White Light (Rudy Rucker novel)
Encyclopedia
White Light is a work of science fiction
by Rudy Rucker
published in 1980 by Ace Books
. It was written while Rucker was teaching mathematics at the University of Heidelberg from 1978 to 1980, at roughly the same time he was working on the non-fiction book Infinity and the Mind.
On one level, the book is an exploration of the mathematics of infinity
through fiction, in much the same way the novel Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
explored the concept of multiple dimensions
. More specifically, White Light uses an imaginary universe to elucidate the set theory
concept of aleph number
s, which are more or less the idea that some infinities are bigger than others.
) with a troubled family life and dead-in-the-water career. He begins experimenting with lucid dreaming
—aided by "fuzz weed" (marijuana
)—hoping to gain insight into Cantor's continuum hypothesis
.
During an out-of-body experience
, Felix loses his physical body and nearly falls victim to the Devil
, who hunts the Earth for souls like his to take to Hell
; Felix calls upon Jesus
, who saves him. Jesus asks Felix to do him a favor: to take a restless ghost named Kathy to a place called "Cimön", and bring her to God/Absolute Infinite
, which can be found there.
Cimön is permeated with the notion of infinity in its various guises: just getting there involves grappling with infinity, as Cimön is an infinite distance away from Earth. Felix and Kathy get there in their astral bodies by doubling their speed in half the time so that they asymptotically approach infinite speed at four hours. Eventually, at the speed of light
, they turn into the eponymous "white light" and merge with Cimön.
In this new world, Felix encounters famous scientists and mathematicians such as Albert Einstein
and Georg Cantor
, who all reside in a hotel that is based on Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel
. Felix stays there after Kathy leaves him; the hotel is full, but Felix has the desk clerk move everybody one room up, leaving an empty room for him.
He falls in with a loquacious beetle named "Franx", reminiscent of Franz Kafka
's The Metamorphosis
, which is mentioned in Rucker's Afterword. The two decide to climb "Mount On", which itself is infinite (not aleph-null infinite, but perhaps instead cardinality of the continuum
or greater).
After many adventures, Franx and Felix find Kathy. They leave off climbing Mount On, and instead try the other side of Cimön, the Deserts, littered with portholes to Hell. Felix merges with the Absolute Infinite, but Kathy is scared and refuses.
Eventually, Felix wakes back up on Earth in his body; everybody attributes his dreams to a spectacular binge-drinking and marijuana-smoking episode, until Felix remembers an insight he had regarding the continuum hypothesis: if there were three basic kinds of existence, that of solid matter
, aether
, and things he calls bloogs which are not aleph-null or c infinitely divisible, but a higher infinity, then the hypothesis will have been disproven.
With the aide of a physicist friend, he uses his astral travelling abilities to create a ball of this bloog-matter. The ball has unusual properties such as ignoring gravity or being indivisible, or to be more precise, being a physical instantiation of the Banach–Tarski paradox
, which means it can be broken apart into multiple pieces, each of which is exactly like the original. It is implied the US government suppresses their research.
praised White Light as "a good, intelligent, powerful novel," describing it as "a sort of cross between Raymond Chandler
and Lewis Carroll
(another mathematicizing fabulist) with a tip of the hat along the way to Franz Kafka
."
in the introduction to recent editions, "I have never really left my body and gone to infinity's Heaven."
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
by Rudy Rucker
Rudy Rucker
Rudolf von Bitter Rucker is an American mathematician, computer scientist, science fiction author, and philosopher, and is one of the founders of the cyberpunk literary movement. The author of both fiction and non-fiction, he is best known for the novels in the Ware Tetralogy, the first two of...
published in 1980 by Ace Books
Ace Books
Ace Books is the oldest active specialty publisher of science fiction and fantasy books. The company was founded in New York City in 1952 by Aaron A. Wyn, and began as a genre publisher of mysteries and westerns...
. It was written while Rucker was teaching mathematics at the University of Heidelberg from 1978 to 1980, at roughly the same time he was working on the non-fiction book Infinity and the Mind.
On one level, the book is an exploration of the mathematics of infinity
Infinity
Infinity is a concept in many fields, most predominantly mathematics and physics, that refers to a quantity without bound or end. People have developed various ideas throughout history about the nature of infinity...
through fiction, in much the same way the novel Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
Flatland
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions is an 1884 satirical novella by the English schoolmaster Edwin Abbott Abbott. Writing pseudonymously as "A Square", Abbott used the fictional two-dimensional world of Flatland to offer pointed observations on the social hierarchy of Victorian culture...
explored the concept of multiple dimensions
Dimensions
Dimensions is a French project that makes educational movies about mathematics, focusing on spatial geometry. It uses POV-Ray to render some of the animations, and the films are release under a Creative Commons licence....
. More specifically, White Light uses an imaginary universe to elucidate the set theory
Set theory
Set theory is the branch of mathematics that studies sets, which are collections of objects. Although any type of object can be collected into a set, set theory is applied most often to objects that are relevant to mathematics...
concept of aleph number
Aleph number
In set theory, a discipline within mathematics, the aleph numbers are a sequence of numbers used to represent the cardinality of infinite sets. They are named after the symbol used to denote them, the Hebrew letter aleph...
s, which are more or less the idea that some infinities are bigger than others.
Plot summary
The book is the story of Felix Rayman, a down-and-out mathematics teacher at SUCAS (a state college in New YorkNew York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
) with a troubled family life and dead-in-the-water career. He begins experimenting with lucid dreaming
Lucid dreaming
A lucid dream is a dream in which one is aware that one is dreaming. The term was coined by the Dutch psychiatrist and writer Frederik van Eeden . In a lucid dream, the dreamer can actively participate in and manipulate imaginary experiences in the dream environment. Lucid dreams can seem real and...
—aided by "fuzz weed" (marijuana
Cannabis (drug)
Cannabis, also known as marijuana among many other names, refers to any number of preparations of the Cannabis plant intended for use as a psychoactive drug or for medicinal purposes. The English term marijuana comes from the Mexican Spanish word marihuana...
)—hoping to gain insight into Cantor's continuum hypothesis
Continuum hypothesis
In mathematics, the continuum hypothesis is a hypothesis, advanced by Georg Cantor in 1874, about the possible sizes of infinite sets. It states:Establishing the truth or falsehood of the continuum hypothesis is the first of Hilbert's 23 problems presented in the year 1900...
.
During an out-of-body experience
Out-of-body experience
An out-of-body experience is an experience that typically involves a sensation of floating outside of one's body and, in some cases, perceiving one's physical body from a place outside one's body ....
, Felix loses his physical body and nearly falls victim to the Devil
Devil
The Devil is believed in many religions and cultures to be a powerful, supernatural entity that is the personification of evil and the enemy of God and humankind. The nature of the role varies greatly...
, who hunts the Earth for souls like his to take to Hell
Hell
In many religious traditions, a hell is a place of suffering and punishment in the afterlife. Religions with a linear divine history often depict hells as endless. Religions with a cyclic history often depict a hell as an intermediary period between incarnations...
; Felix calls upon Jesus
Jesus
Jesus of Nazareth , commonly referred to as Jesus Christ or simply as Jesus or Christ, is the central figure of Christianity...
, who saves him. Jesus asks Felix to do him a favor: to take a restless ghost named Kathy to a place called "Cimön", and bring her to God/Absolute Infinite
Absolute Infinite
The Absolute Infinite is mathematician Georg Cantor's concept of an "infinity" that transcended the transfinite numbers. Cantor equated the Absolute Infinite with God...
, which can be found there.
Cimön is permeated with the notion of infinity in its various guises: just getting there involves grappling with infinity, as Cimön is an infinite distance away from Earth. Felix and Kathy get there in their astral bodies by doubling their speed in half the time so that they asymptotically approach infinite speed at four hours. Eventually, at the speed of light
Speed of light
The speed of light in vacuum, usually denoted by c, is a physical constant important in many areas of physics. Its value is 299,792,458 metres per second, a figure that is exact since the length of the metre is defined from this constant and the international standard for time...
, they turn into the eponymous "white light" and merge with Cimön.
In this new world, Felix encounters famous scientists and mathematicians such as Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist who developed the theory of general relativity, effecting a revolution in physics. For this achievement, Einstein is often regarded as the father of modern physics and one of the most prolific intellects in human history...
and Georg Cantor
Georg Cantor
Georg Ferdinand Ludwig Philipp Cantor was a German mathematician, best known as the inventor of set theory, which has become a fundamental theory in mathematics. Cantor established the importance of one-to-one correspondence between the members of two sets, defined infinite and well-ordered sets,...
, who all reside in a hotel that is based on Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel
Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel
Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel is a mathematical veridical paradox about infinite sets presented by German mathematician David Hilbert .-The paradox:...
. Felix stays there after Kathy leaves him; the hotel is full, but Felix has the desk clerk move everybody one room up, leaving an empty room for him.
He falls in with a loquacious beetle named "Franx", reminiscent of Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka was a culturally influential German-language author of short stories and novels. Contemporary critics and academics, including Vladimir Nabokov, regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century...
's The Metamorphosis
The Metamorphosis
The Metamorphosis is a novella by Franz Kafka, first published in 1915. It is often cited as one of the seminal works of short fiction of the 20th century and is widely studied in colleges and universities across the western world...
, which is mentioned in Rucker's Afterword. The two decide to climb "Mount On", which itself is infinite (not aleph-null infinite, but perhaps instead cardinality of the continuum
Cardinality of the continuum
In set theory, the cardinality of the continuum is the cardinality or “size” of the set of real numbers \mathbb R, sometimes called the continuum. It is an infinite cardinal number and is denoted by |\mathbb R| or \mathfrak c ....
or greater).
After many adventures, Franx and Felix find Kathy. They leave off climbing Mount On, and instead try the other side of Cimön, the Deserts, littered with portholes to Hell. Felix merges with the Absolute Infinite, but Kathy is scared and refuses.
Eventually, Felix wakes back up on Earth in his body; everybody attributes his dreams to a spectacular binge-drinking and marijuana-smoking episode, until Felix remembers an insight he had regarding the continuum hypothesis: if there were three basic kinds of existence, that of solid matter
Matter
Matter is a general term for the substance of which all physical objects consist. Typically, matter includes atoms and other particles which have mass. A common way of defining matter is as anything that has mass and occupies volume...
, aether
Aether
-Metaphysics and mythology:* Aether , the material that fills the region of the universe above the terrestrial sphere* Aether was the personification of the "upper sky", space and heaven, in Greek mythology-Science and engineering:...
, and things he calls bloogs which are not aleph-null or c infinitely divisible, but a higher infinity, then the hypothesis will have been disproven.
With the aide of a physicist friend, he uses his astral travelling abilities to create a ball of this bloog-matter. The ball has unusual properties such as ignoring gravity or being indivisible, or to be more precise, being a physical instantiation of the Banach–Tarski paradox
Banach–Tarski paradox
The Banach–Tarski paradox is a theorem in set theoretic geometry which states the following: Given a solid ball in 3-dimensional space, there exists a decomposition of the ball into a finite number of non-overlapping pieces , which can then be put back together in a different way to yield two...
, which means it can be broken apart into multiple pieces, each of which is exactly like the original. It is implied the US government suppresses their research.
Reception
Thomas M. DischThomas M. Disch
Thomas Michael Disch was an American science fiction author and poet. He won the Hugo Award for Best Related Book – previously called "Best Non-Fiction Book" – in 1999, and he had two other Hugo nominations and nine Nebula Award nominations to his credit, plus one win of the John W...
praised White Light as "a good, intelligent, powerful novel," describing it as "a sort of cross between Raymond Chandler
Raymond Chandler
Raymond Thornton Chandler was an American novelist and screenwriter.In 1932, at age forty-five, Raymond Chandler decided to become a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Depression. His first short story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in...
and Lewis Carroll
Lewis Carroll
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson , better known by the pseudonym Lewis Carroll , was an English author, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer. His most famous writings are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, as well as the poems "The Hunting of the...
(another mathematicizing fabulist) with a tip of the hat along the way to Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka was a culturally influential German-language author of short stories and novels. Contemporary critics and academics, including Vladimir Nabokov, regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century...
."
Transrealism
The main character is a transrealist interpretation of Rucker's life in the 1970s. (Rucker taught mathematics at the State University College at Geneseo, New York from 1972-1978.) As such, though the character is fictional, he bears some exaggerated resemblance to Rucker's interpretation of himself at the time. Rucker tells John ShirleyJohn Shirley
John Shirley is an American fantasist, author of noir fiction, and science-fiction writer. Shirley is a prolific writer of novels and short stories, TV scripts and screenplays who has published over 30 books and 10 collections...
in the introduction to recent editions, "I have never really left my body and gone to infinity's Heaven."
External links
- John Shirley's Introduction with some additional paragraphs.