Unifier
An incomplete story about the limits of understanding. Undated.
Prologue:
It’s easy to identify the exact moment when the world stopped making sense. It’s easy to find in history books. It was when we received the First Solution.
The First Solution was the result of an international effort to build a machine the scale of which the world had never seen, built to help us probe the mysteries of the universe.
Humans had stalled out in their understanding of physics. We had theories that explained phenomena with incredible accuracy, but we could not make the theories work together. We couldn’t knit them into one seamless whole. This is why we built this machine, and why we named it Unifier.
Unifier was an artificial intelligence, though probably not the way humans of a hundred years earlier would have imagined it. The fact was that AI had turned out to be something of a disappointment.
The AIs were smart alright, but they never really gained what we would consider true sentience. They never manifested the creative self-directed problem solving that drove humans to the top of the food chain. Whatever fire evolution lit in our nervous system hundreds of thousands of years ago was simply not something we could figure out how to kindle.
Man had tried inventing a companion, but instead built really fancy power tools. Unifier was one such tool.
Though lacking in some fundamental human creativity, Unifier made up for it with incredible problem solving capabilities and unthinkable power. Computer scientists and physicists worked together to apply cutting edge machine learning concepts with the mathematical tools to model and understand the cosmos.
The physicists had developed some estimates for how much computing power they might need, and it was immense. Caverns filled with computer hardware honeycombed the countryside of three continents, towered over by power plant after power plant. It was the biggest international super-project in the history of humankind.
While Unifier was still being built, they were able begin training it. The preliminary results were very promising. Unifier could accurately model physical systems many orders of magnitude more complex than humans had ever managed before, which hinted at a novel understanding. And when it delivered its first preliminary unified theory of physics, it was less than halfway assembled.
That was the first hint something was wrong. Unifier’s theory of physics, the one it used to accomplish such computational miracles, was nonsense.
Not only was it nonsense, it was enormous and unwieldy nonsense. It was chock full of mysterious constants that seemed arbitrary and random, and as far as our best minds could figure, any order you could even try to place on the mess of equations seemed self-contradictory.
Work continued, more systems were brought online, and the embarrassment for humanity just compounded. Each new iteration produced a theory that, for all we could tell, seemed totally different from the last. But also, it was bigger and uglier. And still Unifier was able to use these theories to astonishing effect.
After a time, mankind’s hope in understanding Unifier’s theories flagged, and they turned to a new goal. Perhaps they could use Unifier as an oracle. They could use it to answer questions about the universe they desperately wanted to know.
Perhaps Unifier’s unique and inscrutable knowledge of the universe could still be used to deliver tangible rewards to humanity.
The scientists worked to figure out how to ask Unifier a new question. It was not really what the system was designed for, and it was far more difficult than they imagined. They had to develop a new language to code these questions in a way that Unifier could answer. And at this, at last, they succeeded.
The first question they posed to Unifier was designed to stress the system so they could monitor its performance while it directed all of its resources to answering.
Unifier, they asked, design for us a system that outputs more energy than it uses. In other words, Unifier, design us something that is physically impossible.
Perhaps it was really the test they claimed it to be, or perhaps humanity hoped to have a bit of fun at the expense of the machine that had so humbled them.
Unifier set to work diligently, churning away at its calculations for days while the scientists monitored its performance and prepared a more useful question. But unexpectedly, Unifier returned a positive result.
The result was stupid. There was no hiding it. It was utterly absurd. Unifier delivered a design for a machine with no moving parts, simply two small metal chambers of slightly different sizes, filled with an intricate pattern of wiring, all specified with incredible precision, and a switch on the side.
Humanity built this device with growing unease. They knew that it could not possibly work, but they had begun to doubt their understanding of the universe. And for good reason, as it turned out. The device worked. While drawing no energy and doing no work that scientists could identify, this device small enough to fit in a backpack could generate enough electricity to power a small neighborhood.
It was physically impossible, it was nonsense, and it worked. It was the First Solution.
—
Artificial intelligence
Humanity no longer makes meaningful contributions to the study of physics. It is studied by machines. The AI is a mixed bag. We never got the general superintelligence that so many feared. Some problems the AIs are very good at, but others they aren’t. They are not good at self-directed pursuit of goals. They are, at best, an intellectual power tool. With the right kind of directed problem solving they can produce miracles. Incomprehensible miracles.
Directed to solve problems in the realm of physics they have changed the way we knew the world works. Or more to the point, they have erased our understanding. The solutions they produce work. We have no idea how, but they do. But the solutions themselves are incomprehensible, and to the extent we can understand them, they seem contradictory, almost random.
Scientists the world over boiled over in frustration as the solver turned out one stupid solution after another.
But The Drive exists. As best we can understand it, it seems to keep the ship still and move the universe and we have no idea how it works. But we know how to use it.
The rest of the story is incomplete:
The story takes place on a colony ship.
It arrived at its destination and for the first time in human history detected artificial structures that were not human in origin.
All of the aliens were dead. As the humans tap into the data systems it is gradually revealed that the aliens suddenly just gave up on life and rotted away. The story is the mystery of why.
It seems as if the answer could be related to physics itself.
On the ship is one of earths greatest physicists. He is seen as an explainer, one that can at least grasp some of the machine physics and try to put them into concepts humans can understand, though must of it is beyond him.
At some point they wake him. With the help of the ships computer he begins work.
The scientist gets frustrated and eventually refuses to work on it saying it is total nonsense. Another physicist is awoken against his protestations.
He loses his mind and becomes catatonic. Like the aliens.
The final reveal is that the math suggests there is no objective reality. The laws of physics are a farce. That is why the drive seems to break every law humans understand. The machines could do the math but they couldn’t understand it. The humans couldn’t do the math, but if they could they would have understood. The aliens managed to do the math. They managed to understand it.