Penrose picked up a handful jelebi candies and kneaded them into the shape of a two foot long cord. With a quick jerking motion of the wrist he flipped it up to the ceiling where it rocked back and forth like a vacuum fluctuation from the edge of a chandelier.
"Oh, is that so?" Witten roared, roused to anger at last, "Well! here's what I think of your gravitons!" Witten sent half a dozen date pits flying over Penrose's shoulder . One of them grazed John Archibald Wheeler on the side of the head just as he was standing up. Wheeler picked it up ,turned around to face Witten, and said :
" I'm too grown up to get involved in this debate. Thank goodness you're not arguing about total nonsense like cosmic inflation. It ought to obvious to a babe in swaddling clouts that the substance of Everything consists of densely packed flecks of frothing quantum foam, borne on the crests of Time's All-Sundering Wave!!" To emphasize his position, Wheeler held up a large inflated loaf of poori , squashed it between his hands , and threw it across the room:
" Thus to all inflationary scenarios!"
It appears that Wheeler's gesture had intersected , ( in twistor space), with the local action of the universal DeBroglie Probability Wave, to produce a spontaneous symmetry breaking that rippled through the dining room like a space-time thunderbolt. Within seconds the genteel ambiance of the Quadrangle Club had degenerated to the arena of a free-for-all food fight between the world's weightiest intellects!
"Topological geons!" cried Rafael Sorkin, " Causal pre-sets!". As he said this he threw a bowl of rasam in the direction of our table: " The causal sets in the pre-geometry encode the arrow of time! Penrose's arrow will never fly! The point is blunt and the arrows are all wet! Geons! Geons!"
Lou Kauffman stood up and barked : " I think that all of you are tied up in knots! The basis of Everything is knotted strings! It's as clear as the nose on your face." Saying this, he dumped a plate of basmati rice in Witten's lap. NOT strings, Ed; KNOTTED strings! In particular, the KNOTS IN the strings, NOT the STRINGS themselves! The knots are organized within a grand underlying scheme called the NETWORK! The Network rules ALL ! NATURE, my friends , is the ULTIMATE CONSPIRACY!"
Roger Penrose stood up and swore lustily with many gesticulations: " All of you idiots who believe in time-travel should take a look at this!" He raised up a decanter filled with fruit juice, poured its contents on the tablecloth, then smashed it on the floor. With his left foot he broke up the larger pieces until it was reduced to a gravel heap.
" Okay, folks!", he shouted, " Make the glass come back again! Do it! Try and drink the orange juice! Has my point be proven? Long live the graviton! Long live the Weyl Curvature Hypothesis! Long live Cosmic Censorship! Long Live Everything!" Then Penrose started throwing knotted strings of jelebis about the room.
As plates and bowls and fistfuls of food went flying through the air, one could hear a commentary that went something like this:
" Rainich-Misner-Wheeler, you jackass!"
" No! No! Never! Ashtekar- Rovelli - Smolin!"
" You fool! You didn't apply the Pryce-Tani-Foldy-Wouthuysen transformation!!"
" I think one ought to take a look at the Noyes-Manthy-Gefwert discrimination!"
" Why? Don't you trust the Christodoulou- Hawking-Bekenstein computation?"
" Yes! But what about the Chern-Simons-Feynman-Jones-Witten invariant!"
" Don't be ridiculous! You can't reconcile that with Becchi-Rouet-Stora-Tyntin quantization!"
" Not even in a Nakanishi-Lautrup field? With Steukelberg formalism?"
" I solved that myself, thank you, without the help of the Hatcher-Thurston-Haher-Wajnryb Theorem!"
- along with more highly illuminating commentary of the same character.
It was deemed that the situation had gotten out of hand when Ed Witten threw a dishful of raita yogurt dressing at Hugo Sonnenschein, president of the University of Chicago. Sonnenschein threatened to deny them all travel grants unless they stopped carrying on . This had the desired effect.
The final word went to Stephen Hawking . Obviously delighted by all the excitement, Hawking had been busily engaged in putting together a message in his computer. Now he played it back:
" Human beings are so desperate for immortality that everyone hopes that, at the very least, his own pet Theory of Everything with survive forever."
Lalitha spoke with real affection about the University of Chicago, their home for half a century. After Chandra's cremation, she and several friends walked about the campus with the urn of his ashes and sprinkled them at his most frequented sites , the classrooms, labs, dining-halls, libraries, bookstores.
Both he and she came from distinguished families of scientists and humanitarians. Her aunt was Sister Subbalakshmi, the most famous figure in the Indian struggle for woman's rights. Chandrasekar's uncle C.V. Raman was himself a Nobel prize-winning physicist, while his father was a noted theorist of Karnatic music.
By all the evidences, Chandra's father, C.S. Ayyar, was a difficult human being. Wali , who does his uttermost in the biography to remain neutral, cannot avoid painting Ayyar as tyrannical and bullying. A simple glance at the photograph that accompanies his treatise on Karnatic music, published in 1951 , confirms as much. It shows a man arrogant, threatened, narrow-minded, yet at the same time very capable, perhaps too much.
The same image of the man comes out in the very touching story with which Lalitha brought the evening to an end. She spoke clearly, in a cracked, quavering voice as befits an octohemigenarian , stopping once in awhile to recover a word, or to ask Kameshwar for a translation. She said that after their marriage in Madras, she and Chandrasekar had gone to Bombay to visit with his father before returning to England. She was so happy at being married at last , (she had waited for him for 6 years) , that she found herself singing a song written by a famous composer which takes as its theme the soul's yearning to be free from the wheel of karma and the torture of endless rebirth.
C.S. Ayyar overheard her and started railing against her for singing such a gloomy song on a day when she should be looking forward to married life and - most cogently - children. Finally he stormed out of the house and didn't come back again until they'd gone.
Lalitha assumed that Chandra didn't like the song either,however when the incident came up later in conversation he told her that he was very fond of it and encouraged her to sing it as much as she wished. In 1933 when, ( under the pressure of the rejection of his work by an astronomical community too craven to stand up against the reputation of Eddington ) , Chandrasekar changed his field of research, he asked her to sing it again. Chandra would eventually change his research area within astrophysics 8 times. With each transition came a period of confusion; he never had confidence that the end of one set of preoccupations would be followed by renewed energy in another direction. In these fallow periods, he would ask Lalitha for the song. It restored him: the doctrine of rebirth has its positive side, because it means that the end of one road must always be followed by the commencement of a new one.
Lalitha finished her presentation by singing it for us . The voice was elderly and infirm, yet confident of itself, the mixture of grief and hope coming through clearly despite differences of language and musical culture. Everyone was deeply moved.One felt that one had been privileged to listen to the lone whimper of humanity in the chilly inflation of astrophysical discourse. It had been made manifestly evident to all of us that for all human beings, the fundamental issues of faith, grief, hope, death, rebirth and love, as exemplified in this touching lyric, were of more universal significance than calculations of information loss in the interiors of black holes.
Not that they aren't fun to make .