Quantum Space: Book One in the Quantum Series

by Douglas Phillips

  The major leaned forward in his chair and rested his elbows on the desk. “Vasquez, you’re doing a fine job. I’m happy that you’re so dedicated to the program. Very responsible. But what you’re saying doesn’t make any sense. Large objects in orbit, in stable orbits, don’t just disappear.”

  Vasquez didn’t flinch. “Well, these did.”

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  Nala Pasquier closed the blinds on her office window. With only the grounds of Fermilab on the other side, it didn’t increase privacy, but it made her feel better. She returned to her desk and studied the computer screen. Displayed was a list of background processes, and she read each one. Some were clearly Windows services, a few provided support to her desktop apps, but many names were indecipherable and would need to be researched to discover their purpose.

  “Shit,” she muttered under her breath. “It’s got to be here somewhere.”

  She opened an incognito browser tab and typed furiously. She mouthed more expletives as she worked and paused only to take another sip from the mug of tea on her desk. Arriving at the end of the list, she pushed the keyboard away, leaned back in her chair and stared at the ceiling.

  “Who am I kidding?” she whispered, her eyes burning a hole in the ceiling tile. “No matter what I do, they’re always watching.” After a few seconds, her trance broke and she consciously scanned the ceiling, looking once again for the hidden security camera that she had never found.

  She grabbed her phone and started an app. A window automatically popped up on the computer display over on her desk. The message on the computer was one that no one else would see, she hoped.

  Authorization required for download to external devices. Enter password.

  She typed. Progress bars displayed on both the computer and her phone.

  “At least I’ll have my own copy.” She sent a nervous glance through the narrow window adjacent to her office door. The hallway was still empty. “Even if it is illegal.”

  10 Science

  Marie watched out the car window as Illinois freeways and business parks gave way to suburbs and finally to cornfields. Daniel drove while the GPS provided navigation. He hadn’t spoken more than a few words since they had left the airport. He gazed ahead, apparently lost in thought. Given the newness of their partnership, she thought it better not to interrupt.

  In the distance, a tall A-shaped building rose above the trees just as they passed a sign directing visitors to Fermi National Laboratory. They passed under a large sculpture of steel arches and stopped at the curb in front of Wilson Hall. It looked more like two buildings, each leaning into the other. A glass atrium separated them, its edges curving hyperbolically toward the sky.

  Marie looked up as they entered the cathedral-like interior. For people who studied the world of the very small, they certainly worked in a space that was very large. The opposing walls soared two hundred feet to a skylight at the top. If the intent was to impress, the architecture had certainly succeeded.

  They stopped at the reception desk, signed in, and picked up visitor badges. A group of schoolchildren gathered nearby, their teacher herding them into as tight a circle as she could manage. Two boys with higher energy chased each other around the group like orbiting electrons.

  Marie leaned toward Daniel. “Feels more like a public playground than a physics laboratory.”

  Daniel glanced at the kids as if he hadn’t noticed, and smiled. A minute later, a young man approached the desk. “Welcome to Fermilab. I’m Josh, an intern in Dr. Park’s team. Shall we go up?”

  The elevator traveled on the building’s slanted path and deposited them on the fifteenth floor. They stepped out to a commanding view. A complex of buildings and parking lots transitioned to green prairie grass that stretched for several miles around the central core. Superimposed on the land were three distinct rings. The smallest was just beyond the parking lot. In the distance was a larger ring, at least the size of horse racetrack. The third was so large it disappeared into the distant trees, its gentle curve only hinting at its full size. Each ring was marked by a mix of concrete paths, water ditches, electrical lines and other equipment, but the sum of the disparate features was indisputably circular.

  “Beautiful,” Marie mouthed.

  “Yeah, it’s a great view of the facility,” Josh agreed. He pointed almost straight down. “That smaller circle is the Booster. The protons do about twenty thousand laps to build speed. The larger ring is the Main Injector, which accelerates them just under the speed of light.” He smiled with pride. “It makes a vibration that you can feel in your bones. Sometimes I sit in the Main Injector while I’m eating my lunch.”

  He pointed to the broad curve of the largest circle. “The big one is the Tevatron. For twenty-eight years, it was the largest accelerator in the world. But it’s no longer in use. Congress ended funding in 2011.” The intern’s words were tainted with disappointment, and Marie wanted to give him a sympathetic pat on the shoulder. There’s nothing like having an enormous empty shell as a daily reminder of lost opportunity.

  They continued down the hallway and stopped at the largest office on the floor. A gray-haired Asian man, casually dressed in a pullover sweater and wearing glasses, looked up from his work. He pushed away from his chair, his hand outstretched.

  “Dr. Rice, Ms. Kendrick, so glad to meet you. You arrived very quickly. I was on the phone with Dr. Bradley less than one hour ago.”

  Marie recalled the briefing materials that Bradley had provided. Jae-ho Park was a Korean immigrant who had come to America as a college student. He was a key player on the teams that had discovered the bottom quark in 1977 and the top quark in 1995. Over the years, his renown had morphed to exalted status, and many considered him the father of experimental particle physics. Some of the staff called him Captain Quark, a play on his name and pop culture that Marie found irresistible.

  Marie shook his hand, and Daniel did as well, far more vigorously. “Dr. Park, it’s an honor,” he said. “A pioneer in your field.”

  “Please, Dr. Rice. There is no need.” Park seemed to be the personification of both humility and serenity, his Asian roots firmly shaping his personality. “Dr. Bradley explained to me the purpose of your visit. He also shared information about the most unfortunate accident with the Russian spacecraft.”

  He faced Daniel and Marie alternately as he spoke. “I spent much time on the phone with Dr. Bradley. I hear his concern, I understand it. But I’m afraid that your trip is wasted time.”

  Daniel lowered his eyebrows in doubt. “Wasted? Why?”

  “There is simply no connection between the work we do at Fermilab and the disappearance of that spacecraft. There cannot be. We do amazing things here, which I will be happy to show to you, but our work is restricted to the boundaries of this facility—in fact, within just a few meters of the Diastasi test bench. We have no capacity to affect an object that is thousands of kilometers away.”

  Daniel shifted his stance. He seemed to be ready to say something, but only half-opened his mouth. His expression was remarkably the same as just hours before as they’d sat in Bradley’s office and heard about the quantum dimensions of string theory. It was a look of skepticism, but carefully tempered by etiquette. Marie was beginning to recognize her new partner’s style.

  Daniel finally spoke. “I’m relieved to hear that, Dr. Park, and others will be as well.” His body language showed strength, and his words seemed careful but compelling. “I’m sure you’ll understand that we’ve been asked by the president’s advisors to investigate and determine if there is any correlation. To do that, we’ll need to review the Diastasi program, to whatever depth is required.”

  Park stretched his arms wide as if opening a kimono, or in his case, maybe a hanbok. “By all means, you are welcome to see what we do. You will find it quite incredible.” He waved a hand in the air. “Please, do not mistake my dismissal as noncooperation. I am personally concerned for these astronauts. I was relieved to hear t
hat transmissions from them were received, and I agree their situation sounds very unusual. But… I must repeat that we could not have affected this spacecraft.”

  Daniel gave a courtesy nod, but his skeptical expression remained. Park started down the hallway and motioned to them. “Please, come with me. I will show you myself. Let me explain our amazing capabilities, but also our system limitations.”

  They followed down the hallway and back to the elevator. Park tapped his badge to the elevator security pad, and they dropped to a basement level, several floors below the lobby. They stepped out into a concrete passageway lined with dozens of multicolored pipes, bundles of wires and electrical panels. The sight was entirely different from the public-facing Wilson Hall.

  They turned a corner to a long concrete corridor with no apparent end. Enormous rectangles of layered metal plates stood bolted to the wall every few feet and disappeared down the corridor. A large pipe pierced the center each rectangle, like an arrow puncturing a series of targets. Jumbles of wires and cables were attached to the walls and ceiling. If this was a planned scientific system, it was hard to distinguish from chaos.

  “This is the linear accelerator, where it all starts,” Park explained. “We insert source protons into the central tube, and the magnets you see along the wall accelerate them down this corridor. The proton beam exits at high speed and enters two additional accelerators, the Booster and the Main Injector. Once fully accelerated, the beam is directed to our neutrino test bench, which is where things get really interesting.” He grinned and waved them forward.

  They climbed stairs and walked down a smaller concrete passageway, sterile in comparison, with no equipment or wires. At the end was a doorway labeled NuMI / NOvA and beyond it a large workshop where the chaos of pipes and wires reappeared. Several pipes passed overhead, each labeled with something about their purpose, 150 GeV M’ or 8 GeV Recycler, and some with more understandable words like Waste Water and Nitrogen.

  They stopped in front of an elaborate machine, taller than a person and at least twenty feet long. It was a strange composition of hundreds of odd-looking parts, each performing some unknown function. Aluminum pipes passed through copper fittings. One part made of brass looked like the inside of a trombone.

  Marie laughed to herself. A machine built by a mad scientist, she thought. The only thing missing was Dr. Frankenstein waving his arms wildly and screaming into the sky, just as a lightning bolt split the air.

  A set of parallel gray metal plates curved around the opening of a central pipe. It looked like they might carry high-voltage electricity. She imagined Dr. Frankenstein throwing an old-fashioned switch on the wall, showering the opening with sparks. Or maybe not.

  “This is the NuMI horn,” Park explained. “It stands for ‘neutrinos at the Main Injector.’ We have many experiments that require high-energy neutrinos, and this is where they start. The proton beam I described to you earlier hits a graphite target—it looks like a stack of coins. The protons collide with the graphite atoms and tear them apart, like a billion tiny explosions. Out the other side comes a stream of neutrinos, also moving nearly the speed of light. We use the NuMI horn to focus the beam to the width of a pencil and send it on its way to the detectors.”

  Apparently the NuMI horn didn’t require lightning to operate.

  “We have two neutrino detectors, both very large. Down the hall is the three-hundred-ton detector, filled with a liquid scintillator—like water. We have a much larger detector, fourteen thousand tons, located in Ash River, Minnesota.”

  Marie glanced at Daniel wide-eyed, and Park noticed their surprise. “Yes, Minnesota. It is hard to imagine, but the neutrino beam travels from here to Minnesota in three milliseconds, passing through the Earth as if it were not even there.”

  “That’s amazing,” Marie said. “I just heard a similar description from Dr. Rice on the flight here. Apparently, neutrinos don’t stop for anything.”

  “They don’t even slow down,” said Park. “Their interaction with solid rock is negligible. They have no electrical charge and almost no mass. The Earth is nearly transparent to them.”

  Park stepped over to a pipe exiting the elaborate machine. “So, you might ask how we can detect a particle that passes through everything. And the answer is, we detect them because we produce so many of them. If you send a trillion neutrinos into your detectors, occasionally one of them will hit an oxygen or hydrogen nucleus in a head-on collision. That is when we catch them. We see the results of that collision.”

  “And what do you do when you catch them?” Daniel asked.

  “We find out what flavor they are. A neutrino oscillates naturally between its three flavors. It may start out as a tau neutrino, but by the time it arrives in Minnesota, it may have changed to an electron neutrino. Very strange, yes. One thing becomes another, like an apple becoming an orange while you weren’t looking.”

  Daniel bent down and peered into the central opening of the NuMI horn. Marie hoped nothing was operating, or would start. The thought of a beam of high-speed particles blasting through a person’s head was alarming. She touched his shoulder and pulled him back. “Don’t do that!” she asked. Daniel seemed unconcerned.

  Park rested a hand on the monstrous machine. “And now I’ll tell you my secret.” Daniel moved closer, and Marie wondered if the investigation was about to come to a grand conclusion.

  “Neutrino oscillation has been a joy to study, but quite fascinating to control.”

  That’s it? she thought. You have control? She wondered how anyone could expect to operate an advanced lab without control.

  “Come with me.” Park waved them forward and talked as they walked. “Like all quantum particles, neutrinos behave sometimes as a particle and sometimes as a wave. In the early twentieth century, physicists discovered that we can control this behavior. The simple act of observing a quantum wave collapses it to a particle. A very strange discovery that is not completely understood even today.”

  “The famous double-slit experiment,” Daniel remarked.

  “Indeed. In the past few years we have learned to control neutrino oscillation, to synchronize a trillion neutrinos into a coherent beam. It is very much like a laser, coherent light.”

  Daniel walked side by side with Park. “So, what do you do with a coherent beam of neutrinos?”

  “As you shall see, Dr. Rice, amazing things.”

  Marie trailed behind. Park was certainly hinting that drama was around the corner. She was impressed with the equipment, but unclear about its purpose. A neutrino laser? Are they making a weapon? How can this relate to Soyuz?

  They stopped at a closed door with a red sign. Diastasi: Authorized Personnel Only. Park touched his badge, and the door clicked open. “Diastasi,” he said. “It is a Greek word. It means dimensions.”

  They entered a workshop with yet more pipes and wire bundles, but in this room, the pipes focused toward a large clear Plexiglas box mounted on the far wall. Beneath the box, a young man with a thick beard looked up from his computer.

  “Good morning, Thomas,” Park said. “Could we power up for a test? I wish to show Dr. Rice and Ms. Kendrick what we can do.”

  “A demonstration!” remarked Thomas. “We can do that. Did our guests take the blue pill or the red pill?”

  “Very funny.” Marie laughed. She shook his hand and hoped she wasn’t about to wake up to find that life was just a simulation. Given the explanation so far, exposing another side of reality seemed within the realm of possibility.

  Park stood in the center of the small room and looked around. “In this lab, we change the limits of space. I do not mean space like outer space. I mean the physical, three-dimensional space that exists everywhere. You are familiar with string theory?”

  Daniel nodded. “Mostly. Before we arrived, Marie and I talked about one of its more unusual side effects, that of extra dimensions of space.”

  “Quite correct,” responded Park. “String theory describes ten dimensio
ns of space, three at the macro level where we exist and seven at the quantum level where strings exist. These extra dimensions are just as real as the three dimensions that we perceive, but are much too small to see or feel. This presents a logical challenge—how do we imagine a dimension that we cannot see?”

  Park stepped over to a shelf and picked up what looked like a plastic toy, cube-shaped, blue and translucent, with another cube visible inside it. “This plastic model is our best effort to represent a hypercube, or tesseract. It is a four-dimensional object, but within our three-dimensional world, you can only see part of it.”

  He turned the blue plastic cube in his hand, making the interior surfaces visible. “What I hold is just a shadow of its reality. If viewed from four-dimensional space, it is eight cubes, each perpendicular to the other. The leap in logic is how to imagine a cube being perpendicular to another cube.”

  Daniel responded, “I recall an animation on the Internet showing a tesseract, rotating to show how it looks in four dimensions.”

  “I have seen the animations as well,” said Park. “I find them confusing, no better than this model.” He held the blue cube up to his eye. “But what if we could change our viewpoint? What if we could expand a fourth dimension of space from its normal quantum size to several meters, a size that is much more relevant to us? What would we see?”

  Marie was unclear whether this was a trick question. Thomas was smiling as though he knew the punch line that was coming.

  “Yes, Dr. Rice, Ms. Kendrick. I propose that we move our viewpoint to a position outside our normal 3-D space. Would you like to see? Certainly, you must be curious?” Daniel’s eyes darted around the room and then back to the cube. He certainly looked curious. Marie was too, but also wary.

  Park replaced the cube on the shelf and stepped over to Marie. “Our demonstration will need your assistance. Ms. Kendrick, would you be our volunteer?”

  Becoming a guinea pig for the mad scientist wasn’t an appealing proposition. At this point, taking the red pill seemed to be where they were heading.