Fermat's Last Stand

The detective, Jake Binneli, sought answers. His partner would officially be on disciplinary leave for two more weeks, so he'd be alone on this one. But, this was Philadelphia and officially didn't mean shit, rules were sometimes bent to conform to the demands of circumstance, a good enough rationalization as any.

He'd recently left the crime scene, nothing more to be discovered there that he could see. Later, after he'd gathered more information, he'd return when the hoopla had died; sit quiet and take it all in. That worked for him sometimes. Alone he could focus on the vic's last moments, the immediate atmosphere might reveal something of importance not noticed in the quick run through in the beginning, when the crime scene investigators and police and coroners were tromping all over the place.

The body of a young woman, a coed, had been found early that morning in the school library on the floor near the stacks devoted to science and mathematics, the vicitm of a single gunshot to the back of the head, assasination style. He'd have to wait for the M.E.'s report to know if she'd been raped. No shell casings or signs of a struggle. Except for the blood spatter on the rug and some books, it was neat and clean. And no witnesses.

During vacation break the library was fairly deserted. Apparently she'd been alone far in the back of the top floor, the one reserved for graduate students. Her purse hadn't been taken and money and credit cards were still in a side pocket of her suede jacket. He held one piece of evidence in his hand, an enigma he was sure no one in the precinct would be able to decipher. He'd have to ask her professors; she'd been a graduate student in the mathematics department.

The piece of tablet paper had been curled in her hand. The note read simply: A to a prime power is congruent to A modulo that prime. What the hell? Did it have anything to do with her death or was it simply something she'd been working on at the university? He needed to find out so he arranged a meeting with her advisor, a Doctor Wilkinson.

He rendezvoused with his partner, Mary Ann Foley, at the diner where they usually had breakfast. They were both divorced and living alone, Foley had a cat named Jezebel. He filled her in on the particulars as they drove to the University of Pennsylvania, a sprawling campus located midtown. Traffic was abysmal so Foley had plenty of time to stare blankly at the note found in the vic's hand.

"What the hell is this?" she blurted between bites on a sugar donut.

"That's what I said," shot back Binneli. "It can't have anything to do with her gettin' killed." He leaned on his horn and cursed. "Could it?"

"I don't see how, but, stranger shit has happened." She sipped coffee through a straw, a habit that always irked Binneli, especially in midtown traffic.

"Why don't you drink like a human, for Christ's sake. Aren't you embarrassed?"

"No," she laughed. "At least I don't spill it all over myself like a pig."

"Pig? That only happens when you drive." He blared the horn again as he turned onto 34th street.

"Park there," Foley pointed with her straw. "There, what are you, blind? There."

He pulled in front-first and jammed the brakes; her container of coffee almost flew out of her hand. She gave him one hard disgusted look and opened the door. It was going to be one of those days, she thought.

It was spring break and only the most dedicated of students was on campus. They asked several where the math department was located before finally running into someone who could actually give coherent directions. Just because they couldn't afford to go away, like to Fort Lauderdale or some such, didn't mean party time wasn't going on.

The outer office of Doctor Wilkinson consisted of three desk-sized tables covered with papers in folders, stacks of books precariously arranged and loose sheets containing what appeared to be equations, figures and graphs. A long bulletin board filled one wall; it too was almost covered. Some notifications and announcements were clearly outdated, an audit was needed. Binneli knocked on the inner sanctum door, the opaque glass top-center rattled a bit. After a few seconds the door opened and there stood a short, roundish bespeckled man with a receding hairline, offset by bushy eyebrows, and cropped beard. Somehow he managed to look distinguished. His eyes, thought Jake, sharp enough to bore through lead.

***********************

A Day In The Life Of...
It was spring, the field mice had overrun his small, hole-riddled trailer set in the dense woods near a narrow, shallow, yet fast-moving river. He had been kept awake all night long by the sounds of their foraging, sitting up to shine his flashlight in the general vicinity of a disturbance whenever it got too annoying, then screaming at the offender to scare it out, a temporary cessation, very temporary. So, he laid in his bunk, just waiting for the next mouse scratching and shuffling amidst an otherwise still and quiet night, the faint rushing sound of the river in the background.

Around dawn he was exhausted and felt defeated, his nerves worn thin. He had no traps and no money to buy any. It had been three days since he'd eaten, all he had was coffee which he drank constantly, it added to his already frazzled temper. He was ready to raise the white flag. That morning, he sat outside in a lawn chair purchased at a thrift store the previous fall. The sun brought solace, comfort, and warmth after a long winter of what seemed like continuous rain and chill. He sat very still, sipping coffee, watching the butterflies, bees, and birds going about their business. They looked purposeful, they had jobs to do and no time to waste. Time was all he had, and he was very good at letting it slip through his fingers. He wanted someone to visit him, but nobody ever did. He was alone with the birds and the butterflies and the mice and the river.

He had long since stopped trying to direct his thoughts in any kind of meaningful way. Memories and images welled-up unbidden; he treated them with indifference as though they were someone else's for whom he didn't care.

He sat this way for most of the morning, nobody came, there were no sounds except for an occasional bird and, of course, the river. He wished he was part of the river, he wished he could just walk into it and become one with it, going wherever it went, cascading over rocks, slipping quickly past the banks, onward to the sea. He roused himself to walk down that way and stood on the bank watching its swiftness and certainty, it decisiveness. The river harbored no doubts about itself, it knew what it was and reveled in it; it had power and purpose and meaning.

He closed his eyes to listen, trying to absorb and infuse his soul with the sense of it. For a moment he forgot himself, letting the strength and determination of the river saturate his dried-up and depleted spirit. Then it passed; he stood detached, separate, and alone.

Suddenly, a gust of wind from downriver ruffled the thick brush along the banks; the towering fir, cedar, and maple began to sway causing him to look up. A solitary twig broke loose, falling silently to the forest floor, one among many already there, lost in the confusion. Then, as quickly as the wind had arrived, it too passed and all grew still again. The self-contained bubble of air seemed also to have purpose, to be on a mission of its own, traveling fast with no time to dawdle.

He walked back up the hill to return to his chair in the secluded clearing in front of the trailer; he poured himself yet another cup of coffee, now lukewarm.

He sat very still, the sun coursed the blue sky, the butterflies and birds continued about their business; nobody came to visit, he didn't care. A mysterious peace filled him, he was no longer anxious and unnerved, no longer worried and uncertain.

He sat in the sun sipping coffee listening to the river as the Earth slowly turned under him.

***********************

Science News

The Washington Post
by Viktor Dobrozny
May 12, --

---


Under The Table
In his den, Doctor Demian Dinklestein, analytical chemist, stared at the slowly rotating ceiling fan from the comfort of his favorite leather lounge chair. Surrounded by shelves laden with research materials and drafts of papers he'd written over the years, he pondered the problem he'd been working on for the past decade, considered by him to be a secret of the universe. It occupied his mind at off-hours when the real work for which he was hired by the university lost interest, varied as it was.

The Periodic Table was a mess, he complained to any who would listen. He understood Mendeleyev's rationale underlying the groupings and also appreciated its predictive power; nonetheless, he saw something about the nature of the elements which he believed would not only produce a more cogent, multitiered arrangement but would allow for adjustments to relationships hitherto unrealized. However, none of his colleagues gave it much credence; although, out of respect for his age, reputation and tenure, they pretended to see his point, obscure though it be.

His idea, to him, was simple and his inability to get it across was the source of the utmost frustration. He accused his peers and associates of being mired in the past, trapped by convention, fearfully protective of their precious reputations. It's not mysticism, he'd mutter: To each element associate a sound [note] and its spectroscopic color. To a group, link a chord and to a period, a melody. As each note is played the colors will blend and form compounds on a computer screen. Never before seen or imagined compound complexes could be discovered or created due to the degree of control over the mixing of color-sounds. Imagine a symphony of designer molecules? A Mozart of new materials with never before seen properties?

Instead of only the outer shell of an atom -- its valence -- being affected, deeper shells, ones closer to the nucleus, would enter into the combinations. It was all very simple, he'd say, but he couldn't conjole any algorithmically inclined chemist to work on the project. They were preoccupied with their own research, they would say; shrug, smile sympathetically, and walk away, quickly.

However, serendipity rules -- sometimes. One day in the school cafeteria, Doctor Dinklestein ran into a visitor from another planet. And he hasn't been heard from since. He left a note on the door of his offfice: Gone to Xulcatur -- back soon.

***********************

Paleoneurobotany
The study of paleoneurobotany has few adherents around the world; it's a difficult subject, not meant for the faint of heart. Moreover, they are shunned by the rest of the scientific community as not only expousing what's considered fringe science, but also for not producing provable results, instead engaging in packaging pure speculation and conjecture as rock solid facts. Nonetheless, in the latest edition of the American Journal of Paleoneurobotany, no fewer than six foremost members of that esteemed yet obscure brotherhood collaborated on a single article of ground-breaking significance. To whit: 400 million years ago, plants were on the verge of organizing neural pathways from root through stem to leaf tip into the semblance of what can only be considered a fully functioning brain capable of cognition and basic reasoning.

As it happened: Seventy-five million years after plants first gained terra firma, the self-organization of a primitive brain reached critical mass and the final threshold was about to be crossed. In fact, amongst varying species that collectively formed an ecosystem, a rudimentary language had evolved. The absence of evidence of any structure capable of functioning as vocal chords in the fossil record points to a form of telepathy as the medium of thought transfer. However, evolution hinges on contingency and necessity working in tandem. With the advent of sexuality -- flowering plants -- basic, nascent communication broke down. Consequently, as we see clearly today, they restricted themselves to spreading information through simple chemical means.

It's the general consensus of paleoneurobotanists worldwide that, owing to the exploitation by flying insects (symbiotic though it be), sex curtailed and derailed the incipient emergence of genuine intelligence. It's a curious aside that such preoccupation has the same effect on humans as well.

Plants are essentially opportunists, after all, especially the seed bearers who appeared after the green frontiersmen had secured terrestrial earth. The insects made it easy for these sexually active plants to reproduce and dominate the planet. Overwhelmed by clouds of pheromones in the otherwise unspoiled atmosphere, the original green spore plants -- ferns, mosses, cattails -- lost the will to evolve further along intellectual lines. They were thwarted, in other words, and regressed; instead concentrating their energies towards refinement of purely metabolic and phylogenetic design.

Were it not for sex, paleoneurobotanists contend, plants may have eventually left behind their vegetative existence to achieve an organic sentience beyond mere awareness and gone on to form societies and civilizations and, possibly, become mobile in the process. Imagine an intelligent life-form able to live off the sun? What great philosophers, teachers and statesmen they would have made. God knows they could do no worse.

However, they shouldn't think of themselves as failures for not realizing their ambitious dream. Maintaining the same basic body plan for 475 million years successfully is nothing to sneer at.

*****************************

Science Report: Thought Has A Material Base
Doctor Oscar Gablinski, of the Munich Polytechnic Institute, and his team have recently discovered that thought affects the familiar material plane in a manner, and from an oblique dimension, previously unanticipated or imagined. That is to say, the brain's biochemical activity in the form of cogent coherent engrams is not only capable of generating four-dimensional phenomena in ordinary five-percent matter, but also is directly connected on multiple channels at once to the fabric of spacetime. As the stationary ether was once believed to exist, it had always been accepted that an intervening medium was necessary for thought-manifestation, but now Doctor Gablinski has shown that thought is everywhere; in fact, it is the medium. In other words, without thought, there would be no spacetime.

As well, they've demonstrated that thought-energy can pass through both ordinary and dark matter with the same ease as neutrinos. Unlike neutrinos, however, thought encapsulates information about the nature of the universe, and, as such, is self-organizing, complex, and capable of replicating and evolving, much like an organism. Experiments have been conducted at the Polytech's Cognitive Research facility that clearly point towards the development of a theory describing how thought can be transformed into reality on all levels of existence. Apparently, it happens all the time, we're just not aware of it. That is to say, underlying the whole of the multidimensional universe is what may be called a psychic field, the source of all that is and the well-spring of cognition.

It's expected by the scientific community at large, and the neuroscience community in particular, that Doctor Gablinski will no doubt receive the Nobel prize for this work. His findings explain much, after all. They go to the heart of mysteries of the physical realm as well as shedding light on the nature of consciousness and its role in creating and shaping the world around us.

Ether: Physics: An all-pervading, infinitely elastic, massless medium formerly postulated as the medium of propagation of electromagnetic waves.

---

"If we could change our psychic apparatus and should then discover that the world around us was changing, this would constitute for us the proof of the dependence of the properties of space upon the properties of consciousness."

From Tertium Organum by P. D. Ouspensky

"The thoughts that one creates generate patterns at the mind level of nature."

William Tiller ---- Tiller Foundation

*****************************

Science Report - November, 2126
Doctor Leonardo McEisenstein and his team at the Appaloosa Academy of Sciences in Hungdung, China--Advanced Exploratory Division--have recently discovered that when the entire set of universes composing the local block are stacked on top of one another, for any parallel event and property under observation, the varying quantum series of probabilities 'fill in,' creating a continuum of infinite detail--fractally receding beyond the reach of present instrumentation--as well as an emergent configuration not otherwise apparent. This latter phenomenon has yet to be investigated; it may hold the key to understanding how blocks of universe-sheaves join and work together.

Parallel Universe Theory has been around since the late 21st century, but once Doctor McEisenstein's group had ascertained the generating function defining discrete distances separating adjacent universes, the frequency operator revealed, through the universe-frequency wave equation--the McEisenstein Equation of Isomorphic Membrane Mechanics--the precise characteristics of each quantumly varying membrane-universe by projecting it physically 'into' our space, its manifestation nonlinearly apprehended, its specific laws and constants translated conformally.

"There is yet much to learn," Doctor McEisenstein said at the awards ceremony, "we have only seen the frontier; now we have to discover what lies therein, what it all means, and,..., ponder the incredible vastness of the Hyperverse. We live on but a single membrane of a local block among countless billions, and for each block, the universes exist independently alongside each other and pass through one another unnoticed, while yet embedded one within the other. How can that be?"

At that point, his eyes welled up and a glassy look came over him; he was led away by two of his team.

*****************************

Click image to the right for larger version ... →

Science Report
The picture on the right is a schematic of the Milky Way galaxy and its vast family of neighboring galaxies. I scanned the picture from the Scientific American magazine edition, October, 2011, page 45. The accompanying article is entitled: The Dark Side Of The Milky Way. It has to do with dark matter galaxies (satellites) and their affect on our galaxy, causing a serious warp in its outer region, like a vinyl record that'd been left on a heater. A quote from the article states: "In the universe as a whole, the ratio of dark to ordinary matter is almost exactly 5."

In the picture, the yellow dots respresent known satellites, the red indicate predicted faint satellites, and the blue, predicted dark satellites. The cone is the area surveyed by the Sloan telescope, our galaxy is just off to the left of its apex.

For animated versions of the diagram in this article, including a 3-D tour of the Milky Way, visit: scientificamerican.com/oct2011/blitz.

---

In the same edition there's an article on the Higgs boson. Here's a quote by Fermilab theoretical physicist, Bob Tschirhart, I thought was interesting: "There's a layer of existence out there we haven't discovered." Really. Physicists speculate on what is referred to as an "energy desert" existing between the realm they are able to probe now and the realm of new physics on the other side. As well, they speak of other levels of reality. If we include the current theorizing on the underlying nature of space and time, science seems to be on the verge of discovering worlds that have only been imagined in the contexts of science fiction and magic.

Within the fields of cosmology, astronomy, and particle physics, in particular, a major upheaval in the universe of thought concerning the nature of everything is in the offing. For example, the ingredients we have assumed necessary for life to exist may not be all that necessary. Nature coughs up its secrets through application of our cognitive faculties, based on the questions asked. So, our knowledge is constrained and fashioned by our humanity which limits us in our perception and understanding, how we filter and interpret reality. By so doing, we humanize reality. We can't help but be geocentric, projecting and imposing our understanding of how things work onto the universe. The Copernican revolution has not yet come to an end. If we can imagine that how we see things may not be the only way, that the human universe is not the only one, then, possibly, a new mode of questions might emerge the answers to which might elucidate the blind spot.

*****************************