I didn't know what to say; she was right on every count. And on top of all that was Mosalas antipathy, and the risk I ran of losing her cooperation if I was caught straying into this territory at all.
What's more, I couldn't help but sympathize a little with the ACs' stand. It seemed that almost everyone I'd encountered in the last few years—from gender migrants fleeing other people's definitions of sexual politics, to refugees from nationalist cant like Bill Munroe—was weary of having someone else claim the authority to portray them. Even the Ignorance Cults and TOE specialists resented each other for similar reasons, although they were ultimately contesting the definition of something infinitely larger than their own identities.
I said cautiously, "I can hardly offer you a vow of unconditional secrecy. But I'll try to respect your wishes."
This seemed to be enough for Conroy. Perhaps she'd weighed up everything before we'd even met and decided that a quiet briefing had to be the lesser of two evils, even if she could extract no guarantees.
She said, "Anthrocosmology is really just the modern form of an ancient idea. I won't waste your time, though, listing what we do and don't have in common with various philosophers of classical Greece, the early Islamic world, seventeenth-century France, or eighteenth-century Germany… you can mine all the distant history yourself, if you really care. I'll start with a man I'm sure you've heard of: a twentieth-century physicist called John Wheeler." I nodded recognition, although all I could recall immediately was that he'd played a seminal role in the theory of black holes.
Conroy continued, "Wheeler was a great advocate of the idea of a participatory universe: a universe shaped by the inhabitants who observe and explain it. He had a favorite metaphor for this concept… do you know the old game of twenty questions? One person thinks of an object, and the other keeps asking yes-or-no questions, to try to find out what it is.
"There's another way to play the game, though. You don't choose any object at all, to start with. You just answer the questions 'yes' or 'no,' more or less at random—but constrained by the need to be consistent with what you've already said. If you've said that 'it' is blue all over, you can't change your mind later and say that it's red… even though you still have no precise idea what 'it' really is. But as more and more questions are asked, what 'it' might be becomes narrower and narrower.
"Wheeler suggested that
I said, "You mean like… making measurements on microscopic objects? Some properties of subatomic particles don't exist until they're measured—and the measurement you get has a random component—but if you measure the same thing a second time, you get the same result." This was old, old ground, well-established and uncontroversial. "Surely that's the kind of thing Wheeler would have meant?"
Conroy agreed. "That's the definitive example. Which dates back to Neils Bohr, of course, whom Wheeler studied under in Copenhagen, in the nineteen-thirties. Quantum measurement was certainly the inspiration for the whole model. Wheeler and his successors took it further, though.
"Quantum measurement is about individual, microscopic events which do or don't happen—at random, but according to probabilities determined by a set of
