Einstein's Bridge

by Cramer, John

  Wolfgang used the mouse to make a box around one of the larger speckles, then clicked on a control. A new window appeared. It showed the black points of the measured X-ray spectrum, a smooth variation ending in a series of spikes, overlaid in green with the matching reference spectrum that the computer had fitted to it. The graph label in the lower right of the window showed the green line of the fit with the symbol “Cd.”

  “‘Cd’, that’s cadmium,” said George. “What the hell would cadmium be doing on that chip?”

  Wolfgang scanned other regions of the chip and found similar green speckles. He set a cut so the microprobe responded only to the cadmium X-rays and backed off the magnification. A pattern became clear. Near the end of the chip where the tiny gold connection wires were attached there were concentrations of the material. He panned over to the new chip. No such areas were present. “It must have come from the manufacturing process used in that particular batch,” Wolfgang said.

  “I doubt it,” said George. “Remember the tests we did on unused chips? I think this cadmium contamination must have something to do with the way they were mounted in the pixel detector’s holder. Let me try a long shot.”

  He pulled his cellphone from his pocket and dialed. “Hi, Murray,” he said, “George Griffin. I’m glad you’re in already.”

  “Hi, George,” Murray’s voice answered in the earpiece, “Yeah, I had to come in early today to get something ready before a contractor crew arrives. What’s up?”

  “Murray,” George said, “What do you know about how the chip connections were made on the pixel detector? Were we using any new techniques or materials? I’m particularly interested in soldering or spot welding.”

  “Hmm,” Murray said and paused. “Yeah, I remember. We had some problems with cracked solder joints due to the flexing of the thin beryllium frame, so we went to a new more ductile solder alloy. I think it came from Japan or somewhere. Sony had been using it in some of their LCD processes.”

  “Do you have a spec-sheet on it?” George asked.

  “Yeah, lemme see here ...” George could hear the sound of typing as Murray interrogated the LEM materials specification database. “Aha! Here it is. What did you want to know?”

  “Is there a breakdown of the metals used in the alloy?” George asked.

  “Um, yeah. It doesn’t give percentages, that must be proprietary info, but it says that in descending order of concentration it contains tin, lead, silver, cadmium, and indium.”

  “Bingo! Thanks Murray. I think you’ve just solved our pixel detector problem.” George felt a great wave of relief. The problem that had been plaguing him for months was probably solved.

  He hung up and turned to Wolfgang. “There’s cadmium in the solder they were using for mounting chips,” he said.

  “Ja,” said Wolfgang, “so ...?”

  “Cadmium has a low vaporization temperature. It gets spread around easily, and can migrate on a substrate in the presence of electric fields. And it selectively absorbs neutrons and makes betas and gamma rays. It’s used as a neutron-eater to control nuclear reactors. That’s harmless in a normal environment, but near the SSC beam there are great floods of neutrons traveling along the beam line. That’s what’s killing our detectors. We’ve been poisoning them with cadmium-based solder.”

  “Ja,” said Wolfgang, “and ATLAS wasn’t using such solder, so it had not the problems. I see. Sehr gut, George. We must test this theory, of course.”

  “Of course,” said George, “but at least I have some progress to report at the group meeting this morning. I’ll need some hardcopies of those images showing the cadmium spots.”

  Wolfgang set about capturing the microprobe images they had produced as image files.

  George’s cellphone beeped. He excused himself, walked across the room, and pressed the receive button. Must be Murray calling back, he thought.

  “Hello, George.” It was Roger. “I’ve been working all night on our little problem. I understand the message!”

  “You do?” George said. “That was fast. Tell me all about it.” Roger sounded very alert for someone who had been up all night.

  “The 12 primes and 144 primes were the key,” Roger said rapidly. “The following bit-stream is a set of pictures. The resolution matrix is 1728 by 1728. That’s 12 to the third power, 12 times 144.”

  “Excellent,” said George. “And what are the pictures?” He was feeling a rising excitement. This was starting out to be a very good day.

  “There are 12 pictures in all,” Roger said. “I don’t understand all of it yet, but I’ve made some progress. It seems to be a tutorial in elementary science, very graphic and with a minimum of symbols. You know the bit. The periodic table, the structure of matter, and so forth.”

  “That doesn’t sound very informative,” said George, feeling a slight disappointment. Roger seemed to be building up slowly to ... what?

  “Just wait,” said Roger. “Then it gets into general relativity and cosmology. And then it comes to the punchline. George, the Snark isn’t a particle. It’s the mouth of a wormhole!”

  “A wormhole?” George exclaimed. “Do you mean an Einstein-Rosen bridge?” He paused, struggling to recall the concept. “That can’t be right, Roger. When I studied general relativity at MIT, my prof was very fond of the idea of Einstein’s Bridges, of curving space into a shortcut between two distant locations.

  “But, as I recall, the things are dynamically unstable. They have the annoying tendency of winking out of existence so rapidly that one can’t even shoot a photon through. And besides, an Einstein-Rosen bridge should have a lot of space curvature and a mass comparable to a black hole, shouldn’t it?”

  Roger laughed. “You were at MIT a while back, my friend. In the late ‘80s Kip Thorne at Cal Tech discovered that, theoretically at least, a wormhole can be kept open and stabilized in several ways, all involving a bit of negative mass-energy. And as for the wormhole mass, it can be anything from a Planck mass upward. A Planck mass is only a microgram, I don’t think you know for sure that your Snark isn’t that massive.”

  “A microgram?” said George. “That’s much too large. If it started at 2% of the speed of light, it would never have come to rest in the detector.”

  “Perhaps the chaps on the other end helped to stop it,” Roger said. “Perhaps that’s what all of those jets were accomplishing.” George could imagine Roger’s grin.

  “Does the message say where they are? Where the other end of the bridge is located?” George asked.

  “Yes,” said Roger. George waited, but Roger said nothing else. He seemed to be playing for dramatic effect.

  “So where are they? Is it a nearby star system? How many light years?” Damn the man and his cute games, George thought.

  “It’s not that simple,” Roger said quietly.

  “What do you mean, it’s not that simple?” George was growing exasperated. “Roger, where in Hell are they?”

  “Not in Hell,” Roger said. “A place that’s harder to reach than that. They’re in another universe, George.”

  PART 6

  June 21, 2004

  January 15, 1992

  “The truth is, I don’t think there is a single person in this body who has the scientific background to know for sure whether [the SSC] is the greatest investment ever or the worst ...”

  — Congressman Newt Gingrich (R- Georgia)

  June 20, 1992

  “High-energy research with particle accelerators has resulted and will result in plastics for medical use, solutions for DNA research and ... maybe even for AIDS, ...nuclear waste disposal ..., pollutant removal ..., location of oil deposits, creation of integrated circuits ..., studies of water tables ..., cryogenic engineering, tumor and body chemistry detection ..., ultra-fast computers ..., and lots, lots more ...
”

  — Congressman Bob Livingston (R- Louisiana)

  “They have already, as a result of this program, developed cancer technology, developed treatment of tumors, developed advanced plastics that can be used in hospitals to reduce hazardous wastes ... The SSC is almost driving supercomputer technology, and supercomputers are what has made the United States an advanced technology (leader) in lots of areas.”

  — Congressman Sam Johnson (R- Texas)

  “What will happen once [the SSC] is finally completed? It deals with compressed energy. Scientists say they will be able have enough energy to run an automobile ... In the medical profession, they will have a machine that [can] find any tumors or cancer in your body, never using a knife.”

  — Congressman Bill Sarpalius (D- Texas)

  CHAPTER 6.1

  Snark Seminar

  THE TIME had passed so rapidly. Alice couldn’t quite believe that it had only been nine days since they had isolated the Snark. She recalled how George had commandeered a new laboratory room for them to work in and set up the recording and display hardware, how Roger had quickly scanned electronic conference proceedings, identified SETI experts on alien contact, and persuaded them to come to the Laboratory, how the subtleties of the Snark’s pictorial messages had slowly been decoded. It seemed like months of events compressed into a handful of days.

  She looked around SSC’s large lecture theater. It was absolutely packed. Alice suspected that its occupancy probably exceeded the fire-code limit by 25%. The front row was occupied by the Laboratory hierarchy, with Roy Schwitters, the SSC Director, seated in the center. Jake Wang sat immediately to his left, and occasionally delivered a whispered comment in the director’s ear. Also scattered along the first and second rows were the group leaders, Nobel laureates, and distinguished physicists that Alice had come to know and recognize in the past two weeks.

  George had wanted Alice, as a participant in the Snark discovery, to sit on the front row also, but as a reporter she had preferred to sit half-way back in the lecture theater where she could experience the reactions of the audience around her. She had arrived forty minutes before the seminar was scheduled to begin, and she was glad that she had. Late arriving graduate students and others sat on the floors, filling the aisles and the space on the floor in front of the first row of seats. Both walls were lined with remotes. Alice had heard from some of the late arrivals that all the telepresence units and couches in the Laboratory had been commandeered for the special seminar, bringing all interactive data analysis at the SSC to a dead stop.

  George had been speaking for over half an hour, and was now getting to the final conclusions of his talk, which had been designed to provide an overview of the past week’s work on the Snark. The seminar schedule, projected at the beginning, had indicated that George would speak first for 45 minutes, followed by a question period and a break, followed by 30 minute talks by four other speakers. Roger Coulton, seated now at the far right of the front row next to his boss, Bert Barnes, would discuss the twelve Snark diagrams and their interpretation. Professor Angelo Axel, distinguished cosmologist from the University of Chicago, would discuss inflationary cosmology and bubble universes. Professor Rudyard Horne of Cal Tech would discuss general relativity and quantum gravity as applied to stable microscopic wormholes. And Professor Wilson Mulligan, George’s friend from the University of Washington Astronomy Department and a long-time leader of SETI efforts in radio astronomy, would discuss strategies for establishing two-way contact using the Snark.

  There had been some discussion of coupling the seminar to a press conference, but George had vetoed that idea, preferring to wait until the two-way contact attempt had been made. Alice was delighted with this decision. She had a major news scoop, the discovery of the Snark, ready to break to an unsuspecting world later this afternoon. Alice took digital camera shots of the arrangement on the front row and made detailed notes of everything. She was thinking of the news release, the Search article she would write on the Snark, and the popular level science book that would follow it. The Snark was a historic event, and she was in a unique position to write its history.

  George started his talk by projecting several multi-colored and rotating views of the now-famous “Snark event” on the large computer-driven flatscreen at the front of the room. He mentioned several important features of the LEM detector that had been essential in discovering the event. He graphically traced the path of the Snark through the various layers of the detector, projecting diagrams that showed in detail the region where the Snark had stopped. He then described how he and Alice had come in the middle of the night and removed the scintillator bar containing the Snark from the LEM detector. He held up a unit like the one they had removed.

  Alice smiled. George made it sound as if their actions that Saturday night had been a thoroughly planned course of action, a careful set of logical steps, rather than the slightly beery culmination to an evening of dancing at P.J.’s. And he didn’t mention that after they’d found the thing, they’d gone to Alice’s house and screwed like demented weasels. He seemed to imply that at least half of the insights that had led to finding the Snark had been hers. George was a gentleman, but he was unduly generous. She felt embarrassed, thinking about her half-finished techno-thriller.

  George showed a close-up image of the lead-glass scintillator that held the Snark, made at a sufficiently low light level that the blue glow was visible. This was followed by graphs showing the wavelength spectrum of the light and its time structure. Then he described the encoded message, including all twelve of the bit-map images it contained. Finally, George described the plan for transmitting a message in the other direction, mentioning that one of the following speakers would describe the plan in more detail.

  There was thunderous applause in the auditorium as George concluded. The SSC Director stood and asked if there were questions. Alice shifted in her seat, wondering what the question period would bring. She could see that Jake was holding his hand stiffly in the air.

  The director called on the first questioner, a theorist in the front row who asked a detailed question about the energy and momentum balance in the reconstruction of the Snark event. George answered the question and projected a new diagram which provided additional information.

  Another questioner, an experimentalist for the LEM group whom Alice recognized, asked skeptically about the mass and charge of the Snark and how these related to its stopping power. George quickly admitted that there was a problem here, and projected a graph showing an analysis of the Snark’s ionization track in the various parts of the LEM detector. He followed this with a graph of the time-of-flight analysis of the Snark event. “If we assume the Snark is an object having a Planck-scale mass with a velocity of beta equals point-oh-two,” he finished, “then the observed ionization should have been insufficient to bring it to rest. We suspect that the previously unknown color ionization process, the process that produced the 29 jets we saw, also served to decelerate the Snark. Roger has suggested that there may have been neutral particles involved in the deceleration, which we wouldn’t track. We would be interested in other suggestions bearing on this issue.”

  The third questioner, one of the accelerator engineers, wanted a more complete explanation of what had been learned from the bit-map diagrams. In particular, what could be learned about wormholes and about the location from which the message was being sent. “First let me deal with the wormhole question,” said George. “The wormhole or ‘Einstein-Rosen bridge’ as we used to call it when I was in graduate school, is almost as old as Einstein’s general theory of relativity itself. The mathematics of general relativity indicates that when space becomes sufficiently curved and distorted, a three dimensional tube can form that connects one region of space-time with another, a sort of spatial shortcut.” George projected a diagram of a surface curved back on itself, with a tube connecting one region of the sur
face to another.

  Alice was amused. George had spent long hours fetching papers on wormholes from electronic preprint databases, studying the papers in great detail, complaining about the unintelligible math, and bombarding Roger with questions. Now, a week later, he sounded like an expert who had been working in the field for years. Perhaps he had learned something from his association with Jake.

  “In 1962,” George continued, “Fuller and Wheeler showed that a wormhole is so dynamically unstable that it would pinch closed before any light, matter, or information could pass through it. Then in 1988, Morris, Thorne, and Yurtsever demonstrated that a Casimir-effect capacitor could stabilize a wormhole, preventing its pinch-off. Subsequent work of Visser and others demonstrated that the same stability could be achieved in other ways. From what we now gather from the Snark diagrams, there are ways of stabilizing a wormhole that we had not previously considered. Professor Horne will discuss this later.”

  “But what’s at the other end of the wormhole? In particular, what’s this ‘other universe’ business you mentioned?” the questioner persisted. “Are we talking Everett-Wheeler probability branches or shadow-matter worlds or what?”

  “None of the above,” said George. “Professor Axel will address the cosmological aspects of the Snark message later today, but let me attempt a low-brow experimentalist’s answer to your question. The ‘inflationary scenario’ describing the early history of the Big Bang is a synthesis of cosmology and particle physics. But up to now, there seemed no hope of attempting any experimental verifications of its predictions. The scenario described the very early universe as a region of expanding space saturated with an almost unimaginably large quantity of energy. As that space expands, a local irregularity occurs, perhaps around a single magnetic monopole, and a sort of bubble forms. Inside that bubble is what we would call normal space, while outside is the energy-saturated space in which the strong, electro-weak, and gravitational forces are indistinguishable. The walls of the bubble, driven by the energy liberated in this transition from one kind of space to another, move outward faster than the speed of light. That bubble of space is what became our universe. We and all the space we can reach, all the planets, stars, galaxies, and galactic clusters are inside it. But a larger mega-universe, the true cosmos, remains outside the bubble.”