by Lucy Hawking
“No, you’ve cheated!” shouted George at the TV. “That’s not winning—that’s being the biggest loser of all.”
Annie interrupted him. “Where are we?” she cried, pressing her face against the screen. “You promised us we would arrive safely at the LHC! You swore on the Oath.”
“Oh no, my dear,” cackled Zuzubin. “If you listened more carefully and did not give in to your immature habit of making rash assumptions, you would have heard me correctly. I said you would arrive safely at your destination. Which you have. I never told you where that destination would be.”
Annie ran over to the door and paused just in front of it.
“Wait!” said George. “Annie, don’t open the door. We don’t know what we’ll find.”
“Exactly,” said Zuzubin. “You, my dear little friends, are in the Inverse Schrödinger Trap. It was so easy! You just walked straight in.”
“What does that mean?” asked Annie in bewilderment.
“It means”—George gave a heavy sigh—“that we will only know where we are when we open the door. We could be anywhere at all, but we won’t find out for sure while the door is still closed.”
“Too good, too good,” mused Zuzubin. “While the door remains closed, you are in an infinite number of locations. Shall I show you some of the possibilities?” The scene through the window changed to a vista of something glowing white-hot, with a yellowish tinge. Annie and George both recoiled from the glare coming through the window.
“Perhaps,” said Zuzubin, “you are in the middle of planet Earth, held in the crystalline center of the inner core. In that case, you would be right in the heart of a one-and-a-half-thousand-mile ball of solid iron, which is about as hot as the surface of the Sun. The pressure is three point five million times the pressure on the surface of the planet. Open the door—please! Be my guest! I will be most intrigued to know what happens—will you fry or will you be crushed? Which will be first?”
George’s jaw had dropped. He stared in horror at the window.
“Nothing to say for once?” said Zuzubin. “Then I will continue our lesson in geology. Around this iron ball lies an outer core of liquid iron—which, by the way, is exceedingly toasty as well—and around that, another mantle of rock through which volcanic lava sometimes escapes. Even if you did get that far, your blood would bubble in your veins, as it is unbelievably hot down there. But that isn’t the end of it. From there, you’d have to dig through twenty-five miles of the rocky crust to get to the surface. Of course, after just a few miles, you might find that you’d broken through to the bottom of the ocean! Oh, children!” He clasped his hands together. “Let’s look at what that would be like for you!”
Annie sat down very suddenly on top of the cat, which yowled indignantly and wriggled out from under her to take up a position on the sofa, from where it shot her murderous looks as it washed its paws.
The picture through the window changed again. This time they were underwater in a deep trench, so far down that the sunlight never penetrated. In the light from the room behind them they could see squiggly reef formations and a plume of black smoke coming out of a hole in the ocean floor.
“Let’s say you find yourself at the bottom of the Pacific, in a hot spring,” gloated Zuzubin, “where strange prehistoric life-forms exist, hidden from human eyes, able to survive on the minerals expelled through the vents from the core of the Earth itself.”
A massive worm, longer than either of the kids, swam straight at the window, bashing into it. Its long pallid body squelched along the glass as it retreated in surprise.
“Oh dear, he didn’t see us!” exclaimed Professor Zuzubin. “Well, that is because he has no eyes. He’s a giant tubeworm—what a lovely creature. You’d like to take a little swim with him, wouldn’t you? He’s quite friendly,” said Zuzubin vaguely. “Which doesn’t really matter. After all, you’ll boil alive in the heat from the hydrothermal vent. If you don’t drown first, that is.”
George sat down next to Annie and put his arm around her. She was shaking. “Don’t look anymore,” he said. “He’s trying to frighten us. Don’t let him.” But George himself couldn’t tear his eyes away from the hideous picture outside the window.
“I see I still don’t please you!” said Zuzubin sorrowfully. Once more, the view from the window shifted. This time, all they could see was mile upon mile of ice floes, stretching away from the window for eternity. “Perhaps you don’t like to be warm! Let’s try a different view. Maybe you are at the South Pole, in the middle of the Antarctic winter.” Strong winds buffeted the window. A group of penguins could be seen, their heads bowed against the fierce gusts of freezing air.
“You see, little children,” Zuzubin continued, enjoying his captive audience, “on the other side of that doorway are all the infinite possibilities. Perhaps you have been shrunk down to quantum size so you can find out what it would be like to be a quark!”
“That can’t happen,” said George. “It isn’t possible.”
“Oh, really?” said Zuzubin. “You couldn’t become confined forever with the three quarks and the myriad quark-antiquark pairs and gluons swarming around inside a proton? The probability of ever escaping would be very small. No one has ever seen a quark outside a hadron, George, and no one will ever see you—”
“No,” insisted George. “That’s totally bogus and wrong.”
“I leave it to you to find out,” said Zuzubin smoothly. “Experiments are a fundamental part of science, and I look forward to watching the results of your attempt to prove me incorrect.”
“Shut up!” shouted Annie. “We have to get out of here!”
“Please,” said Zuzubin. “Don’t stay a minute longer than you wish. All you have to do is open the door.”
“But we can’t!” said Annie, sinking onto the sofa. “Can we? If we open the door, we’ll probably die …”
“Only probably,” said Zuzubin comfortingly.
THE QUANTUM WORLD
UNCERTAINTY AND SCHRÖDINGER’S CAT
The quantum world is the world of atoms and subatomic particles; the classical world is the world of people and planets. They seem to be very different places:
C
Classical: We can know
both where something is
and how fast it’s moving.
…
Classical: A ball
traveling from A to B
takes a definite path. If
there is a wall in the way
with two holes, then the
ball either goes through
one hole or the other… .
Classical: We know the
ball is going to B, and not
to somewhere else.
…
Classical: Gentle
observations don’t affect
the motion of the ball.
Q
Quantum: We can’t know
both exactly, and perhaps
we know neither—this is
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty
Principle.
…
Quantum: A particle
takes all paths from A
to B, including paths
through different holes—
the paths add up to
produce a wavefunction
rippling out from A.
…
Quantum: The particle
can reach anywhere the
wavefunction can reach.
We only discover where
it is when we make an
observation.
…
Quantum: Observations
completely change the
wavefunction—e.g., if
we observe our particle
at C, the wavefunction
collapses to be
completely at C (then
ripples out again).
A Cat in a Box!
But cats (classical!) are made of atoms (quantum!). Erwin Schrödinger ima
gined what this might mean for a cat—though don’t do this to your pet cat (Schrödinger didn’t actually do it either)! He imagined shutting a cat inside a (completely light-and soundproof) box with some poison, a radiation detector, and a small amount of radioactive material. When the detector bleeps (because an atom produces radiation), then the poison is automatically released. After a while in the box, is the cat still alive? The atoms in the box (including the cat’s) take all possible paths: In some, radiation is produced and the poison released; but not in others. Only when we make an observation by opening the box do we discover if the cat has survived. Before that, the cat is neither definitely dead nor definitely alive—in a way, it’s a combination of both!
“That means we are trapped … ,” said George slowly. “In this room … forever.”
“I have provided plenty of reading material,” said Zuzubin. “You’ll find all the major texts on the bookshelves, and there is some nourishment in the fridge.”
Annie leaped up and went over to the fridge, as though it might show her a way out of this trap. But all it contained was a box of breakfast cereal and five large chocolate bars, with a bottle of milk marked CAT.
“Shredded Wheat and chocolate?” protested Annie.
“A perfectly adequate diet, I have always found,” said Zuzubin coldly. “I would have asked you for your culinary preferences, but there really wasn’t time. You were in such a terrible hurry.”
“This is your room, isn’t it?” said George, the truth dawning on him. “You live here when you go into hiding—when you disappear, you come here.”
“It’s peaceful,” admitted Zuzubin. “It gives me time to think.”
“So there is a way out,” said George, pointing at Zuzubin through the TV screen. “You return to Foxbridge, so we must be able to. You don’t come in here and just take a chance on where you’ll end up when you open the door. I bet you’ve used this room to get to the LHC and to all the other places as well. It’s how you travel around.”
“Well, yes, of course!” said Zuzubin. “Using the TV remote control, I can make an observation that causes the portal to pick a definite location. So when I open the door, it has taken me to my chosen destination.”
“The remote control!” shouted George. “Annie, we must find the remote control for the TV set!”
“Look as hard as you like,” sneered Zuzubin. He dangled an object in front of the screen. George slumped in defeat as he realized Zuzubin had the remote in his hand.
“Are you just going to leave us here while my father gets blown up?” said Annie very quietly. It seemed like all hope had gone.
“I am,” confirmed Zuzubin. “Would you like to watch? I can play it for you on the television set, if you would like. I am eager to make my guests happy.”
“Nooooo!” cried Annie, so loudly and painfully that, back in Foxbridge, Vincent heard her and knew it was time to act.
Chapter Seventeen
Vincent had been hovering behind the old professor, hoping that he would somehow give him a clue how to get Annie and George out of the trap. He knew he could easily overpower the old man, but what good would that do? If Zuzubin wouldn’t tell him how to extract George and Annie from the bizarre room that he could see on the screen, they could be in even more trouble than before.
Vincent glanced down at George’s cell phone, which he’d picked up off the floor, and saw that the screen bore the message: MISSED CALL—HOME. It was at that moment that he heard Annie’s cry of pain, and realized he could stand by no longer.
Readying himself, he leaped out from behind the pile of old furniture with a great battle cry. He flew through the air and landed immediately behind Zuzubin, felling him with one swift and totally accurate karate chop. Zuzubin had half turned in surprise, but he toppled like an ancient tree, his eyes rolling back in his head as he crumpled to the floor and lay there, unconscious.
On the screen, Vincent saw Annie and George’s astonished faces peering back at him.
“Vincent!” Annie covered the TV screen with kisses.
George dragged her back. “Vincent!” he said. “That was amazing!”
“Vincent, you’re the best!” said Annie.
George elbowed her out of the way again. “But, Vince, how are we going to get out?”
“Call my dad!” shouted Annie. “Tell him about the bomb at the LHC!”
Using George’s cell phone, Vincent scrolled through and found Eric. He pressed the green phone icon and waited. But all he got was an electronic voice, telling him that the phone was switched off and he would have to try again later.
“The remote control!” shouted George. “Vince, get the remote control from Zuzubin!”
Vincent looked down at the prone figure of Zuzubin, splayed on the floor in his tweed suit, his mustache drooping to one side. He leaned down and pried a remote control out of Zuzubin’s fingers, holding it up to the TV screen so George and Annie could see it.
“Is this the one?” said Vincent.
“Yeah!” said George. “That’s it! Now can you get us out?”
“Like, er, how?” asked Vincent quietly. “How does this thing work?”
“Oh no,” said George. “I didn’t think of that. I don’t know.”
“What if you look at it more closely?” Vincent held the control right next to the screen.
“It’s no good,” said George in frustration. “The picture isn’t clear enough. And Vince,” added George, “you’ve got to be quick. There isn’t much time!”
“Call the LHC!” said Annie. “Tell them there’s a bomb!”
“Forget it—they wouldn’t believe him,” said George. “There’s only one way—that’s to get there and defuse the bomb ourselves.”
On the other side, Vincent was staring at the remote control. “When I press ‘menu’ on my TV remote at home,” he said slowly, “it makes the television change between functions. Which is sort of what we need the Inverse Schrödinger Trap to do—we need it to change from a trap to a portal. Shall I try it?” he asked nervously.
“You have to!” said George. “It’s our only hope!”
Vincent took a deep breath and pressed the menu button. Nothing happened. He pressed it again and a list came up on Cosmos’s screen. The same list of options appeared on the television screen, inside the Schrödinger Trap. He read out loud the first option on the list: “Foxbridge.” And then he read out to his friends, waiting inside the Inverse Schrödinger Trap, the second option: “Large Hadron Collider.”
“Those must be the locations Zuzubin has visited! If we choose the Collider, perhaps it will take us to the place where he left the bomb! If there are arrow buttons on the remote,” said George, speaking very fast, “use them to select LHC.”
“I don’t know!” fretted Vincent. When it came to dangerous sports like skateboarding and karate, he knew no fear. But faced with sending his friends into certain danger, he felt terrified. “I can’t!” he said. “I can’t send you to the LHC! We know there’s a bomb!”
“Vincent, do it!” said Annie, shoving George out of the way again. “You have to get us to the LHC! If you don’t, my dad will never come home—that’s what Reeper said! The quicker you do it, the more time we have when we arrive to find the bomb and defuse it. Press the button, Vince! And we’ll open the door. Send us there!”
Vincent gave a heart-wrenching sigh and pushed the select button, the cursor hovering over the highlighted “LHC” letters on the screen.
As he did so, George reached forward and pulled open the door …
The last Vincent saw of his friends on the television monitor were their backs, disappearing through the portal doorway. Had he managed to work Cosmos correctly? Would they arrive safely at the LHC? Was the LHC, with the bomb primed to go off, a place where he should have sent them? Should he have made them come back to Foxbridge? And what if he’d pressed the wrong button and opened something exotic like a wormhole for them to pass through? What if he’d accidentally sent
them back in time? What then?
Vincent gently sank to the floor and waited, his head in his hands, while Zuzubin, the progenitor of all this evil, snored on the floor beside him.
THE LATEST SCIENTIFIC THEORIES
WORMHOLES AND TIME TRAVEL
Imagine that you are an ant, and you live on the surface of an apple. The apple hangs from the ceiling by a thread so thin that you can’t climb up it, so the apple’s surface is your entire Universe. You can’t go anywhere else. Now imagine that a worm has eaten a hole through the apple, so you can walk from one side of the apple to the other by either of two routes: around the apple’s surface (your Universe), or by a short cut, through the wormhole.
Could our Universe be like this apple? Could there be wormholes that link one place in our Universe to another? If so, what would such a wormhole look like to us?
The wormhole would have two mouths, one at each end. One mouth might be at Buckingham Palace in London, and the other on a beach in California. The mouths might be spherical. Looking into the London mouth (a little like looking into a crystal ball), you could see the California beach, with lapping waves and swaying palm trees. Looking into the California mouth, your friend might see you in London, with the palace and its guards behind you. Unlike a crystal ball, the mouths are not solid. You could step right into the big spherical mouth in London, and then after a brief float through a weird sort of tunnel, you would arrive on the beach in California, and could spend the day surfing with your friend. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have such a wormhole?
The apple’s interior has three dimensions (east– west, north–south, and up–down), while its surface has only two. The apple’s wormhole connects points on the two-dimensional surface by penetrating through the three-dimensional interior. Similarly, your wormhole connects London and California in our three-dimensional Universe by penetrating through a four-dimensional (or maybe even more-dimensional) hyperspace that is not part of our Universe.
Our Universe is governed by laws of physics. These laws dictate what can happen in our Universe and what cannot. Do these laws permit wormholes to exist? Amazingly, the answer is yes!