'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 technique 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 research 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 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 demonstrated. 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 reactions 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.'
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 neighbour'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 mentioned. You and I almost had it back there 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 gravitational 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
'One such sequence is: "Every body in the universe attracts every other body in the universe"; another, "The secret of immorality is-", and still another, "Gravity is itself the result of the action of — and it can be nullified by-'
'But, by definition, pure noise is a completely random sequence of pulses, containing pulses in all possible relationships.
'Therefore: any information-bearing message is a special sub-class 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.'
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.'
'Why? Is my logic wrong in regard to noise and information?'
'Gad, I don't know. It sounds good. It's right, of course, but exactly what does that have to do with the operation of the human mind and Project Levitation?'
'From a structural standpoint, I can't answer that question — yet. Functionally, it appears that there must be in the human mind a mechanism which is nothing but a pure noise generator, a producer of random impulses, pure omniscient noise.
