Daniel laughed out loud. He could easily hang around this woman—tonight, tomorrow, the next day and the day after that. “Something tells me that Fermilab is going to be high on my priority list for quite a while.”
“Good then. We’ll be happy to have them,” she said. “It’ll be fun.” Her face turned down but her eyes lifted up, meeting Daniel’s. “You’re going to be famous pretty soon. Can you handle that?”
Daniel couldn’t deny it. The president’s press conference just a few hours earlier had provided only the most basic of information—the missing astronauts had been safely recovered with help from a nonhuman intelligent device, as he had phrased it. But the floodgate was open and the crush of international press would be coming Daniel’s way—as soon as they learned about his role in the discovery.
“I’ll figure that out, too.”
“There are going to be a lot of questions, Daniel. I’m really not sure how we’re going to explain it. Most people won’t understand any of it—the technology, the hub, multiple dimensions of space. It’s just too much ground to cover and still be believed. My mom, for example. She’s not dumb, but everything I do is way over her head.”
He picked up the tesseract and tossed it in the air a few times. “For everyone in this bar, it’s just a piece of plastic with an interesting shape. Only you and I know what it really is.”
Nala nodded. They were on the same wavelength. “Yeah, I get it. Most scientific discoveries have that problem. Only a select few people have the privilege of experiencing it directly. Everyone else hears about it secondhand. They believe it or they don’t.”
“Exactly. Which means that every scientist has an obligation to lay out the evidence, clearly and truthfully, and in a way that the average person might grasp. Your mom, my sister, everyone. The same goes for educators. Children are pretty accepting of whatever they’re taught, which puts the burden on teachers to present a reality supported by evidence and not just throw out a bunch of alternatives and hope the kids figure it out. Evolution, not creationism. Climate change described by science, not pulled from some energy lobbyist’s pitch.”
He patted the tesseract. “This discovery will be the same. How did we get there? Who are they? Can we accept them, or will we fear them? Those of us who had direct experience in the discovery have an obligation. We all have some work to do.”
“Are you going to help?” she asked.
“I’ll do my part. You?”
She nodded. “I’ll try. In a way, I feel like one of those kids. I’m really excited to find out what’s next in our lesson plan. I only got a glimpse of that document they sent, but it looked pretty amazing.”
“Yeah, they seemed to be prepared for us. I wonder how many times they’ve done this. Eight lessons, then they turn us loose?”
“Into the galactic conversation.”
Daniel nodded. “Many people, he said. Many planets. Each bringing their own unique knowledge and perspective. The galactic conversation. It’s hard to imagine what we might learn.”
“Even better than the Internet. I say cheers to that.” They held up their glasses and clinked.
A young couple approached their table. The man wore a fashionable hat skewed to one side and the woman hung on his arm like a similar accessory. “Hey, man, I was watching you play with the plastic block. What’s it for?”
Daniel handed the tesseract to him. The young man turned it over in his hands while Daniel explained. “It’s called a tesseract. It’s a four-dimensional object. Most of it you can’t even see because it exists beyond our three-dimensional world. If you turn it enough, you might feel the extra mass that your eyes can’t see. It feels like it’s not quite in balance.”
“This is for real?” The man turned it a few times and bounced it up and down in his hand, and his eyes widened as it shifted. “That’s so cool, man. I gotta get one of these.”
“Not in production yet, sorry. But stay tuned. I think you’ll be hearing a lot more very soon.”
The man handed the tesseract back. “Make sure you get it into stores before Christmas, man. You’ll probably get rich.” He waved, and the couple wandered off to find their friends.
Daniel set the tesseract back on the table. “There you go, a side business for Fermilab. You can sell these things in the gift shop.”
Nala’s elbows rested on the table, her chin in her hands. “I’ll suggest it to Jae-ho, but don’t hold your breath. We’re not exactly a marketing machine.” She pointed to her phone. “Those two should see the video—now that’ll blow their mind.”
“You have the video on your phone? That one?”
“Yeah. No big deal. It’s going to be on every website in the world by tomorrow.”
Daniel looked both ways to see if anyone was watching. It probably wouldn’t matter anyway. “Play it, I’d like to see it again.”
She opened a file, and they huddled closely together to watch.
Blue and green plants waved gently in a watery environment. The plants moved in slow motion with ripples spreading slowly across their flat structure like a flag in the wind. Beneath the plants, a solid surface was covered with what looked like miniature structures of some kind. But the view changed, zooming in closer. The scale of the structures became more apparent—they were buildings beneath enormous kelp-like trees.
The view continued to magnify, showing detail on the buildings, windows perhaps, and some vertical banners of various colors. There were small white objects floating around and above each building. As the view clarified, it was clear the white objects weren’t just floating. They were living creatures, who were moving—swimming—in every direction. Their soft white bodies expanded and contracted as they moved, like jellyfish. They even had a single tentacle drifting gracefully away from their propulsion end.
The view magnified further, focusing on a single building and dozens of creatures around it. The zoom stabilized and something remarkable happened. The white creatures interrupted their random movements and formed into several groups, with exactly five members in each group. And they started to dance.
It couldn’t be described as anything else. They danced. In complete unison, each member of each group dipped left, dipped right, spun in a circle, expanded and then contracted their bodies. A soft rhythmic beat could be heard that coincided perfectly with their movements. The effect was beautiful and artistic. It had the feel of a delicate performance, a water ballet of sorts, performed by creatures with the softest and smoothest of bodies.
“They’re really beautiful,” Nala said. “Like ballerinas, except that it’s the tutu dancing by itself.”
“I love the grouping thing they’re doing,” Daniel replied. “It seems very social. Obvious intelligence.”
“And they’re our neighbors—at least that’s what he said. I noticed he didn’t reveal where they actually live.”
“Doesn’t trust us yet?”
“Would you?”
It was a fair point. Tribes of humans weren’t exactly accepting of individuals not of the tribe. Looking different or behaving differently often meant a newcomer was ostracized. How much worse would it be adding nonhumans to the mix? Creatures whose looks and behavior were utterly foreign to us? Would we extend compassion and respect as equals? Or would we revert to our long and sordid history of conquering those who could be conquered? The video provided some hope. Beauty and elegance went a long way to overcoming primal fears.
She closed the video file but left her phone on the table. A mischievous look crossed her face. “I was thinking about posting it to Facebook.” She smiled.
“You might want to wait on that,” Daniel offered. “Something tells me that high-level people are putting together a communications plan right now. You don’t want to be the rogue factor.”
“True,” she said. “Probably wouldn’t be a good idea to get fired twice in one week. But…” She shook a finger. “But they’d better not bury this. Otherwise, I’m going public.”
“They won’t. They can’t. Government bureaucrats don’t have that much control.”
“You have a lot more faith in authority than I do.”
Daniel leaned in closer. “Yeah, I noticed that with you. What’s that about?”
She shook her head. “My history with authority? It’s a long story. Not much fun.”
“I’ve got time.”
She reached out and put a hand over his. “Daniel, we’re out for the evening. Together, you and me. Semi-alone, if you don’t count the five hundred people in this bar. Relax and let it unfold. There’s a lot of fun things we can do tonight.” She smiled.
Daniel turned his hand over and held hers. He looked into her sparkling eyes. “What’d you have in mind?”
She locked eyes with him. “Well, I could take you home and make those fabulous enchiladas that I have in my refrigerator. Or you could try out my float pod. But, really, I think we should climb onto my workout bench and make passionate love. Or my bed, if you’re feeling traditional.”
There was never anything coy about this woman. Daniel’s response was easy. “Good options. Can I choose all of the above?”
She nodded, and her mischievous smile returned. “You can. But I do have to warn you, sir…”
Daniel’s brow raised. “Yes?”
“That little mental exercise where I blew in your ear?”
“Yes, I do recall. Very… ah… stimulating.”
“You haven’t seen anything yet.”
Her smile alone was enough to cause a meltdown. Daniel held it together, just barely. She held out another hand and he took it. They both stood up and he pulled her close, her perfume filling his senses. “Shall we get out of here, Dr. Pasquier?”
She looked up into his eyes. “I’m all for that, Dr. Rice.”
They left the noise of the bar behind. Outside, the night was cool and clear and a few stars shone overhead. The lights of Chicago didn’t help, but the view to the east, across the darkness of Lake Michigan, was much better. The bright star Sirius was rising. Somewhere beyond it would be VY Canis Majoris, and Core. Daniel absorbed the view and their newfound knowledge. This part of the night sky would never be the same.
Several of the brighter stars were also visible, and he knew them all by name. Capella, Procyon, Pollux and Aldebaran. All neighbors, only a short hop away—when you had technology that could compress space. One of these neighbors might have an orbiting planet, an ocean planet that was home to an intelligent water species. Dancers. It would make a good name for them, at least until we knew them better. Perhaps the Dancers could swim to the surface of their ocean and even look up into their night sky. They might see the star we call Sol, our sun. What name had they given it? Daniel was curious.
His trance was broken when Nala lightly kissed his lips. “Hey, scientist. The door’s open. You ready to step through?” She grabbed his hand and pulled him toward the waiting taxi.
Afterward
I hope you liked the story. There will, of course, be another book in the Quantum series—more on that below. For now, allow me to step outside the narrative and look back.
For me, science fiction is best when it starts from a solid base in reality and extends from there into fiction. How far the book extends is up to the author, but it’s the base that makes it science fiction. Without real science, the story is better cataloged as fantasy.
If you’re not a particle physicist but you’re curious, (you are curious, aren’t you?) I thought I would use this section to distinguish the reality in this book from the fiction. It also gives me an opportunity to provide supporting information in case you’re interested.
Writing the fictional portions of this book was tremendous fun, but the reality of the quantum world is just as fun. Our real universe is sometimes so bizarre that it’s hard to know what’s demonstrably real, supported by solid evidence, and what is speculation. But the refusal of the universe to behave the way we think it should is also what makes science fun. We have this fantastic opportunity to discover how the universe really works, not how we think or hope it works.
The science of quantum physics gets going in Chapter 5, “Quantum.” Spencer Bradley describes the Standard Model, quarks, leptons and bosons and the discovery of the Higgs boson at the CERN laboratories in Geneva in 2012. Of course, all of this is real, and most people have heard about the Higgs boson because it was plastered all over the news at the time. But ask the average educated person what the Standard Model is and you’ll get a blank stare. This is a shame, because it’s one of the fundamental achievements in the realm of physics in the past hundred years.
The Standard Model is a terrible name, as several characters mention. It really should be called the Architectural Diagram of the Universe or something grand like that, because that’s exactly what it is. We, and by “we” I mean humans, have discovered the fundamental building blocks of our universe, the Legos, as Bradley called them. Yet most people don’t even know this fact, much less have any notion of what the model looks like. It’s not anyone’s fault, but I do wish we had a better method of science education for adults. Most people stop learning anything about science once they graduate from high school or college, but discoveries continue throughout their lifetimes.
The Standard Model is one such discovery. When I was in high school in the 1970s, the Standard Model diagram that I show in this book didn’t exist. In just the past several decades, scientists at Fermilab (yes, of course it’s a real place!), Argonne and elsewhere have pieced together the basic structure of all matter in the universe. And not only did they discover the elemental particles (quarks, leptons and bosons), but they figured out the relationships to particles that we already knew about (protons, neutrons and electrons) and the relationship to the forces (electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear force). During this process of discovery, the theorists described what particles might exist, and the experimentalists started searching for them.
Not only did they find these particles, one by one, but they were clever enough to put all of this knowledge into a single-page diagram that exquisitely shows the building blocks and their relationships, the Standard Model diagram. It’s an amazing scientific achievement, and it all happened in the past forty years or so, and mostly in the suburbs of Chicago at Fermi National Laboratory. Americans should be immensely proud, yet most don’t even know this history.
Daniel shows the Standard Model diagram to Marie in Chapter 8, “Chicago.” He says, “In this single diagram, you’re looking at the underlying structure of our universe. It’s a parts list, but it’s also an architectural drawing. Everything you’ve ever touched or felt is here. The air you breathe, the ground you stand on, the sunlight that pours down, the stars in the night sky. All in those seventeen boxes.”
Of course, I asked him to say that. Characters are pretty compliant in that way. I also believe that in the future, a real person will present an even better diagram, the so-called Theory of Everything. (Definitely a better name!) The Theory of Everything diagram will look pretty much the same as the Standard Model, but it will have a graviton on it, another theoretical boson that has yet to be experimentally discovered. This future diagram might also explain things like dark matter and dark energy, which we don’t fully understand yet today.
When this happens (2030? 2040?), we might be finished. We will be able to list all of the fundamental components of the universe and describe its architecture in detail. I know that this goal is perfectly achievable. Why? Because we’ve already done it with atoms. The Periodic Table of the Elements has stood rock solid for more than a century, with the only additions coming in the form of elements that decay so rapidly they don’t exist outside of the laboratory. The ultimate version of the Standard Model diagram will take its place next to the Periodic Table as a major achievement of science.
We’re actually pretty close right now, and from my perspective, missing a graviton or a dark matter particle is like having a jigsaw puzzle that is 95 percent comp
lete. There may be a couple of holes, but you can still see the picture. If you want to know more about the Standard Model, Wikipedia has a pretty good page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Model, and Fermilab has a great public outreach program: http://www.fnal.gov/pub/science/particle-physics-101/index.html.
How about neutrinos? Are they real? Yes, of course. There are three flavors of them in the Standard Model. And, yes, Fermilab today is using a concentrated beam of neutrinos in their experiments, including shooting this beam straight through the Earth to detectors in Minnesota and South Dakota. And, yes, it’s also true that several trillion neutrinos from the sun just passed through your body since you started reading this sentence. Did you feel them?
In Chapter 10, “Science,” we arrive at the doors of Fermilab. Is the history of this place real? Did they really discover all these tiny particles and create the Standard Model? Yes, and no. Yes, Fermilab has a long history in particle physics, but it’s not the only place; I simplified. Since the 1960s, there were many universities (University of Chicago, Columbia, SUNY Stony Brook, University of Hawaii, University of Illinois—Urbana-Champaign and probably more) as well as other research centers and government laboratories (CERN Geneva, DESY Hamburg, Argonne National Laboratory and probably others). But Fermilab was the premier particle accelerator in the world from 1974 until 1993, (when Congress decided to kill the Superconducting Super Collider in Texas and the accelerator construction at Fermilab—a sad day!).
If you want to get a sense of Fermilab’s heyday, this is a fun page: http://history.fnal.gov/botqrk.html. It describes the discovery of the bottom quark and has several 1970s-era photos of the scientists involved and the equipment they used. By the way, Fermilab is open to the public with tours available. Batavia, Illinois. Go, and bring all the little quarks with you.
As I write (2017), the accelerator at CERN is the premier location where protons smash into atoms, but that may not last much longer. The Chinese really are building a new accelerator, and it really is named “The Higgs Factory” (who knows how they came up with that?). The information in Chapter 23, “Chinese,” is as accurate as I could make it. China is a terrible country when it comes to scientific research because they encourage students and scientists to plagiarize and the Central Committee can overrule any discovery to enforce the “truth.” This is not science, it’s the classic argument from authority. We’ll soon see what the Chinese do with The Higgs Factory. It’s expected to go online in the early 2020s and it will dwarf the size of CERN in Geneva. I’ve heard some physicists say the whole facility may be a huge waste of money because there are now doubts that higher energy will discover anything new. We’ll see.
Quantum Space: Book One in the Quantum Series Page 30