The Thing in the Viewer

by The Apeiron Collective

Table of Contents

Table of Contents
parts 1, 2, 3

part 1

Report to Ryan Smithers, Vice Chancellor

Post-doctoral research fellow and mathematical physicist Bronte de Hay remains missing. Below is a printed four-part manuscript signed by her. Besides a number of pages in her handwriting, this printed matter is all that was of interest to be found within her sparsely furnished Florey address,. The handwritten material is of a sort that suggests she ran out of paper and left in an agitated state. The front door was wide open when police arrived, and her white classic convertible was still in the driveway. A possible sighting suggests de Hay may have headed north into bushland on foot. The search for her continues.

Police found the mss and handwritten notes when attending de Hay’s Florey premises following a workplace incident at the Mt Stromlo Observatory, of which I think you are aware. After the incident, de Hay had repossessed the Viewer of the Pre-Bang Telescope. The Viewer was not found with the mss and handwritten notes. Despite de Hay’s impressions to the contrary, the Viewer remains the property of The Australian National University.

Important technical details needed to construct a new Viewer are also missing, and they are also property of the Australian National University. The ANU and Australian Federal Police have had no luck trying to locate one Dr. Shamass, who according to the mss could be of assistance in their investigations.

Part 1 of the mss: Beginnings

My name is Bronte de Hay and I am from a respected family of Oxford scholars. In my early twenties I had an ongoing affair with a louche British peer, during which time I privately pursued my mathematical inclinations. He and his family were not terribly interesting, being in the main obsessed by commercial culture and transactions conducted on mobile phones. With the affair ended, I yielded to my own family’s pressure to gain at least some formal qualification and took up classical studies at Oxford, obsessed by Grecian ideals. But in my own way, I would all too soon return to a field more conducive to the study of mathematics.

If my career as a polymath was regarded as all the less remarkable as I am from an old academic family, it was regarded as all the more due to my gender. That is a sad snapshot of the barriers women still face, though in fact both the domains in which I excelled, classical studies and later astrophysics, have in recent times seen prominent contributions from women. Having worked hard to put my name alongside that of, for instance, Vera Rubin, who had dared to gauge the rotation of the very galaxies, I will now remain infamous for an ill-fated experiment.

The way all this happened was that, having attained a PhD in the study of antiquity, in my mid thirties I set about understanding a certain highly unusual inscription, etched on a most singular cup. This, despite my noble aspiration, is where I went so badly wrong. Certain materials and ideas should be destroyed or kept under heavy lock and key, and certainly not exposed to early career researchers who, even if they are no longer youths, may not really understand the kind of material with which they are dealing.

Information concerning the cup’s location had been passed onto me by the mysterious Dr Shamass of Streeling University. I met Shamass at a conference in New York on The YWH Principle, referring to an abbreviation of the name Yaweh. Attended by scholars of the most non-canonical variety, the conference attracted the ire of local fundamentalists from the three Abrahamic religions. The faithful, no doubt despite many differences, had managed to set up a solid picket.

Shamass, a Victorian-styled gentleman of incongruous features, surprised me all the more because I could not recall him from our bus ride to an underground car park. It was the only way past the siege and into the centre where the conference was held. Yet there he was, as though he had some way to traverse space-time unknown to his fellow humans.

His paper used an apocryphal text to argue that the I am that I am of Exodus 3:14 meant a timeless becoming out of nothingness. As I was extremely interested in ancient cosmology, later Shamass and I discussed Anaximander’s idea of an indeterminate plenum, the Apeiron.

“Anaximander postulated that this Apeiron contained all opposite qualities like wet and dry or hot and cold” I informed Shamass, though I had no doubt the latter was already acquainted with the theory in question. “But he did not think of the Apeiron as, for instance, damp or tepid. As yet, no quality engages with its opposite. All are co-mingled to the point of neutrality.

“The Apeiron can then be thought of as over-determined as concerns the possession of properties. This Apeiron may also become less dense in places, and unevenly less dense, such that some qualities become able to take on their opposites and make themselves felt as determinate properties. A universe such as our own is born, the anomalous imbalance between the opposites playing out over cosmic time.

“Steeped in shamanistic law, Anaximander possessed even less equipoise than Eastern contemporaries like Rāhula,” I continued to Shamass in whispered tones. “Rather he seemed startled by conclusions arrived at under frenzied inference. More than two millennia before a viable theory of evolution, the man had also claimed that human beings originated in the sea. Perhaps blasphemous sightings of the dreaded Fishpeople may have inspired this shockingly unripe idea.”

The obscure scholar nodded gravely. “I will contact you soon enough,” Shamass hissed. Immediately a loud crashing sounded as the fundamentalists broke into the foyer. YWH conference goers backed away in a semi-circle as several of the faithful rushed at us, and were intercepted by security guards. Only meters away a guard and protester scuffled, the latter losing his footing due to a shove to the chest. The guard knelt on his back pinning his arms, wary of the surrounding melee.

A few of the more able-bodied attendees on the forward extremes of the semi-circle were tempted to join the fray. Shamass had already swiftly disassembled his cane into two smaller fighting sticks. He made short work of a invader on the right side of the action, rapidly striking his assailant to the ground from both left and right.

At this point. protesters were distracted by the wail of a siren and screech of brakes from outside. The distraction allowed the head of security to corral us and take us back to the car park.

Again, Shamass was nowhere as we piled into the bus, and there seemed no other way out of the siege. However, I had not long been back at Oxford when I received a handwritten photocopied missive decorated by what seemed to be cross cuts of wood grain. The Copperplate read:

“You need an item of everyday use belonging to the teacher of Anaxagoras. Dig near the outlines traditionally said to belong to the unholy man.”

I took the ‘teacher’ reference to be to Anaximander, the main influence on Anaxagoras. The latter had sacrilegiously added the idea that the Apeiron had a primal mind or nous.

Already I knew something of the archaeological site purported to outline Anaximander’s house. So it was that, obtaining a research grant from my alma mater, I staved lonely desert ground with archaeologist’s spade. White-clad, bearded and quite traditional, locals to this remote part of Miletus in modern day Turkey sifted uneasily through the dig. They accepted any work I offered them with a reticence that required considerable financial encouragement to overcome.

One evening, a vicious blade flashed from a voluminous robe. Alerted by a familiar hostile attitude, I managed to curve away from the knife, receiving only a nick. Then I struck down on the knife-bearing hand with my own forearm and delivered a right to the assailant’s untucked chin.

Amid a gaggle of voices, the attacker’s arms were pinioned by two friendlier locals who, I think, were forced to admire my courage and perseverance. Nonetheless, potent taboos surrounded anything to do with the accursed personage of Anaximander.

Eventually the fragments of a wide-brimmed cup, or a kylix, began to appear in the dirt. The chalices familiar from church services are stockier, later versions of these vessels. Imagine my excitement when I saw that a wide lip allowed the outside of the cup to bear a lengthy inscription! In fact, even before finalising dates and concluding the reassembly I was convinced Anaximander had himself inscribed the cup, initially due to the sheer oddness of what was inscribed.

As well, I was then forced to wonder how Shamass could have known in advance of such a find, without, par impossible, being personally acquainted with the Ancient. This was not the only oddity I confronted. While epigraphic evidence is always historically important, when classical scholars study philosophical ideas from before the fourth century BC like Anaximander’s, they refer to fragments. But these are quotes preserved by later writers like Aristotle, not inscriptions.

The night I found the cup I emailed Shamass, first shaking desert dust from my laptop, then connecting to a satellite dish mounted outside. Somehow I knew not to ask Shamass how he was aware of the artefact. Instead I typed:

“However unsure the astrophysicist is that she will find what lies behind the Big Bang, she can be certain of one thing. When we consider what might be prior to the creation of our unimaginably vast universe, our speculations threaten to become hopelessly bizarre. Today’s wildest science fiction about nanobots remaking objects or about computing systems producing astonishing virtual realities cannot compare to the Apeiron.”

Many cosmogonists would disagree. The unpopular “No Boundary Proposal,” first dictated in Stephen Hawking’s unearthly lilt, denies the existence of any temporal boundary at the start of the universe. Instead an eternal spacial surface produces universes in various probabilities. Ours being one of many, No Boundary accommodates much and is hard to confirm or deny.

The same difficulty comes with the idea of God kick-starting the Big Bang ex nihilo. The idea was the brainchild of eccentric Jesuit priest, Fr.Georges Lemaître, and had to be rehabilitated by more empirical proposals. Roger Penrose thinks we can show Big Bangs come from prior Heat Deaths. His disturbing hand-scribbled diagrams represent cycles of mind-boggling space-time expansions. Anaximander’s notion is likely to be thought of by many as sharing the theoretical weaknesses of other non-cyclical theories.

Actually, The Apeiron proposal could also be verifiable or falsifiable by observation, should we peer back far enough. This is certainly an advantage over the No Boundary Proposal. It is rather hard to imagine sighting timeless space. Further, Anaximander’s haunting notion requires neither unsatisfying non-explanations like God, nor speculative cosmic cycles.

By the next morning Shamass had replied to my enthusiasm for Anaximander’s ancient theory. Attached to Shamass’s email was a photocopy collage picture of a figure in a radiation-style suit. Through the visor, surrounded by heavy etching, a distorted face peered. Beneath were equations describing the relationship of antimatter to matter.

Astrophysicists are indeed vexed by the preponderance of matter over antimatter that came to characterise our universe. Shamass seemed to be hinting that matter and antimatter should be understood in terms of Anaximander’s oppositions. Two opposed qualities come out of the apeiron and engage via the Big Bang in quantities that permit a temporary balance here or there: matter or antimatter, the former over all winning out in our universe’s case. The push of dark energy versus the pull of dark matter might be another example of such an astronomical opposition, our cosmos itself the unimaginably vast battleground on which these mighty opposites meet.

It was barely a fortnight later that I finally fully reassembled the kylix, my work illuminated by a basic solar powered LED that shone against flapping canvas. Already I had no doubts as to the inscription:

My translation from the ancient Greek: If you were to know this you would be deranged, for you would instantly know everything.

By removing the Viewer that you will no doubt be claiming I have stolen, I have tried to protect you from the real meaning of so cryptic a pronouncement. For now I will say no more than that there was an odd thing about the shards. The patina of the outside of the cup was exactly the same as the inside, as evident on several edges. This may possibly have been due to smashing just after firing. Further, the shards were concealed in a midden, as though buried deliberately. Purposeful smashing!

Anaximander himself had shattered the cup! Using thermoluminescence, the shards of the kylix were dated to 570-565 BCE, suggesting that the cup was inscribed roughly when Anaximander was forty. This was the stage in life at which Ancient Greek thinkers were expected to circulate their theories.

After inscribing the cup, Anaximander had realised his inscription would do nothing to make his theory of the Apeiron palatable. But was Anaximander right to think that observing the Apeiron must cause derangement?

Investigating the sublime, Immanuel Kant had surmised that indicators of incomprehensibly large numbers overwhelm the mind via the senses. The human mind tries and fails to understand the sensory input. How, then, would such a mind respond to the Apeiron?

With all qualities in equal measure, the mind could, if falsely, perceive a bland mid-range set of properties such as damp or tepid. Alternatively, there could occur a super-sublime experience, as the mind struggled to make sense of all possible content. The experience could involve violent shock.

Then and there I knew I was willing to risk madness by using myself as a test subject. This may itself sound unhinged. But beside the sublime having its own perhaps destructive attraction, I wanted to vindicate Anaximander’s theory by observation and was willing to risk anything to do so. It would be dishonest to deny that I was partly attracted to the fame that would accrue to someone who could do this. Perhaps the archaism “Apeiron” could even be replaced by a more contemporary-sounding term such as “de Hay Anomaly” or some such.

I would take Anaximander’s dire warning to avoid sighting the Apeiron as nothing short of a challenge. Even if I accomplished no more than joining the ranks of those who investigate the cosmos in its entirety, my family would be forced to realise the error they had made in dismissing my outstanding mathematical abilities.

While I had obtained my doctorate in classical studies, I now realised that I needed a second doctorate and to be part of an altogether different project. At the time, the Pre-Bang Telescope was in its infancy. Through my involvement with this maturing endeavour, you of the astrophysical community came to know the name of Bronte de Hay.

Proceed to part 2...