Astounding British Edition, May 1953 — page 24: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

terest in the problem is only to the extent of proving the decision correct. “If you will forgive me for using you for guinea pigs in my project, I submit to you that I have given a far more powerful tech- nique for scientific investigation than you have ever possessed before. The technique of the conviction that any desired answer can be found. You have not been hoaxed at all. You have been shown a new and powerful scientific method. “If you could and did lick a problem previously impossible to you, in a matter of weeks, how many more of your own re- search problems are just waiting for this new approach?” There was a good deal more said at the meeting. Some of it was highly confused. Berk’s explanation was not understood at all by several of them. It would take a long time for it to sink in thoroughly, even for him, Mart thought. There was just a trace of anger within him that he found hard to put down. But he chuckled at the smooth way in which Berk had engineered the project. He’d bet the psychologist had some uneasy moments because of Dykstra! There was a sort of stunned feeling in his mind as he began to recognize the absolute truth of what Berk had demon- strated. He saw it reflected in the faces of some of the others a sort of blank why- didn’t-somebody-tell-me-this-before look. It was finally agreed they would meet again the next day to thresh out their re- actions to what had been done. As soon as they were able to break away, Berk took Mart’s arm. “I almost forgot to tell you, you are invited to dinner tonight.” “That had better not be a hoax,” said Mart. After dinner, the two of them went out into the. patio with which Berk struggled to give his city lot the dignity of an estate. They sat down on a garden seat and watched the moon come up through the neighbor’s television antenna. “I want the rest of it,” said Mart. “The rest of what?” “Don’t be coy. The rest of the guys are going to get it out of you in the morning, but I want it first.” Berk was silent for a while then he started speaking. He lit a pipe and got it going well. “Jennings almost had it in that speech about the floodgates of the mind which you men- tioned. You and I almost had it back there AE a Pe A te © a ee, ee ee eee Pa ee tg SS, od gg Fe - ee Or nn DT en a ne Oo OSes tS eee aaa Ye ass * See - “ $ — ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION when we were trying to solve the problems of the Universe in school. “It boils down to the thing you asked me up in the mountains: What is the process of thinking? Where does original thought come from?, “Consider the abstruse equations you cooked up in a matter of days on the gravita- tional flow around the curvature of space. Why didn’t you do it ten years ago? Why didn’t somebody else do it a long time ago? Why you, and nobody else? “I wanted you on the project especially, Mart, because I want you to give me a hand with this thing, if you will. It’s a little more than I can handle. I don’t know whether it’s physics or psychology or some weird cross between the two. “Anyway, here’s where I started: You know communication theory. You know that any kind of data can be put in code form consisting of pulses. For example, a complex photograph codified in terms of half-tone dots. There are many possible methods of coding information into pulses. The code can use dot-dash, it can use time- separation between pulses, it can use pulse amplitude, a thousand different factors and combinations of factors. But any information can be expressed as a special sequence of pulses. “One such sequence is: ‘Every body in the universe attracts every other body in the universe’; another, “The secret of immortality is—’, and still another, ‘Gravity is itself the result of the action of—and it can be nullified by—’ “Any answer to any question can be expressed in terms of a special sequence of pulses, wherein some relationship between the pulses is a codified expression of the information. “But, by definition, pure noise is a com- pletely random sequence of pulses, contain- ing pulses in all possible relationships. “Therefore; ~ any information-bearing message is a special subclass of the class ‘noise. Pure noise, therefore, includes all possible messages, all possible information. Hence, pure noise, which is actually another term for pure probability, is omniscient!” “Now, that isn’t just an exercise in scholastic logic. It is a recognition that all things can be learned, all things can be achieved.” i PO Fe ee SG, et POE ae Oa ep eee ee oh Te ps Sty, As ~ a Sn <o, a) The hs ae Mart stirred and blew a violent cloud of » cigar smoke at the moon. “Hold it!” he exclaimed. “There’s got to be some limit to .the territory you take in.” m Eomichbooks.co