenomena.
... His bureau was frequented by paraphysicists and ectoplasmologists, builders of teleportation stations and of pneumatographs that make possible the opening of communications with the spirit world.
... he was never jailed, managing to balance at the very brink of criminality.
We really have no idea what a multitude of conmen and crackpots inhabit the domain that lies halfway between contemporary science and the insane asylum
... Before long, Laserowitz was publishing a series of articles with screaming headlines, declaring that on the Mount Palomar tapes certain areas of noise were interspersed with sections of silence, so that together they formed the dots and dashes of Morse code.
An insane idea, but Rappaport could not rid himself of it. A stream of information - human speech, for example - does not always tell us that it is information and not a chaos of sounds. Often we receive a foreign language as a complete babble. Individual words can be distinguished only by someone who understands the language. For someone who does not, there exists but one way to make possible that all-important recognition.
...
It was in the highest degree unlikely, but nevertheless possible. Whenever he experienced brainstorms like this, Rappaport, usually an easy going sort of person, showed unusual initiative and energy.
... As I have said, it is only possible to reveal such noise as information if the emissions of the message repeat themselves in a circle and one can set them side by side for comparison.
... Rappaport did not tell Hense at first what he was about, preferring to keep it quiet; this way, if his idea fizzled, no one would ever know. This amusing beginning of what later became a most unamusing affair was related by Rappaport many times; he even kept, like a sacred relic, a copy of the newspaper that led him to his famous revelation.
After all, he told him, the entire neutrino emission of one quadrant of the firmament is a veritable ocean covering an enormous spectrum of frequencies, and even if Halsey and Malhoun, combing that spectrum once, had by sheer luck pulled from it a "piece" of emission that was artificial, coming from an intelligent sender, it would be a miracle indeed for them to accomplish the same thing - again by luck - a second time.
A top FBI legal adviser told him that the Universe, lying mainly outside the nation's borders, did not fall under the jurisdiction on the Bureau; it was the CIA that concerned itself with foreign problems.
But in that case he and I were of the same faith, with this one difference, that we practised it in different monasteries.
...
Every great matter has, among its circumstances, some that are ludicrous or pitifully banal, which does not mean that they do not play an integral role.
In addition, I could not believe that a civilisation incommensurably above us would send out into the Cosmos information convertible to weaponry
Therefore, whoever did not know him long and well was confounded, for it seemed impossible ever to tell what the man thought true and what false, and when he was speaking seriously and when he was merely amusing himself with words.
... He must have had a great deal to hide, surrounding himself as he did with such a laboured din; he always had so many ideas, plans, projects, and got himself into so many unnecessary things, was a member of all sorts of societies, conservatories, a professional respondent to academic questionnaires and polls of scientists; he overburdened himself intentionally, because in that way he would never have to be alone with himself - there would never be time. He dealt with the problems of others, and understood people so well, one naturally assumed he understood himself well, too. A mistaken assumption I believe.
... He had the special penetration of the richly endowed, who are able to take hold of any problem, even one foreign to them, immediately from the proper angle, as if instinctively.
... He was convinced that the culmination of humanity had already taken place, long ago, possibly in the Renaissance, and that a long, accelerating downhill career had begun.
My attempts to keep up a conversation with such people (like holding up the head of a corpse, but I did it for Baloyne) collapsed after five minutes, whereas he was able to jabber with them for hours on end - God only knows for what reason!
... What surprised me the most in him was that he apparently held actual views of some sort. But possibly they were only a good imitation.
... The wholesale dealer takes no interest in the inner life of the trained pig that runs about for the truffles; all that exists for him are the results of the pig's activity, and it is no different between us and our authorities.
But there was no help for it: one's personal experience in life is fundamentally unconveyable. Nontransmittable.
... Since that was altogether impossible, he decided to believe in reincarnation. Maintaining the belief for fifteen or twenty minutes would be sufficient.
I dwell on these descriptions to show the reader the central figures of the project from a less official angle, and also to introduce him to the special atmosphere of a community sealed off from the world. Indeed, it was curious, that creatures as different from each other as Baloyne, Nye, Rappaport and myself should have come together in a single place, with the mission of "establishing Contact", an ersatz diplomatic corps representing mankind vis-a-vis the Universe.
The worthlessness, the sterility of all those lines of reasoning, laced lovingly with mathematics, was really comical, though at the same time depressing.
... The former we called "elves", the latter "dwarves". The internal jargon of the Project had a rich vocabulary; it could serve, along with the forms that the coexistence of both "parties" took, as a worthy subject for some future sociologist.
... The general meetings almost always ended in open quarrels.
... (for the life of me I cannot remember exactly what it is pleiographers do, though I am certain it was explained to me once)
Those advisers had mastered only one maxim, but that they mastered for all time: if one man dug a hole with a volume of one cubic metre in ten hours, then a hundred thousand diggers of holes could do the job in a fraction of a second.
... Not everything that the elves did, I must say, was without value.
But even the College of Cardinals can be led to cannibalism, provided only that one proceeds patiently and by small degrees. The mechanism of psychological adaptation is inexorable.
... Our ability to adapt and therefore to accept everything is one of our greatest dangers. Creatures that are completely flexible, changeable, can have no fixed morality.
{I may add 2 these excerpts at some stage ...}
Some Links:
Some illustrations - hint: when the little box pops up asking if you want to download characters, just click on 'Cancel'.
The simpleton - has absolutely nothing to do with the book but thought I'd stick it in anyway :)
This one aint on that list (yet) ...
