by Lucy Hawking
“I won’t touch it. But we have to choose … Look!”
Underneath the slot where you inserted your money was the display that counted up the coins you’d paid for the drink of your choice. The display showed two numbers, which were rapidly counting down—eighty was now replaced by seventy-nine. “I bet that’s the number of seconds left until the explosion,” said Annie. “So we have to choose something—and fast—or the bomb will go off anyway. What would happen if we pressed all eight switches at once? Would that work?”
“Well, no,” said George. “Because it’s a soda machine—that’s why it’s so clever! Think about it—with a normal soda machine, you can only press one button at a time and get one drink. It will only let you make one choice. So we can’t press more than one button now either.”
“But which button do we press?” asked Annie.
George gulped and read along the top row of drinks. “Fizzy-Wi Zzzz,” he read. “Quark-O-Taster! Gloopy Gluon. Phrozen Photon. Nutty Neutrino. Electron Energy Drink. Hi-Hi-Hi-GG-Up! Lemon-flavored Iced Tau.” The figures on the time display were now at sixty, showing that the seconds were dwindling fast. George looked down at Schrödy. “Any ideas?” he asked. The cat seemed to shake his head sadly, as if to say he’d done all he could. He curled up on George’s feet and started washing his whiskers. “Annie?” said George hopefully.
“One of them,” said Annie, “must be the odd one out … One of them must be the setting that Reeper used to make the quantum observation so that the bomb was made to choose one of the eight codes. But which one?”
“W and Z bosons … ,” George repeated to himself. “Quark … Gluon, Photon, Neutrino. Electron, Higgs, and Tau. Which one are you?” Suddenly his brain lit up like the lights on the soda machine. “Eureka!” he cried. “I’ve got it! It’s the Higgs! That’s the odd one out.”
“Are you sure?” said Annie. The time display now showed they were only thirty seconds away from the explosion.
“Higgs,” said George quickly. “It’s the theoretical one. All the rest—we know about them, we know they exist. But we don’t know if the Higgs particle really exists or whether it’s just a useful way of making the rest of our knowledge fit together nicely.”
“Press it!” urged Annie. “Press it, George, now! Before it’s too late!”
As George leaned forward, the time display showed fifteen seconds left. His hand hovered.
What if he was wrong?
What if he pressed the wrong button and was responsible for blowing up the Large Hadron Collider—and everyone and everything inside it?
A memory nagged at the back of his mind. Eric had once talked about how all observations in quantum theory were fundamentally unpredictable (“indeterminate” had been the word he’d used). Physicists could only calculate the probability of a particular result, and only in special situations was the probability a certainty. How, then, had Reeper been able to force the bomb to choose “Hi-Hi-Hi-GG-Up”? He looked down at Pooky’s piece of paper—and realized that the last character on the line of symbols was not a number at all, but a capital H.
The display was still ticking down—9—8—7—6—5—when George, finally sure that he had worked it out, struck the button to choose the Higgs drink.
Immediately the lights stopped flashing on the front of the machine. Only the Hi-Hi-Hi-GG-Up button continued flashing. The time display froze at four seconds. ENTER CODE scrolled across a window by the drinks button.
George quickly punched in the number part of Pooky’s code, upon which the whole machine briefly lit up and trembled. The time display disappeared and the word DISARMED appeared in its place.
As the kids watched in amazement, they heard a clunking noise, and the machine dispensed a can of soda into the transparent tray at the bottom and promptly switched itself off.
“Well!” said George. “That’s not at all what I expected!”
Schrödy purred happily, and Annie sank to the floor in relief. Suddenly they heard something else—this time the sound of a heavy door being flung back and footsteps approaching. The footsteps got closer, and a disheveled-looking Eric came round the edge of the great machine and ground to a halt when he saw the kids.
“Annie! George!” cried Eric. “What the blazing stars is going on?” Behind him appeared a phalanx of bemused-looking scientists who had hot-footed it to the ATLAS cavern.
When the alarms had gone off, the scientists had quickly realized that somehow there were two small people in the ATLAS Detector Cavern! Pushing his way through the crowd gathered around the computer screen, which showed the image of the intruders, Eric had realized to his horror that the duo bore a striking resemblance to his daughter Annie and her best friend, George. With the other scientists, he had watched in shock as the two figures had set off down the staircase in front of ATLAS and fallen out of view of the cameras. At that moment, Eric snapped into action and ran from the trigger room, determinedly striking out in the direction of the ATLAS detector.
“Dad!” said Annie, falling on him and hugging him. “You’re safe! The LHC isn’t going to blow up! Science isn’t over!”
“What are you talking about?” exclaimed Eric.
“Professor Bellis,” said one of the other scientists. “Can you explain why two children, apparently related to you, have managed to appear in the sealed underground section of the Large Hadron Collider, thus triggering the interlock system and forcing a beam dump?”
“Ah, Doctor Ling,” said Eric, nodding at the scientist who had just spoken.
“Could you kindly explain what is going on?” Under Dr. Ling’s arm was Cosmos, the little silver laptop. Even in his hurry to follow Eric as he had shot out of the trigger room, headed for the ATLAS detector cavern, Dr. Ling had clearly not wanted to leave Cosmos unguarded.
“Er, well, no!” said Eric, and the scientists began to frown. But George quickly stepped forward.
“Um … hello, everyone,” he said. “Sorry about this. There was this quantum mechanical bomb inside the soda machine.”
“The soda machine?” said Dr. Ling. “But that’s been out of order for ages! No one ever uses it … ah,” he said. “So that it made it a really clever place to hide a bomb.”
“If the bomb had gone off,” continued George, “the whole Collider would have been destroyed. We—that is, me and Annie, because I would never have worked it out all by myself—knew there were eight switches that arm or disarm the bomb. There are eight different soda options in the machine, which means each one represents one of the switches on the bomb. We had the code here”—he waved the scrap of paper with Pooky’s code on it—“and we knew that the designer of the bomb had, in secret, already made an observation. So we just had to work out which option it was—and that was all about picking the right soda. We thought it must be the ‘Higgs,’ because all the others are the names of particles that we know exist, while the Higgs is still theoretical and hasn’t yet been confirmed by the experiments here at the LHC; but actually”—he looked over at Annie—“it was the right choice because the code here ends in H. We picked Higgs, entered the code, and the bomb has now been disarmed.”
“Ah … the first time the Higgs has been actually observed at the Large Hadron Collider,” said one scientist. “And it was via a soda machine!”
The other scientists whispered among themselves. “A quantum mechanical bomb?” they muttered. “Who could think up such a fiendish device?”
“But how could this awful thing have happened?” said Dr. Ling, sounding anxious. “Who could have wanted to cause such devastation and destruction?”
George and Annie looked at each other. Annie stood up and started to explain this time.
“This organization—TOERAG …” The scientists groaned, but Annie carried on: “TOERAG wanted to blow up the Collider while you were all here so that it would appear that the high-energy experiment had gone wrong. They thought that it would kill two birds with one stone—all the world’s top physicists wo
uld be gone and people would think that these kind of experiments were too dangerous and they would never be tried again.”
“I don’t understand,” said Dr. Ling. “How did they manage this? We have maximum security at the Collider. How could they have gotten in?”
“They had an insider,” George explained.
“It was Zuzubin, wasn’t it?” broke in Eric sorrowfully. “He betrayed us, didn’t he? George, do you know why?”
Eric looked so sad that George didn’t want to mention Zuzubin’s treachery anymore. But he had to answer the question.
“Er, well, Annie and I—we think that Zuzubin wanted to use old Cosmos as a time machine and go back to the past. He wanted to make it look like his theories—the ones that everyone has forgotten about—were right after all. And that you were wrong. He was also trying to show that he predicted the Large Hadron Collider would explode so that his theories would appear to be correct.”
Eric took off his glasses and polished them on his shirttails. “Oh dear,” he said. “Poor old Zuzubin.”
“What do you mean, poor old Zuzubin?” said George hotly. “He tried to blow us all up! You can’t feel sorry for him.”
“He must have gone crazy,” said Eric, shaking his head. “The Zuzubin I knew would never have done anything like this. He would have known that science is an ongoing story. It isn’t about who’s right or wrong, it’s about progression. It’s about doing the best work you can and then letting the scientists who come after you build on what you created. It may be that your theories are disproved—that’s the risk you take. To try anything new means taking risks and if you don’t do that, then you will never achieve anything meaningful. And of course we get it wrong sometimes. That’s the point. You have to try and fail and start again, and keep going—not just in science; in life as well.”
“Indeed,” added Dr. Ling. “The greatest challenges come not when our predictions turn out to be accurate, but when they’re not and instead, we discover new information that means we have to change everything we thought we knew.”
Just then, Dr. Ling’s pager bleeped furiously, as did the pagers of all the other scientists present, making a chirping noise—it sounded as if a flock of starlings had flown into the room. Everyone seized their pager and read the short message. A huge shout went up.
“What is it?” George asked Eric. “What’s going on?”
He hugged both children again. “It’s ATLAS!” he said. “He’s got a result for us! Just when we least expected it! He’s got some new information about the early Universe. Now, if I can put that information into Cosmos …” He trailed off.
All the scientists fell silent as they remembered that the difficult question of Eric’s guardianship of Cosmos had not yet been resolved.
Dr. Ling stood there, looking thoughtful. “Professor Bellis,” he said very courteously, “I believe there is a matter that we must deal with before we can investigate this new and exciting piece of information from ATLAS. Before I ask the Order of Science to vote on whether you should remain as the sole custodian of Cosmos, I would like to know—how is it that these two children know so much? How have two mere kids managed to use their unexpected knowledge of quantum theory to prevent an enormous and catastrophic event today at the Large Hadron Collider—an event that would have put back the progress of humanity by centuries?”
Eric didn’t get a chance to speak as George interrupted.
“I can tell you that,” he answered. “We know stuff because Eric is always explaining things to us. But he doesn’t just tell us—he gets us to go on journeys with him so that we have to work stuff out for ourselves. He helps us by giving us knowledge, but he also gets us to use our brains to make that knowledge mean something.”
“And he uses Cosmos to do this?” queried Dr. Ling.
“Cosmos helps him to make it fun and exciting for us,” said George. “That way, we learn things, and then, when we face new challenges, we know how to apply what we learned to different situations and come up with answers. But also”—George shot a worried look at Eric but decided to continue—“we wouldn’t have been able to do this—to save all these lives and the Large Hadron Collider—if it hadn’t been for Doctor Reeper. He put himself in danger to join TOERAG—who knows what they might have done to him if they had found out he betrayed them? And he sent his avatar into space to tell me about the bomb. Without him, we could never have stopped them. Will you think again about letting him rejoin the Order of Science? He really deserves to be welcomed back.”
“Hm,” said Dr. Ling. “Very interesting. I will put these matters to a vote. All those in favor of Eric Bellis remaining as the operator of Cosmos, please raise your hands.”
A forest of hands went up.
“All those not in favor?”
Not a single arm was raised.
“All those who would like to readmit Graham Reeper to the Order of Science?”
Even with Eric’s hand raised, they were still two votes short of a yes.
“George and Annie,” said Eric pleasantly, “I believe you are both members of the Order. Would you like to vote?”
They both smiled and raised their hands.
“In that case,” said Dr. Ling, handing Cosmos over to Eric, “I would like to return Cosmos to your guardianship once more. And we will find Doctor Reeper and re-award him his fellowship. For saving science from destruction …”
“Thank you,” said Eric, clutching Cosmos gratefully. “Thank you, Doctor Ling. Thank you, colleagues from the Order of Science. But most of all, thank you, Annie and George.”
“Just one thing,” said Dr. Ling as the group started to disperse toward the elevator. “Professor Bellis—no more pigs. Please. Not with the supercomputer, anyway.”
“Of course,” said Eric hastily. “I’ll use my car next time I need to move a pig … When I’ve found him again,” he added to himself under his breath. This would be the first item on his to-do list, after he’d examined the results of the experiments into the beginning of the Universe.
“Incidentally,” said Dr. Ling as they joined the back of the line for the elevator, “did I see a cat in here? I can’t believe it—how could a cat get down here?”
“Oh yes, that was Schrödy. He was—” Annie started to say, but then fell silent. Looking around, she saw no sign of the black and white cat. “Perhaps he’s gone into another dimension,” she speculated in surprise. “After all, he has ten to choose from, if M-Theory is correct.”
“Schrödy?” Dr. Ling enquired.
“An imaginary friend,” said George firmly. “Of Annie’s. She’s still very young, sir, and she still has these fantasies—Ouch! Ouch! Annie, get off me …”
M-THEORY—ELEVEN DIMENSIONS!
How can we combine Einstein’s classical Theory of General Relativity, which describes gravity and the shape of the whole Universe, with the quantum theory explaining tiny fundamental particles and all the other forces?
The most successful attempts all involve extra space dimensions and supersymmetry.
The extra dimensions are rolled up very tightly so that large objects don’t notice them!
Supersymmetry would mean more fundamental particles: e.g., photinos to go with photons, and squarks to go with quarks! (The LHC may see these, and perhaps even detect extra dimensions.)
The theory of superstrings (supersymmetric strings) replaces particles (dots) with tiny “strings” (lines). By vibrating in different ways—like different notes on a guitar string—strings behave like different types of particle. Although this sounds strange, strings can explain gravity!
Superstrings must exist in ten dimensions—so six extra space dimensions must be hidden away. We don’t understand yet exactly how this happens.
In 1995 Ed Witten suggested that the varied types of superstring theories are all different approximations to a single theory in eleven dimensions, which he called M-Theory.
Scientists disagree on what the M means: Is it magic, myster
y, master, mother, or perhaps membrane? Future generations of physicists will discover the truth!
Scientists have studied M-Theory very hard since then, but still don’t know exactly what it is, or if it really is a Theory of Everything.
Chapter Nineteen
Back at ground level, in the control room at CERN, the scientists gathered gleefully around the banks of computer monitors to review the surprising new data uncovered by ATLAS and the high-energy collisions that were taking place in the tunnels below. Dr. Ling and Eric were very busy, inputting these results into Cosmos.
“This is very exciting,” Eric said to George and Annie. “This new information from ATLAS will allow us to run a simulation of the Universe backward on Cosmos. We can start at today and work all the way back for thirteen point seven billion years. It’s going to be quite a show!”
“Um, Dad … ,” said Annie. “Before you do that, could you give Mom a call? She was really worried about you. She’ll want to know that you’re okay.”
“Oh, of course!” said Eric, picking up one of the phones on the desk and dialing. “Hello, Susan!” he said into the handset. “Yes, yes, I’m fine … What? Annie? Lost? No, she’s here with me … How did she get to Switzerland? Ah, well, that’s a long story … No, no, George is here too … Yes, we will be back in time for the party … No, I haven’t forgotten that I promised to pick up the cake …”
As Eric struggled to explain how the two kids had shown up safe and sound at the Large Hadron Collider, George tapped Dr. Ling on the shoulder.
“Doctor Ling,” he said. “What about TOERAG? What will happen to them now?”
The scientist looked very serious. “I have put out an international alert,” he told George. “I hope that they will be found and arrested. They endangered lives with their actions, and if it hadn’t been for you and Annie, today would have been a tragedy.”
“Will you find them?”
“Wherever they are on this planet, we will track them down.”
“TOERAG wasn’t trying to protect people at all, was it?” asked George. “They just frightened people into joining them.”