When she tried to recall Brad, how he lived, all she could remember was his work, his ambitions. Ruefully she saw that she had not really known him at all. Perhaps if she had, she would have picked up on how much of a rivalry he felt toward Zak, and then guessed about his keeping the data to himself. Then maybe she would have been there when the hard blue glare came, could have gotten him away…
The deceased had indeed displayed several of the duller virtues, to hear the minister tell it, but to Alicia they paled to nothing in the wild glare of her own vices.
They had no place to go after the service. On the way back along the 55 freeway they stopped in the lab at UCI, drawn somehow without ever saying why. Yet they both understood; Max hauled in his briefcase from his trunk, a full overnight bag stuffed with papers and his laptop.
She showed him what she had learned. He waited her out, scratching his chin absently, seemingly off in a world by himself. He was a handsome man in a compact sort of way, features chiseled from a face that did not seem to have met much dismay in its passage through life. Devotees of theory were often like that, childlike in their fascination with the intricate play of ideas, oblivious to the rude rub of the real.
When she was through and thinking about leaving, maybe calling Jill and going out somewhere, Max said cautiously, “I’ve been doing some thinking of my own…”
“Why am I not surprised?” More theory…
He grinned. “You hated the wormhole idea so much…”
“So did Brad, remember.”
“So he did. I’ll miss his skepticism; we’re going to need it.”
“Sounds like I’m going to need some right now.”
To his credit, he grinned again. They sat in the cool, bleached light of the bay for a long moment, staring at each other forlornly. Then he began cautiously to circle around his own thoughts. The ship of theory could set sail on tides of mathematical grandeur and hope alone, but only data could fill its sails. Now Max had more information about the sphere than he could fathom. Like meteorologists, more reliable at foreseeing the climate than at predicting tomorrow’s weather, he began with what had been done before.
“I looked for precursor ideas,” Max said. “I ran a quick database search on key words—‘Macroparticle,’ ‘Quark-gluon,’ ‘Plasma’—and got nothing useful.” He looked almost apologetic, mouth drooping at one corner in self-parody, drawn and tired; she realized that she was probably worse. “So I went back to my own thinking. I’ve got another crazy idea.”
“I need real answers,” she said, trying to draw some strength out of somewhere. “Is this crazy enough to be right?”
“It’s probably impossible. That close enough?”
“It’ll do.” She had to smile, but it was a bleak one. “Shoot.”
“I think it’s like a wormhole, but not to another place in our space-time.”
“I still don’t buy the wormhole idea, and now you want to tack on—”
“A whole new space-time.”
“How?”
Max brought a sheaf of photocopied sheets out of his briefcase. “I looked back at papers Alan Guth wrote with a bunch of other guys in the 1990s. Strange stuff, but it might fit.”
“A separated space-time?”
“Look, suppose we think back to one second after the Big Bang. To make it, you’d need about 1089 of the basics—protons, electrons, neutrons, photons, neutrinos. A lot. But now think about an earlier time, before the universe inflated, before it really took off. All you need there is a region of false vacuum.”
She knew all this, the standard early universe scenario from grad school, furniture supplied by particle physicists to the field of cosmology decades before. It had become as conventional as the story of how rock ‘n’ roll evolved from American pop to British invasion to psychedelic and then into slow decline. A minute region begins—never mind why—excited to a higher energy state. The Grand Unified Theories of a generation before demanded only a speck of false vacuum 10-28 centimeters across with a mere gram of mass packed into it. Close to nothing, in other words. But that matter was compressed to a density 1080 times that of water. Beyond the range of any conceivable techno-trick.
“—so if a false vacuum can form,” Max was saying, “it should neck off from ours in an instant.”
“Uh, ‘neck’?” Her lips puckered skeptically.
She could just barely keep up with his terminology, a frequent problem she had with theorists. He had already generated some computer sketches and printed them out with hand-lettered labels. She tried to follow the way the false vacuum formed a “bubble wall” within ordinary space, which was the “true vacuum” where everybody lived.
“Yeah, a neck is an indentation in our space-time—which is the ‘true’ vacuum. This dent represents a false vacuum, a dip which deepens very fast. This drawing tells the geometric truth, too. Once the bubble of false vacuum”—he shaded in the bulb at the base of the space-time funnel—“has room to move, it can grow without taking up volume in our space-time.”
The best way to follow a theory, she knew from long experience, was to break it into pieces and worry each until she got some physical feel for it. “So the false vacuum makes a new space as it expands.”
“Right, new. Very important. It doesn’t have to expand at our expense.”
“That cord connecting us to the bubble, you mean it’s—”
“One end of it is a sphere, in our space-time. A class of wormhole nobody really analyzed before.”
“Why is it solid?” Back to the earlier questions.
“Because the special compressed space-time that makes this cord, it’s like an inconceivably hard substance. Light goes through it, nothing else.”
“You said something like that before.” To Brad, she thought, then deflected her mind away from the memory with “Why should I believe that now?”
“Because it’s the only explanation for how we can have a stable sphere sitting over there and not a tiny black hole.”
“I don’t get it. This separated space-time, it’s necking down and should get farther away, right?”
“But it’s also expanding. How those effects counterbalance, I don’t know.”
“What do these old papers say?” She riffled through the photocopies skeptically, catching titles that made no sense.
Max fidgeted with his chalk, a sure sign of uncertainty. “Well, the simple analysis shows that it should choke off rather fast, in about 10-37 seconds.”
Rather than laugh in his face, she looked at her watch.
“You need to be somewhere?” Max asked.
“No, just checking to see if 10-37 seconds had passed.”
He laughed explosively and she saw that he was uneasy about this theory, wanted her to approve. That was oddly touching in itself, but she kept to the physics. “What would it look like in that time, which you say is 10-37 seconds, before it was gone?”
He still shuffled his feet and fidgeted his chalk. “The standard calculation says it should look like an infinitesimal black hole. It would radiate away its energy by Hawking emission in about 10-23 seconds, a burst of energy like a megaton explosion.”
“Whoosh! Boy, you theorists like to throw around the impossibilities.”
She smiled to herself. So even if God made a universe this way, theory showed that it should gurgle down the drain in 10-37 seconds, gone forever. It reminded her of a line from an old Woody Allen movie, that if it turned out that there was a God, at least He wasn’t evil. The worst one could say was that He was an underachiever.
Max went on, undaunted. “Ah, but! That result leaves out the possibility of ‘miracle struts,’ the kind of negative energy density regions I talked about before. If they’re in place, then the black hole doesn’t form. We get instead a new class of wormhole, held open by the tension in those struts of negative energy density.”
“Why not just say they’re held open by angels?”
He sighed, nodding ruefully. “I know this soun
ds like so much hot air. But we’ve got a real object to describe here, something made in a quark-gluon plasma. Nobody has proved that a negative energy density zone of the right size—as big as that sphere over there—is impossible.”
“How could the RHIC uranium collisions lead to this?” she demanded.
“Quantum tunneling,” Max said.
She blinked. A quantum system could make a jump from one state to another totally different configuration, even when the usual classical rules of energy conservation didn’t allow it. The textbook case she had done as an undergraduate: calculate how often a prisoner, running at a wall, could quantum-mechanically “tunnel” through the wall and escape. This was where the popular press got the term quantum leap, used without understanding, as usual.
She recalled solving that problem and being intrigued by the simple form of the result. It turned out that his chances depended exponentially on the thickness of the wall and so was infinitesimally small unless the wall were so thin that he could poke a finger through it anyway. Still, in principle, if he kept running at it, eventually he could escape through any thickness of wall. It might take a billion years, but in principle…
“Look at it this way,” Max said. “Quantum tunneling means that a system can ‘explore’ energetically not-allowed regions of the classical configuration space. If a tiny false vacuum starts, it can tunnel through to another space-time, a very different one, as long as that final state is also allowed by general relativity.”
“To believe anything so far-fetched, I’d have to see a solid calculation.” She sat on a lab bench, grateful for a moment of speculation, but pretty sure they were going nowhere. Her old doubts about Max were returning, though in the last few days he had been a valuable friend.
He shook his head vigorously, hair waving from a cowlick. “Impossible. That demands a complete theory of quantum gravity, which nobody has. The closest is a slung-together guess by three guys at MIT.”
He tossed her a thick paper titled “Is it Possible to Create a Universe in the Laboratory by Quantum Tunneling?” by Edward Farhi, Alan Guth, and Jemal Guven from Nuclear Physics, a respected journal, dated 1990. Weighty evidence, but she was seldom impressed by long theory papers; her gut feeling was that a really good idea could be expressed simply and briefly—and had better be, if a theorist expected an audience beyond her fellow pencil pushers.
She frowned doubtfully. “You believe this?”
“I believe the calculation leaves a lot of possibilities open. Look at this—” Another paper, this time by Alan Guth alone. “See? A direct quote: ‘If there exists a false vacuum with an energy density near the Planck scale, which is certainly not excluded by anything we know, then the tunneling probability would be of order one.’ That’s the last line of the calculation.”
In a tiny sliver of time just after the Big Bang, she knew, matter was thickly packed at the Planck density. For that instant, gravity and the other forces were all one great metaforce, and Creation had a free hand. The Planck energy was the chemical energy of a car’s full tank of gasoline—all concentrated in a single particle. A quantum state like that might be possible, she supposed, but… “So what? That doesn’t prove an accident at RHIC could conceivably—”
“No, something else does.” He stopped leaning against the blackboard and came toward her. “Your data.”
“How?”
“That hydrogen recombination line. Your detectors saw the moment when electrons and protons settled down into marriage, making hydrogen.”
“Meaning what?”
“The sphere is a window into a whole other universe—one just created.”
Alicia frowned. “A whole universe…?”
“This ‘Mini Bang’ of yours made a separate, tiny space-time. Not vacant, but with mass, just like ours. Then it expanded. That’s why you kept getting that spectrum of a hot blackbody. The mini-universe was expanding, cooling, but the radiation was still getting reabsorbed by the matter. That’s what gave the simple spectrum. When the mini-universe got big enough, the matter thinned out, the radiation cooled. As soon as things were mild enough, the electrons found the protons, they got hitched, and the wedding announcement was a burst of photons.”
She saw it now. “That’s what we detect now in our night sky? The relic radiation. It’s been rattling around the universe ever since the atoms formed.”
“Exactly. When it was emitted, it was hot stuff: 3,000 degrees. It’s been cooling off ever since, so now it’s just weak microwaves in our sky. The hydrogen recombination line, that we can’t see at all anymore. It’s masked by infrared from dust clouds. But you saw it, right here, coming from that sphere.”
“Look, I don’t remember much of the cosmology course I took, but I do recall that matter combined into hydrogen long after the Big Bang.”
He nodded. “For us, yes. You’re right about the era when hydrogen formed; I looked it up. A lot of things were suspiciously going on then. For example, the energy density of light was about equal to the energy density of mass then. When light lost out to matter and the atoms were free to form, well, that might affect the other end of this window we have here.”
She didn’t let him dodge her question. “When did it happen?”
Grudgingly he said, “In our universe, the relic radiation came from about four hundred thousand years after the Big Bang.”
She could always smell a theorist ducking a crucial point. “Doesn’t that kill your theory? The sphere is only weeks old.”
“True.” He tossed his chalk into the tray. “There’s more to learn, then. If that sphere is a peephole into a universe, then time is running faster on the other side.”
She waved away the time issue; the main idea was still dawning on her. “A whole universe?” She stared at the sphere, gleaming innocuously. “And we have a window on it?”
“Yeah, a window held open by negative energy density tension. It’s recapitulating our whole history, but faster.”
“How much?” She was having trouble with all this. “How fast?”
“Uh, I’ll have to work on that.” His fragile air of certainty collapsed; he shrugged. Theory in such rarefied realms was as fragile as a butterfly’s wing, its flight sustained by bravado.
“We’d better be sure we even know what we’re talking about,” she said uncertainly.
He gave her a wobbly grin. “Can’t go to the experts—there aren’t any.”
She glimpsed in his face something she knew all too well: what it was like to work on hard problems and have them take up all the space in you, leaving nothing for the soft word of people and pleasantries. You had to live with an awful uncertainty, not just the obvious nugget problem but the suspicion that you were wrong all down the line, asking the wrong question of reality, and would get from Mother Nature the nonreply you deserved.
Something in the swing of his shoulders, an unthinking confidence, moved her. Could he possibly be right? She was bone-tired and ready to clutch at straws, maybe, but—she wanted it to be right. So that the tragedy of Brad’s death—in Creation’s sunburn, she thought unsteadily—was offset a bit by the birth of a whole new…
“A cosmos… should we call it that?” She stared at the shrouded sphere and felt a mingling of wonder and fear: awe.
“No, we should have a different name for it. The cosmos is big. This is little, a toy.” He gazed over at the silent, deadly thing. “Its hardness… maybe we’re seeing a kind of durable event horizon here? One that lets very little through, except stray photons. Maybe the UV got scattered enough to slip through a tiny little trajectory-space…”
She sighed. “We’re just guessing.”
“When you have a Ph.D., you call them hypotheses, not guesses.”
She smiled, said nothing, just looked at the U-magnet and what lay within, cloaked and latent and suddenly, strangely chilling.
Max continued gamely, “It lets through nothing solid, anyway, so we can literally rap on it with our knuckles.”
“Sure, measure everything. It might all matter. Maybe we should borrow from gravitational theory, call it a new kind of event horizon?”
“A theorists’ name.”
“Ummm, right.” He followed her gaze, peering at the shielding around the sphere. “A pocket-sized space-time that nonetheless, in its own geometry, opens onto all the structure ours does.”
“Yeah, but ‘cosmos’ seems a little grand.”
“Maybe something that claims a little less than everything?” he said uncertainly.
“Let’s shorten it. How about ‘Cosm’?”
“Ummm.” He narrowed his puffy eyes, nodded. “Better than any of the mathematical words I’ve been fooling with…”
“Cosm, then,” she said. It seemed right somehow.
4
“Dad? I’m in trouble.” Not the sort of telephone call one wanted to make, but Jill had browbeaten her into it.
“Honey, I heard.” His voice was slow and careful, deeper than she remembered. “Friend spotted the piece in the Register, faxed it to me.”
“I wish the university hadn’t said anything to the newspapers.”
“A medium-sized piece on the first page of the Metro section, factual, no speculation on cause of death. I think you got off pretty well.”
His quick rattle of professional assessment reassured her. “We really don’t know cause of death, Dad,” she said guardedly.
“But you’ve got ideas,” he said, tone rising, his drawing-her-out voice.
“Look, could you come down for dinner or something?” There, out in the open. She had gone to him before, out of the blue, with troubles far smaller than this.
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