Panic in Level 4: Cannibals, Killer Viruses, and Other Journeys to the Edge of Science by Richard Preston Page A
Authors: Richard Preston
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until the family decided to try to take Gregory abroad for medical treatment. In 1976, Volf and Malka applied to the government of the USSR for permission to emigrate. Volf was immediately fired from his job.
It was a totalitarian state. The KGB began tailing the brothers. “I had twelve KGB agents on my tail,” David told me. “No, look, I’m not kidding! They shadowed me around the clock in two cars, six agents in each car—three in the front seat and three in the backseat. That was how the KGB operated.” One day in 1976, David was walking down the street when KGB officers attacked him, fracturing his skull. He nearly died. He didn’t dare go to the hospital; he went home instead. “If I had gone to the hospital, I would have died for sure,” he said. “The hospital was run by the state. I would forget to breathe.”
One July day, plainclothesmen from the KGB accosted Volf and Malka on a street corner and beat them up. They broke Malka’s arm and fractured her skull. David took his mother to the hospital, where he found that the doctors feared the KGB. “The doctor in the emergency room said there was no fracture,” David recalled.
By this time, the Chudnovskys were quite well known to mathematicians in the United States. Edwin Hewitt, a mathematician at the University of Washington, in Seattle, had collaborated with Gregory on a paper. He brought the Chudnovskys’ case to the attention of Senator Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson—a powerful politician from Washington State—and Jackson began putting pressure on the Soviets to let the Chudnovsky family leave the country. Not long before that, two members of a French parliamentary delegation made an unofficial visit to Kiev to see what was going on with the Chudnovskys. One of the visitors was Nicole Lannegrace, who would later become David’s wife. The Soviet government unexpectedly let the Chudnovskys go. “That summer when I was getting killed by the KGB, I could never have imagined that the next year I would be in Paris in love, or that I would wind up in New York, married to a beautiful Frenchwoman,” David said.
I F PI IS TRULY RANDOM , then at times pi will appear to be orderly. Therefore, if pi is random it contains accidental order. For example, somewhere in pi a sequence may run 070707070707070707 for as many digits as there are atoms in the sun. It’s just an accident. Somewhere else the exact same sequence may appear, only this time interrupted, just once, by the digit 3. Another accident. Every possible arrangement of digits probably erupts in pi, though this has never been proved. “Even if pi is not truly random, you can still assume that you get every string of digits in pi,” Gregory told me. In this respect, pi is like the Library of Babel in the story by Jorge Luis Borges. In that story, Borges imagined a library of vast size that contained all possible books.
You could find all possible books in pi. If you were to assign letters of the alphabet to combinations of digits—for example, the letter a might be 12, the letter b might be 34—you could turn the digits of pi into letters. (It doesn’t matter what digits are assigned to what letters—the combination could be anything.) You could do this with all alphabets and ideograms in all languages. Then pi could be turned into strings of written words. Then, if you could look far enough into pi, you would probably find the expression “See the U.S.A. in a Chevrolet!” Elsewhere, you would find Christ’s Sermon on the Mount in his native Aramaic tongue, and you would find versions of the Sermon on the Mount that are blasphemy. Also, you would find a guide to the pawnshops of Lubbock, Texas. It might or might not be accurate. Even so, somewhere else you would find the accurate guide to Lubbock’s pawnshops…if you could look far enough into pi. You would find, somewhere in pi, the unwritten book about the sea that James Joyce supposedly intended to tackle after he finished
It was a totalitarian state. The KGB began tailing the brothers. “I had twelve KGB agents on my tail,” David told me. “No, look, I’m not kidding! They shadowed me around the clock in two cars, six agents in each car—three in the front seat and three in the backseat. That was how the KGB operated.” One day in 1976, David was walking down the street when KGB officers attacked him, fracturing his skull. He nearly died. He didn’t dare go to the hospital; he went home instead. “If I had gone to the hospital, I would have died for sure,” he said. “The hospital was run by the state. I would forget to breathe.”
One July day, plainclothesmen from the KGB accosted Volf and Malka on a street corner and beat them up. They broke Malka’s arm and fractured her skull. David took his mother to the hospital, where he found that the doctors feared the KGB. “The doctor in the emergency room said there was no fracture,” David recalled.
By this time, the Chudnovskys were quite well known to mathematicians in the United States. Edwin Hewitt, a mathematician at the University of Washington, in Seattle, had collaborated with Gregory on a paper. He brought the Chudnovskys’ case to the attention of Senator Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson—a powerful politician from Washington State—and Jackson began putting pressure on the Soviets to let the Chudnovsky family leave the country. Not long before that, two members of a French parliamentary delegation made an unofficial visit to Kiev to see what was going on with the Chudnovskys. One of the visitors was Nicole Lannegrace, who would later become David’s wife. The Soviet government unexpectedly let the Chudnovskys go. “That summer when I was getting killed by the KGB, I could never have imagined that the next year I would be in Paris in love, or that I would wind up in New York, married to a beautiful Frenchwoman,” David said.
I F PI IS TRULY RANDOM , then at times pi will appear to be orderly. Therefore, if pi is random it contains accidental order. For example, somewhere in pi a sequence may run 070707070707070707 for as many digits as there are atoms in the sun. It’s just an accident. Somewhere else the exact same sequence may appear, only this time interrupted, just once, by the digit 3. Another accident. Every possible arrangement of digits probably erupts in pi, though this has never been proved. “Even if pi is not truly random, you can still assume that you get every string of digits in pi,” Gregory told me. In this respect, pi is like the Library of Babel in the story by Jorge Luis Borges. In that story, Borges imagined a library of vast size that contained all possible books.
You could find all possible books in pi. If you were to assign letters of the alphabet to combinations of digits—for example, the letter a might be 12, the letter b might be 34—you could turn the digits of pi into letters. (It doesn’t matter what digits are assigned to what letters—the combination could be anything.) You could do this with all alphabets and ideograms in all languages. Then pi could be turned into strings of written words. Then, if you could look far enough into pi, you would probably find the expression “See the U.S.A. in a Chevrolet!” Elsewhere, you would find Christ’s Sermon on the Mount in his native Aramaic tongue, and you would find versions of the Sermon on the Mount that are blasphemy. Also, you would find a guide to the pawnshops of Lubbock, Texas. It might or might not be accurate. Even so, somewhere else you would find the accurate guide to Lubbock’s pawnshops…if you could look far enough into pi. You would find, somewhere in pi, the unwritten book about the sea that James Joyce supposedly intended to tackle after he finished
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