Mosala said, “I believe we have to take a difficult stand and declare: the probabilities just don’t matter. Forget the hypothetical ensemble of other universes. Forget the need to fine-tune the Big Bang. This universe does exist. The probability of our being here is one hundred per cent . We have to take that as given, instead of bending over backward trying to contrive assumptions which do their best to conceal the fact of that certainty.”

Forget fine-tuning the Big Bang. Take our own existence as given. The parallels with Conroy’s spiel the night before were striking – but I should hardly have been surprised. The whole modus operandi of pseudoscience was to cling as closely as possible to the language and ideas of the orthodoxy of the day – to adopt appropriate camouflage. The ACs would have read every paper Mosala had published – but a similar ring to their words hardly granted their ideas the same legitimacy. And if they clearly shared her vehement distaste for the fantasy that every culture could somehow inhabit a cosmology of its own choosing, I didn’t doubt for a moment that Mosala was infinitely more repelled by their alternative, in which a lone TOE specialist played absolute monarch. Worse than a Belgian or Zairean space-time: a Buzzo, Mosala, or Nishide cosmos.

I said, “So you take the universe for granted. You’re against twisting the mathematics to conform to a perceived need to prove that what we see around us is ‘likely.’ But you don’t exactly go back to setting the dials on the SUFT machine, either.”

“No. I feed in complete descriptions of experiments, instead.”

“You choose the most general All-Topologies Model possible – but you break the perfect symmetry by giving a one-hundred per cent probability to the existence of various setups of experimental apparatus?”

“Yes. Can I just—?” She rose from her chair and went into the bedroom, then returned with her notepad. She held up the screen for me. “Here’s one example. It’s a simple accelerator experiment: a beam of protons and antiprotons collide at a certain energy, and a detector is used to pick up any positrons emitted from the point of collision at a certain angle, with a certain range of energies. The experiment itself has been carried out, in one form or another, for eighty or ninety years.”

The animation showed an architectural schematic of a full-size accelerator ring, and zoomed in toward one of several points where counter-rotating particle beams crossed, and spilt their debris into elaborate detectors.