A Ruby Beam of Light

by Tom DeMarco

  “Aha!” It was Homer.

  “Aha yourself.”

  “I don’t mean Aha in general, but Aha in particular. Aha about coherent light. About coherence. Today, my young friend, today we shall sit down here and be very coherent. Are you ready for coherent?”

  “Ready for coherent.”

  Homer dumped an armful of books on top of his desk. He motioned to Loren to sit in the easy chair. Then he sat down himself in his chair behind the desk. Being a fairly short man, he disappeared entirely behind the mound of materials on the desk.”

  “Oops.” He popped up again. “Well, let’s see here. In the interests of coherence, we will have to make up for the deplorable design deficiency of this chair. What were they thinking to make it so low?” He took the books from the desk and some others from the floor and piled them up on the chair. Then he sat down again on top of the books. “Excellent, excellent, better than excellent. Now, where were we?”

  “No place yet.”

  “Right. No place. Now imagine we are someplace. Imagine we are in a place where Planck’s constant is One.”

  Loren looked closely at Homer’s face in the reddish light.

  Homer’s expression gave nothing away. “Planck’s constant is one. One point zero zero. What kind of a place is that?”

  “A place where quantum effects are visible to the naked eye,” Loren said, or re-said, he wasn’t sure which.

  “Right.”

  “Billiard balls don’t roll smoothly, but move from one discreet position to the next. And they’re blurry, their positions are vague.”

  “Right. Now tell me, Loren, how did we come to be in this place?”

  “That’s a dumb question, Homer. We came to be there because you imagined it up, it was part of your hypothesis.”

  “Right. We have to ask the dumb questions, Loren. If we only ask intelligent questions, and if we only supply intelligent answers, then we will just go over all the same intelligent ground that all the other intelligent people have been over before. The dumb question is How do you come to be in a place where Planck’s constant is one?”

  “I guess it’s an alternate universe, like Mr. Tompkins went to.”

  “Suppose it’s not. Suppose it’s just the regular old universe. This universe. Suppose you’re right here in Ithaca. And billiard balls, all of a sudden, don’t roll around smoothly like they used to, but they hop from one position to another without ever passing in between. Poof, the ball disappears, and poof, it reappears half an inch to the right, only fuzzy so you’re not sure exactly where it is. Now, who should be playing billiards in Ithaca at this moment but Dr. Loren Martine of Salamanca, noted physicist and puzzler over the puzzles of the world. He taps the ball and it goes poof, poof, poof. And he thinks Aha! But Aha, what?”

  “Aha, Planck’s constant has changed.”

  “Aha, right. But what does it mean that it changed? Isn’t it a constant?”

  “Homer! What are you getting at? Of course it’s a constant.”

  “If it’s so constant, how come the billiard balls are suddenly going poof? How come the value of the constant is all of a sudden set to one point zero. Unless I remember wrong, it used to be six point six two four times ten to the minus thirty-fourth. Some constant.”

  “I don’t know, Homer. Stop asking dumb questions. Ask some intelligent questions.”

  Homer looked disappointed. But he came up as always with the lopsided smile and tried again: “Okay okay. Two minutes for intelligent stuff, a two minute timeout. Then we go back to the Modified Ithaca with the poofing billiard balls and you will tell me why the constant wasn’t constant. For this two minutes, I will entertain you with a enigma. The enigma is this: There isn’t room to turn around in this office, so why do you suppose I keep this eight foot long monstrosity?” He gestured back over his shoulder toward the maser. “I give you a hint, it’s not for the pretty colored light.”

  “Why do you keep it? Because it reminds you of something, I guess. Or of someone.” Loren knew that Homer had worked during one of his sabbaticals with the man who built the machine.

  “Sentimental value, he suggests. Oh yes it has some sentimental value. Lots of fond memories. From 1968. Who could not be sentimental about 1968? In 1968, for example, I was younger. This point is often lost on people your age, but before you are older, you are younger. It was in Zurich at the E.T.H., the Eidgenoesishhe Technishe Hochschule, Einstein’s old school. Oh yes, very sentimental. Right? Wrong. That’s not why it’s here. I would keep it around for sentimental reasons if it were eight inches long, but not eight feet. Some other reason.”

  “Um, because it illustrates something, something interesting.”

  “Right. What?”

  Loren had a faint memory of something strange about the maser, an odd property that had been noted at the time and never adequately explained. “There’s something that happens inside the beam. Something that’s not quite what you would expect.”

  “Aha!”

  “Jesus, Homer, I haven’t thought about this in years. There was a paper.”

  “Yes. By Andronescu of the ETH, my old friend, Andronescu.”

  “Something about heat transfer inside the beam. Things don’t heat up as quickly as they should. Was that it?”

  “Close enough. Boyle’s Law of expansion of gas under increasing temperature didn’t seem to apply exactly inside the beam. The gas expanded less than it should have. But only a very tiny bit less, by a few parts in a thousand. Anyone else would have thought it was a measurement error, but not Andronescu. Andronescu was a marvel in the laboratory. A man of extraordinary precision. A big Romanian with a mop of black hair and enormous hands, but so delicate. He measured a perturbation of a twentieth of a percent in the volume of the gas, but it was always there. Outside the beam a certain volume, then inside the beam a twentieth of a percent less at the same pressure and temperature.”

  “Andronescu’s Paradox.”

  “A wonderful piece of work, that. A paradox in the very fabric of the universe. A delicious paper. Published in German in the ETH physics series for 1971. And for this delicious piece of work, the reward was…?”

  “I don’t know. He died. Nobody thinks about it anymore.”

  “Right. The regular reward for great work.”

  “I remember, some researchers at CERN in Geneva tried to duplicate the experiment using laser beams and they couldn’t make it happen.”

  “Right, it doesn’t happen in a laser.”

  “Maybe it doesn’t happen in a maser either.”

  “Oh, it does. I can show you. I will in a moment. But believe me for the time being, Loren. Boyle’s Law which is a constant is inconstant inside the beam.”

  “Oh. I see.”

  “Boyle’s constant, Planck’s constant. What does it mean when a constant becomes unconstant?”

  Loren stared into the red beam. The history of science was full of seeming constants that had finally been found to be variable. Until the time of Kepler, for example, it was thought that the gravitational force was a constant. Wherever or whenever you checked, objects tended to fall to the earth with the same acceleration. In fact, the force of gravity is not a constant but a variable that depends on the mass of the planet and the distance from its center. But the earth’s mass never changed and man could only change his distance from the earth’s center by inconsequential amounts. So the gravitational attraction had always been considered a constant of the universe. Kepler proved otherwise.

  Loren chose his words carefully. “When a constant appears to have changed…I suppose it has to mean that there was some variable hiding inside the constant.”

  “Good boy.”

  “There is a variable, a quantity that can vary, but that almost never has.”

  “Good.”

  “If it never varied through all of history, for example, we would never identify it as a parameter at all. Only when it did change for the first time would we see that what had seemed like one
of the laws of physics was suddenly not true any more. Or not entirely true.”

  “Good.”

  What could be going on inside the beam? Loren unfocused his eyes and imagined himself inside the red light. He was in a closed container, actually part of a thin simple gas. There were atoms all around him floating in suspension, excited by a heat source. He was one of the atoms. As he warmed up, he darted around bumping against the others, creating pressure and expansion. But not quite as much as usual. The effect of the beam was making him sluggish, by just a tiny bit. Why was that? What was going on? Damned if he knew. He looked up at the old man seated across from him. Homer was sound asleep.

  There were two copies of the Andronescu paper in the bookshelves outside the computer room. Loren took one and a German-English dictionary back into his own office. By the end of an hour he had struggled all the way through the paper with at least some understanding. At least he had answered the main question of whether the pressure chamber that Andronescu used was opaque or transparent. It was opaque. He had used a closed aluminum capsule of fixed volume with a pressure sensing device inside it, virtually identical to the capsules used in the freshman physics lab to demonstrate Boyle’s Law. So how did the atoms of gas know they were in the presence of a light beam if the light couldn’t get into the chamber? Maybe there was something else happening along with the light beam, some other effect set up by the beam. Loren thumbed back to a passage that was underlined and had a marginal note beside it in a fine, stylish hand. The note was in German and initialed with a single letter, C. The C, he thought, probably stood for Constantin, Andronescu’s first name. He looked up in a German dictionary the one word he didn’t know, Streichholz. It meant ‘match.’ The note said that a match burned more slowly inside the beam, that it heated up more slowly and that it cooled down more slowly.

  Loren went back into Homer’s office. He found a box of wooden matches left alongside of the maser. There were, now that he looked, dozens of burned matches under the track. Loren struck a match on the side of the box and let it flare up and settle down into a steady flame. Then he introduced the flame into the beam. The height of the flame was indeed reduced. He held it for another moment inside the beam to see if it would smolder out, but it showed no inclination to do so. It just burned with a lower flame. With his second match, he noticed that the same effect could be produced by holding the flame near, but not actually in the beam. The whole region over the track appeared to induce slowed burning.

  “This love business. What a complication to a nice orderly life!” Homer was awake again.

  “Hmmm?”

  “The female of the species, or maybe I should say the female species, you know about that?”

  “Sure, Homer, everybody knows about that. Um, question: Why do you think the match burns funny just outside the beam?”

  “Answer: Andronescu’s Paradox. Question: Why are women the way they are? I mean, how do they get that way?”

  Loren shook out the match and turned around to Homer. “Something’s on your mind.”

  “Always something there, I hope.” Homer looked down at his hands folded in his lap. “Do you think that a woman sixty seven years old could be interested in…” He looked up at Loren, “sex?”

  “Sure.”

  “Ah. Well maybe that’s it then. Who would have thought? I mean Maria, who would have thought that after living her whole life without…” Homer stopped, colored a bit under his white hair. “What a big mouth, Homer. A big mouth. Better to give secrets away with.”

  “She hasn’t ever…?”

  Homer looked pained at his own indiscretion. “No. Never. I’m sure of it. You mustn’t say anything. I talk too much.”

  “I’ll keep her secret.”

  “And I, of course, the same.”

  “You?”

  “My lifetime experience to date: Nothing. Zero.”

  So there weren’t just two adult virgins left in the twenty-first century, there were at least four. Loren sat back down in the easy chair. “It’s not too late, Homer. You can learn. You can get a book.”

  “I have a book! Of course I have a book. That part is easy. But how do you go about these things? How do you know if that’s what she wants? She sends me signals, but I don’t think even she knows what they mean. And I don’t know. I am just guessing. Suppose I am wrong?”

  Loren could feel the emotion welling up inside of him. He wasn’t quite sure his voice would be steady. He reached out across the corner of the desk to put his hand on Homer’s arm. “Go for it, Homer. Don’t wait. Don’t analyze it to death. Trust your hunch.”

  “Yes, trust my hunch. That must be the answer.”

  “It is. If you’re wrong, so what? But if you’re right, and if she’s right, it could be…”

  “Yes. It could be new life for two old goats. And so what if I’m wrong? Like you say, just a little embarrassment. She will say, ‘Certainly you didn’t think that I meant…’ And I will say, ‘Ooops, sorry.’”

  “It wouldn’t be so terrible.”

  “Not so terrible. It’s just that I’m still a little, well, scared. Here I am almost seventy years old and never in my whole life have I put myself in a position where I could be rejected by a woman. And now I am going to.”

  “Bravo.”

  Kelly and Edward and Sonia had arrived and begun work. Loren and Homer stayed shut up in Homer’s office, struggling over the puzzle of the beam. It wasn’t just a puzzle, Loren felt sure, it was a clue to something they had been missing all along. There was no obvious link between the anomaly inside the beam and the frustration of their Peculiar Motion research, but Loren was beginning to believe that solving one would unlock the secret of the other. It was only a hunch, but he was trusting his hunch.

  Homer had already been down the paths they were exploring now. It was possible he had been all the way to the end and made the discovery that Loren had still to make. But in his intrinsic way, Homer might have come to an understanding of what caused the paradox, and still not been able to write down or express the answer. It was likely that he needed the assistance of a mechanic. Or maybe Homer didn’t need him at all; he certainly seemed sure of where he was heading. Perhaps he had worked it all out himself. And all he was trying to do now was take Loren through the same steps in order to check himself.

  Having Homer as guide brought its own brand of frustrations. The man could fall asleep in the middle of any sentence. Their discussion was punctuated by a number of naps. After each one of these, Homer would start off in a different direction. He could wake up thinking of almost anything:

  “Inside, the human mind is a kind of computer,” he told Loren upon waking one time. “Oh yes. Very comforting that idea, because computers we understand. To the extent the mind is like a computer, we can figure it out. Years ago it was different. People didn’t understand computers for squat. They had to explain computers in terms of the brain, because the brain seemed more familiar to them. So they named the parts of the computer after parts of the brain: logic centers, memory, inferencers. They called computers “mechanical brains.” The brain is like a computer or like an array of them. My brain is. What I don’t know about is Claymore’s brain.”

  Loren looked up from the maser. “Claymore’s brain is not like a computer?”

  “Different. For instance he has funny memory. For some things he is a whiz. He remembers virtually everything he reads, never has to look back to check a detail. But he can’t remember our parents. Doesn’t know where we lived as kids. I sometimes think he has no memory that goes back beyond a few months.” Homer looked right through Loren for a moment. “Not much memory of the past, but it’s possible that he has memory of the future. I say that it’s possible, but is that possible? I don’t know. A man with no memory of the past, is it possible that he is using all his memory circuits to ‘remember’ things about the future?”

  “Beats me.”

  “He has often seemed so sure of what was going to happen
. And sometimes, he is extraordinarily right. When we first came to Ithaca eleven years ago, Claymore got out of the car where I parked it and walked directly up to the house I had rented. But I hadn’t parked in front of the house, because there were some other cars there, and I had never described the house to him. It was down the street and on the other side, but he went right to it. It was as if he were going home. And there have been other things. So many. I always think he knows what’s going to happen, only he doesn’t talk about it.”

  “The man who remembers the future.”

  “Yes. And now he seems to ‘remember’ that we are going away. News to me, but for some reason he thinks so. Soon we are going someplace, and we’re not coming back. He won’t buy groceries, nothing that won’t be eaten in the next few days, because we won’t be here. I ask him about it, but I can’t get him interested. Only there are all these clues in the way he acts.”

  “We’re going to Florida, maybe that’s it.” Homer was planning to bring Claymore and all the project members along to Fort Lauderdale for the Academy of Arts and Sciences Awards dinner. It was to be a grand lark, a bit of well earned vacation. “We’re going to Florida, but aren’t we coming back? It’s only a few days. Or maybe I should bring more stuff, I mean if it’s forever.”

  “I’ll consider that when I pack.”

  “And he says, this is the hardest of all to follow, he says that it’s going to be a different color.”

  “It? What it?”

  “Everything, I think. That the future is colored more pink, a little more pink.”

  “Nice. A rosy view of things to come.”

  “Yes. But what does it mean? The future hasn’t happened yet. How could he have seen anything from it? Time progresses in one direction only. It makes no sense.” Then he went silent, lost in thought. For a moment, Loren thought he had gone back to sleep again. But he hadn’t. After a long pause, Homer said, “What is time?”