George and the Big Bang

by Lucy Hawking

  Such explosions are rare. One would need to happen within a few thousand light-years to do real damage, and the beam would need to hit us very precisely. Thus, astronomers who have studied the problem in detail are not that worried!

  SELF-DESTRUCT!

  We’ve already done a lot of damage to our planet—without any help from asteroids or gamma rays.

  The Earth is

  home to more

  than seven

  billion people.

  The Earth is suffering from overpopulation.

  All those extra people mean we will need to grow more food, putting a greater strain on the Earth’s natural resources and sending even more gases into the Earth’s atmosphere. There’s been a lot of argument about climate change. But scientists are clear that the planet is getting warmer and that human activity is the reason for this change. They expect this change to continue, meaning that the world will get hotter and some areas will experience heavy rainfall while others suffer from drought. Sea levels are expected to rise, which could make life very difficult for people who live on coastlines.

  Globally,

  nearly a quarter of all

  mammal species and

  a third of amphibians

  are threatened with

  extinction.

  There are more and more humans on Earth but fewer and fewer other species. Extinction of other animals is a growing problem, and we are seeing whole groups of species disappear from the face of the Earth. It seems a real pity that we are destroying our beautiful and unique planet just as we are learning how it really works.

  “Exactly! My dad says humans need to look for a new home,” said Annie, “just like Freddy does. Pigs need about the same conditions as people, so if we can find a place in the Universe that’s suitable for human life, then Freddy would be fine there as well.”

  “So all Cosmos has to do is find a new home for humanity and we’ve found somewhere to keep my pig?”

  “Precisely!” said Annie happily. “And we can visit him in space from time to time, so he doesn’t get lonely and sad again.” They both fell silent. They knew that their master plan was rather less than perfect.

  “How long is it going take us to find somewhere for Freddy in space?” asked George eventually. “Your dad has been searching and searching for a new place for human beings to start a colony, and he still isn’t sure he’s found the right place.”

  “Um, yeah,” admitted Annie. “We might—just might—want to think about finding Freddy somewhere a bit closer to home, just for now.”

  “Somewhere on planet Earth would be good,” agreed George. “But how are we going to get him to his new home—in space or on Earth? How are we going to carry a great big pig around?”

  “Now that is the great geniosity of my brilliant plan!” cried Annie, perking up. “We’re going to use Cosmos. If Cosmos can send us on great big journeys across the Universe, then he can take a pig just a short hop across planet Earth. Cosmos, am I right?” she demanded.

  “Annie, you are,” confirmed Cosmos. “I am so clever and intelligent that I can do any or all of the things you have mentioned.”

  “But is he supposed to?” asked George. “I mean, isn’t your dad going to be angry if he finds we’ve used his supercomputer to transport a pig?”

  “Unless you order me to do so,” said Cosmos slyly, “I would have no reason to inform Eric that we have taken a porcine adventure together.”

  “See?” said Annie. “If we ask Cosmos to take Freddy to somewhere he’ll be safe, then Cosmos will do it.”

  “Hmm,” said George, still sounding doubtful. He’d been on journeys before where Cosmos had been allowed to pick the destination, and he wasn’t sure that the supercomputer always got it right. George didn’t want to push his pig through the portal—the amazing doorway into space that Cosmos could open up—and find he’d been sent to a sausage factory. Or the top of the Empire State Building. Or a remote tropical island that would be too hot for Freddy—not to mention too lonely.

  “Cosmos,” he said politely, “could you show us the places you’d take Freddy before you actually send him there? Oh, and for the moment, until we find somewhere permanent, they all have to be close enough for us to bike to, because I don’t think we should keep using you—we might get caught.”

  “Processing your request,” replied Cosmos. When Annie’s family had come back from America, Cosmos had suffered a mega breakdown. Eric had managed to fix him, but he had returned with a much more user-friendly attitude. Now, his circuits whirred for a few seconds, and then an image appeared, floating in the air in the center of Eric’s study, connected to Cosmos by two thin beams of light.

  “It’s a map!” said George. “It looks like … Hold on! It’s Foxbridge!”

  “Indeed,” said Cosmos. “It is a three-D image. Anything Google can do, I can do better.” He harrumphed. “The presumptuous upstarts.”

  “Oh my, it’s beautiful!” sighed Annie. Every feature of the ancient and distinguished university town of Foxbridge was drawn in loving detail on Cosmos’s map—each tower, rampart, spire, and quadrangle represented in perfect miniature.

  In a corner of one of the courtyards, a little red light was flashing.

  “That’s my dad’s college!” said Annie in surprise. “Where that light is flashing. Why are you showing us Dad’s college?”

  “My files tell me that pigs need a quiet, dark space with fresh air and some sunlight,” said Cosmos. “The place marked is an empty wine cellar at the base of an old tower. It has a ventilation system, so the air is clean, and a small skylight. It hasn’t been used for many years, so your pig should be safe and comfortable there for a few days, provided you take the precaution of bringing some straw with him from the farm.”

  “Are you sure?” said George. “Won’t he feel a little cooped up?”

  “For a short while your pig will enjoy perfect peace and quiet,” replied Cosmos. “It will be a little break for him until you decide where you would like him to be permanently housed.”

  “We have to get him out of that farm!” exclaimed Annie. “And quickly! He’s having a terrible time and we must, must, must save him!”

  “Can we see the cellar?” asked George.

  “Certainly,” said Cosmos. “I will open a small window into the cellar so that you can verify the information I have given you.”

  The map melted into thin air and was replaced by a rectangle of light as Cosmos created his portal: Annie and George had gone through it many times to journey into space. On those occasions, Cosmos had made a door. But if he just wanted to show them something, he drew a small window for them to look through.

  “This is so exciting!” exclaimed Annie while they waited. “Why did we never think of using Cosmos to travel around the Earth before?”

  The rectangle went dark. George and Annie peered at it more closely.

  “Cosmos, we can’t see anything!” said George. “I thought you said there would be some daylight. We don’t want Freddy to think he’s gone to prison!”

  Cosmos sounded confused. “I have checked the coordinates, and this is the right location. Perhaps the window has been covered.”

  “Jeepers!” whispered Annie. “The darkness—it’s moving!” Through the window, the blackness seemed to be swaying from side to side.

  “Listen!” she hissed. “I can hear voices.”

  “Not possible,” replied Cosmos. “My data tells me that the cellar is no longer in use.”

  “Then what are all those people doing there?” said Annie in a hollow voice. “Look!”

  Staring through the window, George realized she was right. What they were seeing was not a dark room where no light penetrated. It was a throng of tightly packed people, all wearing black clothes. He could just make out shoulders and backs—the crowd seemed to be facing away from them.

  “Can they see us?” whispered Annie.

  “If they turn around, they will see the portal window,�
� said Cosmos, who had conducted a brief scan of the room. “Although it is entirely inconsistent with logic, probability, and reason, the cellar appears to be filled with human beings.”

  “Alive ones?” said Annie in a terrified voice. “Or dead ones?”

  “Breathing and functional ones,” said Cosmos.

  “What are they doing?”

  “They are—”

  “Turning around,” interrupted George in horror. “Cosmos, close the portal!”

  Cosmos snapped the window shut so fast that no one in the cellar noticed the tiny flash of light. Even if they had, none of them would have guessed that their secret meeting had just been witnessed by two very puzzled kids and an agitated supercomputer in an ordinary suburban house somewhere on the edge of Foxbridge.

  However, a voice from inside the cellar drifted into the room where Annie and George sat, motionless and shocked. “All hail the False Vacuum!” it said. “Bringer of life, energy, and light.” In Cosmos’s hurry to shut down the portal before anyone saw it—and them—he had closed the visual monitor but not the audio port, so they could hear but not see the events in the cellar.

  A deathly hush followed. Annie and George hardly dared to breathe. Then, as though they were listening to a particularly horrible radio show, the voice continued.

  “These are dangerous times!” it hissed. “We may be living through the last days before the Universe itself is ripped to shreds by a bubble of cosmic destruction. Criminal scientists at the Large Hadron Collider will soon begin their new, high-energy experiment. We failed to stop them from using the Collider last time. But now, the situation is far more serious. The moment these crazy fools switch on their machine, a cosmic catastrophe will be unleashed that will exterminate the entire Universe! Their plans to take the work at the Large Hadron Collider to the next level could reduce us all to nothing.”

  Annie and George heard the densely packed crowd in the room hiss and boo at these words.

  “Quiet!” said the voice. “Please—our distinguished scientific expert will explain.”

  A new voice spoke. This time it was an older, soft-spoken one. “These dangerous lunatics are led by a Foxbridge scientist called Eric Bellis.”

  Annie squeaked and clapped her hand over her mouth. Eric Bellis was her dad!

  “Bellis is masterminding the high-energy collision experiment using the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider—the LHC. It is about to enter its most dangerous phase. If Bellis achieves the collision energy he intends, then I calculate that there is a significant probability of causing the Universe to spontaneously decay by creating a piece of the True Vacuum.

  “If the tiniest bubble of the True Vacuum is created in a particle collision at the LHC, the bubble will expand— at the speed of light—replacing the False Vacuum and obliterating all matter! All atoms on Earth will dissolve in less than a twentieth of a second. Within eight hours, the Solar System will be gone. Of course, it does not end there …”

  But the voices from the cellar were fading now as Cosmos struggled to hold the connection.

  “The bubble will continue to expand forever,” the voice went on in a menacing whisper. “Bellis will have accomplished the unthinkable—the destruction of the entire Universe!” With the last “ssssss” of “Universe” left hanging in the air, the voice was silent once more.

  For a moment George, Cosmos, and Annie froze. Cosmos snapped out of it first.

  DANGEROUS ENVIRONMENT FOR PIG RELOCATION! flashed up across his screen in big red letters several times.

  “We’re not sending Freddy there!” agreed Annie, who looked rather dazed. “We’re not having our pig spend time with those creepy people! ’Specially not if they’re going to be rude about my dad!”

  George gulped. What had those black-clad people been talking about? “Cosmos, Annie,” he said urgently, “who were they?”

  Chapter Three

  “Who were who?” said a voice as Eric himself pushed open the door to his study, a steaming mug of tea in one hand and a pile of scientific papers jammed under his tweed-jacketed arm. “Hello, Annie and George!” he said. “Enjoying the last day of summer vacation?”

  The two friends stared blankly back at him.

  “Oh dear! Should I take that as a ‘no’?” said Eric. “Is something wrong?” He smiled at them both. Eric couldn’t stop smiling these days. If George had to describe Annie’s father at the moment, he would have used the words “incredibly happy.” Or “incredibly busy.” In fact, the busier Eric was, the happier he seemed. Since he had moved back from America, where he had been working on a space mission to try to find traces of life on Mars, the scientist always seemed to be in a rush and always seemed to be enjoying himself. He was happy at home with his family, he loved his new job as professor of mathematics at Foxbridge University, and he was super-excited about the big experiment he was running at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.

  The project at the LHC was the continuation of work started by scientists hundreds of years earlier. The aim was to discover what the world was made of, and how the tiny fundamental pieces had fitted together to form the contents of the Universe. To do this, Eric and the other scientists were trying to find a theory that would allow them to understand everything about the Universe. They gave it the simple name the “Theory of Everything”: It was the greatest goal in science. If they could only find it, scientists would be able to understand not only the beginning of the Universe but possibly even how—and why—the Universe we live in came about.

  THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING

  Throughout history, people have looked around and tried to understand the amazing things they saw, asking: What are these objects? Why do they move and change like that? Were they always there? What do they tell us about why we’re here? Only in the last few centuries have we started to find scientific answers.

  Classical Theory

  In 1687 Isaac Newton published his Laws of Motion, describing how forces change the way objects move, and the Law of Universal Gravitation, which says that every two objects in the Universe attract each other with a force—gravity—which is why we are stuck to the Earth’s surface, why the Earth orbits the Sun, and how planets and stars were created. On the scale of planets, stars, and galaxies, gravity is the architect who controls the grand structure of the Universe. Newton’s Laws are still good enough for placing satellites in orbit and sending spacecraft to other planets. But more modern classical theories, namely Einstein’s theories of relativity, are needed when objects are very fast, or very massive.

  NEWTON’S LAWS

  The Laws of Motion

  1. Every particle remains at rest, or in motion along a straight line with constant velocity, unless acted on by an external force.

  2. The rate of change of momentum of a particle is equal in magnitude to the external force, and in the same direction as the force. The rate of change of momentum of a particle is equal in magnitude to the external force, and in the same direction as the force. The rate of change of momentum of a particle is equal in magnitude to the external force, and in the same direction as the force. The rate of change of momentum of a particle is equal in magnitude to the external force, and in the same direction as the force. The rate of change of momentum of a particle is equal in magnitude to the external force, and in the same direction as the force.

  3. If a particle exerts a force on a second particle, then the second particle exerts an equal but opposite force on the first particle.

  The Law of Universal Gravitation

  Every particle in the Universe attracts every other particle with a force, pointing along the line between the particles, which is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.

  Quantum Theory

  Classical Theory is fine for big things, like galaxies, cars, or even bacteria. But it can’t explain how atoms work—in fact, it says atoms can’t exist! In the early twentieth century,
physicists realized they needed to develop a completely new theory to account for the properties of very small things like atoms or electrons: quantum theory. The version that sums up our current knowledge of fundamental particles and forces is known as the Standard Model. It has quarks and leptons (the component particles of matter), force particles (the gluon, photon, W and Z), and the Higgs (which is needed to explain part of the masses of the other particles, but has not yet been seen). Many scientists think this is too complicated, and would like a simpler model. Also, where is the dark matter astronomers have discovered? And what about gravity? The force particle for gravity is called the graviton, but adding it to the Standard Model is difficult because gravity is very different—it changes the shape of space-time.

  The Challenge—

  the Theory of Everything …

  A theory explaining all the forces and all the particles—a Theory of Everything—might look very different from anything we have seen before, because it would need to explain space-time as well as gravity. But if it exists, it should explain the physical workings of the whole Universe, including the heart of black holes, the Big Bang, and the far future of the cosmos. Finding it would be a spectacular achievement.

  With this astonishing prospect in sight, thanks to the new results from the LHC, it wasn’t surprising that Eric was in a good mood. Such a good mood, in fact, that he didn’t even object to the kids using Cosmos when they weren’t supposed to.

  “I see you’ve been on my computer!” He raised an eyebrow, but he didn’t look angry. “I hope you didn’t get strawberry jam between the keys again,” he said mildly, leaning over to look at Cosmos.

  “Where’s the best place in the Universe for a pig to live?” Eric read off the screen. “Ah!” His face cleared. “Now I understand.” He ruffled Annie’s hair. “Your mom said you were both worried about Freddy.”

  “We were looking for somewhere else for him to go,” said Annie.