Dave Rucker
Dave:
We’re seeing continued cooling. The sphere has contracted another three millimeters, too, so some minor adjustments are going on, all right.
Better be careful around the recombination time.
We’ve got to keep as much of this out of the media as possible.
Alicia
Alicia:
Our director feels that since this object has shut down the Laboratory indefinitely, we have suffered the most and should handle all relations with the press. We’re negotiating with UCI right now.
The globe weighs well over a million kilograms! This we got from a combined study by geologists and engineers. It’s resting on the bedrock. Nobody has a clue how to get it out of the way of RHIC.
Dave
Dave:
Wonderful. You face the media music all you want. I had a little negotiating session with Vice Chancellor Lattimer and other honchos here, who’re doing the dance with your people, I gather. They want to manage developments, too. I propose that we let them fight it out, so long as they leave us alone with the physics.
Have you thought about rebuilding RHIC around your Cosm? Maybe alter the curve so the particles go around?
Is that possible?
Alicia
Alicia:
We’ve already engineered that one out. Pretty expensive, but the big problem is, who would work right next to the globe? The risk-based pay scale would kill us.
We’re sitting and waiting for recombination here.
Getting demonstrators, too—threats, even.
Everybody’s pretty depressed. RHIC is down and we may never get to rebuild it. If we do, it’ll take a year or more. And while the experiments with gold worked well, we don’t dare risk using uranium again.
Dave
Dave:
Remember, Magellan didn’t actually make it all the way around the world, but it’s his name we remember.
Alicia
This last message was a weak salute, but she could not think of anything more to say.
Decades before, an important result that eventually won a Nobel was nearly rejected by Physical Review Letters because a piece about it had run in the local university newspaper. Only after the student journalist owned up to cobbling his story together from gossip did the journal editor relent and allow rapid publication. Alicia worried about such tiny matters and anxiously awaited the judgment of Physics Letters, a rather easier journal.
Not that journals were so important, she told herself, especially since the Net pervaded all physics. Research was what got talked about; anything written down and published in hard copy was by definition done, uncontested, boring.
She had posted her paper at the usual watering holes for the particle and cosmological species. The Net was mostly a hunting ground. If an interesting paper turned up, physicists would e-mail or waylay its author at a meeting to get the real dope. Where was the work going? Who was in on it? What did Big Authority X or Y think? Particle physics was genuinely international (more so since the waning of the Americans), but it followed the patterns of a dispersed village. It was like photons exchanged between interacting particles, nourishing sandwiches of information establishing that one knew enough to give good gossip.
Gossiping and staking claims, particle physicists in person rarely credited others. In their publications, though, tradition demanded a spare ledger of credits. Building on past work, one had to pay royalties of credit and even homage by citing. This had been the hardest part of writing her letter, so she had resorted to general works on cosmology, Alan Guth’s papers with collaborators, and other papers whose abstracts she could scarcely comprehend: protective coloration.
Refereeing resembled the body’s immune system. Science could defend itself against small assaults on conventional wisdom, but major events, like Heisenberg’s invention of quantum mechanics in 1925 or Watson and Crick’s discovery of DNA’s double helix in 1952, overwhelmed the lethargy of any establishment.
So when she finally got her three referee reports, none challenged the importance or basic authenticity of the work; all asked for a few extra references, though. This gave away more about the probable referees than the paper; hitching a ride on a gaudy bandwagon about to depart.
The letter would go into print immediately. This unleashed the media managers of both UCI and Brookhaven and Alicia hunkered down.
Once installed in the observatory, she seldom noticed the bare rectangular austerities and eye-jarring clutter of her new lab; to her it was all one instrument, shaped by a supple logic to ask questions of the physical world.
She had a mild affection for this big integrated tool; running a measurement, she mentally donned the lab the way she put on a jacket. She knew the point of this room down to the last cable and moved through it vigilant for any difference between the diagram in her mind and the never-perfect reality. Yet she felt a tension here, too, a vexed irritation at a universe that withheld its secrets. Theorists faced thickets of intractable mathematics; experimenters struggled with balky gear, their dirty hands a badge of hard-won honor.
She and Zak reviewed their data, but there was little new. Zak went off to get some more supplies. The UCI security guard knocked on the observatory’s side door: a visitor.
“Max!” She brightened. “Where have you been?”
“Hermit time.” He was in jeans and a sweatshirt, but looked rested. “I went off to do some calculating.”
“I need some moral support here.”
He studied her face and she remembered the penetrating gaze when they had been outside the lab, about to confront the police, several thousand years ago. “Looks more like you need immoral support. A weekend of relapsation.”
“I had that. I went to the mountains. By the time I got back, Brookhaven had fallen on their sword.”
“It’s going to get worse. Be sure you stay rested.”
Abruptly she hugged him. “Boy, don’t I wish.”
They stood that way, he making no move one way or the other, and eventually she took her arms back and gave him what she hoped was an unreadable smile. Not that she would have known quite what to write into it, she thought, not at all.
She told him about Physics Letters accepting her paper and he nodded, as though the outcome were obvious all along. “You have fresh marching orders for us, the experimenter infantry?”
He grimaced and inched his way around her gear, now arrayed in metal racks to conserve space. “I think we ought to start looking for stars.”
“Uh, how?”
“Looking very small and very fast.”
“Explain?”
Max settled back in the one comfortable chair in the place. “There’s really no choice in good physics between beauty and utility, y’know. Anything really useful had better be simple, though God knows it may be hard as hell to work out the consequences, just because the math is tough and often quite new—but not because it’s complicated. In fact, it’s elegant, usually in ways we haven’t seen before.”
“Ummm, sounds like an introduction to a lecture.”
“I burrowed into string theory, came up with some better solutions.”
“They’re still time-shifted, as before?”
“Definitely. That comes out of some beautiful math, but it ran into a wall. See, the local physics near a wormhole throat doesn’t tell us much, so I decided to take a more engineering approach.”
“You? Mr. Math Equals Truth?”
He tipped his head in confession. “Thing is, we can measure the Cosm’s mass and tidal force, so start there. If it’s changing in time, that’ll tell us something basic. From that, I can calculate the curvature of space-time required. From that, calculate the stress energy and ask if it is physically possible.”
“It has to be possible—it exists!”
“Sure, but I’m trying to find out what field theory will give us a Cosm, see?”
“How about the mass we already measured?”
<
br /> “I used that. The answer is that near the throat the stress energy is peculiar but not obviously incompatible with known physics. It demands a negative energy density, of course—the exotic stuff that holds this throat open. Then I realized that we know one more important fact—you’re still alive.”
She blinked. “Say what?”
“You were the first person to touch it, right? It didn’t kill you—or me or Zak later—so whatever weird stuff holds that throat open, it isn’t going to come apart when ordinary matter touches it. But it can repulse matter, and nearly all radiation, or otherwise we’d have been flooded with hot plasma.”
“Same for Brookhaven’s globe, too.”
“Exactly! Once might be a miracle, but two’s a statistic. That means there’s a whole class of equilibria for these things. How come? Maybe something about slamming uranium together, polarized just right—I dunno. But I used that fact to select out the kind of theory that would give me rock-solid spheres, and now I trust the work.”
“So? How do we see stars?” She smiled. Typical theorist, he had gotten so carried away with the sublime beauties of it all that he had forgotten his conclusion.
“Uh, this sphere, the solutions show that there’s got to be a sphere on the other end, too. A chrome ball sitting in space, in that expanding universe. It gathers in light from nearby like a fish-eye lens. We see images, just as if we were there. Walking around the cosm is just like craning your neck. But already that universe is thinning out, matter getting separated. So odds are, there’s nothing interesting nearby. So we need a telescope to survey the sky near that point.”
“I’ve got to become an astronomer.”
“Yes. But in a universe that’s moving at a rate millions of times faster than we are. So even distant stars will move while you’re looking.”
“They’ll look like smears of visible light?”
Max shrugged, in the irksome way theorists did when dismissing a minor detail. “I suppose so.”
I suppose so. His idea made sense but implied that she had to look sharp and fast to make out anything. This meant more gear:
• Framing camera, 5 ns/shot, 50 ns pause, 3-shot capability
• Streak camera, gives one shot 10 ns long
• X-ray framing camera (?)
She took this list to Onell, the department chairman. Her Department of Energy grant was bone-dry already and to continue she needed a quick infusion of funds. Onell told her she could have it, pending the dean’s approval, but she should “be a good campus citizen, too.” She asked what this meant and Onell started in again about serving on the “mentoring” team and she walked out of his office and went straight to the dean. Not the politic thing to do, but she was in a hurry and it was summer, a time which should, she reasoned, be free of academic prattle. What was that old adage? Easy work drives out good work. Committees and administration were simple and seductive. If you had nothing of pressing interest to do, they might even get to be fun, though she doubted it.
The dean listened soberly and gave her some of the same tut-tutting medicine, but then with brisk efficiency signed off on thirty thousand dollars that she could use immediately. The X-ray camera would cost fifty thousand dollars, so she forgot about it. Instead, she called up people at other institutions and after a day spent working the phones she got one on loan from Sandia Labs. This was doubly good, because this route would not arouse interest in the usual alleys of the particle physics community. For the rest of the gear, she located local suppliers. With Zak she drove a UCI van up to L.A. to get it right away.
Within two days of all work and no sleep, she had a makeshift observing rig mounted next to the Cosm, an array of optical readers and light pipes and lenses that could collect visible emission from a tiny patch of the sphere. Max thought that the Cosm acted like a spherical lens, dispelling images outward, so to get a real image of anything she had to study one small zone.
Of course, his expectations rested upon a bunch of airy mathematics scribbled into four or five yellow pads he carried around wherever he went, in classic nerd fashion. He did his calculations with a rather elegant silvery fountain pen, though, which redeemed the yellow pad stylistic flaw somewhat—but still, she reminded herself, his anticipations were gossamer stuff indeed. But she liked the chance to test one more possibility, even a tenuous one. Amid the rising hubbub of attention from the outside world, the rituals of thinking through the measurements, setting up, and tinkering were positive joys in themselves.
By now the Cosm was developing at a colossal rate. She worked it out from Max’s exponential equation and had to check it twice to be sure she had not made a mistake.
Every second in her lab, twenty-three years passed in the Cosm.
She had to admit, the number made her gasp. It meant that nearby stars would smear out their images, if the sphere at the other end were rotating at all.
“Sure, it’s not spinning around on our end—not in the lab frame, anyway,” Max said. “But we’re moving, too. The Earth’s spinning, it’s orbiting the sun—”
“So somebody looking from the other end could see us.”
“Yes, but not the stars in the night sky. They sweep around every night.”
“We don’t know what the other end’s doing, do we?”
“Nope. It’s orbiting around whatever matter is near it.”
“That’s why I got the framing cameras.”
“Uh, what do they frame?”
She had to chuckle. Max put up a good front but gear was not his area. “It takes a snapshot every five-billionths of a second.”
He whistled. “So you can get a snapshot covering less than a second in Cosm time.”
“Good enough?”
“Uh, hope so. No bets.”
“I thought you were the brave theorist, voyaging on strange seas of imagination, bound for alien shores.”
“I’m a theorist who hates to lose money.”
She and Zak ran the framing cameras with the observatory utterly darkened. They chose a spot on the Cosm’s surface and expanded it with an ordinary microscope, then took snaps only five nanoseconds long. The first day yielded absolutely blank negatives. Not actual photographic negatives, of course—all data was processed digitally from light pipes; hardly anybody used real film anymore.
The second day’s work yielded the same. And the third.
On the fourth they got a tiny pip of light.
The fifth day gave them more of it, enough for Alicia to extract a spectrum.
“It’s a K-star,” she said confidently. “I’d guess it’s about a light-year away.”
“Goddamn,” Max said and just stared at the spectrum, then back at the photo image: a red dot.
“I expected more eloquence, Magellan.”
“Lay off the strange seas stuff. This is real.”
“All my results are authentic, fresh off the reality griddle.”
“A real star. In your universe.”
“My universe? I don’t own it. In fact, Brookhaven has lawyers getting ready to argue that it’s theirs.”
“Precedent is clear,” Max said. “You made it, you own it.”
“What precedent?”
“Genesis.”
Zak coughed, as if embarrassed. Alicia wondered what tone she had been using. “I think there may be more of those, too,” Zak said quietly.
“How come?” Alicia said.
“While you were processing that image, I shot two more.” Zak grinned. “Used longer exposure times. There are fainter dots nearby.”
“Stars forming near each other,” Max said decisively. “Let Brookhaven claim those, huh?”
5
Orange County Register:
UCI PROF COULD COST TAXPAYERS BILLIONS
Damage to Long Island Laboratory ‘Colossal’
(AP) Officials at the Brookhaven National Laboratory revised upward their estimates of the eventual cost in money and lost time following from the mysterious accident there…
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From: [email protected]
I know you don’t know me and since you don’t return phone calls (I have left SIX MESSAGES), I have to use e-mail. I feel I have to speak out for all those who are appalled at your behavior. I am a taxpayer tired of know it alls who think the laboratories we built for them are their playthings and steal what is not rightfully theirs from these labs. You may think taking this thing—which I don’t for a moment believe is a “universe”—is okay since now you are famous but…
Dear Faculty Member:
I am responding to your communication regarding the recent events concerning a professor in our Physics Department and the Brookhaven National Laboratory. This matter must be kept in perspective. As Chancellor I have been close to the complex legal and ethical issues surrounding this controversial and still-evolving case.
I am sending this letter to all those who have privately inquired into the circumstances of this issue and wish to reassure you that I am following the advice of the Chancellor’s Special Committee on all issues in the disagreement between UCI and the Brookhaven National Laboratory. UCI shall not condone any irregular or illegal actions by its own faculty in the conducting of scientific research. Indeed, UCI has historically been vigilant in assisting the prosecution of any faculty accused of wrongdoing. Nor shall we allow this dispute to reflect badly upon our growing reputation as a leader in cutting-edge research in the fields of physics, medicine, biology, and engineering…
Professor:
The Bible has cases similar to yours, foretelling of those who would usurp the power and dignity of God to further their own ends, which are the same as those of the Fallen. If you will turn to Scripture in this dire hour, you will find succor in the following passages: …
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