I said warily, “You tell me.” I’d come here expecting a serve of the usual florid cult-speak from the very start: gibberish about archetypal warlocks and witches, or the urgent need to rediscover the lost wisdom of the alchemists. The strategy of taking quantum mechanics and distorting the boundaries of its counter-intuitive weirdness in whatever direction suited the cult philosophy was far harder to track. In the hands of a smooth-talking charlatan, QM could be blurred into just about anything – from a “scientific” basis for telepathy, to a “proof” of Zen Buddhism. Still, if I couldn’t gauge the precise moment when Conroy moved from established science to Anthrocosmological fantasy, that hardly mattered; I could map it all out later, when I had my electronic teat back, giving me access to some expert guidance.

Conroy smiled at my edginess – and continued in the language of science. “What happened, historically, was that physics merged with information theory . Or at least, a lot of people explored the union, for a while. They tried to discover whether it made sense to talk about building, not just a space-time of individual microscopic events, but all of the underlying quantum mechanics, and all of the various – then, non-unified – field equations … out of nothing but a stream of yes-and-no answers. Reality from information, from an accumulation of knowledge. As Wheeler put it, ‘an it from a bit.’”

I said, “Sounds like one of those nice ideas that just didn’t pan out. No one at the conference is talking about anything of the kind.”

Conroy conceded, “ Information physics pretty much vanished from serious contention when the Standard Unified Field Theory rose from the ashes of superstrings. What did the geometry of ten-dimensional total space have to do with sequences of bits? Very little. Geometry took over. And it’s been the most productive approach ever since.”

“So where do the Anthrocosmologists fit in? Do you have your own – ‘information physics’ – rival TOEs … which the establishment won’t take seriously?”

Conroy laughed. “Hardly! We couldn’t begin to compete in that arena, and we have no wish to do so. Buzzo, Mosala and Nishide can fight it out between themselves. One of them will come up with a flawless TOE in the end – I’m certain of that.”

“Then—?”

“Go back to the old Wheeler model of the universe. Laws of physics emerge from patterns – consistencies – in random data. But just as an event doesn’t take place unless it’s observed, a law doesn’t exist unless it’s understood. The question then is: understood by whom? Who decides what ‘consistent’ means? Who decides what form a ‘law’ can take – or what constitutes an ‘explanation’?