White Matter

Kurt - In the basement

We had started in the cryogenics room, a series of stainless steel vessels and boxy processing units linked together by an array of piping, some of which merged into the walls. It looked a bit like a brewery, only without the smell. Lines had been painted on the concrete floor marking out safe passage through the machines. As James led me through this labyrinth, halting in front of a control panel, he explained how the place ran on liquid helium, that here was where the liquefaction took place. "If you want a metaphor that might make sense to your non-scientific readership, tell them it's like a balancing act. Temperature is a measure of how fast atoms and molecules are vibrating, so the closer to absolute zero we can get them, the slower the movement. Your brain on the other hand is a warm, squishy mass of molecules in motion. It is literally humming in there. So, if we want to look inside and measure what is happening, we need to make our sensors absolutely still and undisturbed. Or as close as we can manage."

When I suggested this didn't quite make sense – why should stillness in one place compensate for movement somewhere else? – he replied that pop science explanations often don't, but that it was true all the same.

"It's the loophole in the second law of thermodynamics. Chaos always wins in the end; but set things up just right and you can shift the disorder from where you don't want it to where you do, leaving behind the answer to the question you are asking."

When I failed to respond, he gave me an encouraging look. Here on his own territory, in this windowless room with its dials and its pipework, James was the epitome of the affable and bespectacled professor, diluting the edginess that had been evident at our first meeting. It no doubt helped that I made an ideal audience; with enough scientific education and native intelligence, or so I'd like to think, to understand what he was saying, but also a depth of ignorance about the subject matter that cried out to be filled in, accompanied by a practical need to learn.

"Well spotted though. Perhaps that art school didn't ruin your critical faculties after all."

"Hey, just wait a minute. Who said anything about art school? I'm self-taught. Whatever I produced, it was all my own doing. No one to blame but myself."

"No formal training at all?"

"If you must know, I started out with architecture. Until I failed the entry year exams, that is. Probably just as well. Seemed destiny had other plans for me."

"You mean, becoming an artist?" I hadn't told anyone about my past career; the information just seemed to have spread of its own accord.

"I guess so. Either that or collaborating with a bunch of mind control freaks."

The words came out a little more harshly than I intended. The tone of our conversation until now had been light-hearted, and when I turned to James he was still smiling.

"Is that how you see us?"

"It's how those protestors see you. I guess I'm still reserving judgement."

We moved on through a further series of rooms stacked with computer servers. James dismissed these as 'number crunchers' of no great interest and started speaking instead about the science behind his brain scanning machines and what it was they were trying to do. "Think of us as bottom feeders, trying to eat our way up to daylight. And the thing that feeds us, the thing we always keep coming back to, right down at the bottom of everything, is quantum physics. You have probably heard it described as the science of the very smallest scale, but it is also the basis for applied sciences like chemistry, which in turn underpins biology, metallurgy, electronics, all of those. Brain scanners too. When you put all these things together, what you get is a bottom-up explanation of how the world works.