Los Angeles Times, unsigned editorial:
GODLIKE GAFFES
Recent events in the abstruse world of nuclear physics have cast UC–Irvine and the Brookhaven National Laboratory into the glaring light of national publicity, exposing a human drama of sobering short-sightedness. Considering the implications of this work, involving the accidental production of what appear to be a wholly unanticipated class of physical objects, the physics community has displayed little understanding of its responsibilities. We feel, for reasons outlined below, that a special national committee should be appointed, perhaps at the Federal level (since funding came from that level), to provide oversight and wise counsel in the further studies of these objects. Already vast damage has occurred, life lost, and much rancor fills the news columns as the two institutions confront each other—all over shiny spheres of inexplicable meaning…
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Like all profs you don;t think anymore about your own student do you? Remember the one who DIED IN YOUR PLACE and all because you stole something wasn;t yours? Its students pay your salary and you treat them like dogs or worse, we hear nothing about THEM do we? Now there’s a bigger one of these things and youR damn lucky it didn;t kill anybody. Your meddling with WHOLE UNIVERSES is the ultimate grossout arrogantt prof experiment and you should be ASHAMED.
After a largely fruitless day in the lab, she beat the traffic down the Pacific Coast Highway, avoiding the toll road, and went for a walk along the beach at dusk before her Dad-planned rendezvous at a new downtown Laguna restaurant. After the crash and tang of the waves, the halogen lights had an electric leer, their promises licking out of the gloom that had swallowed the sunset.
Orange County, with its signature long lines of tall palm trees, was working toward being “max-frilled,” as the slang had it, but at least it didn’t have the touches of L.A. The post office didn’t offer valet parking yet. On rainy days parking tickets weren’t slipped inside protective envelopes, as in Beverly Hills. There were no water bars, with fifty chilled varieties at two bucks a glass, with no ice because it would erase the regional subtleties. And when you called the police department and got put on hold, no classical music played.
She left the beach and went along Ocean Avenue. Outside the Sea Lounge were ranks of motorcycles, mostly Harleys. Through the open windows she could see a jammed crowd raising beer glasses to the monotonous thump of the live band. Being Harley guys, they were of course rebels, rugged lone wolves, individual spirits, as was obvious because they were all wearing the same jackets and jeans, bandannas and sunglasses, big brass belt buckles and tattoos, probably even the same underwear. (Boxers or Jockeys? she wondered. Her social intuition was not precise enough to guess.) She walked on, feeling the tiny sliver of self-consciousness that always came when she was far from the academic context and immersed in a thoroughly white crowd. Biker gangs were the stuff of cartoons now, most of them with graying, fast-receding forelocks and bulging bellies, but the tiny voice didn’t care about that.
Summer’s vagrant breezes stirred the lush shrubbery, exciting the birds. A tiny mote still darted after the sweet water residents left out. Beneath the actinic streetlights coming on the hummingbirds were eerie, like moths with beaks.
“Hey, gal! Wait up.”
Jill was overtaking her at the corner of Ocean and Beach. “You’re looking great.”
“I met a guy, became beautiful,” Jill said breathlessly.
“Who?”
“Then we broke up, but I kept my looks.”
“Well, at least you didn’t keep him around for cosmetic reasons.”
“And you? What about this guy you’ve been working with?”
“Max? Great guy, not my type.”
“He’s what? Gay? Dead?”
Alicia had to laugh. Jill never let her get away with a brush-off. “He’s a good man, just doesn’t do it for me.”
“At least not right away.”
“Which means?”
Jill stopped outside the buffed steelwork façade of the restaurant, No Strangers, her face tilted sideways in the way she had of showing concern. “You’re never going to fall for a man in a microsecond. Me either, come to think of it, though I try to.”
“Max, well, we’ve been working together a lot lately…”
“And that’s an antiaphrodisiac?”
“No, but I have a lot on my plate right now.”
“You need to get out of your head a little more.”
“It’s enough just to get out of the lab. This is the first time we’ve had a chance to talk in what… a month? And we’re doing it on the sidewalk.”
“Gives me a chance to look over the bikers. Gives you a chance to calm down before you meet this lawyer.”
“Lawyers I can deal with. My dad’s something else.”
Jill had been a good gal-buddy through all this, unlike her more distant pals from the academic world. Alicia’s friends didn’t call that often, and she didn’t either. They just moseyed along, knowing they would take in a movie or have dinner once a month or so to catch up; by unspoken agreement, they did not remember birthdays. Jill’s friends were different. They called every few days, gave full-packed parties (with games, even), had nicknames for each other which they always used, all looked good and slim and shared similar tastes in clothes (this year was slim but casual). They all had intriguing little quirks, like Jill’s carrying her “special tools” to pick locks. In short, they were a television show. Alicia was sure there were identical tribes among the Black Bourgeoisie, but she had never gotten along with them, probably because she was a bit dull; yet Jill seemed to accept Alicia as a fellow tribeswoman without comment.
“No stalling,” Jill said, giving her a mock push through the yawning restaurant door, which resembled a mouth with polished metal teeth. Inside, the place had enough bare concrete and ribbed ducts and stark lighting to be a surrealist theme bar. Very hip but still just mother joint where luncheon was lunch for six bucks extra.
“Dad!” He was sitting with a thin black man who would be Bernie Ross. Jill always made her father’s face light up and that gave her time to explain to Mr. Ross that she had been bedeviled by events, which was why they had gotten into a perpetual game of phone tag, and even e-mail just got buried—
“Hey, not your fault,” he said affably, holding up both hands, palms out. “People been on your case. And it’s Bernie.”
Maybe it was Bernie’s personality or just possibly an ever so slight loosening that came from having not one but two solid black men around; somehow the effect worked. She had a gin and tonic and traded jokes and do-you-knows with Bernie, classic Black Bourgeois Network stuff. Against the razor-angst metallic styling of the restaurant she had to admit that Bernie’s cozy bear look was vaguely out of place, like a cowboy wearing glasses. But so was she, and always would be, in a place whose menu featured drinks that faked absinthe, a twenty-seven-item coffee menu, and had a special on a Spicy Tower of Jicama.
“I resisted following Dad’s advice, of course, and now I’m in pretty deep,” Alicia said.
Bernie nodded. “We’re playing catch-up ball here.”
“Sounds like my girl’s not even in the game yet,” her dad kibitzed from the side.
Alicia gave her father a pursed-mouth expression that said, in family code, I’m doing all right here by myself, thank you. “I think UCI is cutting a deal with Brookhaven over my head.”
“As long as you just lie there and do nothing, they’ll do that,” Bernie said guardedly.
“I know, I know. I should’ve had my own representation. I thought UCI would protect my interests.”
“UCI protects UCI,” Bernie said, and Dad nodded.
“Well, I sent you my version of events.”
She had written up a chronology of her actions, figuring her memory was getting filled up with the rush of events. This habit she had picked up from keeping good lab notebooks; she had even kept
diaries about her relations with men, coding their names by number in case anyone found the notebook (as one guy did, later; the coding worked).
“I have some questions”—Bernie’s hands came up again, deflecting her worried, tight-brow expression—“but we don’t have to do that this evening.”
“I got a call from the vice chancellor’s office today informing me that the Department of Energy has come into the matter,” Alicia said.
The table got quiet. An espresso machine shrieked its mournful moist wail somewhere. “That’s serious,” Dad said.
“Very.” Bernie frowned. “They have police powers, where matters of property are concerned.”
“Translation?” Jill put in.
“The Feds can confiscate property,” Dad said.
“Stolen property,” Bernie added.
“The Cosm isn’t stolen,” Alicia said, offended.
“It was made in a federal lab,” Bernie said. “Powers of reclamation have expanded steadily, partially driven by the War on Drugs legislation. I checked into the statutes—”
“It’s not theirs!” Alicia spat back.
“How can it be?” Jill demanded loyally.
“It was made within and by use of their facilities,” Bernie said.
“But I made it, not them,” Alicia shot back.
Bernie shook his head. “The statutes are clear.”
“I don’t like the sound of this.” Dad glowered at his salad as it arrived, an oily anthology of virtuous veggies.
“I expect the university does not want to get caught in the middle on this,” Bernie said. “I’ve used some contacts of mine to feel them out, just informally, and it’s a solid gray wall.”
“Contacts?” Alicia asked.
“Informants,” Dad said. “Don’t ask for names.”
“They say the administration is trying to distance themselves as much as possible from you,” Bernie said soberly, “on advice of counsel and of the Department of Energy.”
“Translation?” Alicia said, feeling weak. She raised a finger and ordered another gin and tonic.
“The Feds will go easy on UCI if they get what they want,” Dad said.
“Which is?” Jill asked.
“My head, roast-suckling-pig-style, with an apple in my mouth.”
Bernie said gently, “You’re overdramatizing.”
“Privilege of the condemned, isn’t it?”
“Not so fast,” Dad said. “We haven’t even gotten our ball on the field yet.”
“No fair switching to sports analogies,” Jill said. “Let’s stick to food imagery.”
“I’d rather have the food itself.” Alicia was feeling the gin working like an emulsifying fluid on the air. This was a cliché trendy spot in the all-hard-surfaces mode, every voice sharpening under the reflections from concrete, marble, and steel. The usual instability was at work, in which every table finds that it must talk louder to overcome the noise, which then builds nonlinearly as fresh customers arrive and more alcohol reaches tired workday brains. The lights dimmed about every twenty minutes, momentarily suppressing the chatter.
Their waiter took their order as if he knew secrets but wasn’t telling. His pseudo-tux was cut to enhance his shoulder blades, which gave the impression that he had swallowed a coat hanger. She found herself looking at him and somehow, also nonlinearly, thinking of Max. This transition she could not explain and put it down to the gin. Bernie stirred her out of her reflection by bringing up details of UCI’s position, what the vice chancellor had said, and similar matters of High Gossip that she could never remember. Alicia tried to answer his barrage of questions, grateful for Jill taking up her father’s energy. Dad had been calling and e-mailing furiously and finally “just happened” to be in the area, so he had arranged this dinner to get Bernie “on the team.” Alicia watched Jill charm Dad and wondered at her fluidity, an innate social grace that made Alicia feel like the ugly duckling in a performance of Swan Lake.
Then they got back to Topic A and Alicia was at stage center.
Dad opened with, “Now, honey, let me ask a dumb question—”
“Your questions are never dumb, merely ignorant.”
“Thanks. That’s reassuring, I guess.”
—and they were off, with Alicia having to provide show-and-tell descriptions, like minilectures in a course titled Universe Building 101.
Already she knew to start very simply. Suppose two masses were far from each other, she began. They attracted each other gravitationally, so they each fell toward the other and collided; kinetic energy was created. Yet their gravitational fields were superimposed once they collided, so there was more gravitational energy in the end, too. The only way this made sense was if the kinetic energy gain was positive and the gravitational energy gain was negative.
She had resorted to diagrams on napkins by that time, so intent that she barely noticed that they were good polished white cloth and the coat-hanger waiter was glaring at her.
“So the net sum is zero—no total energy has been created here, right? If absence of a gravitational field corresponds to no energy, then having a gravitational field means negative energy. What happened at RHIC—both times—was creation of an intense speck of matter with a gravitational energy just about equal to its kinetic energy. The Collider didn’t have to provide the whole energy cost of making a universe, just the down payment, a compressed speck of mass. That meant that we could make a distortion in space-time with the properties of the early universe, at very little cost.”
She went on about how compressing 10-5 grams of matter into a speck 10-33 cm. across could start a Big Bang. But one could also rely on quantum tunneling. This allowed a quantum state to move into a final state not allowed by pure energetic requirements. Then a bigger less-massive speck could tunnel into the Big Bang state. More diagrams here. She finished by noting that those mass and size numbers were called the Planck mass and size, named for the first physicist to think of energies on this scale.
“Honey, how much energy is that?”
“Ummm, it corresponds to a tank of gasoline.”
“Make a universe in one pit stop,” Bernie mused. “Jeez-us.”
Dad whistled. He was really trying; she could see that. She was pleased that she had gotten the idea over. “I can explain more fully the implications of the quantum gravitational model—”
“Say no,” Jill stage-whispered to Dad out of the corner of her mouth.
“Uh, no.”
6
A classic story: a particle physicist went to a shopping mall with his wife and agreed to meet her at a store in half an hour. But while browsing in a bookstore, he met a stunning blonde and they hit it off and he went with her to her apartment. Two hours later he remembered and rushed back to the mall. Remorseful, facing up to the enormity of what he had done, he told his thoroughly steamed wife that he had met a woman and made love to her for two hours. Angrily, she said, “You’re lying! You were in your lab!”
Alicia told Max this joke after she found him sleeping on the floor of the observatory the next morning. “I thought I’d beat the morning traffic,” he said groggily over coffee. “Drove down at midnight.”
“There are easier ways. I’ll give you a key to my apartment. Just sack out in the side room when you need to.”
“Uh, thanks.” She let him recover slowly. Plainly, he was worried about something.
“What’s up? You’ve been calculating a lot lately.”
“I’m wondering if this thing of ours is at all predictable.”
“Meaning, dangerous?”
“Well, yes.”
He had been working on a plausible model, the same one that gave them the exponential time behavior. It showed that a child universe would expand at no cost to the parent. Thanks to the warping ability of the wormhole, the child grew into a space of its own. “Remember that old basic paper on making child universes? It’s studded with phrases like ‘We cannot be decisive’ and arguments where ‘We have
not excluded’ and ‘Our entire discussion has been in the context of classical general relativity.’ And they’re right.”
Alicia shrugged; theorists’ worries were pretty far from her immediate concerns. Zak came into the lab and started making ready for more measurements. Zak reported that he had images of some more stars and diffuse, gassy patches. They were all moving away, as seen in steadily redder Doppler shifts.
“The other universe is expanding, so its stars are getting farther apart. At least, so far,” Alicia said.
Zak had the data neatly computer-filed; she let Max worry by himself for a while as she checked everything. She and Zak would have a fantastic body of data when this was all over, in both senses of the word. When she came back to Max, he said earnestly, “We have to check our assumptions.”
“Such as?”
“I’ve found some solutions that have the Cosm growing with time.”
“In size?”
“Yes, and mass.”
She stood up, stretching. If Max’s math led down a path, well, there were worse reasons to follow. Theorists avoided being seen as too mathematical and lacking a gut physics feeling. Experimenters took pains to evade seeming to be routine engineers or gadget jockeys. But they had to find common ground.
The fact that you could attack a problem without worrying about making up lecture notes in the next ten minutes was the best part of working in the summer. “Zak, let’s try something new.”
They took two days to be sure: the Cosm now weighed half of its original 100 kilograms. They checked the measurement three times; it was difficult weighing something suspended in a magnetic grip.
“How the hell can that be?” Zak said, the “hell” an index of his fatigue. “How come we didn’t notice?”
“No way to tell, was there?” Max asked.
“It’s also two millimeters smaller,” Alicia said. “So its radius is utterly unrelated to its mass.”
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