Chapter 36: Unexpected Theory
The Institute deemed the Ring officially completed on November 11, the day Galina Filipovna triggered that first particle collision. But the east wing offices in the admin building were not painted and fully equipped until Christmas. And construction never really stopped at the Ring. Experiments led Galya and other physicists to conceive more complex and more powerful experiments, which required amplifications, reconfigurations, and inventions that the binders Galya took to Moscow in 1991 hadn’t contemplated. The Ring itself posed constant mechanical and geological challenges. Groundwater regularly seeped into three areas of the lake side of the Ring, never enough to damage equipment or foul experiments, but enough to require constant inspection and patching and finally a month-long shutdown of the Ring while Rudy and his men dug out three miles of tunnel, installed new drainage, and poured fresh concrete to produce a leak-free Ring a year later.
The whole complex was built well, but at that scale, something always needed fixing. Rudy transitioned from directing construction to something that could have been called physical plant manager, maybe chief engineer, or just head repairman. No title for his position was ever written down, he had no nameplate on any office door, and he didn’t need any title. Maksim and the other workers who remained after the dig was done—those builders knew where things were, how they were connected, and how to get at them and fix them when the need arose—kept calling Rudy Foreman, and new workers naturally followed suit.
Rudy expected Galya’s Ring would help her win a Nobel Prize and rewrite the laws of physics. Oslo did not call Irkutsk, and water still flowed downhill in Goryachiy Klyuch, but Rudy noticed that the Director’s CV on the Institute website (a project Nina took on with great vigor) showed Galina Filipovna was publishing twice as many articles in the physics journals as she was before she switched on the Ring.
Rudy paged through a couple of Galina Filipovna’s journal articles in the Ring library. He found no cosmic revelations, or if he did, could not translate them from the formulas in which Galina Filipovna and her colleagues shared their findings. And Galya never pretended to be a Feynman or Hawking. She drilled into the mysteries of the universe, flung protons and electrons and muons, scrutinized their underground explosions, and etched the results into the vast superstructure of scientific knowledge, leaving it to future authors to attempt the perhaps impossible task of translating her experiments and the resulting theories into answers and meanings that regular men like Rudy could understand.
Rudy didn’t trouble himself with the details. The Ring was paying off. Galina was doing the science she wanted, the science she had recognized as vital before she earned her doctorate but which she couldn’t do until she built the Ring over twenty years later. Rudy didn’t need to know what that science revealed about matter and energy and the fabric of the universe. He just needed to know that Galya knew, and would learn more, every day, thanks to this great machine that he kept working.
But the Ring and its massively powerful particle interactions led Galya down a path of exploration that no one, not Rudy, not the visiting physicists, not Galya herself, foresaw. Galya’s analysis of the universes of data that burst from the Ring’s routine big bangs led to an achievement well outside of particle physics. This achievement had more impact on the human world than any of the particles she discovered or fields she postulated… or so scientists and biographers might have argued twenty or fifty years down the road, had they known about it. This unexpected product of Galya’s Ring research never appeared in the journals. It was never known outside of the Ring Group’s inner circle and a handful of others inclined to silence. It was never acknowledged by the scholars and technologists who unwittingly recreated her work in pale and persistently flawed replicas.
The development no one at the Ring predicted was Galina Filipovna’s prediction theory… and the Ring Group’s prediction machine.
* * *
Rudy was present when Galina Filipovna had her epiphany.
Like Rudy, Galina Filipovna now spent every workday at the Ring. When she wasn’t in the main control room carrying out experiments, she was in her office, a big room taking up the entire northeast quarter of the second floor of the administration building’s east wing. Her desk sat by the windows that took up the entire east wall, but she often had the blinds drawn as she worked at the digital whiteboards that covered all three walls in the west half of the space. Rudy had acquired eight of the large devices, and Vitaly had customized their programming to synchronize the boards. Galya could write a formula or draw a diagram on the north wall, then tap the figure with her plastic marker or her finger and slide the item aside or sweep it across the room to another wall. She could punch up a browser window next to her drawings to check data from her files or review an online report. And with just a couple taps, she could save everything she’d written on all three walls, start with clean slates, and bring back earlier work at any time. Galina Filipovna took to the new technology immediately and never missed her chalkboards.
One spring day Rudy and Kolya were sitting on the floor by Galina Filipovna’s desk, checking settings on the upgraded connection to the Ring’s supercomputer, while Galina Filipovna toured her whiteboards. She was reviewing days of outputs from particle interactions, formulas, matrices, grids and cubes and hypercubes of coordinates, positions and energies, descriptions of entire systems manipulated all at once, like multiplying Russian economic production by Turkish weather and getting optimal shipping rates for centrifuges—at least that’s how Kolya once jokingly explained Galina Filipovna’s opaque mathematics. She was oblivious to Rudy and Kolya. Their quiet technical utterances—bit rates, resistance, microseconds—had nothing to do with the math Galina Filipovna was doing, but Rudy heard in their numbers a counterpoint to the nearly tangible procession of Galya’s inquiry, long silences punctuated by fits and spurts of her digital pen tapping out tiny starbursts of theory.
Tap tap tap tap. Tap tap tap.
“20.1, minus .4… 402, 419… minus .1…”
Tap tap. Tap.
It took a few minutes for Rudy to realize something strange about the silence, like listening to the symphony decrescendo to a soft landing, not realizing the piece was finished, waiting as the conductor held her position, baton up, and the musicians remained at attention, holding while the last waves resonated through the hall and came to rest in altered silence. That silence mattered as much as the notes. Each made the other matter.
Galya was silent now, pen in hand, eyes locked on her north board. She did not move. Not even her eyes shifted. That cluster of blue hieroglyphics, marching in an order that spoke through Rudy’s mathlessness to the visual sense of mechanical interplay that made him good at fixing things, held her attention like a magnet, like a connection made, like comprehension flowing through a high-voltage wire that stunned the person touching it. Did he need to pull her away before the connection did harm?
Galina snapped her attention away from the charged board and its figures. She caught Rudy staring at her, waiting to see steam from her ears or tongues of flame above her head. Jolted, he fumbled and dropped his meter on the floor. She ignored him, ignored Kolya, walked past her desk, looped the room, and came back to the swarm of deltas and other symbols that had stopped her tapping. Galya stepped back, her eyes animated now, flitting around the entire board, to the adjoining boards, following the currents back to that central result that made her eyes spark.
“O-ah!” Galya shouted. Kolya and Rudy both jerked upright, as if scolded, as if about to be struck by whatever lightning Galya was divining. Galya repeated the cry three times, tapping the board and, on the last, elongated shout, flashing her pen around the focal equations, leaving a thick blue arc. That last shout stretched to a roar, a declaration of dominion over recalcitrant secrets.
“Maybe,” Kolya whispered, eyes on the door, “we should step out.”
“No, stay!” Galina Filipovna ordered. “I have to say it to know it. This result—” she pointed at the work she had marked “—Kolya, do you recognize the form?”
Kolya unfolded his legs from where he sat next to the floor outlet and approached the boards, like a student called forward for an oral quiz. He squinted at the figures and rattled off some textbook terminology. Rudy, who remained kneeling on the floor by his tool box, recognized Greek letters and not much else.
“Close,” Galina Filipovna said. “This—” she waved her hand at some surrounding figures “—is the world, the data we collect about it. This—” red arrows slicing across the board “—is our interpretation. And this—” two red stars, a stunningly effusive decoration for Galina Filipovna “—is our model. This, within these parameters, is what happens next.”
Kolya nodded. “RIght, the modeling process for next-generation particle interactions produced by our supercollider. Added data informs model; more informed model guides our search for more data.”
“Yes, yes, particle interactions. But look at the formula again. For particles, read people.”
Kolya’s eyes widened, and he covered his mouth. He started tracing back through the equations.
Rudy stood up and leaned against Galya’s desk. He knew studying the marks on the board would not help him understand. “What happens next?” Rudy asked. “Our next project?”
“Not just our project,” she said. “What comes next in any logical, quantifiable system. Particles, trajectories, words, actions—if we can represent them in sufficient detail, we can make better and better predictions of what will happen next.”
“You’re talking about people…” Rudy struggled with the suggestion “…what people will say and do next?”
Galya nodded once, sharply. She opened a browser window and a virtual keyboard on her board and typed a query. The screen showed search results for the CEO of Gazprom, the Russian energy giant.
“The Web gives us vast quantities of text, data, tracks of human thought and experience. We can find patterns in thought and communication and action that would never come out from reading a thousand books over a lifetime or from reading a newspaper every day. The machines you have built for me can take in every human’s lifetime of reading and writing and communicating—all that is recorded online, at least—and determine how a person, or how humanity, would most likely respond to a given question or scenario. We can model the minds that produce all that we know and say, and we can model what those intelligent minds will figure out and say.”
Rudy’s thoughts clicked. “Artificial intelligence?”
Galya was surprised by Rudy’s apt summary. “Yes. Artificial intelligence. In theory—” she stabbed at the board “—in this theory, with enough data, we can forecast what an intelligent system would produce. We can predict what reasonable people—” suddenly she glanced around her formulas and put red asterisks next to a couple of matrices “—and perhaps what unreasonable people will say. And if we can predict what they will say, we can predict what they will do.”
Kolya continued to hunt through the formulas on the boards. “It’s one thing to say how many mesons will emanate at what trajectories from a collision of two high-velocity electrons. It’s another to say what strategic plan Gazprom’s boss will propose next year. People aren’t particles.”
“Aren’t they?” Galya asked, eyebrows raised. She pointed at her board. “Look at the math. Think of the complexity and volume of data that we pour into these formulas from our particle experiments. Inputs, outputs, recurring patterns, reliable predictions of future interactions.”
Galya tapped the browser window and slid it on top of her formulas between the two red stars. “Apply this math to the Web, all the things people are saying, all the interactions captured in text and data. We couldn’t do this before, because we could never know this much about individual actions, and even if we had, we didn’t have the computing power to process it all into timely predictions. But now our Ring computer and the shared processing power across Tumannost can process all the data from our experiments, simulate a hundred trillion particle interactions at once, and say there, there is where we will most likely find the Higgs boson.
“Substitute people for particles. We collect specific statements, actions, everything we can find about specific people, perhaps for specific organizations, we compare them to all other similar datasets, we run practically infinite simulations, and we can derive most probable subsequent behavior.”
“And do what?” Rudy asked.
Galya blinked and shook her head. Rudy felt like an undergrad who hadn’t done the reading for Galina’s seminar. “If I’m right, if the data is sufficient, we can predict business decisions, market trajectories….”
“And we make money,” Kolya interrupted.
“We make money?” Rudy repeated, still not quite believing.
“We make money,” said Galina, “and maybe we never rob another bank.”