Einstein's Bridge

by Cramer, John

  “You should have seen what the straw tubes just did!”

  George blinked. He was sure that this had not been a detector failure. He was all too familiar with detector glitches and knew how they looked. This was not a glitch. He had just witnessed the law of conservation of energy being violated with extreme prejudice.

  He walked to the central console, sat down, and began to write in the logbook. Then he looked across the room. “Ralph,” he said, “run the diagnostics! Quick! If that was an equipment glitch, we need to know as much as possible about what happened.” The technician strode to an equipment rack and began to move switches.

  Alice was suddenly beside George. “What just happened?” she asked.

  “As Lewis Carroll might have put it, Alice, we just saw a Snark,” he said. “An impossible event. Something just lit up the LEM detector in a way that, according to our conventional wisdom could not, should not have happened. The collision event, according to our readouts, had more energy, more momentum, and more particles than the laws of physics can allow. It could not have happened, yet it did.”

  “Was it some kind of breakdown of the equipment?” she asked.

  “Perhaps,” he said, “but I doubt it. Except for the obvious problems with violated conservation laws, it behaved like a real event. I saw a particle producing a huge ionization and with more momentum then both beam particles put together. It made a jet of particles every few centimeters. It was like a machine gun that was spitting quarks.”

  Several people had gathered around George as he talked. “But if it’s real ...,” said a graduate student.

  “Even if it’s real, folks,” said George, “there isn’t much we can do about it tonight. It must have been a rare event. It isn’t likely to repeat soon, and unless it does it’s an unpublishable fluke, a glitch in the apparatus due to causes unknown. We should examine it carefully and train the trigger net to watch for more. For now, I want everyone who noticed something unusual to write an entry about it in the logbook and sign their entry. We’ll discuss this with the next shift at the 6 AM run meeting. Before that, we need every thing that everyone observed written out in full detail.”

  As the crew members dutifully wrote their entries, animated discussion erupted among the physicists. They batted about speculations and ideas on what they had seen, what it might mean, and how they might analyze the data from the event. Finally, however, the discussion deflated from lack of focus. As it tailed off, one by one the participants drifted back to their consoles and workstations.

  Alice stood by George for a moment longer, smiled, then walked back to her lapstation. She began to type very rapidly

  It was going to be a long night, George thought, but he was glad she had been here for the excitement.

  CHAPTER 4.4

  Bridge

  WHEN the summoner had activated, Tunnel Maker had been deep in transtemporal meditation. He hurried out of his personal enclosure, hurled himself down a deep inertial shaft, and accelerated through a maze of access conduits to the enclosure of the Bridge Generator.

  A glance told him that there had been a massive discharge. The energy receptacles in the long row had been fully drained of their antimatter and stood cold and empty. He accessed the data stream from the nearest neural node. His sensorium translated along the time axis until he came to the discharge event.

  A feeling of relief overlaid with deep satisfaction suffused his emotion center. The apparatus had performed flawlessly. A microscopic Bridge with the right characteristics had been snatched from the quantum vacuum, establishing a connection between his universe and a point of ultra-high energy density in the target Bubble. The Bridge Generator had successfully brought the new Bridge to a stable energy balance.

  He studied the data stream further. The Bridgehead had appeared in the new Bubble while traveling at a high velocity relative to the matter medium there. It had appeared in a vacuum, passed through a region of pure element 4 and several layers of element 14, then moved to a gaseous medium consisting mainly of element 10, with traces of elements 1 and 6. It had traveled some distance in that and various solid media which analysis showed to consist of layers of elements 14, 26, 29, 82, and 92. A momentum flow through the Bridge consisting mainly of massive neutral dark-matter particles, with a few quarks entrained, had been established and used to decelerate its Bubble end until it had come to rest. The Bridge had stopped in a medium made of elements 82, 14 and 8. The ambient temperature of the medium was between the freezing and boiling points of water. The data on the medium made of element 92 was particularly interesting. It was essentially pure isotope 238, with only faint traces of the other expected isotopes.

  The message implicit in these data was very good news. The new Bubble was an accessible matter universe. The combination of materials encountered was clearly a product of technology. Element 10 was an inert gas and was never found naturally in high concentrations.

  There was also a puzzle. The isotopic composition of the element 92 medium through which the Bridgehead had passed was difficult to explain. Element 92 was the most massive and highly charged of the stable chemical elements, with good structural properties, and so it was a commonly used material. That much was to be expected. Because of its high nuclear charge and mass it was excellent for slowing or stopping charged particles. But why did the medium consist of pure isotope 238, with only parts per hundred thousand of the other two stable isotopes? Isotope separation was technologically very difficult, particularly for so massive a nucleus, and there seemed little point in it.

  Was it possible that the processes of nucleosynthesis in the new Bubble were sufficiently different as to suppress the natural occurrence of the other two stable isotopes of element 92? Tunnel Maker had no idea. The Individuals specializing in astrophysics and cosmology should be alerted immediately to these data. Perhaps when contact was established, they could learn the answer by asking.

  CHAPTER 4.5

  The SSC Cafeteria

  ALICE had learned that the SSC Cafeteria, along with the SSC Visitor’s Center and Science Museum, was perched atop a small artificial hill made of dirt that had been excavated from the tunnels during the construction. On the flat Central Texas landscape it seemed to be the highest viewpoint for three hundred miles. Her gaze swept across the golden prairie and the blue and gold sky. They had arrived while the fading colors of a spectacular sunrise were still visible.

  Alice felt exhilarated. Although she had been up all night, she didn’t feel tired. She could not recall when she had felt more alive. “George,” she said as they sat down at a window table for breakfast, “I still don’t understand. If what we saw this morning was some unprecedented new physical phenomenon, why isn’t that important news, a big scientific breakthrough?”

  George shrugged as he cut a piece of ham. “Because we can’t explain it, we can’t reproduce it, and we can’t eliminate the possibility that it was the result of faulty equipment. Therefore, we can’t publish it. It will have to remain as a big one that got away.”

  “You said something like that at the run meeting,” she said, “but you can’t just ignore what happened.”

  He chewed thoughtfully for a while. “Let me recall a little piece of physics history for you, Alice,” he said, finally. “There is a might-be particle called a magnetic monopole that was suggested by certain theories of Dirac and others but had never been observed. It’s supposed to be a fundamental particle like an electron or a proton, except that instead of having an electric charge, it ‘s supposed to have a magnetic charge, like the north pole of a bar magnet that has been cut off and isolated, with the south pole completely gone.”

  From force of habit Alice took her notebook from her purse and began to take notes.

  “In the early 1980’s,” said Professor George, slipping into lecture mode, “a physicist at Stanford named Blas Cabrera
designed and built a very clever detector for finding magnetic monopoles using some tricks involving superconductors. And a few months after he turned on the apparatus, on Valentine’s Day, February 14, 1982, nature sent Cabrera a special valentine. In the middle of the night the apparatus recorded the perfect signal of a magnetic monopole passing through the sensitive volume of the detector.”

  “That sounds like our Snark,” said Alice.

  “Actually, his situation was a bit better than ours,” said George. “He had a fairly respectable theory that predicted the particle he had apparently detected, right down to the observed signal. And so, with considerable fanfare, he published a paper describing his monopole observation in a very prestigious journal. Cabrera’s paper produced a kind of physics gold rush. Dozens of laboratories set up various types of monopole detectors. Cabrera himself received a big National Science Foundation grant and built a much bigger version of his original detector. And they all waited ...

  “That was over twenty years ago, and for all I know they’re still waiting. Because neither Cabrera nor anyone else has yet detected another believable signal of a magnetic monopole. And if they did see another one today, they’d have trouble getting the result published, because the physics community now ‘knows’ that there are no magnetic monopoles. The current standard model of cosmology, the inflationary scenario, now explains why there are none.”

  Alice wrote rapidly. “But what did Cabrera see?” she asked finally.

  “Nobody knows,” said George, taking a sip of orange juice. “I guess he saw a Snark, just as we did last night.”

  “This is new to me,” said Alice. “Does this happen all the time in science? Are there desk drawers full of unpublished data on spectacular measurements that only happened once and can’t be reproduced? It sounds like a dirty little secret of the field.” Maybe she should do a Search article about it, now that she had her foot in that magazine’s door. But she had to finish her Fire Ant novel first. Nobody can make much of a living writing freelance articles for science magazines.

  “Perhaps it is,” said George. “When I was an undergraduate at MIT, I had a very good course on the philosophy of science. I did a paper on a famous essay by the French philosopher-scientist Poincaré. He was an excellent physicist, but he had the problem that he was also a devout Catholic. Poincaré was deeply concerned about the implicit conflict between divine miracles and the laws of physics. So he considered a hypothetical phenomenon that occurs, like a miracle, just once in the history of the universe. He argued convincingly that science has no way of dealing with a one-shot physical phenomenon. They have to be reproducible. Poincaré believed that scientists would tend to ignore one-shot events, might even pretend that they didn’t exist.”

  “It would seem, George,” said Alice, “that Poincaré’s dilemma has been dumped in your lap. What are you going to do with it?” She smiled. She enjoyed listening to him talk and particularly enjoyed skewering him with his own logic.

  He winced. “Dammit, Alice,” he said, “the paper I wrote for that class challenged the professor on that point and argued against Poincaré’s conclusion. The Big Bang seemed to me to be a good counter-example of a one-time event with great scientific significance. I guess that, basically, it goes against my grain to ignore data, particularly interesting data. But after what happened this morning and considering the alternatives, I must concede that perhaps Poincaré had a good point.”

  “You can’t just drop it!” said Alice. Her investigative nature was offended by the thought that she might never know what they had seen.

  George inhaled deeply and sighed. “Believe me, Alice,” he said, “I won’t drop it. After I get a few hours of sleep, I have lots of work to do on the Snark. I have to study its kinematics. I have to find out if we’ve previously recorded anything similar that we didn’t notice. But as long as it’s just one event, it’s not going to be of much interest to my LEM colleagues.”

  “Well, I’m interested,” she said, and meant it.

  CHAPTER 4.6

  The Palace

  GEORGE looked down on the Palace from above, consulted an index that hung in mid air before him, then pointed his pink wireframe hand in a direction that led along a diagonal track that led deep into the Palace. He sped above the endless rows of statues, past pools and stairways and atria, until he arrived at the icon that he had reserved as a repository for anomalous events recorded by LEM, a goat-headed figure with a male human body.

  Just before 8 this morning he had returned to his room at the SSC Hostel, but after about four hours of sleep he had come wide awake with an irresistible compulsion to know more about the bizarre event that had occurred in the LEM detector. Lying in the narrow bed he had used his briefcase workstation to connect to the SSC network directly from his room. Now he was about to have a closer look at the Snark.

  Months before, George himself had set up this system for identifying anomalous events selectively. Jake and most of the other principals of LEM were not particularly interested in anomalies. They had a clear vision of the object they wanted to find. It was the Higgs vector boson, the theoretically predicted mediating particle that, in the early universe, had split the strong interaction off from the electroweak interaction. The Higgs had a theoretically predicted range of possible masses centered around 200 GeV and a definite signature in the LEM detector that was clear and unambiguous. The whole idea of LEM, and indeed of the SSC, was to discover the Higgs and collect the Nobel Prize.

  Therefore, most of George’s LEM collaborators did not welcome any distractions from the unexpected. George, a maverick as usual, felt as a matter of principle that the whole point of experimental physics was to discover the unexpected, not to confirm the predictions of some theorist. Therefore, he had the anomaly territory all for himself.

  “Output summary, please,” he said to the goat-headed statue. A cube appeared in the air before him. Its sides contained multicolored lists summarizing the progress made, enumerating the events scanned and recorded, tabulating and plotting their characteristics.

  George reached out and turned the cube, studying the list of events that had satisfied the trigger criteria of LEM but showed anomalous behavior when processed by the analysis programs and categorized by the LEM neural network.

  He quickly found the Snark event from this morning. He gestured in the air, there was a “pop” sound, and he was in darkened space. He floated in darkness before an intricate self-luminous structure, a multicolored starburst pattern of gently curved arcs emanating from a central vertex point. He reached out and touched a green-hued line that radiated upward from the vertex. It dimmed to a dotted line, retaining its place but revealing behind it a more complex structure. A violet line speared outward from the vertex, punctuated at almost regular intervals with clusters of red-fingered jets, like a straight vine with red blossoms.

  So many jets. George had never seen anything like it. His fingers made a gesture and a column of figures appeared to the left of the structure.

  The very heavy ionization of the undeviated particle was noted, along with the unusual production of jets. Interesting events usually showed one to four jets, always coming from the vertex. But the summary list showed that this event had 29 jets, none from the vertex! That, of course, was not possible. Even with 40 TeV in the center of mass and colliding particles with 40,000 times the proton rest mass in available energy, there simply wasn’t enough energy to break loose 29 quarks or gluons, to make 29 jets.

  George scanned the summary table more closely. There was also a problem with the momentum balance of the event. Usually jets, clusters of particles emitted in the same direction, are emitted nearly back-to-back because of momentum conservation. But these jets were systematically emitted in nearly the same direction that the massive particle was moving, almost as if they were being emitted to slow it down. In the process, there was an apparent vio
lation of the law of conservation of momentum, even if one left out the momentum of the heavy particle.

  George shook his head in wonder as he orbited the structure, viewing it from above, from below. With another gesture he quadrupled its size. He pointed and flew to the starburst, then moved into it. Radiating lines seemed to pass through his wireframe body. George placed his eye at the vertex and sighted out along the long violet trajectory of the Snark. It showed no curvature at all in crossing the 2 Tesla toroidal magnetic field.

  What if ...? With quick motions he bracketed the violet structure and its jets, shaping the boundaries of the surface around it with his hands until only the violet line and its attendant red blossoms were within. Then he gestured and the envelope was empty, the violet structure gone.

  The column of figures reappeared. After correction for the energy and momentum removed by expected but unobserved neutrinos, the laws of conservation of energy and momentum had been reestablished. The violet line and its jets were the problem.

  A double hit, George wondered. He gestured and the violet line reappeared. Once again he expanded the starburst. And again. And again. Then he propelled himself close to the vertex, the center from which all the lines radiated. Within the position resolution of the detector, the violet line came from the vertex. There was no hint of an offset that might indicate event pileup.

  Finally, George scanned the database for other similar events that might have been previously recorded but overlooked. There was not much there. A couple of events showed unusually large missing mass and momentum, probably from very energetic neutrinos. A few were obviously the result of electronic glitches in the detector. He deleted these, implicitly telling the neural net that similar ones should, in the future, be recognized as uninteresting.

  This would require further thought, he decided. He gestured for hardcopy of the characteristics of the Snark, the output directed to the color laser printer in the Hostel lobby, then gestured again and the starburst vanished.