The final person at the table, however, was the real shocker. She was a middle-aged brunette, whose white skirt and floral blouse broke the rule for office uniform. Rules were for lower level staff. Alex recognized her as Magrit Knudsen, Tomas de Mises’s boss. She was a major force, already a Jovian Worlds’ cabinet member and tipped to become a leader in the Outer Planets’ Development Council.
Why was she here, for a routine progress review meeting?
The way that Kate had explained the procedure, Alex, or possibly Alex and Kate, would brief Glaub and a couple of staff assistants. They would brief de Mises, and de Mises would in turn provide summaries for people farther up the chain of command. Apparently normal procedure didn’t apply today. Alex was expected to brief the whole ladder at once, from top to bottom. Magrit Knudsen seemed to be studying him with special interest.
Kate’s raised eyebrow said, “Don’t blame me. I didn’t know she’d be here, either.” But there was no time for discussion, because Kate and Alex were barely in the room before Mischa Glaub snapped, “All right, let’s get on with it. And keep it short. We’ve all got other business to attend to.”
Kate glanced at Alex and nodded. He was on, with an instant decision to make. Either he described what they had as early results, the product of a still-evolving model and therefore not to be taken seriously, or he said what he really believed, which was that his model was right, that it was far superior to anything that had ever existed before, and that it predicted terrible danger in all plausible human futures.
The rational thing to do was to be modest about the model, dismiss this set of results, and promise better in the next review. There were two problems with that. First, given the promises that Alex had made for model performance once the Seine was in operation, there might be no next review. The whole project was likely to be scrapped. And second, Alex was a lousy liar. He couldn’t stand up and make statements that he didn’t believe. What he did believe was his model.
Avoiding Kate’s eye, Alex described the runs of the past two days and displayed their results. At first, the four people across the table sat and listened, sometimes nodding approval. Then he came to the critical years and showed the trends flattening and turning down. The audience became restless.
The model reached 2154 and the population dipped below 6 billion. Mischa Glaub was the first to break. He exploded, “You know what you’re showing there? You have the whole bloody System in catastrophic decline. But I’ve seen six other projections in the past month, and not one shows anything but expansion.”
Alex drew a deep breath. “All the other models are no good.”
Pedersen, whose group had produced three of those other projections, said, “Now just a minute, if you’re going to accuse my people—” Mischa Glaub snorted and said, “Cut the crap, Ligon. Unless you got damned good reason—” At the same time, Kate said, “What I think he means is—”
“Why?” Magrit Knudsen spoke no louder than the others, but her one word cut them off in mid-sentence. She went on, “It’s not enough to tell people that your model is right, and all the others are wrong. You have to explain why your model is better.”
When Alex said nothing, she added, “Ligon — that’s your name, right, Alex Ligon? — there’s an old saying: a man who understands what he’s doing can give an explanation of his work that the average person can follow over drinks in a bar. I happen to believe that’s true.” She glanced at the clock. “We’re not in a bar, and I’m supposed to be somewhere else. But I count myself as an average person. I’ll give you half an hour. Tell me about your work. Tell me why I should keep funding it, rather than canceling you on the spot.”
She knew his first name, although no one in the room had used it. How come?
Alex postponed that question for later. She had put him on the spot. He had not had the time to fine-tune and polish a simplified explanation to the point where Pedersen’s man, Macanelly, would follow it. He must go ahead with what he had, and hope that Magrit Knudsen was three or four rungs higher up the monkey ladder than Loring Macanelly.
He began with a direct question. “Did you ever take physics courses?”
Knudsen looked puzzled, but she nodded. “Twenty years ago. Don’t assume I remember anything.”
“I’m sure you’ll remember all we need.” Alex in principle was briefing the whole group; in practice he was talking to Magrit Knudsen alone. “For instance, for hundreds of years the scientists who worked with a gas would describe it by some basic properties… Not just what sort of gas it was, but they would measure its pressure and temperature and volume. Later on they got more fancy in their descriptions, and added things like entropy and enthalpy, which we don’t need to bother with now. People used those basic variables to tell how a body of gas would behave under different circumstances. They called the branch of science that was developed to do this thermodynamics.”
He looked at the others. Magrit Knudsen nodded, tentatively and apparently a little puzzled. Mischa Glaub from his expression was ready to explode, but he and the others wouldn’t override their boss. Alex figured he had about five minutes.
He went on, “The important thing about thermodynamics is that you don’t need to know anything about the gas at a more fundamental level. You get valid results without knowing that a gas is actually made up of separate molecules. The thermodynamic variables you are dealing with actually represent averages over a huge number of individual particles, but your results are correct even if you have never heard the word ‘molecule’ or ‘atom.’
“But then people learned about molecules, and they had a mystery to solve. How did the overall general properties they’d been dealing with somehow emerge from the action of a whole lot of separate particles? It took a while, but eventually physicists like Maxwell, Boltzmann, and Gibbs developed a theory based on the molecules themselves. The theory was called statistical mechanics, and it showed how to relate the behavior of ensembles of tiny particles to the general thermodynamic properties that people were used to.”
His audience was becoming more restless. Mischa Glaub was squinting and glaring. Ole Pedersen muttered something to Tomas de Mises that sounded like “What the hell’s he going on about?” Even Kate, who knew where Alex was going, was biting her lip.
Magrit Knudsen nodded. “I follow you so far. But I hope this is leading somewhere.”
“It is. The other predictive models used in the departments are like thermodynamic theories. What I mean is, they work with general variables. A general variable can be anything you choose: economic production by industrial sector or by location; overall computer capacity; transportation supply and demand; population; commodities and services. The theories tie these things together, and model the way that they evolve over time.
“But something like transportation demand is a derived quantity. It arises because of the separate needs and actions of more than five billion people. You could say, it’s like a thermodynamic variable that arises from the combined activity of a huge number of small, separate units. That’s a true statement, but it doesn’t go far enough, because all molecules in a gas are essentially identical. Whereas every human being is essentially different.
“My predictive model recognizes that fact. It derives the general variables that other models take as basic. If you want to think of it this way, the model is a statistical mechanics for predictive modeling. It allows you to derive all the ‘thermodynamic’ general variables of the older and obsolete models.”
Alex saw Ole Pedersen’s head jerk. The word “obsolete” was a red flag, since Alex was describing what the models of Pedersen’s directorate still did today. Pedersen was bristling and seemed ready to interrupt. Alex hurried on.