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eBook Category: Science Fiction
eBook Description: A physicist who has unlocked all the mysteries of subatomic particles is forced to face his own mortality and the questions for which physics provides no answers. This hard science fiction piece provides equal doses of heady intellectualism and emotional impact as it explores both the rigorous field of physics and the human condition.

eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: F&SF, 1989
Fictionwise Release Date: December 2000

90 Reader Ratings: Great Good OK Poor

Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [71 KB], eReader (PDB) [29 KB], Palm Doc (PDB) [16 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [15 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [38 KB] - PocketPC 1.0+ Compatible, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [88 KB], hiebook (KML) [65 KB], Sony Reader (LRF) [45 KB], iSilo (PDB) [13 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [17 KB], Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [44 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [27 KB]
Words: 4571
Reading time: 13-18 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

I labored to find that single, unified parent force. No laboratory experiment can lead us to it, for the energies demanded must rival those of time's first thin instant. So it is up to argonauts on mathematical seas to chart the shadow curve of that Ur-Law.

Consider in turn the breadth of our universe; then the Earth; then a nucleus; finally, a thin wedge called a superstring. Each step downward in scale is by twenty orders of magnitude. That is how remote our theories have become.

Such smallness preoccupied me then. The image of a tiny wriggling string informed my nights, my dreams.

I sometimes awoke, my head still aching from the accident. I was uncomfortably aware that my mind was cradled in a shell of bone, my precarious reason hostage to blunt forces. Intelligence was besieged.

A friend of mine once referred to our brains as "meat computers." She was involved in the study of artificial intelligence, and as the aches slowly ebbed I often thought of her coarse, but perhaps true, remark. Yet my own head still bowed over the intricacies of theory.