Final Theory

by Mark Alpert

  As the baseball went around again, David glanced at the benches and saw that Karen and Ricardo were leaving. They were going to one of Ricardo’s gigs downtown; Jonah would spend the night at David’s apartment. Karen waved good-bye, blowing kisses at Jonah and reminding him to brush his teeth. And then, just before departing, she bent over to kiss Monique. For David, the most surprising thing of all was that his ex-wife and his new girlfriend had become close friends. The horrible episode at Fermilab had drawn the two women together, and now Karen was advising Monique on how to handle David’s various neuroses. The universe was indeed a strange and wondrous place.

  “Hey, Dad!” Jonah yelled. “Throw the ball already!”

  David had been absentmindedly fingering the stitches on the baseball. He lobbed it to Jonah and took off his mitt. “Play with Michael for a while, okay? I gotta take a break.”

  He went to Monique’s bench. She was reading something in the newspaper’s international section, her eyebrows curled in concentration. David sat down next to her and glanced at the front page. SECRETARY OF DEFENSE RESIGNS was the lead headline. And just below it, in smaller type: VICE PRESIDENT PRAISES HIS RECORD.

  “You reading about the secretary of defense?” David asked. “We caught the tail end of his speech at Fort Benning, remember?”

  Monique shook her head. She spread the paper and pointed at a story near the bottom of chapter 2. The headline was PHYSICISTS DISCOVER NEW PARTICLE. “I know these researchers,” she explained. “They’re at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. They found a boson with a rest mass of two hundred and thirty-six billion electron volts.”

  “And what does that mean, exactly?”

  “According to the standard theories, this new particle shouldn’t exist. But the unified field theory predicts it. Einstein predicted it.”

  “I still don’t—”

  “It’s a clue, David. And when physicists see clues, they start theorizing.” She folded the newspaper and tossed it aside. Her forehead was creased with worry. “After a few more discoveries like this, they’ll start to piece it together. It’s only a matter of time before someone figures it out.”

  “You mean the unified theory? Someone’s going to rediscover it?”

  She nodded. “They’re already pretty close. For all we know, some grad student at Princeton or Harvard could be working on the equations right now.”

  David took her hand. There was nothing else he could do. For the moment Herr Doktor’s secret was safe in Michael’s head, but all their precautions would be for naught if another physicist discovered the theory and published it. On that day they’d have nothing left but hope. David shivered as he sat next to Monique, staring at the school yard full of frenetic children. It’s all so fragile, he thought. It could be gone in an instant.

  Then he moved his hand to Monique’s belly, splaying his fingers over the soft cotton of her blouse. She turned to him and smiled. “It’s too early to feel anything yet. She won’t start kicking till the fourth or fifth month.”

  David smiled back. “How come you keep saying ‘she’? You’re sure it’s gonna be a girl?”

  Monique shrugged. “I just have a feeling. I had a dream the other night that we were taking her home from the hospital. I was putting her in the car, strapping her into the infant seat, and all of a sudden she started talking. She actually introduced herself to me. She said her name was Lieserl.”

  “Whoa. Pretty strange.” He rubbed her belly just above the navel. “So is that what you want to call her? Lieserl? Or maybe Albert if it’s a boy?”

  She made a face. “Are you crazy? The last thing the world needs is another Einstein.”

  David laughed, and although he knew it was strictly impossible, he could’ve sworn he felt something move under his palm.

  Author’s Note

  I WAS HALFWAY THROUGH WRITING FINAL THEORY BEFORE I realized how perfect this novel was for me. My job at Scientific American is to simplify bewildering ideas such as string theory, extra dimensions, and parallel universes. In 2004, while I was editing a story for a special issue on Albert Einstein, I became interested in his long search for a unified theory—a single set of equations that would incorporate both relativity and quantum mechanics, combining the physics of stars and galaxies with the laws of the subatomic realm. Einstein struggled with this quest from the 1920s until his death in 1955, but all his efforts to formulate a unified theory met with failure. As I read about this part of Einstein’s life, I began to wonder: What would’ve happened if he’d succeeded? The discovery of a unified theory would be one of the greatest achievements in the history of science, but it could also have unintended consequences. Einstein knew all too well that his theory of relativity had laid the groundwork for the atomic bomb. Would he have published the unified theory if he knew it would’ve paved the way for weapons that were even more terrible? Or would he have kept it secret?

  My fascination with Einstein began in college. I was an astrophysics major at Princeton University and my adviser was the renowned theorist J. Richard Gott III (author of Time Travel in Einstein’s Universe). For my undergraduate thesis, Professor Gott suggested that I work on a problem in relativity: How would Einstein’s field equation work in Flatland, a model universe with only two spatial dimensions, like a tremendously wide sheet of paper. After filling a notebook with scribbled equations, I showed the solution to Dr. Gott, who gave me the best compliment you can get from a theoretical physicist: “This solution is nontrivial!” We coauthored a research paper titled “General Relativity in a (2 + 1)-dimensional Spacetime,” which was published in a scientific journal called General Relativity and Gravitation in 1984.

  By the time the paper appeared, however, I’d decided that I wanted be a poet rather than a physicist, so I entered the MFA writing program at Columbia. Two years later, when I realized that poetry would never pay the bills, I became a journalist. I worked for newspapers in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and Alabama before returning to New York and writing for Fortune, Popular Mechanics, and CNN. I came full circle in 1998 when I started working at Scientific American. I was amazed at how much had changed in astronomy and physics since I’d left the field. And I soon discovered, to my great surprise, that the obscure article I cowrote with Professor Gott had become an important paper for physicists who were continuing Einstein’s search for a Theory of Everything. Over the past two decades the article has been cited more than one hundred times in various physics journals. As it turns out, theorists are very interested in testing their hypotheses in two-dimensional models because the mathematics is simpler.

  This article became the inspiration for Final Theory. The research paper that my hero, David Swift, coauthors with his own adviser, Professor Kleinman, is about relativity in two dimensions. Like me, David is a former physics student who now writes about science for a general audience. Except David is a professor instead of a magazine editor. And he’s a lot braver and better looking than me.

  I’ve tried to make sure that the scientific principles presented in the novel, and the high-tech gadgets as well, are authentic. For example, the Highlander robotic car is a real vehicle built by the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. The Dragon Runner surveillance device, also developed by the Robotics Institute, has been tested by the U.S. Marines in Iraq. The Virtual Combat Simulator that appears in Chapter Ten is similar to the VirtuSphere, a system I tried myself during a visit to the U.S. Naval Research Lab. And the idea that sterile neutrinos may take shortcuts through extra dimensions is a real hypothesis that has been proposed to explain some anomalous experimental results that were reported at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in 2007.

  I knew early on that I wanted the climax of the novel to take place at Fermilab, so I arranged a visit to the facility and got a tour of the Tevatron, the four-mile-long circular tunnel where protons and antiprotons are accelerated to nearly the speed of light and then smashed together. The best part of the tour was the requisite safety briefi
ng, during which the lab personnel explained the various hazards we might encounter in the tunnel, such as radioactivity left over from stray proton collisions or the possibility of asphyxiation from helium evaporating from the superconducting magnets. As I took notes, I thought, This is fantastic material! The book is going to write itself!

  In the end, though, I had a lot of help. My colleagues at Scientific American have been wonderfully supportive. The members of my writing group—Rick Eisenberg, Johanna Fiedler, Steve Gold-stone, Dave King, Melissa Knox, and Eva Mekler—gave me invaluable criticism and encouragement (especially Rick, who read every page of the first draft and filled the margins with sound advice). I’m very lucky to have a superb agent, Dan Lazar of Writers House, and a marvelous editor, Sulay Hernandez of Touchstone/Fireside. But I owe the greatest debt to my family. My parents nurtured my love for science, and my wife, Lisa, supported my dream of becoming a novelist long after the point at which any reasonable person would’ve given up hope. This book is for her.