COSM

by Gregory Benford

  “I’m just glad I had the backup work nearly done.” Her stomach lurched with guilty fear. What if they found out this was a bluff? Well, now it was out. Too late for afterthoughts. She willed her gut to relax.

  “Indeed,” Dave said neutrally.

  She made her expression earnest and modest. She didn’t have to fake the fatigue lines. It had taken plenty of hours to make the results look plausible and authoritative. One of the beauties of involved numerical calculations was that if they looked reasonable, nobody was going to check details. Among people always a bit behind where they thought they should be, tedium was a useful repellent.

  Dave slid his gaze to Hugh. “Seem okay?”

  “These count numbers,” Hugh said judiciously, “they’re done with an optimized integral?”

  “Yes.” Curt nod of the head. Best to be clear and simple. She had done a quick cut at the complicated sums. The order of magnitude was right, but no more.

  “Spallation rates—”

  “All included.”

  Hugh nodded, twisted his mouth a little in his standard skeptical reflex, let the pause play out. Then he carefully looked at Dave, not Alicia, let two more seconds squeeze by, and said reluctantly, “I’ll… boot it to the lawyers.”

  “Great! Alicia, you may proceed as soon as we get to the judge.”

  “Which will be…?”

  Dave picked up his phone. “I’ll have this messengered over.”

  “Lawyers never do anything fast.”

  “Yeah, or cheap,” Hugh said sourly.

  “These will. Tom Ludlam has been riding their asses about this.”

  She got up with an odd, giddy feeling. So quick, so easy. Technically she had finessed here, not lied. Fatigue blended with guilt, a potent mixture. She would have to learn to live with both. Sleep would work on one of them, anyway.

  Dave gave quick instructions in the clipped, slightly aggressive style the better managers used and then said cordially to her, “Come on, I want to have a look at your setup.”

  “Mind if I stop at the cafeteria? I skipped breakfast.”

  “Could use some decent coffee myself,” Dave said.

  Hugh left and they biked over to the cafeteria, Alicia feeling bulbous and awkward. She was not fat but muscular and the ride made her perspire. Usually she was so busy that she ate from the coin-operated vending machines; she equated the cafeteria with luxury. With teams working all hours, breakfast was always available, even if it was steam table stuff. She got some virtuous Lite Granola with nonfat milk and then splurged calories on the works: eggs, bacon, toast with butter.

  The early lunch crowd half-filled the cafeteria. A lot of science gets done in the coffee shop. The management provided little notepads at each table.

  The customary social order played out in the geometry of table placement. The librarians, administrative assistants, and secretaries—all women, most in pantsuits and a few wearing dresses—clustered in groups of four. Engineers and senior technicians sat together in groups of six or eight. As Alicia threaded her way toward a small table, a troop of experimenters from the big PHENIX particle detector trooped by, pulling tables end to end to sit as a body. Theorists ate in smaller bunches. Nobody ate alone and people scanned the room often, noting who ate with whom—or didn’t.

  She was used to this pattern and could pick out the physicists by dress alone. They looked like a middle class suburb on a weekend, disdaining any distinguishing details: jeans or anonymous slacks, down-market shirts with sleeves rolled up, cushioned shoes. Alicia wore black jeans, a minor deviation, with a broad black belt and a pale yellow blouse, the understated feminine offset by steel-shanked work boots. Admin types wore classic business garb, even suits, but left their jackets in the office, wearing them only in meetings with outsiders.

  Dave took pains to never look like an admin guy, signaling this with his tan slacks and lumberjack shirt. Still, he was as earnest and hardworking as any coffee-driven obsessive one could find in the Lab. The sort of man, she mused, who would go to a T.G.I.M. party. He bit into some low-cal crackers and sipped coffee while she dug into her eggs.

  “Cereal comes after?” he said.

  “That’s how I like it. I’m a nutritional pervert.”

  He watched her putting away bacon and toast. “I remember breakfasts like that.”

  “First Law of Thermodynamics still applies. If you eat it, and you don’t burn it off, you sit on it.”

  “You burn it, looks like. Exercise?”

  “Worry. Saves time and you don’t have to shower.”

  “I know you’re wound pretty tight about this first trial, but don’t be.” He leaned back, elaborately casual as he got to the point of this little interlude. “It’s just a first shot. Nobody’s going to frown if you don’t get anything.”

  “Thanks. Not that I believe it, of course.”

  He smiled. “Okay, you caught me giving the standard rookie speech.”

  “My dad says it’s better to be underestimated.”

  “He’s right. What’s his line of work?”

  “Op-ed.”

  “Uh…?”

  “Sorry, family jargon. Opinion-editorial writer, Thomas Butterworth.”

  “Can’t say I—”

  “He’s a small-time columnist, runs mostly in the conservative papers.”

  “Which nobody here would read, right?”

  “Only the malcontents.”

  “You and he don’t usually agree.”

  “How’d you guess?” An edge in her voice?

  “Conservatives have been better supporters of physics than the liberals.” He gazed around, automatically checking out the seating configurations. “But I’ll bet there aren’t five confessed Republicans in the room.”

  “Dad’s a libertarian.”

  “Oh, then all bets are off.” He eyed her as she dug into her Lite Granola. “Y’know, we do have high expectations here from everybody. RHIC has to show performance, make a splash.”

  She nodded, noting that this contradicted his this-is-just-a-first-shot speech a moment before, designed to put her at ease. “Congress sank nearly a billion in, wants some headlines?”

  “Well, we’re not quite that bald about it.”

  “Maybe we should be.”

  “Plenty of people think we’re way beyond the point of diminishing returns in particle physics, and for nuclear—well, they confuse it with reactors.”

  She arched an eyebrow. “All that stuff about science running out of gas?”

  He sighed ruefully. “I had dinner last week with a congressman. He seemed to halfway believe it.”

  Fashionable skepticism about science had risen around the turn of the millennium, when every pundit and amateur philosopher was pronouncing the end of eras. There was some worthwhile argument to the position, which had kept it alive until now, five years later.

  Some felt that the big, solvable issues were largely done, and the unsolved ones couldn’t be settled. That left smaller, manageable, naggingly boring science, like sequencing human DNA. Of course the implications of that knowledge could be vast, but no one expected grand syntheses to emerge. Mostly, it would be endless detail. Fascinating particulars indeed, but smaller in scale than the heroic era that had followed Crick and Watson.

  Some observers foresaw a style of sardonic science emerging—a blend of speculation, ironically oblique points of view, reinterpretations of the same data. Sardonic science’s luminous figures were those like Richard Dawkins, Mr. Selfish Gene himself, unable to add any new data or brilliantly turned experiments, but arch and arrogant in a fetching way, sarcastic and insightful rather than original.

  Often sardonic science came from figures who had retired or gotten bored with the humdrum world of grinding, everyday science and so had entered a “philosopause” of armchair rumination. But not all. Even some luminaries of particle physics saw the great era closing. The essential outlines of the universe were done, they said. A physics devoted to minutiae
would follow.

  Alicia sniffed in derision. “Lack of imagination isn’t an argument.”

  “It affects the budget.”

  “So do all the geezers sopping up their Social Security.”

  “Hey, we compete with a lot of social needs.”

  “I’m not arguin’.” She gazed at him levelly. “Just want enough beamtime to get something done here.”

  “You’re the first to try uranium, so you can’t expect to get a lot of time. We’re fitting you in between stand-downs at the other detectors. For example, on PHENIX—”

  “I know, this is just a trial run. In a week you go back to hunting.”

  The promise of the Collider was that using heavy ions might—just might, no guarantees—for the first time cross a fundamental threshold. Slamming whole nuclei together might create a new state of matter, one ruled by the jawbreaker-named Quantum Chromodynamics. The resulting high-energy densities could conjure up a spitting particle fog called the quark-gluon plasma. Gluons were particles which held together the lumbering protons and neutrons, until a collision broke them open like egg sacs, spraying wreckage. Such a miasma of subnuclear particles resembled how the universe had looked in the first millionth of a second of the Big Bang. Collisions at the RHIC focus could be like a “Mini Bang,” as the Lab publicists liked to put it.

  Only that hadn’t happened yet. The first five years of running at RHIC had failed to provide clear evidence of any such state.

  “Your idea is neat,” Dave said, still inspecting her face. (Or was she just feeling guilty?) “I mean, go for the most total energy, jumping to the highest mass nuclei available.”

  “I’m going just a bit above gold.”

  Though gold was a lighter element, it could be accelerated to over one percent higher energy per nucleon than uranium. But uranium had 41 more nucleons than gold. That might count in creating a particle fog. Some theorists thought that the total punch of a nucleus was the key. A majority didn’t.

  She shrugged. “It’s just a small chance.”

  “One worth trying. And I’m glad to see it for other reasons, too.”

  “The black thing.”

  “The black woman thing.”

  “Hugh brought up those minority scientist points that got added into UC–Irvine’s proposal. How much difference did that make?”

  His mouth pinched at the edges. “Not much.”

  “How much?”

  “I’d have to look it up.”

  “Come on, Dave, that’s a standard administrative dodge.”

  “Nobody thinks you’re here because of anything other than ability, Alicia.”

  “I want to be sure of that. These minority scientist programs—”

  “You have the full support of the staff here, believe me.”

  She shrugged and smiled ruefully, feeling awkward for even bringing it up. Getting time on RHIC was a lesson in diplomacy itself, never one of her great skills, and self-doubt dogged her still. “I’d kinda hoped all that hype had blown away. Black woman particle physicist, one of a kind, a zoo animal—”

  “Find the quark-gluon plasma and that’ll look like nothing.”

  “Your publicity people, the last time they made out like I was the only person on the whole experiment.”

  He held up a placating hand. “That’s media-biz. People don’t want complicated stories.”

  She nodded ruefully. “One of them said to me, ‘The best technical journalism cooks up a pound of personality and an ounce of content.’ Sheesh!”

  “True, though.” His face sobered. “Uh, there’s one more matter. We’re having data storage troubles, as you probably heard.”

  “No, I hadn’t.” Though this was no surprise. The stream of numbers spat out by the myriad RHIC diagnostics was a Mississippi compared to all earlier machines.

  “We’re going to have to keep all the uranium data and process it here,” he said flatly.

  “What! I want to process it at UCI, too.”

  “We’re not going to have it in a form you can use.”

  “I can do it in BITNEX—” And they were off, trading acronyms for computer systems and software, DAQ and PMD and CPU, voices sharpening as their disagreement worsened. She finally said, “Damn it, we agreed that I would get a fair, equal crack at the data.”

  “We just don’t have the resources of people or machine time,” Dave said stonily, “to translate the masses of uranium data into your machine language.”

  “You should have told me!”

  “We’ve been barely keeping our noses above water on this. When I went to the central counting facility, they just shook their heads.”

  “But it’s in our contractual—”

  “There’s a clause about the Lab getting to do first-pass processing of the data—”

  “That’s just a default term. We have an agreement—”

  “Not really. It’s up to our discretion.”

  “Damn it, it’s my data!”

  “You’ll get it, too.”

  “When?”

  Dave’s eyes drifted away from hers uneasily. “We’ll let you have representative events, say one out of every hundred. Getting it all, though, will take a few months.”

  “Months! We’re due to have a second run here in half a year. We’ll have to come back without enough time to think over our first results.”

  He shrugged, angering her with the gesture more than he had with his words. She blurted, “It’s my experiment!”

  “It’s our experiment. You’re a guest.”

  She wanted to snap back but realized it would do no good. The Lab would eventually get her a filtered, compressed data set, sure, but she and her research group would be cooling their heels until then. Struggling to be civil, she limited herself to: “I don’t like this.”

  “I’m sorry, but there it is.”

  She could see that he was embarrassed by this reversal. Was this a side effect of the continuing division at Brookhaven between the nuclear physics people and the rather more lofty types who called themselves particle physicists? With RHIC the nuclear guys had annexed another neglected piece of the particle physicists’ landscape, and Alicia was definitely a member of the particle tribe. The edgy relationship of the two fields produced spats and squabbles; this smelled like one. As a visiting particle type, she went to the end of the line when data-processing computer time got handed out. She sighed and tried not to show how angry she was.

  Dave smiled tentatively. “So now, how about showing me your setup?”

  4

  Alicia took a deep breath to fight her nerves. The oily reek of big machines, the sharp bite of cleaning solvents, the dull dry smell of electrical insulation—all conspired in the earthy mustiness of the underground world.

  She could not sit still before the data screens that filled one wall of the operations and counting center. Instead she paced in a short orbit determined by the length of her headset wire. Every time she made her turn, Alicia looked at a poster of horses plunging along a racetrack. There were a dozen people in the room, the RHIC team plus the UCI team, Brad Douglas and Zak and herself, but she had eyes only for the screens.

  “Dispatching the run now” came a heavy voice in her headphones. “Tuning beams.” That meant the Booster had done its job.

  She kept her voice flat and restrained as she said to Zak, “The ponies are away.”

  Since the Collider was a miles-long ring racetrack, their joke was to translate accelerator jargon into horsey talk. Zak’s eyes widened. “Out of the gate?”

  “Hitting the track now,” she relayed.

  The room’s electronic displays gave few hints of the drama occurring, but she could see it in her mind’s eye. The Alternating Gradient Synchrotron was handing off its particle ponies to the controlling magnets and pulsing electric fields of the big track. Specially designed strippers had ripped all the electrons from the uranium atoms until they now coasted unprotected, their total nuclear charge of 92 protons exposed t
o the shove of electric fields.

  Into the ring racetrack came 57 bunches of nuclear uranium, stacked around the circumference boxcar fashion. Each bunch held a billion nuclei. In ten-millionths of a second a bunch shot around the track. In a separate stream an equal number of bunches accelerated the opposite way. They could cycle for a day if unneeded, coaxed and herded by electromagnetic fields alone.

  “Incoming,” Zak announced.

  The uranium nuclei had already stacked into the Collider to the running density. Now they were focused at the experiment nexus. With a twitch of electromagnetic fields, the two counter-streaming currents of nuclei suddenly met each other. The counting room staff sent her images.

  “Getting hits!” she cried.

  Alicia envisioned two streams of cigar-shaped uranium nuclei, focused against each other in the beam pipe. Nuclei would strike each other at odd angles, shattering themselves into tens of thousands of particles each second.

  In her mind’s eye she saw the myriad extinctions as flowers. Gaudy, with lines zipping in and out, forming a pattern of garish, baroque growth. Oppositely directed, the nuclei had no net momentum in the laboratory. Their fragments would blossom in tiny, fierce explosions that sprayed debris into narrow cones fore and aft of the collision. The flux perpendicular to the line of flight was the crucial zone where diagnostic sensors sought the Grail: a quark-gluon plasma.

  Cheers from the technical staff. Somebody was slapping her on her back. A woman was cheering in a screechy voice and only when she stopped did she realize that it was herself.

  A cork popped and bounced off the tiled ceiling. An electronics tech handed her a plastic cup of cheap champagne. Alicia thanked everybody, grinned, said words that she forgot the moment they escaped her mouth. She gulped some champagne and it was really awful and she didn’t mind.

  The whole while she was there with them and also not, a portion of her always focused on the screens. Flowers blossomed there, their glossy vector traces color-coded for particle types. The harvest of her detectors, the intricate measuring slabs she had toiled over for most of her adult life.

  She hugged Zak and gave him a quick peck on the cheek. Somebody flipped a switch and the audio boomed with Brahms’s Second Symphony. Her detector group was the Broad RAnge Hadron Measuring Spectrometer, or BRAHMS. The grand chords hammered in her ears, but she didn’t ask for it to be turned down.