His Master's Voice - Stanislaw Lem

After many months back to the blog and that too because of two pages of scribbled lines on a flight to Delhi many months ago that I found while re-arranging the room

The recurrent theme for Lem - Solaris, Fiasco and as I discovered, in "His Master's Voice" of the problems of communication and any meaningful contact with civilizations and cultures different from our own. In HMV, there is a cosmic "letter" that has been received on earth - transmitted by means of a neutrino-beam that can penetrate through almost any kind of matter. The beam (originating from "Canis Major") requires it to be powered by something as powerful as the sun indicating a civilization capable of astral engineering. An impressive array of scientists and humanists assemble to "solve" the puzzle in a desert in an abandoned nuclear facility.

Some random notes - thinking points:

a. Lem goes into satirical commentary at length on how science has sold its conscience to military research and imperialism
b. The protagonist himself (along with another physicist) discovers a unique effect in the neutrino beam - "Frog's Eggs" (consisting of weak nuclear interactions) - which incidentally is a suspension of large molecules (perhaps like primordial life suggesting extra-terrestrial origins of life). The neutrino beam or the letter as the property of increasing the probability of life's molecules to survive. The TX effect is the discover of "fission" at a distance - instantaneous. However, as the pursue this project in a clandestine way, they come to realize that the TX (Tele-eXplosion) effect decreases in precision of where the explosion happens as the intensity of the explosion increases - a manifestation of Heisenberg's uncertainty.
c. One theme is of how culture affects understanding and shapes our world view. There is an interesting piece about how natural languages are cultural and how, for instance, genetic language is acultural. A good fried of the protagonist Rappaport, a Jew, who has escaped Nazi Germany (gruesome description of a scene where there is a slaughter and R escapes).
d. Various explantions are posited by different experts. An interesting view is one involving the oscillating universe - expanding "red phase" engendering life and contracting "blue phase" annihiliating it over billions of years. This theory proposes that the letter is something, perhaps from an earlier civlization, that encoded this life-engendering message into the neutrinos which result from the blue phase's contraction and are emitted by stars in the red phase. A regeneration of life in every new universe, the legacy of a hugely advanced civilization. There are many ideas and explanations in the book - one could just take one of them and write entire fantasy about it.
e. There is a discussion on how Judeo-Christian cultures are driven by a sense of guilt from the original sin. The eastern societies are driven by a sense of shame and therefore cultivate a lot of ritual so that there is a more "perfect" way of being. The point stressed was that empericism and the pursuit of modern science and physics was possible only in the Judeo-Christian traditions. The eastern traditions shunned empiricism. Hmmm...
f. Finally, the protagonist, comes to some understanding of his own - he thinks that somehow, the sender made the "letter" such that only a civilization that had reached a certain stage could fully understand it. He feels that they had also taken pains to ensure that a civilization not at that stage cannot misuse the message as shown by the TX effect and the uncertainty around it. There is in that a benevolence that he perceives in the sender - an acceptance of something good. There is probably some Christian acceptance here?