Why Does the World Exist: An Existentia - By Jim Holt Page 0,70

arms did he seem to get some relief.

So I spent the next ten days holding him. Occasionally he would lick my hand or even wag his tail a little. But his condition was clearly getting worse. He stopped eating. He was unable to sleep, crying through the night in pain. When even the strongest painkillers would not abate his agony, I knew it was time for the inevitable.

I stayed in the room with my dog during his euthanasia. The process took about a half hour. First, Renzo was given a tranquilizing shot. This caused his writhing and whimpering to stop. Stretched out on the table, at peace for the first time in days, he suddenly looked much younger than his fourteen years. He was breathing slowly, and his eyes, though sightless, were open. Then a catheter was inserted into his paw for the lethal injection.

The vet in charge of all this looked like a young Goldie Hawn. She and her assistant took turns with me stroking Renzo during the preparations. I did not want to break down sobbing in front of them.

Fortunately, I have a good trick for maintaining my outward composure in such situations. It involves a beautiful little theorem about prime numbers, originally due to Fermat. Pick a prime number—13, for example. See if it leaves a remainder of 1 when divided by 4. If it passes this test—as 13 does—then, says the theorem, that prime number can always be expressed as the sum of two squares. And sure enough, 13 = 4 + 9, each of which is a square. My trick for controlling myself in moments of unbearable emotion is to run through the numbers in my head and apply this theorem to each one in turn. First, I check to see whether the number is a prime that leaves a remainder of 1 when divided by 4; if it is, I mentally break it down into two squares. For the smaller numbers, this is easy. It’s immediately apparent, for example, that 29 is a prime number that leaves a remainder of 1 when divided by 4, and it’s also easy to see that 29 is the sum of the two squares 4 and 25. When you get past 100, though, both tasks become more challenging if you don’t have pencil and paper. Take the number 193. You have to poke it a bit to make sure that it is indeed the right kind of prime for the theorem to apply. And once you have done this, it may take more than a few seconds to see that the squares it breaks up into are 49 plus 144.

I had made it past 193 and was still dry-eyed at the moment the vet gave Renzo the final injection, the one that would paralyze his nervous system and shut down his little heart. It did its work quickly. Just a moment after the plunger was fully depressed, he exhaled in a burst. “That was his last breath,” the vet said. Then he exhaled again, and was still. Good dog.

The vet and her assistant left me alone in the room so that I could sit for a while with Renzo’s lifeless body. I opened his mouth and looked at his teeth, something he would never let me do when he was alive. I tried to close his eyes. After a few more minutes, I left the room and paid the bill, which included a “communal cremation” with other dogs that had been put down. Then, carrying only Renzo’s blanket, I walked home.

The next day, I called Steven Weinberg at his home in Austin to talk about why the world exists.

9

WAITING FOR THE FINAL THEORY

“So you didn’t like the Shoreline Grill? I thought the food there was reasonably good. Pricey for Austin, but not by New York standards. By the way, I’ve completely forgotten why we’re having this chat.”

It was Steven Weinberg, speaking over the phone in his deeply sonorous, ironically gruff voice.

I reminded him that I was writing about why there is Something rather than Nothing.

“That’s a nice idea for a book,” he said, his tone rising on the word “nice.”

The compliment was gratifying. But did he feel the same way that Wittgenstein and so many others did about the question? Was he awed at the very fact of existence? Did he find it extraordinary that there should be a world at all?

“For me,” Weinberg said, “it’s part of a larger question, which is ‘Why are things the