Down the Rabbit Hole

As any developer will tell you, one's typical working week involves forays through the looking glass into a digital realm populated with a diverse and frequently hostile variety of strange and otherworldly creatures. Any large system, will over time have attracted a menagerie of denizens, all of whom will have squirreled themselves away in long-forgotten regions of the code. Typically they'll skulk about evading capture by the developers. The sillier ones will get excited and expose themselves during regression testing, but the more skilled will lurk undetected, biding their time, waiting for the right combination of circumstances so that they may burst forth and wreak gleeful havoc upon an unsuspecting world. Whether it's a lowly Copy-and-Paste Buglet, an insidious Heisenbug, a randomly destructive Jabberwock or even the dreaded client-relationship-ending Balrog, it will have an unerring sense of timing, invariably choosing to emerge one hour before the final release is tagged and built, during deployment or in the middle of a high-profile demo.

Problem was, I didn't even know what breed I was dealing with. From the mess it left and the chorus of client disapproval in my inbox, I had been inspired by midweek to slay a couple of apparent Jabberwocks as they wiffled through the tulgier parts of the system, and beamishly proclaim frabjous victories. But, alas, the carnage continued, and I realised that I was probably dealing with a particularly evasive form of Will-o'-the-Wisp. I'd already ruled out a Heisenbug - a nasty varietal that becomes more nebulous the more you try to pin it down, usually only manifesting itself intermittently. This problem was quite reproducable, but fixing apparent causes was having no effect.

Saturday evening found me at my nadir. After six nights of being misled by a Cheshire Cat, chasing mirages and getting very little sleep, in the rampant throes of the Nepalese Orang-utan Fever, I sat abject and beaten at my desk, log files and lines of code streaming and blurring as my head sank slowly. It had to be a Balrog, a demon of the ancient world. It was all over - this foe was beyond me, my vorpal sword was no use here...

I woke with a start at my keyboard half-an-hour later, my mind clearer and filled with a renewed purpose: I was late for a party, and was supposed to pick someone up on the way. Unfortunately, my right arm and leg had both gone completely to sleep, necessitating five minutes of hopping around jiggling like a belly-dancer before I could even risk trying to use the urinal, let alone drive.

And so I took my fever, three aspirins and a bottle of red and set forth into the wild black yonder...

A for Andromeda

Last week was one hell of a ride. It had everything a Saturday afternoon matinee could want: Adversity, Danger, Suffering, Sacrifice, Noble Heroes (Me), Beautiful Women, and Manxome Foes. A story so tumultuous must, I'm afraid, be serialised in the grand tradition. I give you The Quarkman Romances - Part One: A for Andromeda.

Monday morning started bright and early with a tangible sense of urgency at work. A service pack was coming up for release and we had yet to get anything to the increasingly anxious testers. All kinds of issues of alarmingly architectural significance were cropping up. I had the feeling that I wouldn't be able to get in as much parking-off and talking crap as I'd have liked for the week. I was not mistaken.

It was at about this time that the Fates gathered in the Stygian dim, and regarded each other with conspiratorial smiles. Given in their youth to the dramatic, they had tended to concern themselves mostly with heroes, hydras, gorgons and Kraken-ravaged virgins. Upstaged in modern times by cinema and technology, they'd had to find subtler means of directing the actions of their Dramatis Personae.

Act One, Scene One: Enter Quarkman left stage, unconcernedly, with a idyll in his heart and a lilt in his gavotte...

Now it's hard enough making your way in the world as an earnest young software developer-about-town with tropical storms, cosmic-ray muons, fundamentalists, astrologers, health ministers and the like to watch out for, without also having three goddesses from Hellenic times poking about in your config files and corrupting your repository. And so it was that I was informed by my previous employer that the system I'd raised and developed from humble beginings into the great and convoluted mess that it is today, had petulantly decided to go all schizo, leaving 500 users baying for blood. And as we know, Quarkman's First Law of Software states that when rebooting every machine in the vicinity fails to fix the problem (it usually does) then the good folks of Alabama quit the cotton fields and start looking for a developer to lynch.

So I went for a run with Yasmo. Now the Mighty Yasmo is a fearsome beast, bold of heart and hirsute of face, quite unfazed by mere trifles like the Elements or The Thousand Natural Hardships That Flesh Is Heir To - i.e. it meant an unnecessarily exhausting uphill assault. Half-an-hour into it, at the furthest point from my car, it started raining. Having begun as a tropical depression in the Atlantic, it quickly grew to a Category 2 drizzle off the coast before making landfall on the Peninsula as fully-fledged light rain. By the time it got to Newlands, it was a borderline downpour.
"Come!" cried the Mighty Yasmo, frenzied by the tempest, "Let us extend our run further, and charge furiously all the way round the cricket stadium!"

Anyway, I got soaked. And it was probably then, standing broken in the rain at my car, that the Nepalese Orang-utan Fever began its insidious attack upon my body. But off I went to fix the system problem, and therewith began seven days and nights in sleuthful pursuit of the most slippery bug yet. In fact any reader of T.H. White's The Once And Future King would be alarmed to discover that I had in fact unwittingly stumbled upon the tracks of the fabled and mercurial Questing Bug. And here perhaps, some explanation is in order, but it will have to wait until Part two of this torrid tale. Keep 'em peeled.

King of Infinite Space

We could be bounded in a nutshell, but evidence would suggest otherwise. I rolled over the other night and looked at the spot where by rights some exhausted ingenue should be sleeping sweetly, and instead saw through my bedroom window the less immediately enchanting but nonetheless attractive site of Table Mountain's floodlit face. The Tavern of the Seas never had so presentable an ambassador, travelling across the world as it does in so many postcards, photographs and paintings. It even has a constellation in the Southern Sky: Mons Mensa.

That got me thinking. If Table Mountain was not obstructing my view, I would see through the night sky and into the star-filled depths of space beyond. I am told that there would be as many molecules in my line of sight between me and the limits of the Earth's atmosphere as there would be from there to the edge of the Universe. Which got me thinking further: Where is the "edge"? Luckily, and in keeping with my belief that all the wisdom of the world can be found in pop lyrics, the answer was getting airtime every morning on my way to work. In her song "9 Million Bicycles in Beijing", Katie Melua informs us that we are "12 billion light-years from the Edge." Sage stuff. More starlets should take an interest in Cosmology. Whilst the subtleties of Tensor Calculus and Gravitational Lensing might be lost on Paris or Britney, it would surely make them more interesting at dinner parties. I imagine the latter receiving an award:

"I would like to, like, thank my dog for sticking by me when I lost my mobile the other day, and um, oh yeah! I'd really like to thank the Fine Structure Constant for making this all possible, 'cause as we all know, if it was only a little bit different we'd either have failed to coalesce after the Big Bang from free nucleons into the atoms we know today, or we would have been ripped apart long ago by runaway cosmic acceleration."

Thunderous applause.

Anyway, it's not quite that simple - the Universe isn't just a big sphere that's been expanding for the last 12 billion (closer to 13 and-a-half in fact) years, with a nice, definable "edge", beyond which lies an infinite void of nothingness. Ignoring for a moment the complications that Relativity, curved space-time, Inflation, etc. add to this picture, cosmologists cannot currently assert that the Universe is finite in size at all, or even that it is not only one of many - possibly infinitely many - "universes". Sticking with one for now, when they say things like, "x many fractions of a second after the Big Bang, the universe was packed into an area the size of a golf ball," they're not saying that the whole Universe was that size, but that the part we can currently observe was that size. Subtle difference, because the Universe could be infinitely big, which means that back then it was also infinitely big, just a whole more squashed.

The point of all this is the inescapable conclusion of living in an infinite space: anything physically possible is not only possible, but guaranteed. Some simple combinatorial maths will show you that there are only so many ways of arranging a finite set of things, e.g. all the particles in our Solar System. There would be an almost uncountable number of permutations, but the number would be finite. So if you were to lay out all the possible arrangements across space, sooner or later you'd have to repeat, and voila! another Solar System, exactly like this one, with me typing exactly the same sentence. I could be a google kilometres away, but if the Universe is indeed infinite - and there's no good reason why it isn't - I'll be there alright. In fact there would be an infinite number of copies of me, and you could work out the average distance between us. It follows that there would be any number of minor variations too. Uniqueness becomes a hazy concept. Let's not even start to consider the possibility of varying laws of physics in different parts of space.

So if the Universe is truly boundless, we are not alone. We can take solace in the fraternity of our distant doubles, as they are likewise doing as you read this. And if I/we am/are not bounded in a nutshell(s), could I/we yet hope to oneday count one/some of myselves/ourselves King(s) of Infinite Space(s)? Tough one, but at least I can be sure that there are indeed more things in Heaven and Earth, infinitely more things, than are dreamt of in our philosophy.