Einstein's Bridge

by Cramer, John

  “But if you’re wearing glasses, why did I see your face on the remote without glasses?” Alice asked.

  “There’s a TV camera mounted above the couch that scans my face and head, and the magic glasses monitor my eye and eyelid positions. A computer synthesizes a representation of my face from the data and reproduces my features on the remote’s headscreen, with the magic glasses electronically removed. That way the people I’m talking to can see my lip movements, my eye motions, and my facial expressions and react to them. I get 3-D stereo sound from the earpieces, and I wear data cuffs that detect my hand and arm movements. The cuffs buzz when I put my hand through a ‘solid’ object, and I’m now conditioned not to do that.”

  Alice heard soft footsteps to her right and turned. A well dressed man with oriental features stood next to the sofa. “George, have you seen Hans?” the man said. “I think he’s hiding from me.”

  Alice had a roommate in college who was addicted to the Taiwanese cinema, and she recognized the man’s guttural vocal mannerism as those of a Chinese alpha male “bossman”. She smiled and looked closely at then newcomer.

  “We saw him down in the electronics stack an hour ago, Jake,” George said. Why don’t you just call him? He always carries a cellphone.”

  “I was about to have Sally do that,” said Jake, “but I will bet you that he doesn’t answer. Do you know what he did? He told SDC people that they could tune a test beam through our detector tonight.” Jake took a cellphone from his pocket and dialed. “Sally? This is Jake Wang,” he said into the telephone in a completely transformed voice, urbane and courteous. “Would you please try to reach Herr Doctor Professor Hans Koch? Tell him that he is urgently needed in the LEM counting house. Thank you very much, Sally.” He hung up.

  “I don’t think it matters if they tune through our detector, Jake.” George said. “The end calorimeters are rolled back, and we could use a little beam down the pipe to check the veto system.”

  Jake froze and seemed to grow larger. “What?” he shouted. “Just who took out the end calorimeters?” He looked upward, as if seeking the source of his cruel fate. “Who gave permission to roll back the end calorimeters! Do I have no one but fools and charlatans working with me on this experiment? Can I not turn my back for one fleeting moment without having someone roll back the end calorimeters? George, I thought I could trust you. What could have possessed you to allow these imbeciles to roll back the end calorimeters?”

  Alice turned her head away, suppressing a snicker. She found it hard to believe this performance had not been staged for her benefit, perhaps to deceive her into believing that mad scientists could be found outside late-show sci-fi flicks.

  “Jake,” said George, “didn’t anyone tell you that the protection diodes needed to be changed in about a thousand of the calorimeter scintillators?”

  Alice noticed that George’s voice was now unnaturally soothing and well-modulated. He sounded almost like a funeral director.

  “I’m sure it was reported in the setup group meeting yesterday,” said George. “We can’t start the new run until the diodes are changed, and that means rolling back the calorimeters and working on them. That is what’s going on now.”

  “I see,” said Jake. “Somebody must have told the SDC people that our calorimeters were rolled back. That explains a lot. Why can’t my people keep their mouths shut? Why don’t they ask me before talking about our private affairs to other groups. How can I run this experiment when nobody asks me before they do these things.” He gestured again, but the aura of high drama was rapidly dissipating.

  “By the way, Jake,” George said, “there’s someone here that I’d like you to meet.”

  Jake halted in mid gesture and pivoted toward George, then toward the sofa where Alice was sitting. Alice suddenly felt uncomfortable in his gaze.

  “Alice,” said George, “I’d like to present Professor Jake Wang. Jake, this is Alice Lang. She’s a professional science journalist here to do a cover article for Search Magazine on the important new physics that is being done here at the SSC.”

  Alice started to protest that she was only a freelance writer and had no reason to believe that her story would be a cover article, but she didn’t have the chance.

  Beaming, Jake strode around the sofa and took her hand. “Miss Lang!” he said. “I am an avid reader of Search. We are so delighted and honored to have you pay us a visit.” He turned his head sideways and gave her a long look. “Can you keep a secret?” he asked.

  “Uh, why, of course!” Alice said, confused by Jake’s sudden focus on her.

  “You have come here to visit us at a time that must have been arranged by the fates. We are on the brink of the most momentous discovery of our new century. The Higgs particle, the very mysterious and elusive boson that breaks the symmetries that make our wonderful universe what it is, this magical particle is about to reveal itself to us. The great detector below us, which I personally designed, will deliver this new key to understanding God’s creation into our hands. It must be of great significance that you have come here at just this time, this turning point in the history of science.”

  Jesus, thought Alice, he’s trying to write my story for me, right here on the spot. She imagined the reaction of the Search editors to Jake’s hyperbole. “That’s quite fascinating, Professor Wang,” she said sweetly.

  “Call me Jake, please,” he said.

  “OK, and I’m Alice,” she said. “Uh, Jake, I heard what you said about, um, disclosing information. I hope you won’t mind if I interview some of the scientists working on your experiment in the next few days. I can assure you that I’ll treat anything I learn as privileged. I’ll also be sure to check the scientific details for accuracy and sensitivity with you before I use them in my article for Search.” Saying this made her feel deceitful, but it was nevertheless true as far as it went.

  “Alice, we have a deal,” said Jake, smiling and took her hand in his very dry cool one. Then he turned, walked over to a man wearing yellow coveralls, and began an animated conversation about computer chips.

  Alice looked at George. “Wow,” she said, “so that’s Jake Wang.” She was considering how she could work him into her novel, perhaps in a personal encounter with a giant mutant fire ant.

  George nodded, then looked at his watch. “One more thing before I go off to my meeting. Would you be interested in having dinner with me tonight? I’m getting a bit tired of SSC cafeteria food, and I was thinking of finding a nice thick Texas steak.”

  Alice pursed her lips and thought for a moment. She was here under false pretenses and should keep her distance. On the other hand, she liked George. “Sure,” she said finally. “I’d enjoy that.”

  CHAPTER 3.7

  Texas Choice Steakhouse

  ALICE felt exhausted, but somehow fulfilled. It had been a long day, during which she had gathered a lot of valuable material, but the sheer visual complexity of the SSC laboratory and the LEM detector had brought her to the brink of sensory overload. Now it was time to relax and chill out after the afternoon heat of central Texas. She inhaled the delicious smell of steaks grilling on an open fire, leaned back in her chair, and looked up at the building’s barn-like structure. She liked the large overhead wooden beams and ranch-style decor of the Texas Choice Steakhouse.

  She looked closely at the fine print on the membership card that George had received from their waiter in exchange for a $5 bill. It stated that whereas George Griffin was an official and honored member of the Texas Choice Club, he or she was therefore entitled to all the rights and privileges conferred by this exalted status. Among these rights and privileges was that of ordering two long-neck bottles of “ice cold” Lone Star. George took a long pull from that benefit of his new status and smiled contentedly.

  Considering that George must make frequent trips to the SSC, Alice was surpri
sed that he didn’t already have a Texas Choice Club membership. He must not go out very much. Come to think of it, neither did she.

  Alice cut another chunk from the thick medium-rare steak, wondering if she’d be able to finish it all. She glanced at George. Might as well get on with the relationship probing, she decided. “You mentioned that your wife divorced you.” she said.

  George’s eyes widened momentarily, as if he’d been discovered doing something forbidden. “That’s right,” he said. “Grace, who is British, decided to put herself in competition with physics for my attention, and physics won. She’s gone back to the UK now, and I hope she’s happier there.”

  Alice nodded. The message that George’s work was more important than the wishes of his ex-wife came in loud and clear. “As a writer, I’ve been around scientists enough to know that their work requires a large amount of time and effort. Most of them seem to be work-a-holics who love what they’re doing. Didn’t she understand that?”

  “Not really,” said George. “After I landed the faculty job in Seattle, she developed the Oxford-esque vision of me as a university don, tutoring students, attending faculty assemblies, arguing with colleagues over fine points of philosophy, and writing an occasional monograph containing my great thoughts. She simply never understood how things work in experimental particle physics. She had never imagined, she told me once, that such a large group of people would chose to work so hard, for so long, and spend so much money to accomplish so little.”

  Alice grimaced. “Did you have any children?” she asked.

  “No,” George answered. “We held off at first because our finances were very tight. Then in Geneva we discovered that Grace had, as they say, a problem. We could have used one of those microsurgical fertilization techniques, but about then we began having disagreements about my working hours, so it seemed prudent to wait. I suppose we avoided many complications, as it turned out.” He stared bleakly at the table for a moment and then looked up at her. “How about you, Alice? Married? Or otherwise involved?”

  “I’m a widow, actually,” she said, feeling suddenly trapped into unfolding a story she would rather keep packed away. “Steve and I were married for six years. Happily married, I guess you could say. We met as students at Florida State in 1992 while we were both working on Bill Clinton’s unsuccessful presidential campaign. After graduation I got a job as a reporter with the Tallahassee Democrat and supported both of us while he was finishing law school. When Steve graduated he got a job with a good law firm in Tallahassee, which is the state capital. Two good jobs, many good friends, a wonderful life, a nice house. We were active in politics, and Steve was planning to run for the State Legislature when the time was right. We were both too busy to contemplate dealing with children. And then he was killed in a mountain climbing accident.” She paused and swallowed.

  George said nothing, so finally she continued. “Steve had grown up in Montana, and he was a climbing nut. Once or twice a year we’d go off to Switzerland or Colorado or Alaska to climb mountains. I learned enough to keep up with him, most of the time. It was good healthy exercise, and it kept us in top condition. We were at Saas Fe when I suddenly came down with the flu. Steve decided to take the opportunity when I wasn’t along to do something more challenging. He hired a Swiss guide and set out to climb the Eiger. There’d been an unusually heavy snowfall that winter, and it was warming up. And, to get to the point, there was an avalanche where there had never been one before. The guide came back, but Steve didn’t. It them took two days to find his body.”

  George said nothing, but he squeezed her hand.

  “The insurance money and the sale of our house in Tallahassee provided me with enough financial independence so I could do freelance writing instead of working for the newspaper. I’ve been a full-time writer ever since.” She hadn’t intended to talk so much about it, but George didn’t seem to know what to say. So she had babbled on, hoping that her anger at Steve for getting himself killed hadn’t been too obvious.

  She glanced out the window. The sun was low and red over the Texas prairie. “I’m glad it’s flat here,” she said finally. “I don’t much like to look at mountains any more.”

  George took another sip from his long neck beer bottle and swallowed. Twice. “I’m really sorry, Alice,” he said at last. “I’d forgotten that someone could be so charming and so vibrantly alive and still have deep sorrows beneath the surface.”

  She wiped her eye at the inside corner. “I think it’s time to change the subject,” she said in a low voice. Talking about Steve made her recall the pit of depression that had trapped her for so long, that she had struggled so hard to climb out of. “I’d like to see your experiment when it’s actually running and collecting data. So far, all I’ve seen are the preparations.”

  George stroked his beard. “They’re almost finished with the present machine development cycle,” he said. “We expect to have beam available sometime tomorrow night. My next shift at LEM starts at 10:00 PM and ends at 6:00 AM. How do you feel about staying up all night?”

  “Actually, it sounds great,” she said, feeling her spirits lift. “I’m rather a night person. When I’m working on a long piece of writing, I tend to write all night and sleep all day. In Tallahassee it’s quieter and cooler at night, and the work goes better.”

  “OK,” said George. “You’re on for the Tuesday night shift. I hope you don’t bore easily. Experiment runs are usually structured as many hours of routine checking when nothing much is happening, punctuated by an occasional fifteen minutes of panic and confusion when something goes wrong.”

  Alice smiled. “Perhaps I’ll be lucky, and disaster will strike while I’m there.”

  PART 4

  June 8, 2004

  July 5, 1989

  “Building the Super Collider would be a Super Mistake.”

  — Congressman Dennis Eckart, (D - Ohio)

  “So the question becomes, is the SSC the kind of good science we most need right now?”

  — Congressman Sherwood Boehlert (R - New York)

  September 1, 1989

  “Mars is essentially in the same orbit (as Earth). Mars is somewhat the same distance from the sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe.”

  — Vice President Dan Quayle

  September 8, 1989

  “What a waste it is to lose one’s mind -- or not to have a mind. How true that is.”

  — Vice President Dan Quayle

  CHAPTER 4.1

  Pixels and Speckles

  WOLFGANG was sitting at the console of the Scanning Tunneling Microscope when George walked in. “Sorry I’m late,” he said, “the trigger group meeting ran way overtime.” George felt guilty about being late. Wolfgang must have been here for almost an hour and had the STM in full operation. The display showed what looked like the gate region of a failed field effect transistor.

  George walked forward and peered through the thick glass window of the instrument’s sample holder. The silicon slab they had brought was clipped to a complicated positioning mechanism. The interior was close packed with unfamiliar shapes, but George imagined that he could make out the needle-point probe of the STM as it vibrated a few atomic diameters above the surface of the silicon, measuring its electrical conductivity on an atom-by-atom scale. The display screen showed a colorful contour map depicting a lumpy mountain-like terrain. “How’s it going, Wolfgang?” he asked.

  “Schlecht,” said the other man. “It’s clear that your FET gate pinched off destructively for some reason, but its geometry is not significantly different from its neighbors, and also no different from the ones we used in the ATLAS detector.” He gestured at the colorful display.

  George looked at the structures o
n the screen. The p-type and n-type regions of the silicon differed in elevation by a few atomic layers, enough to show up clearly on the STM. The gate region, which should have had an hour-glass shape, was instead two separated clumps with no connection between them. Around the region where the connection channel should have been, George noticed several clusters of white dots. “What are these,” he asked.

  “Those speckles?” said Wolfgang. “I don’t know. There seem to be clusters of them near the gate region. Perhaps they are small particles made during the gate failure, debris from the catastrophe. There must have been some energy dissipated when the semiconductors decided to rearrange themselves.”

  “Perhaps so,” said George. “Can we look at some gate that didn’t fail?”

  “Of course,” said Wolfgang, typing into the keyboard of the STM control computer. The scene on the display began to shift to the right as the piezoelectric needle-position mechanism was given a new bias voltage. The stratified terrain passed by until an hour-glass shape appeared on the screen.

  George studied it closely. “I see a few of the clusters near the gate region here also. There are fewer of them, though, and they seem to be lined up along the gate channel, like spectators along a parade route,” he said. “Was there anything similar on the ATLAS chips?”

  Wolfgang shrugged. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I think we would have noticed.”

  “What’s the scale here, a few microns?” George asked.

  Wolfgang typed a command, and a graduated scale appeared along the lower part of the display. “Ja, the clusters are perhaps a micron across,” he said.