Friday, December 31, 2010

Unintelligent Design

"Well, that's it. Another failed attempt." Dr. Atticus sighed.

"Maybe the next one will hold up?" Dr. Ross suggessted. "I think we're on the right track. Maybe just a little more fine tuning of the z-constant?"

"No, no. Our entire methodology is at fault I suspect. We could tweak constants and starting conditions for eons and never get it right."

"Well how do you suppose it ever happens naturally then, if an intelligent force can't put the pieces together?"

"Random chance has an infinite number of eternities to play with the variables and we do not. For however many ways there are for a universe to exist, there are infinitely many more ways for it to fail to exist, to paraphrase the famous zoologist."

"Well then, maybe that's what we should do?"

"How do you mean?"

"Maybe we should let random chance take over. If we could set up the chamber to iterate over the entire space of possible universes, it will find a workable set of initial conditions eventually right?"

Dr. Atticus closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. The younger generation hadn't been around long enough to know what wouldn't work. That was their problem he thought. "I suppose, but as I said, it might take eternity to even find one that works."

"Maybe we can take advantage of quantum superpositioning to run the experiment in parallel?"

"It's one thing to say that, but it would take an entire rework of the system... the chamber, the shielding. And we don't even know if our methods would be stable under quantum conditions."

"But the attempt would still take less than eternity right?"

"Dr. Ross?" the elder questioned as logic began to take hold.

"Yes?"

"Remind me again why you're the assitant here?"

"Because I'm younger, have published fewer papers, and can't get the same amount of funding you can?"

"Right."

So, nearly a year later, after a complete rework of the experiment they started the system back up. Nearly three seconds later there was, for lack of a better term, a quite large bang.

2 comments:

Lust_Lacker said...

Reminds me of Nine Billion Names for God...

Matt said...

Indeed. Part of my inspiration was actually from something similar: The Last Question by Asimov. Not the first time I've written about this sort of thing either.