The God Patent (14 page)

“Thanks. I guess.” Ryan felt his face start to heat up. Hopefully it was dark enough in the room that she wouldn’t notice.

“My name is Emmy.”

Ryan realized that she’d been holding her hand out to him for far longer than was socially acceptable.

Katarina punched him lightly in the back.

He leaned over and took her hand. “Ryan McNear. Nice to meet you.”

Dodge said, “And this is Kat.”

Emmy nodded to Katarina with the look of someone who had little time for children. Ryan felt immediately defensive. Katarina responded by walking across the room, taking a seat at the opposite end of the couch, and opening the book.

“Your colleague, Foster Reed, has formed a company that claims to be able to develop a power generator, right?”

“My friend Foster is a pretty sharp guy.” He took a quick look at Dodge, who didn’t seem to be listening. “He sent me a book based on his PhD thesis—I don’t really understand it, but it sure looks like Foster knows what he’s talking about.”

“Do you understand that he’s trying to violate the first law of thermodynamics?”

Ryan dug through his brain. Thermodynamics covered temperature, heat, energy, and entropy, but he couldn’t remember the first law.

Katarina rescued him. “You say that as though we all know about this so-called first law of thermodynamics.”

“I’m sorry,” Emmy said. “The first law states that energy is neither created nor destroyed, it can only change form. It means that there’s no way to create energy; it has to come from
somewhere. For example, the energy released by burning wood comes from the energy that was required to form the chemical bonds that make up the wood.”

Ryan pulled a chair closer to the couch and sat down. Standing in front of him, Emmy was only a few inches taller than he was sitting, but when she spoke, she looked larger. Katarina had the math book in her lap, conspicuously pointing the spine in a direction so Emmy could see it.

Katarina said, “Then where does it come from?”

Dodge said, “Stay out of this.”

Almost simultaneously, Emmy and Katarina said, “Shut up, Dodge,” and then looked at each other. Dodge let loose a raspy chuckle and, for an instant, Ryan felt very much at home.

“Energy,” Katarina said. “It has to come from somewhere.”

“Matter began forming from the energy of the Big Bang.” Emmy talked to Katarina the same way that Ryan did, not like an adult to a kid, but as two people with similar interests. The difference was that Emmy sounded like a professor giving a lecture. Then, to Dodge, she said, “Do you have a whiteboard or something that I can use?”

“A whiteboard? Sure Emmy, right next to the lecture hall over by the bowling alley.”

Ryan said, “He’s got a huge desk blotter.”

Emmy motioned to Katarina to lead the way.

“Hold it,” Dodge said. “We don’t all find physics so damn fascinating. Can you just give me the punch line?”

Emmy stopped. “If you don’t understand it, how can you—”

“Because the judge won’t understand it either—no one understands it. The executive summary, please?”

She looked at Katarina and then Ryan.

Ryan said, “I’m interested.”

And Katarina, “I’ll understand it.”

Then Emmy turned to Dodge. “Okay, this is all you need to know: They claim to be able to make a power generator that converts spiritual energy to physical energy. They will say that it proves the existence of a deity. It would also violate several established principles of physics.”

Dodge leaned back and turned on the TV. “That’s all I need.”

“That’s it?” Ryan said. “You’re dismissing Foster, just like that?”

“That’s like, all you really need to know,” Emmy said. She motioned for Katarina to lead them to Dodge’s office. “Come on, you’ll love the physics, and once you understand, you’ll see why your friend’s idea can’t work.”

Ryan followed them down the hall, immediately mesmerized by the wiggle in Emmy’s walk.

Katarina flipped the light switch on the wall. A nightlight near the floor went on. Ryan turned on the desk lamp and quickly grabbed the revolver. He set it on top of a bookcase, hoping that Katarina hadn’t noticed it.

Emmy stood next to Katarina, across from Ryan. “Okay, the basic idea is this: everything was everywhere—all at once.”

Katarina looked baffled too. She said, “Huh? If everything was everywhere…”

Emmy smiled. “Without a universe, there is nothing anywhere or any
when—
without a universe, there is no space or time. It gets tricky without the math—”

“Then use the math.” Katarina stepped closer to Emmy.

Emmy put a hand on her shoulder. “It took me ten years of college to learn this. You can learn the whole story and more, but it will take a long time.”

“I am learning it.” Katarina set the calculus book on the desk.

Emmy picked it up. “You’re only thirteen and already doing calculus? I didn’t get to calculus until I was seventeen.”

Ryan said, “Katarina and I do math together. It’s kind of a hobby, huh Kat?” Saying it out loud to this woman felt like a pickup line. Okay, it
was
a pickup line. His face heated up.

Katarina cocked her head at him. Emmy looked from one to the other. Ryan could feel another blush coming on and had to defuse it. “Is anyone else hungry?”

Emmy said, “I can make Dodge get us a pizza.”

“Pepperoni and shroomage,” Katarina said.

“And beer,” Ryan added.

After Emmy walked out, Katarina said, “Ryan McPlayer. You’re hitting on her.”

Ryan responded, “Duh.”

Emmy came back in. “Pizza in half an hour.” She picked up her pencil. “Whenever language is used instead of math, we have to be careful to distinguish questions that are worth asking from those that sound interesting but don’t make sense. For example, the question ‘what was there before the origin of the universe?’ is meaningless. The word
before
implies that time was passing, but without a universe, there isn’t any time. When I say everything was everywhere all at once, what I mean is that at the instant of the Big Bang, the universe formed and whatever space and time it contained was all the space and time that there is, ever was, and ever will be. The Big Bang is a great burst of energy expanding outward. The character of the universe has changed with time, but it settled down within a few minutes and has been expanding for almost fourteen billion years now.”

Katarina tapped her shoe against the desk, much the way Ryan did when he was nervous. “And that’s forever.”

“Hmm?”

“Forever. If there was nothing before, no time or space, then however old the universe is, that’s forever.”

“Yes! Exactly,” Emmy said.

Katarina perched herself on the corner of the desk where the revolver and gavel pad had been, the calculus text in her lap.

Emmy faced both of them. “At the beginning, there was an incredible amount of energy concentrated at one point.” She took a mechanical pencil from her jeans pocket and carefully put a dot in the center of the blotter. “When I say
a point
I mean an infinitely small spot, so small that it doesn’t take up any space at all.” Then she wrote
E
=
mc
²
at the top of the sheet. “You’ve seen this before. It’s Einstein’s energy-mass relation. It means that energy can be converted to matter and that matter can be converted to energy, okay?”

Katarina said, “If it doesn’t take up any space, does it take up any time?”

Emmy’s eyebrows arched. She stared at Katarina for an instant. “Something only exists in time if it also exists in space. If so, then it exists in time the same way that we do, always in one spot, its present.” She indicated the dot. “The Big Bang describes how the energy expanded into space, how it evolved into matter, and how stars and planets formed.”

“And again, where did that energy come from?” Katarina asked.

Emmy set the pencil down. “It is what formed the universe. There was no universe before the Big Bang—no
from
and no
before
. It’s impossible to talk about anything outside of spacetime.”

Katarina nodded. It didn’t look like a sincere nod to Ryan. Katarina would never accept being shut down like that. Had it been just she and Ryan, her response would have been loud and fast.

Emmy seemed to pick up on it too. “Okay, maybe it would help if I point out something about how science is done and
how it differs from religion. When we do anything, we start with assumptions. If the assumptions are wrong, then everything we do is probably wrong too. If they’re right, then, since we use this perfectly consistent language—mathematics—the results must also be right. So it’s the assumptions we have to worry about. In science, we demand that our initial assumptions be as simple as possible because that’s where we’re investing faith. In religion, people start with faith—huge leaps of faith, belief in gods and ghosts, saints, resurrection—things for which there is no physical evidence. In physics, we have to start with something, at least the belief that our senses aren’t lying to us. I think of this as a small step of faith rather than a leap.”

Katarina smiled with her mouth open, as though she were swallowing something big and sweet. “I like that,” she said. “If you keep looking, and something is really true, then the more you learn, the smaller your leaps of faith until they’re just steps and then not steps at all.”

“Yes! That’s it exactly.” Emmy pumped her fist as though she’d just won something. “You nailed it: the scientific method is nothing but watching your step.”

She and Katarina looked very happy in that instant. Then Emmy turned back to the desk. “I’m going to describe a totally simple model of a big bang—just to get a couple of points across.” She picked the pencil back up and drew a wavy line from the dot to the right. “The wavy line represents the energy in this little universe. So far, it’s just sitting there and time is passing.” She ended the wavy line with another dot and drew two lines connected to the second dot. “At this point, the energy converts into matter. The straight lines represent particles, point-like pieces of matter.”

Emmy looked up at them again. Ryan had the distinct impression that if she caught him spacing out, she would whack his knuckles with a ruler. He couldn’t quite hold back a smile. She smiled back. It was the last thing he expected. And her smile was warm and sweet.

Emmy underlined
E
=
mc
²
and said, “Remember, Einstein told us that matter is a form of energy.” She wrote
e-
next to one of the straight lines and
e+
next to the other. “In this little universe, the
little bang
formed two particles. This one”—she pointed at the
e-
—“is an electron. Electrons carry one unit of negative electric charge. The other one is called a positron, and it carries one unit of positive electric charge.” She looked up again. It distracted Ryan. She was saying things that he’d read about in Foster’s book, and he wanted to pay attention, so he concentrated on the diagram. He hoped she was disappointed that he looked away.

She said, “The laws of nature come from different types of symmetry, and this is an example of one. When matter forms, an equal amount of antimatter also forms. The electron is matter and the positron is its antimatter equivalent—a positron is exactly like an electron except that it carries the opposite charge.”

Katarina said, “Is every electron and positron the same?”

“Very good.” As Emmy nodded, her hair floated against her cheeks and, before continuing, she tossed it back in one graceful motion. “Yes, every electron is exactly like every other electron, and every positron is exactly like every other positron—we call them identical particles.”

“How do you know? You can’t check every one of them.”

“If they differed, the universe wouldn’t look the way it does.”

Katarina looked at Ryan, and they nodded at each other. A big grin formed on Katarina’s face. “Wow…
the universe would look different
, that is
so fucking cool
.”

Ryan said, “Don’t say
fuck
.”

Katarina glared at him. “Lay off,
Ryan
.”

Emmy tore the sheet of paper from the blotter and handed it to Ryan. He rolled it into a tube. She started drawing again. “In this diagram, we start with an electron and a positron moving forward in time. When they meet, they annihilate into pure energy.”