“We send data at the bit level which means that the data is just a series of ones and zeros. If Rodrigo wants to send a one to me, he turns on his detector and measures the spin of his spookyon. There’s a fifty-fifty chance it will be right or left spin. If it’s right spin, which represents a zero, he simply stops measuring to return his spookyon to superposition and measures again. He repeats this process until his detector registers left spin, which is what he wants, and then locks his detector to measure continuously so that his spookyon will remain in left spin. Since his spookyon is locked on left spin, our spookyon here will be locked on right spin.”
“Okay, I get it. Keep going.”
“Now we simply use our detector to measure the spin of our particle multiple times. If all of the measurements result in right spin instead of being random, then we know that Rodrigo has locked in left spin and is sending us a one bit.”
“But isn’t there a small possibility that all of our measurements will come up right spin just by chance?” Rachael asked.
“Quite right,” Joshua replied, “but the more times you measure, the probability of this happening is less and less. What I gave you is a simplified explanation. In reality, the detectors measure the spin millions of times per second and the LEDs in the detector illuminate the sphere depending on the results. It glows blue for right spin, yellow for left spin, and red if the measurements are random.”
“In essence, red means that there’s no entanglement of the spookyons?” Rachael said.
“Either that or Rodrigo doesn’t have his detector locked to a certain spin.”
“But I recall the sphere at Dr. Bowman’s presentation glowing green. What does green mean?”
“Green means coordinated rapid data transmission. Spookyon transmission is half-duplex, which means that only one side can transmit at a time. Both parties cannot simultaneously send data. We use timing and coordination to allow data to be sent both ways, but not at the same time. Again, this coordination is extremely fast and is programmed into the detectors. Once the two detectors establish this synchronization and timing, they light the sphere green. At this point, the half-duplex communication becomes a moot point. We can send a lot of data extremely fast in both directions even though, at the subatomic level, only one spookyon is communicating to the other at a time.”
“Since Rodrigo will have his detector locked on a certain direction of spin during the test, we want a sphere that glows either blue or yellow, right?” Rachael asked.
“Exactly.”
“And red means there’s no connection? No spooky action, no communication.”
“Yes, red is the proverbial traffic light that brings the whole thing to a halt. No traffic, no communication. This is our fifty-eighth test for entanglement, by the way, and all we’ve seen is red.”
“Do you know what caused the failures?”
Joshua sat back in his rolling chair with a slim black leather backrest, his fingers laced casually behind his head. “There could be a lot of different causes. Sometimes we capture a particle, but it’s not a spookyon. Other times the sphere is empty to begin with, meaning that the tokamak registered a false positive during the capture procedure. Then there may be contamination and isolation issues, most likely from cosmic rays—they’re passing through you, me, the Earth—everything—every minute of the day. Or there could be breaches in the laser seals on the sphere, which allows air to leak in.”
“Little bastards,” Rachael interjected with wry humor. “They’re very elusive, aren’t they?”
Joshua managed a weak smile. “It’s difficult to say why we keep failing, but this is the first time I’ve used a new isolation procedure, so I’m very hopeful this time around.” He held up both hands and crossed his fingers. “I think Rodrigo should be ready by now.”
Joshua called Rodrigo on the video conferencing app, and this time Rodrigo answered immediately. “You all set Rodrigo?”
“All set up, boss,” Rodrigo replied.
“We’re ready to rock and roll then. Note the time in your log, switch on your detector, and lock for left spin.”
Thirty seconds elapsed without receiving a reply.
“Rodrigo, are you there, amigo?”
“Present, boss. The detector is locked and showing left spin. Sphere 0 is glowing a bright yellow. The computer confirms a total system lock for left spin.”
“Great. I’m going to activate my detector now. Here’s hoping that my sphere glows blue, indicating a right spin. After all, it’s only our reputations riding on the line, right? Let’s hope trial fifty-eight is the charm.”
“Got your rabbit’s foot, boss?”
Joshua smiled and turned to Rachael. “I’ve got a better good luck charm today, Rodrigo. Much better.”
“Yeah? I’m betting that your good luck charm is five foot six,” Rodrigo speculated.
Rachael moved so that she could be seen on the video feed. “Que pasa, Rodrigo?”
“Thought so,” Rodrigo replied in Spanish. “You must be pretty good at what you do to make it all the way down to the bat cave.”
“I have my moments.”
Thinking back to the previous conversation between Rachael and his assistant, Joshua blushed. “I think I’ll need to learn some Spanish pretty soon.” He pivoted his torso to face the keyboard on his computer. “Enough chatter, Rodrigo. Let’s begin. Here we go. Switching on my detector . . . now!”
10
The Universal Language
All three of them were tense. Joshua’s hand shook a little as he entered the keystrokes on the computer to turn the detector on, which made a few clicking sounds before producing a low, steady hum. Two loud crackling noises echoed in the mine shaft.
“Sounds like backyard bug zappers,” Rachael observed.
“That was just a preliminary degaussing procedure to eliminate any random magnetic fields, which are present everywhere, even in these rocks, albeit it at extremely low levels. No stone left unturned.”
The steady hum resumed.
“You up and running, doc?” Rodrigo asked. “Ready for the money shot?”
“Yep. Should be getting a reading almost any—”
Joshua’s mouth dropped open. Speechless, he rolled his chair back a yard from the table as Rachael simultaneously took two steps backwards. The Bowman sphere was glowing—it was blue.
“Holy shit!” Joshua exclaimed. “It’s working!” Eyes wide, his gaze was riveted on the blue sphere. “God, but it’s a thing of beauty.” He jumped up, spun around, clapped his hands, and grabbed Rachael by the shoulders. “It’s working!” he repeated. “Blue!”
Rodrigo’s voice sounded through the computer. “Say again, boss.”
“It’s blue, Rodrigo. Blue! I can’t believe it! Well, I can believe it, but . . . I mean . . . hell, it’s working!”
He wrapped his arms around Rachael and gave her a bear hug, lifting her an inch off the floor.
“Joshua?” Rachael said.
“What?”
“Bad news—I think. The sphere is glowing yellow now. It changed during your victory lap.”
Joshua’s heart sank. He released the young woman from his arms and crept closer to the sphere, leaning over as if he were a detective examining a small piece of evidence at a crime scene. His brows were knit as he shook his head in consternation.
“What the hell just happened?” he asked. “It’s yellow now, Rodrigo. Did you do something different on your end? Did you unlock your detector?”
“Geez, gimme some credit, boss. This isn’t my first rodeo. My detector is still locked and registering a left spin. Yellow, same as before.”
Joshua backed away and folded his arms, wrapping his thumb and index finger around his chin and jaw in a pose of concentration. As he stared at the sphere intently, it changed yet again, now glowing red.
Joshua’s hands fell limply to his sides. “Damn it! We have nothing—nothing at all. It’s red now. Rodrigo, run a diagnostic on your equipment, ple
ase. Computer, interface, sphere integrity—everything.”
Joshua sat and scooted his chair in front of the computer next to the detector and intently studied the screen. “I don’t see anything unusual. Everything’s as it should be. There’s definitely a spookyon in that sphere, and there’s no evidence of contamination.”
“What’s your best guess?” Rachael asked.
“To be honest, I think we’re crapping out for the fifty-eighth time,” he said with a heavy sigh. “There’s obviously a malfunction somewhere. Or else—” He rubbed his eyes and placed his hands flat on his thighs as he tilted the chair back slightly, head cocked back as he gazed at the top of the mine. “Or else the science behind all this is flawed and Henry sent us on a fool’s errand, though not willingly, of course. He fervently believed in his research. If only I had his damn notebooks.” He shook his head defiantly. “No, Henry was right. I’m convinced of it. The Martian Rover proved it! Gotta be a malfunction.”
“A malfunction in what?” Rachael pursued. “There’s hardly any equipment down here.”
“There has to be something wrong with the detector. Otherwise . . . I dunno.” Joshua began typing on the keyboard in front of his screen.
“The diagnostic’s complete,” Rodrigo said. The voice emanating from the computer was subdued. “Nothing wrong over here. The detector is in perfect operating condition, and I’m still seeing a left spin. Constant yellow, boss.”
A silence of several seconds was broken by an astonished Rachael. “Oh, my God! It’s blue again. Did you run your own diagnostic here in the bat cave?”
“Of course,” Joshua answered with irritation while doing a double-take at the sphere. “Everything checks out fine. Did you get that Rodrigo? It’s back to . . . . No wait! It changed from blue to yellow again!”
“Madre Dios,” Rodrigo said. “The damn thing is possessed.”
“Is that your best scientific guess?” Joshua asked with exasperation in his voice.
The sphere reverted to red.
Joshua stared at the blinking sphere before speaking, his tone one of resignation. “That’s it, folks. This is another failed test. Rodrigo, turn off your equipment. We’re both going to have to analyze what happened today and crunch some serious numbers over the next week. No entanglement. We can’t have this happen again. The university will pull the plug in a New York minute.”
“Okay, the detector’s off. Lo siento. Later, boss.” Rodrigo ended the video call.
Rachael approached the table and, standing behind the scientist, softly put her hand on his shoulder. “I’m really sorry.”
Joshua said nothing as he typed an account of the last several minutes into the computer. The clacking of the keys echoed off the black rocks. All else was silence.
“Uh, Josh,” Rachael said, “you may want to take a look at this. The sphere is blue again.”
Joshua and Rachael spent a minute staring at the sphere as it repeated its blue, yellow, red pattern at regular intervals.
“What can cause that?” Rachael asked. She bent forward, hands on her knees, as she stared at sphere 1.
“Absolutely nothing,” Joshua replied. “It’s violating the laws of physics unless we screwed up big time, which seems to be a distinct possibility. The damn thing is lighting up like a Christmas tree!” Joshua exclaimed, spellbound by the sphere’s display of repeating colors. He checked the interface and then the computer before watching the sphere progress through its sequence of colors.
“Let’s think this through,” Rachael suggested, pacing the smooth, hard floor of the converted mine. “You said the colors blue and yellow indicate entanglement, correct?”
“That’s true, but for a while, both spheres—ours and Rodrigo’s—were yellow. That’s impossible if they are entangled. If his sphere had a left spin, then ours would have to have a right spin to verify a link between the spookyons. That’s the nature of the communication that happens with entanglement.”
Rachael recalled Henry Bowman’s presentation at Wheeler Auditorium and how the baseballs had opposite spins when their images became clear, representing entanglement.
“Then I see only one possibility,” she remarked, “and it’s courtesy of Sherlock Holmes. The spookyon here in the bat cave is entangled, but not with the one in Rodrigo’s sphere.”
“Not following. What are you getting at?”
“It’s Holmes’ famous theorem. When you’ve eliminated all other possibilities, that which remains, no matter how implausible, must be the truth. You said this can’t happen, but it is.”
Joshua rubbed his fingers through his hair as he considered Rachael’s speculation. “It’s theoretically possible, but any other particle it’s entangled with would have to be locked down by a detector. Otherwise, the spin measurement of our particle would be totally random and show red only.”
“Well, there has to be an explanation,” Rachael said. “Science isn’t random. There’s always an explanation, no matter how implausible it may appear at first. Haven’t other labs been working on spookyons ever since Henry’s demonstration? Maybe this particle got entangled with another lab’s by sheer dumb luck—a lab that is using a detector at this very moment.”
“Can’t happen,” Joshua retorted tersely. “The particles have to be created at the exact place at the same time. It’s how they get entangled in the first place, and it’s why we create spookyons in pairs inside the tokamak.”
Rachael felt deflated and out of ideas. “Just brainstorming.” She wandered into the shadows several feet from the table, her body just a dark blue shadow. “Maybe it’s time to bring down some members of your team. Some raw brain power to work the problem as they used to say in Mission Control at NASA.”
Joshua shook his head. “No, not yet. I don’t need a lot of competing voices filling my head right now.” He looked from the sphere to the computer screen. “At least our eyes aren’t deceiving us. The computer is registering the same cycle that we’re seeing: blue, yellow, and red over and over again.”
“And you’ve never seen this pattern before?”
“We’ve never seen a pattern—period.”
“Well you’ve got one now, and it’s not random. The sequence of colors isn’t changing.”
“Granted, but it’s still the proverbial riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”
Rachael stared at the sphere before speaking again. The writer within her was doing what it had for a lifetime: observing with focus and concentration, looking for details, patterns, similarities, differences. “I just noticed something.”
“What?”
“You said that you use timing to allow you to send data via spookyons, correct?”
“Yes.”
“It seems to me that the timing of the colors isn’t the same. It stays red the longest, yellow the shortest, and blue is in between. The color pattern is a constant, but the intervals at which they change are definitely not uniform.”
The provocative statement snared Joshua’s attention immediately. He looked at the sphere with curiosity for several seconds before turning back to the computer. “Damn strange but let me check something.” He tapped a few keys and then invited Rachael to come closer and examine the screen.
Standing behind Joshua’s chair, Rachael bent over and peered at the data.
“The computer has recorded all color cycles since the test began,” Joshua stated. “Like you said, the time intervals aren’t random. Good catch. They’re repeating at specific time intervals. I asked the computer to display them for us.”
The screen showed the following numbers.
blue: 10.1345 secs
yellow: 3.6159 secs
red: 14.9755 secs
blue: 11.3596 secs
yellow: 3.6159 secs
red: 14.9755 secs
blue: 11.3596 secs
yellow: 3.6159 secs
red: 14.9755 secs
blue: 11.3596 secs
yellow: 3.6159 secs
red: 14.9755 secs
The numbers corresponding to each color didn’t vary by a single decimal place in all of the repetitions except the blue measurement on the first line. Joshua hit the scroll key, causing the computer to display the last one hundred sequences. They were all the same.
“I think that first blue data point is aberrant and should be disregarded,” Joshua noted. “We may have turned the detector on mid-cycle and therefore the first blue value is shorter, but the rest are identical.”
Rachael was surprised by the regularity of the numerical data. “Any way that the computer could have accidentally been programmed to do this?” Rachael asked.
“Not a chance. I’m the only one who has access to this computer—not even the team has my password—and I guarantee that I didn’t program a version of Minecraft Rave Lights into it.”
“What about the detector? Could anyone have changed its programming or circuitry?”
“If you’re a conspiracy theorist, I guess it could have been sabotaged, but I’d vouch for everyone on the team. Their careers all have a lot riding on the success of this program. If we ever manage to create stable entanglement, my staff will become scientific rock stars overnight. They’ll be able to write their own tickets.”
Rachael stared at the pattern of numbers on the screen. She’d always been good at picking out correlations and patterns. “May I use the calculator on my phone?” Rachael asked. “I think I noticed something else.”
“Go ahead. It won’t emit any signal as long as it’s in airplane mode, not that it matters anymore at this point.”
Rachael produced the iPhone from her handbag and started hitting numbers on the screen while periodically glancing at the computer where the numbers were displayed. “As Alice said, curiouser and curiouser. You said that blue and yellow means we’re receiving a signal, while red means we’re not?”
“Right.”
“We’re definitely down the rabbit hole,” Rachael said, narrowing her eyes. “When you add together the times for the blue and yellow, you get the time for the red—and to the exact decimal point. The time we’re receiving equals the time we’re not receiving. Can that be an accident?” For Rachael, the question was largely rhetorical.
New Eden Page 7
