Einstein's Bridge

by Cramer, John

  “You have to understand the culture of particle physics,” George answered. “We’re probing the most fundamental aspects of nature, and the intellectual appeal of that attracts some of the best minds in physics, as well as some of the strongest personalities. There are many differences of opinion about how the physics should be done, many violent disagreements. Over the years, a method of resolving differences has evolved, a way of making a firm decision on what path to take, so we can put that decision behind us and move forward. It’s called the ‘shootout’.”

  Alice laughed with delight. “Like the Old West. It sounds quite appropriate for Texas.” she said. Had George deliberately provoked this shootout with Jake? Had he expected to win? He certainly hadn’t gone about it in the right way, if he had wanted to win Jake over. Perhaps he had wanted to get Jake to take a position against investigating the Snark.

  “We even do it in Geneva, California, and Illinois,” George said. “It is a bit like the Old West, except that the shooting is done with ideas and logic instead of bullets. When there is a controversy, the laboratory director will call a big meeting. The groups in contention select spokesmen who present their best arguments in support of their case. The physicists in the audience ask questions, often very nasty ones. This can go on for many hours or even days. Finally the director, sometimes with the advice of an executive committee, makes the decision. After that decision is made the question is considered settled, and work goes on.”

  Alice was puzzled. “I don’t see what that has to do with Jake and what I just saw,” she said.

  “I was coming to that part,” said George. “What you must understand about Jake is that he is the absolute master of the shootout. He’s extremely intelligent. He can go into a library with absolutely no knowledge of a technical subject and emerge a few hours later with complete mastery of it. His presentations are flawless. After the first minute, he’ll have an audience of tough-minded physicists eating out of his hand. His responses to hostile questions are lightning fast and subtly calculated to make the questioner appear absurd, but without any appearance that Jake has ridiculed him. Most of Jake’s adversaries in shootouts never know what hit them. Sometimes it’s a few days later before you realize that the other guy in the shootout perhaps had a pretty good idea. And by then, it’s too late.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Alice. “Why don’t the others see through Jake’s tricks?” Had George provoked the confrontation in private to see what Jake’s response would be?

  “Because they are not tricks,” said George. “Jake really does want to do the best physics in the world, and he’ll sift through the best ideas available, borrowing or stealing where he can, originating where he must, to come up with the best course of action. He’s really good, Alice. That’s why I and the others put up with the personality quirks that come in the same package with his talents.”

  Alice began to see the story possibilities in this revelation. “How did Jake get that way?” she asked.

  George smiled. “I’ve known Jake a long time,” he said. “We were at SLAC when the SLC was just coming into operation.”

  “SLC?” said Alice.

  “The SLAC Linear Collider,” said George. “That was an American attempt to do some quick physics with Z and W bosons and skim off the cream before the LEP machine at CERN started running in the late 1980s. That didn’t work, but it did get Ph.D.s for me and Jake.

  “Anyhow, we knew each other at SLAC. Jake grew up in Taiwan. His family was large and not particularly well off. As a kid he’d collect junk machines and electronics, take them apart, and use the pieces to make things. He liked to make weird electronic gadgets, radios and motion-detectors and spark generators. He managed to slip into the United States somehow while he was still in high school, and went to the University of Minnesota on scholarships while working at odd jobs in Minneapolis for extra support.

  “To understand Jake, you have to realize that a certain style of argumentation involving very fast interchanges is considered a high art in Taiwan. It’s a kind of verbal Karate. Jake was probably the smartest kid in Taiwan when he was growing up, and he naturally learned how to out-argue anyone he encountered.

  “When he was doing his Ph.D. working at SLAC, it must have been a terrible culture shock for him. His haranguing tricks from Taiwan, his oratorical style, and his histrionics didn’t work at SLAC. Everyone just thought he was a crazy Chinese guy and paid no attention to him. But Jake is not stupid. Over a period of time he watched the masters carefully and discovered the key to winning arguments at SLAC, and he began to gain recognition and move up in the pecking order.”

  “And what was his trick?” asked Alice. “It sounds useful.”

  “The key to winning arguments at SLAC,” said George, “is to always be right. And to be able to prove that you’re right so conclusively that no one can prevail against you.”

  “Oh,” she said, disappointed. That didn’t sound like a useful trick at all. “But if he’s always right, why do you argue with him?” she asked.

  “Because,” said George, “the only time Jake is consistently right is when he’s making a public performance. The rest of the time he’s often wrong. He learns to be right by soliciting arguments from people who, at the time, know more than he does.”

  “Then I don’t understand what your argument with him was about,” she said. “It wasn’t a public performance, and he was wrong.”

  “With Jake,” said George, “it’s an iterative process, like breaking a horse. You always lose the first argument. But you have to introduce him to the idea and give him time to get used to it. He can’t stop me from looking at the Snark, but I had to let him know about it and that I intend to investigate it, whether he likes it or not.”

  “Oh,” said Alice, feeling confused. George lost, but he won?

  “Jake isn’t our problem,” said George. “The Snark is. Roger Coulton suggested that the thing might still be around, and now I need to figure out where it might have ended up. Want to watch?”

  “Sure,” said Alice.

  CHAPTER 4.10

  Alice in the Palace

  ALICE put on the magic glasses again and settled back in the recliner. “I think this ‘telepresence’ business is all just a ruse to allow you to lie around on a soft couch all day while you’re pretending to work.” she said.

  “You’re not the first person to suggest that,” said George’s voice in her earphones.

  She was getting the hang of adjusting the glasses. George had explained that she would have an independent ‘body’ in the interface, but that her position would be servoed to his so they would move together.

  As her eyes adapted to the lower light level, she saw that she was standing at the corner of a magnificent building, a Greek temple that appeared to be filled with amazing statues. She was reminded of the Loggia della Signoria on the Piazza Veccio in Florence, but this building was huge. It stretched away as far as the eye could see. Curiously, over the entry stairway were carved and gilded architectural letters that read “LEM Data Analysis System, Virtual Desktop - Version 2.1A,” followed by a modified quotation from Dante.

  George’s voice spoke next to her. “Alice, can you hear me OK?”

  “Sure,” she said and turned to see that a wireframe figure with George’s face stood next to her. “Where are we? What is this place?”

  “Oh,” George said, laughing. “I should have explained. This is our ‘desktop’, our locational interface. Pietro, one of our programmers, had a dual college major in computer science and classical art history. One morning I connected to the system, and here it was in all its glory. He took statues from a giant classical sculpture database and used random combinations of statue elements filtered by an ‘aesthetics’ expert system developed by the Harvard Department of Fine Arts.”

  “It’s beautiful.”
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  “As it turns out,” George continued, “associating computer files and operations with physical locations in the Palace does seem to make a good computer-human interface. The operations and locations feel very natural and stick in the memory. Pietro claims the interface is based on a classical scheme for memory improvement developed by the Greeks.”

  “Are there more of these locational interfaces?” asked Alice, wishing for her notepad. “I’ve never heard of them before.”

  “As far as I know,” said George, “it’s unique to the SSC. But it’s become rather a local fad to see who can come up with the most bizarre locational interface. The SDC programmers designed one based on the works of Lewis Carroll, and I’m told there’s a new one at the E-4 experiment that’s supposed to be derived from the H. P. Lovecraft mythos.”

  The view of the Palace began to change. They were moving through the vast building. The statues were passing faster, now. So fast that she could not comprehend one before the next appeared. They passed gardens, open areas, belvederes, glittering fountains, and elaborate staircases leading up or down. Finally, the view stopped before a goat-headed man. Alice noticed that the words “Snark => Talk to Jake!” were carved in neat architectural letters into the white marble pedestal of the statue.

  “Here we are,” said George. “This is the icon for the event I need to measure.”

  Alice saw George’s phantom hand, a representation of curving connected yellow polygons and lines, reach out and touch the pedestal. The words “Talk to Jake” vanished from the inscription. Then the hand moved to touch the foot of the statue ...

  ... there was a “pop” sound and she floated in a black night illuminated by a spiked flower pattern constructed of many-colored curving lines.

  “This is the Snark event,” George said. “Its collision products passing through the LEM detector made this pattern.”

  “It’s like a neon-tube sculpture I saw once,” she said. As she watched, the phantom hands dimmed each colored line of the pattern until only one remained. It was a straight line that glowed with a violet color, and at random intervals along its length were blossoming bunches of shorter red lines.

  “Here,” said George, “is our Snark. It has a large electric charge and a very large mass. It came out of the vertex, but it took no energy or momentum from the collision.” The phantom hand touched one of the bunches of red along the violet line. “See these? They’re called jets, bunches of energetic particles that are made when a quark or a gluon is ejected by a collision.”

  “I’ve read about them,” said Alice.

  “They always come from the point of collision. Never are they found at random spots along a trajectory like this.”

  “What? Never?” Alice quoted.

  “Well, hardly ever,” George responded.

  She imagined that he must be grinning.

  “Roger Coulton suggested that they’re from a process he called ‘color ionization’. Somehow the Snark is losing energy by separating quarks and antiquarks along its path and making them into forward jets, just as a normal charged particle loses energy by separating electrons from atoms.”

  A frame of yellow lines, which Alice took to be an outline of the LEM Detector, now surrounded them, and they swam in the space it enclosed. “What I’m trying to do,” George said, “is estimate where in the detector the Snark stopped. Ah!” A region at the edge of the detector suddenly contained a sprinkling of colored line segments. The viewpoint shifted until Alice could see that one of the segments, a fat red line, was a direct extension of the violet line that still glowed near the center of the device. A dashed yellow line winked on, connecting the violet line to the red.

  “That,” said George, “means the Snark went through the inner slab of the depleted uranium absorber, made a big flash of light in this lead glass scintillator, but never made it to the outer muon detector. It stopped somewhere in here. A column of green numbers appeared momentarily above the place where the red track ended.”

  The field of view expanded and grew more detailed. Alice could see structures within structures within structures.

  The hand gestured again, and a bar with a hexagonal cross section lit with a violet glow. “Jackpot!” said George. “The Snark hit this lead-glass scintillator unit, and the thing is still scintillating, half a day later. I think our Snark must be embedded in it.” The hands made a another gesture ...

  ... and Alice found herself before the statue of the goat-headed man.

  “OK, I have the Snark’s coordinates,” George said. “Now we know where it’s hiding. So we need to figure out how to get to it.”

  They moved off through the forest of statues at a dizzying speed.

  CHAPTER 4.11

  Theory Seminar

  ROGER glanced at his watch. He had been talking for about forty five minutes now. The seminars of the SSC Particle Theory Group were supposed to last an hour, but that rule was frequently breached by longwinded speakers. At the rate he was going, however, he would finish easily with some time for questions. That was fine, because his headache was intensifying again. “So,” he said, “last night I set up the problem on my workstation to do a preliminary evaluation of the perturbation series, using the formalism outlined on the previous transparencies. Here’s what Mathematica gave me. It’s a standard 3D plot of generalized isospin against flavor, treating both as continuous variables for the purposes of the minimization, with mass as the altitude on the vertical axis” He placed the color transparency on the stage of the overhead projector. It was a brightly hued two dimensional surface that showed the gentle rolling hills of the surface, punctuated here and there by deep depressions.

  Roger ran the red spot of the laser pointer over the numbers near the depressions. “As you can see, the minimization gets the masses of each of the ground-state mesons to better than 1%. I think that can be improved, but it’s fairly good as it stands. I haven’t had time to investigate the baryons, but I see no reason why it should not do as well for them.” He paused and massaged his temples. His forehead was pounding. The bright colors of the slide seemed to bring with them peculiar individual odors. He turned toward his seated colleagues. “Well, that’s about all. This formulation is only one day old, but it shows, as they say, initial promise. In fact, I think it looks quite lovely! Thank you.” He nodded to the group to indicate he was through and switched off the projector.

  The applause from his theoretical colleagues, usually somewhat perfunctory and reserved at the end of an informal theory seminar like this one, was thunderous. Roger smiled. He knew that he had done well. They had understood the complicated ideas that he’d presented, and they were delighted with his new approach.

  “Questions?” he said quietly, and a dozen hands shot up. As he turned to point to a postdoc in the front row, he was surprised by a sharp, peculiar odor. He stared in bewilderment at his audience. Each person seemed to have a bright, coruscating aura around his head. Roger could feel the points of each aura like sharp individual pinpricks. Their faces were weirdly distorted, and they were attempting to speak to him in sibilant, glottal languages that he could not comprehend.

  The sharp smell intensified, and his ears filled with a high-pitched warbling susurrus that seemed to whisper hints of forbidden knowledge. A vast enveloping darkness closed in about him, and he could feel himself falling out of the world ...

  PART 5

  June 11, 2004

  January 15, 1990

  “... the only way to keep the cost of the SSC at $5.9 billion would be to seriously reduce its capabilities ... We considered whether there are cuts that would allow substantial savings ... restored later. We found none.”

  — Report of the Drell Panel on the SSC

  “It’s important that we not end up with a Cadillac but with a Chevrolet ... I’ll help Congress get over the sticke
r shock, and you’ll have to make sure of a sturdy and reliable Chevy.”

  — Senator Phil Gramm (R - Texas)

  May 10, 1991

  “[The SSC costs are] on the road to a bottomless pit.”

  — Congressman James Sensenbrenner (R- Wisconsin)

  May 1, 1992

  “We told [the other Congressmen] that the DOE had blown the $5 billion budget cap [voted by the House in 1990], that we were not going to see the $1.7 billion in foreign contributions, and that they wanted to balance the budget. It’s an easy case to make in 15 or 20 seconds.”

  — Staff Aide to Congressman Sherwood Boehlert (R- New York)

  “[The SSC costs are] on the road to a bottomless pit.”

  — Congressman James Sensenbrenner (R- Wisconsin)

  July 1, 1992

  “This place [the SSC Campus] attracts scientific genius the way the Dream Team attracts autograph seekers.”

  — President George H. W. Bush

  CHAPTER 5.1

  Vigil

  TUNNEL Maker floated into the instrumentation enclosure and connected to a neural node. He felt anxious. It had been more than two rotations since the Bridge had been established and there was still no indication that the Bridgehead had been noticed. The instruments recorded that it remained at rest in the same medium of elements 82, 14, and 8 where it had been stopped. Occasional short-duration flashes of light were observed. These occurred at very regular intervals. They were perhaps part of a testing process but were definitely not a signal.

  Tunnel Maker’s apparatus continued to send light-coded messages through the Bridge. These used the time-tested codes that had been successful in other contacts. They had now been transmitted many times over the past three days, but with no response.