Velvet: Hmmmm, this piece is kind of like wagging a finger as physicists. But I feel for you poor scientists. Especially now. On the one hand you're aware at some underlying erotic level about the ways the sciences have been made into tools for empire. There's some bile there, you feel a bit sick. But also you and everyone around you are studying in some specific detail the horror of the massive bull-headed wrecking being done by the industrial machine. And you're calling out, "Hey! Watch out! Alarm!"

Nelt: Fuck, yeah, and people now, after all the years of constantly seeking the newest cutting edge technology to amplify the power of corporations to manufacture capital -- after all that, they start waffling, and promoting this idea that climate science isn't reliable, goddamn lying everywhere by saying scientists, who know that we're fucking things up about as well as anyone can know anything, are ambivalent!

Velvet: So there's an urge to circle the wagons. To defend the clarity of this truth in the face of danger. None of this "anything goes"... it lets Exxon in!

Nelt: So you're saying you lot should go a bit easier on scientists.

Velvet: Maybe we don't push so hard with all these flag-waving-words, like magic and spells and fairies?

Nelt: Dumb it down?

Velvet: No... just obfuscate the disruption a little.

Nelt: Got it.

Nelt: You know, that's a bit offensive. I mean I love you Velvet, and I know you're meaning well, but scientists are rational, we can hear challenging things. The problem is all these hand-wavy New Agey people coming in -- no offense -- and taking these careful scientific ideas and models and making them say whatever people want, to make a buck. And then, of course, all the corporate money pouring in it's like they're trying to corrupt the data, corrupt the technicians! That's the problem, and if you keep scoffing at the method by which we minimize muddiness and errors ... well, you undermine the very heart of what makes science work! Of course we get upset, and push back!

Velvet: (thoughtfully) So ... you think scientists could be open to talking to trees, listening to the fey, praying to gaia?

Nelt: (grimacing) Geez, Velvet, I mean I think I know what you're talking about, how nonlocality and coherence and all that could conceivably mean that we can coordinate with other forms of life in patterns that don't involve the familiar senses, kind of like how biomolecules sync up human behaviors around sex and the like even if we're not conscious of it, or a million other things... but those words, fairies and the like, they have so many problematic associations, they're so undefined! And... people could get the wrong idea.

Velvet: So you'd rather use jargon, like "large-scale strange attractors within the phase space of multispecific tropisms"?

Nelt: Yeah, that's pretty clear. I mean, it might be worth trying to lay out a typology of different sorts of potential topologies, regardless of specific mechanism, especially with the recognition that the space of correlations is larger than we originally thought, and might involve quantum algebras at various levels of expression. That could allow for an assay of existing data sets to seek traces that we didn't have theoretical tools to observe previously... See what I mean?

Velvet: Yes.

Velvet: Yes I do.

Lights dim. A silent, eternal pause. Lights return, this time like an accelerated moonrise.

Mary: It sounds like he was launching immediately into brainstorming for a research program. Or even a poster proposal for a symposium.

Velvet: (musing) I do wonder what it would be like for this Letter to be written in the scientists' own vernacular: you know, with an abstract, a quick lit review, presentation of a novel theoretical or experimental technique or mobilization of existing technique, then discussion of results and implications for further research.

Mary: Well, but that entire domain is disciplined quite severely. You'd have to conform to all sorts of rhetorical and substantive constraints that would be really hard... I mean not just framing everything in mathematical terms, but also operating within a very specific set of references that really may not be open to the sorts of meta-arguments that I'm hearing you talk about...

Velvet: Yes, quite the challenge, no? A perfect opportunity for a literary stylist to pull off a coup.

Max: Are you talking about some sort of "Sokal hoax" in reverse?

Velvet: Well... in reverse in multiple senses. In other words, the purpose would not be to embarrass physicists by demonstrating that malicious actors can be published via peer-review even when they don't believe their own work. To be honest, that's happened a lot of times with falsified data, and it's sad but it's not particularly interesting. More interesting would be to try very hard to say something powerful and meaningful and intelligibly "true", across these disciplinary divides, by working with and even mobilizing the "boundary conditions" of the scientific paper as such.

Max: But isn't it a rather hackneyed commonplace that metaphysics and physics occupy simply different realms, and it's a category mistake to talk about one in the terms of the other?

Mary: But isn't it just that sort of rigid separation that we're contesting? So, yes: hackneyed. But maybe we're in a moment in which speaking across regimes is intelligible because of specific changes in the details of scientific practice and theoretics...

Max: ...and perhaps because the material conditions rupture business-as-usual in many ways, the trace of changing modes of production in an unstable phase change. (Am I getting the lingo?)

Velvet: Step by step, the longest march! (//Gentle laughter.//)