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picture.”
    “Rather than with the book of Genesis?”
    “Look,” Mike says. “I don’t want to contradict something that you hold—”
    “Hey,” Kelly interrupts. She reaches forward and touches his arm. “I’m a big girl. I’m asking you because I want to hear your perspective.”
    At the mercy of chemical response, Mike grins like a fool. “Why?”
    “Because you obviously know what you’re talking about.”
    “Well, thanks. But I don’t have any idea if what I think is correct. There’s always the possibility that God created a universe that appears to work a certain way, but doesn’t. Or that he set up the rules and part of the game is for us to discover them.”
    “But you don’t think so.”
    “Well, many creation stories were written before man had discovered things about the universe that seem self-evident today. To interpret them literally is to believe, for instance, that the Earth is the center of the universe, that the greater and lesser lights are there to create day and night for us. But today we know the Earth orbits the sun, and we know the moon isn’t a light at all. It’s a big rock that reflects light from the sun.”
    Kelly doesn’t say anything.
    “It’s just . . . if you knew how vast the universe is, how truly amazing it is that people like Einstein could predict how things would work with the tools of mathematics, that he could compose equations that would take years to verify with experiments, and that those experiments would prove with undeniable accuracy that he was right. . . . Everything we think as scientists, every idea we come up with, we expend enormous effort trying to tear it down. Only the most robust concepts survive. Compare that to ancient texts, stories and fables that contain so many contradictions, that seem to be influenced by faulty assumptions and observations, stories handed down by word of mouth for generations before someone finally decided to write them down. And then they were transcribed however many times, and translated, and. . . .”
    “And what?”
    “You know what I think is the most fascinating outcome of particle physics? The realization that our physical world is so different from the way we perceive it. You see a tree beside a lake under a blue sky, and you have a pretty good idea what you’re looking at, right? There is a sense of familiarity as your brain compares this image to previous, similar images. There could be an emotional component to that memory. ‘I like the lake. The best times with my family were at Tahoe.’ That sort of thing.
    “Now, if I were to ask which of those ideas are real and which are filtered through your perception, what would you say?”
    Kelly thinks for a minute. Her smile has long since disappeared. He’s probably gone too far, but there’s no turning back now.
    “Well, the lake is there. The sky, the tree. But my memories, the emotional impact, that’s obviously something I’m assigning to the image that isn’t actually there.”
    “Right,” Mike says. “At least that’s the traditional way to look at the world. But there are other ways to look at it. A philosopher could say there is no verifiable proof the tree is there. He could say that you’re making an assumption about the tree’s existence based on data from your eyes, but who says your eyes can be trusted? Or your brain? How do you know you aren’t hallucinating the tree? It happens to people every day—sick people, users of hallucinogenic drugs, once in a while people just like you and me. Until you touch the tree, maybe it really isn’t there.”
    “Okay, say I touch it. Then what?”
    “Then obviously
something
is there, right? Assuming you’re a real person, that you believe your sense of touch, then it’s obvious something is there. But what, exactly? Think of the reflection on the lake. You see the sky, clouds. If you’d never seen water before, would you think there were clouds in the water?”
    “Sure. Until the wind