![]() ![]() ![]() Rappaport couldn’t bring himself to, even though he sensed that, if no one did, everyone in line would be shot. Then a young Nazi officer asked for a volunteer to step forward. Before his turn came, however, a German film crew arrived, and the killing was halted. He was pulled off the street and put in a line of Jews waiting to be shot in a prison courtyard. Late one night, a philosopher on the team named Saul Rappaport, who emigrated from Europe in the last year of the Second World War, tells the mathematician about a time-“the year was 1942, I think”-when he nearly died in a mass execution. The intention behind the message remains elusive, but why would an advanced life-form have broadcast instructions that could be so dangerous? They manage to translate a fragment of the signal’s information, and a couple of the scientists use it to construct a powerful weapon, which the project’s senior mathematician fears could wipe out humanity. In “ His Master’s Voice,” a 1968 sci-fi novel by the Polish writer Stanisław Lem, a team of scientists and scholars convened by the American government try to decipher a neutrino signal from outer space. ![]()
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