The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  He leaned back, nodding at Buli’s lecture, watching a team of men at the very top. A loud clang rang through the chasm. Sparks showered, burnt-orange and blue. The garish plumes silhouetted the welders and sent cascades of sparks down through the lattice of pipes. For an instant Clay imagined he was witnessing cosmic rays sleeting down through the towering house of iron, illuminating it with their short, sputtering lives.

  “—and I am confident that we have seen well over fifty true events,” Mrs. Buli concluded with a jaunty upward tilt of her chin.

  “What?” Clay struggled back from his daydreaming. “That many?”

  She laughed, a high tinkling. “You do not believe!”

  “Well, that is a lot.”

  “Our detecting mass is now larger,” Mrs. Buli said.

  “Last we heard it was five hundred tons,” Clay said carefully. The claims wired to the NSF and the Royal Society had been skimpy on details.

  “That was years ago,” Patil said. “We have redoubled our efforts, as you can see.”

  “Well, to see that many decays, you’d have to have a hell of a lot of observing volume,” Clay said doubtfully.

  “We can boast of five thousand tons, Professor Clay,” Mrs. Buli said.

  “Looks it,” Clay said laconically to cover his surprise. It would not do to let them think they could overwhelm him with magnitudes. Question was, did they have the telltale events?

  The cooling air came on with a thump and whoosh. Clay breathed it in deeply, face turned up to the iron house where protons might be dying, and sucked in swarming scents of the parched countryside miles above.

  6

  He knew from the start that there would be no eureka moment. Certainty was the child of tedium.

  He traced the tangled circuitry for two days before he trusted it. “You got to open the sack ’fore I’ll believe there’s a cat in there,” he told Mrs. Buli, and then had to explain that he was joking.

  Then came a three-day trial run, measuring the exact sputter of decay from a known radioactive source. System response was surprisingly good. He found their techniques needlessly Byzantine, but workable. His null checks of the detectors inside the pipes came up goose-egg clean.

  Care was essential. Proton decay was rare. The Grand Unified Theories which had enjoyed such success in predicting new particles had also sounded a somber note through all of physics. Matter was mortal. But not very mortal, compared with the passing flicker of a human lifetime.

  The human body had about 1029 neutrons and protons in it. If only a tiny fraction of them decayed in a human lifetime, the radiation from the disintegration would quickly kill everyone of cancer. The survival of even small life-forms implied that the protons inside each nucleus had to survive an average of nearly a billion billion years.

  So even before the Grand Unified Theories, physicists knew that protons lived long. The acronym for the theories was GUTs, and a decade earlier graduate students like Clay had worn T-shirts with insider jokes like IT TAKES GUTS TO DO PARTICLE PHYSICS. But proving that there was some truth to the lame nerd jests took enormous effort.

  The simplest of the GUTs predicted a proton lifetime of about 1031 years, immensely greater than the limit set by the existence of life. In fact, it was far longer even than the age of the universe, which was only a paltry 2 x 1010 years old.

  One could check this lifetime by taking one proton and watching it for 1031 years. Given the short attention span of humans, it was better to assemble 1031 protons and watch them for a year, hoping one would fizzle.

  Physicists in the United States, Japan, Italy, and India had done that all through the 1980s and 1990s. And no protons had died.

  Well, the theorists had said, the mathematics must be more complicated. They discarded certain symmetry groups and thrust others forward. The lifetime might be 1032 years, then.

  The favored method of gathering protons was to use those in water. Western physicists carved swimming pools six stories deep in salt mines and eagerly watched for the characteristic blue pulse of dying matter. Detecting longer lifetimes meant waiting longer, which nobody liked, or adding more protons. Digging bigger swimming pools was easy, so attention had turned to the United States and Japan … but still, no protons died. The lifetime exceeded 1032 years.

  The austerity of the 1990s had shut down the ambitious experiments in the West. Few remembered this forlorn experiment in Kolar, wedded to watching the cores of iron rods for the quick spurt of decay. When political difficulties cut off contact, the already beleaguered physicists in the West assumed the Kolar effort had ceased.

  But Kolar was the deepest experiment, less troubled by the hail of cosmic rays that polluted the Western data. Clay came to appreciate that as he scrolled through the myriad event-plots in the Kolar computer cubes.

  There were 9 x 109 recorded decays of all types. The system rejected obvious garbage events, but there were many subtle enigmas. Theory said that protons died because the quarks that composed them could change their identities. A seemingly capricious alteration of quarky states sent the proton asunder, spitting forth a zoo of fragments. Neutrons were untroubled by this, for in free space they decayed anyway, into a proton and electron. Matter’s end hinged, finally, on the stability of the proton alone.

  Clay saw immediately that the Kolar group had invested years in their software. They had already filtered out thousands of phantom events that imitated true proton decay. There were eighteen ways a proton could die, each with a different signature of spraying light and particle debris.

  The delicate traceries of particle paths were recorded as flashes and sparkles in the house of iron outside. Clay searched through endless graphic printouts, filigrees woven from digital cloth.

  “You will find we have pondered each candidate event,” Mrs. Buli said mildly on the sixth day of Clay’s labors.

  “Yeah, the analysis is sharp,” he said cautiously. He was surprised at the high level of the work but did not want to concede anything yet.

  “If any ambiguity arose, we discarded the case.”

  “I can see that.”

  “Some pions were not detected in the right energy range, so of course we omitted those.”

  “Good.”

  Mrs. Buli leaned over to show him a detail of the cross-checking program, and he caught a heady trace of wildflowers. Her perfume reminded him abruptly that her sari wrapped over warm, ample swells. She had no sagging softness, no self indulgent bulgings. The long oval of her face and her ample lips conveyed a fragile sensuality …

  He wrenched his attention back to physics and stared hard at the screen.

  Event vertices were like time-lapse photos of traffic accidents, intersections exploding, screaming into shards. The crystalline mathematical order of physics led to riots of incandescence. And Clay was judge, weighing testimony after the chaos.

  7

  He had insisted on analyzing the several thousand preliminary candidates himself, as a double blind against the Kolar group’s software. After nine days, he had isolated sixty-seven events that looked like the genuine article.

  Sixty-five of his agreed with Mrs. Buli’s analysis. The two holdouts were close, Clay had to admit.

  “Nearly on the money,” he said reflectively as he stared at the Kolar software’s array.

  “You express such values,” Mrs. Buli said. “Always a financial analogy.”

  “Just a way of speaking.”

  “Still, let us discard the two offending events.”

  “Well, I’d be willing—”

  “No, no, we consider only the sixty-five.” Her almond eyes gave no hint of slyness.

  “They’re pretty good bets, I’d say.” Her eyebrows arched. “Only a manner of speech.”

  “Then you feel they fit the needs of theory.”

  Her carefully balanced way of phrasing made him lean forward, as if to compensate for his judge’s role. “I’ll have. to consider all the other decay modes in detail. Look for really obscur
e processes that might mimic the real thing.”

  She nodded. “True, there is need to study such.”

  Protons could die from outside causes, too. Wraithlike neutrinos spewed forth by the sun penetrated even here, shattering protons. Murderous muons lumbered through as cosmic rays, plowing furrows of exploding nuclei.

  Still, things looked good. He was surprised at their success, earned by great labor. “I’ll be as quick about it as I can.”

  “We have prepared a radio link that we can use, should the desire come.”

  “Huh? What?”

  “In case you need to reach your colleagues in America.”

  “Ah, yes.”

  To announce the result, he saw. To get the word out. But why the rush?

  It occurred to him that they might doubt whether he himself would get out at all.

  8

  They slept each night in a clutch of tin lean-tos that cowered down a raw ravine. Laborers from the mine had slept there in better days, and the physicists had gotten the plumbing to work for an hour each night. The men slept in a long shed, but gave Clay a small wooden shack. He ate thin, mealy gruel with them each evening, carefully dropping purification tablets in his water, and was rewarded with untroubled bowels. He lost weight in the heat of the mine, but the nights were cool and the breezes that came then were soft with moisture.

  The fifth evening, as they sat around a potbellied iron stove in the men’s shed, Patil pointed to a distant corrugated metal hut and said, “There we have concealed a satellite dish. We can knock away the roof and transmit, if you like.”

  Clay brightened. “Can I call home?”

  “If need be.”

  Something in Patil’s tone told him a frivolous purpose was not going to receive their cooperation.

  “Maybe tomorrow?”

  “Perhaps. We must be sure that the devotees do not see us reveal it.”

  “They think we’re laborers?”

  “So we have convinced them, I believe.”

  “And me?”

  “You would do well to stay inside.”

  “Um. Look, got anything to drink?”

  Patil frowned. “Has the water pipe stopped giving?”

  “No, I mean, you know—a drink. Gin and tonic, wasn’t that what the Brits preferred?”

  “Alcohol is the devil’s urine,” Patil said precisely.

  “It won’t scramble my brains.”

  “Who can be sure? The mind is a tentative instrument.”

  “You don’t want any suspicion that I’m unreliable, that it?”

  “No, of course not,” Singh broke in anxiously.

  “Needn’t worry,” Clay muttered. The heat below and the long hours of tedious work were wearing him down. “I’ll be gone soon’s I can get things wrapped up.”

  “You agree that we are seeing the decays?”

  “Let’s say things’re looking better.”

  Clay had been holding back even tentative approval. He had expected some show of jubilation. Patil and Singh simply sat and stared into the flickering coals of the stove’s half-open door.

  Slowly Patil said, “Word will spread quickly.”

  “Soon as you transmit it on that dish, sure.”

  Singh murmured, “Much shall change.”

  “Look, you might want to get out of here, go present a paper—”

  “Oh no, we shall remain,” Singh said quickly.

  “Those devotees could give you trouble if they find—”

  “We expect that this discovery, once understood, shall have great effects,” Patil said solemnly. “I much prefer to witness them from my home country.”

  The cadence and mood of this conversation struck Clay as odd, but he put it down to the working conditions. Certainly they had sacrificed a great deal to build and run this experiment amid crippling desolation.

  “This result will begin the final renunciation of the materialistic worldview,” Singh said matter-of-factly.

  “Huh?”

  “In peering at the individual lives of mere particles, we employ the reductionist hammer,” Patil explained. “But nature is not like a salamander, cut into fragments.”

  “Or if it were,” Singh added, “once the salamander is so sliced, try to make it do its salamander walk again.” A broad white grin split the gloom of nightfall.

  “The world is an implicate order, Dr. Clay. All parts are hinged to each other.”

  Clay frowned. He vaguely remembered a theory of quantum mechanics which used that term—“implicate order,” meaning that a deeper realm of physical theory lay beneath the uncertainties of wave mechanics. Waves that took it into their heads to behave like particles, and the reverse—these were supposed to be illusions arising from our ignorance of a more profound theory. But there was no observable consequence of such notions, and to Clay such mumbo jumbo from theorists who never got their hands dirty was empty rhapsodizing. Still, he was supposed to be the diplomat here.

  He gave a judicial nod. “Yeah, sure—but when the particles die, it’ll all be gone, right?”

  “Yes, in about 1034 years,” Patil said. “But the knowledge of matter’s mortality will spread as swiftly as light, on the wind of our transmitter.”

  “So?”

  “You are an experimentalist, Dr. Clay, and thus—if you will forgive my putting it so—addicted to cutting the salamander.” Patil made a steeple of his fingers, sending spindly shadows rippling across his face. “The world we study is conditioned by our perceptions of it. The implied order is partially from our own design.”

  “Sure, quantum measurement, uncertainty principle, all that.” Clay had sat through all the usual lectures about this stuff and didn’t feel like doing so again. Not in a dusty shed with his stomach growling from hunger. He sipped at his cup of weak Darjeeling and yawned.

  “Difficulties of measurement reflect underlying problems,” Patil said. “Even the Westerner Plato saw that we perceive only imperfect modes of the true, deeper world.”

  “What deeper world?” Clay sighed despite himself.

  “We do not know. We cannot know.”

  “Look, we make our measurements, we report. Period.”

  Amused, Singh said, “And that is where matters end?”

  Patil said, “Consensual reality, that is your ‘real’ world, Professor Clay. But our news may cause that bland, unthinking consensus to falter.”

  Clay shrugged. This sounded like late-night college bullshit sessions among boozed-up science nerds. Patty-cake pantheism, quantum razzle-dazzle, garbage philosophy. It was one thing to be open-minded and another to let your brains fall out. Was everybody on this wrecked continent a booga-booga type? He had to get out.

  “Look, I don’t see what difference—”

  “Until the curtain of seeming surety is swept away,” Singh put in.

  “Surety?”

  “This world—this universe—has labored long under the illusion of its own permanence.” Singh spread his hands, animated in the flickering yellow glow. “We might die, yes, the sun might even perish—but the universe went on. Now we prove otherwise. There cannot help but be profound reactions.”

  He thought he saw what they were driving at. “A Nobel Prize, even.”

  To his surprise, both men laughed merrily. “Oh no,” Patil said, arching his eyebrows. “No such trifles are expected!”

  9

  The boxy meeting room beside the data bay was packed. From it came a subdued mutter, a fretwork of talk laced with anticipation.

  Outside, someone had placed a small chalky statue of a grinning elephant. Clay hesitated, stroked it. Despite the heat of the mine, the elephant was cool.

  “The workers just brought it down,” Mrs. Buli explained with a smile. “Our Hindu god of auspicious beginnings.”

  “Or endings,” Patil said behind her. “Equally.”

  Clay nodded and walked into the trapped, moist heat of the room. Everyone was jammed in, graduate students and laborers alike, their dh
otis already showing sweaty crescents. Clay saw the three students the devotees had beaten and exchanged respectful bows with them.

  Perceiving some need for ceremony, he opened with lengthy praise for the endless hours they had labored, exclaiming over how startled the world would be to learn of such a facility. Then he plunged into consideration of each candidate event, his checks and counter-checks, vertex corrections, digital-array flaws, mean free paths, ionization rates, the artful programming that deflected the myriad possible sources of error. He could feel tension rising in the room as he cast the events on the inch-thick wall screen, calling them forth from the files in his cubes. Some he threw into 3-D, to show the full path through the cage of iron that had captured the death rattle of infinity.

  And at the end, all cases reviewed, he said quietly, “You have found it. The proton lifetime is very nearly 1034 years.”

  The room burst into applause, wide grins and wild shouts as everyone pressed forward to shake his hand.

  10

  Singh handled the message to the NSF Clay also constructed a terse though detailed summary and sent it to the International Astronomical Union for release to the worldwide system of observatories and universities.

  Clay knew this would give a vital assist to his career. With the Kolar team staying here, he would be their only spokesman. And this was very big, media-mesmerizing news indeed.

  The result was important to physicists and astronomers alike, for the destiny of all their searches ultimately would be sealed by the faint failures of particles no eye would ever see. In 1034 years, far in the depths of space, the great celestial cities, the galaxies, would be ebbing. The last red stars would flicker, belch, and gutter out. Perhaps life would have clung to them and found a way to persist against the growing cold. Cluttered with the memorabilia of the ages, the islands of mute matter would turn at last to their final conqueror—not entropy’s still hand, but this silent sputter of protons.