∞

Alan Stern, a professor of theoretical physics and recent recipient of the Nobel prize, was approached at a conference on inflationary theory at a hotel outside Cambridge, Massachusetts, by a young man in a three-piece suit—quite an anomaly, Stern thought, among this rabble of thesis-writers, academic hacks, bearded astrophysicists, and balding cosmologists. Stern, both bearded and balding, was intrigued by the younger man’s air of quiet authority, and the two of them adjourned to the bar, where the younger man disappointed Stern by offering him a job.

“I don’t do classified work,” he said. “If I can’t publish it, it’s not science. In any case, defense research is a dead end. The Cold War is over, or hasn’t that news reached your Appropriations Committee?”

The younger man displayed an impenetrable patience. “This isn’t, strictly speaking, a defense project.”

And he explained further.

“My God,” Stern said softly, when the young man had finished. “Can this be true?”

∞

That evening, Stern sat in the audience as a Lucasian Professor of Mathematics read a paper defending the anthropic principle in the language of set theory. Bored by the lecture and still excited by what the young man had told him, Stern took a notebook from his pocket and opened it across his knee.

God is the root of the All, he wrote, the Ineffable One who dwells in the Monad.

He dwells alone, in silence.

∞

The Two Rivers Physical Research Laboratory was constructed over the course of six months on a parcel of uninhabited land in northern Michigan deeded to the government by an impoverished Ojibway band.