by Lyndon Hardy
When he had been an undergrad, Fig had talked before audiences and knew once he got started he would lose himself in the words. He tried the old trick of thinking everyone was naked, but today that did nothing to help. The image of the exposed paunches of these middle-aged men and women was not a pretty one.
“Chalice is setting some sort of record,” someone in the second row called out. “He’s been here for over a year and hasn’t come to a single seminar. Even sends an RA when he is supposed to be the speaker.”
Great. Even some physicists were hecklers. Fig had to do something to make the atmosphere a little more friendly. He pushed his glasses up on his nose and then a second time to be sure, trying to make the daydream fresh…
Standing in front of a learned crowd. Expounding a great theory and watching their eyes widen in surprise. The thunderous applause. A standing ovation. Glasberg, no Glasberg and Weinhow pressing forward to shake his hand…
So why not? Maybe it could happen. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, he told himself. Excelsior! Faint heart never won fair lady. Margaret’s sassy smile in the eighth grade briefly flickered before him, but he pushed that aside. Into the Breach. Carpe Diem. Concentrate. Oh man, he was going to be so lame. …
Finally, be true to oneself., here goes.
“A physicist, a mathematician, and an engineer walked into a bar…”
“TO SUM up,” Fig said, “the data collected two years ago showed an anomaly in one of the low cross section decay channels. Nothing to write home about, but exactly as Professor Chalice’s super symmetry theory had predicted. Then, when another round of collection after the year-end shutdown was added, the discrepancy became larger. Those results are what I have presented here.
“Professor Chalice could not give this talk because he is busy with the LHC run going on now. We hope when that data is added, we will be able to say…”
Fig paused for effect. “As the bishop said to the actress, “Ah, that is a gluon of a different color.”
This time, no one laughed. Most of the audience immediately rose, not for an ovation but to leave quickly and get back to more interesting work. The moderator stepped to the dais. “Before the questions, I only would like to say that the results presented are an example of CERN’s outreach program — getting some of the smaller universities involved in the work we are doing here. Now please direct your questions to Mr. Newton.”
The questions! The experimental ones he probably could handle by himself. After all, he was the curator of Chalice’s data. But the theoretical ones… He glanced again in the direction of Glashow and Weinberg. They were already gone. None of it was going to happen. Oh, well, there were other dreams where that one had come from.
FIG HURRIED down the long corridor of guest offices on the basement floor of the satellite building. The overhead lights were dim, part of an energy conservation plan to thwart the complaints that CERN was a waste of taxpayer money. It took a bit of getting used to, but it was no worse than a stroll at evening twilight. Most doors were open, the usual indication the occupant would permit interruptions from whatever he was doing.
Luckily, someone had shown him how to use the directory to find Chalice’s room number. It was closed. Not unexpected, given his aloofness.
Fig tapped gently, but got no response. His advisor would be pleased with how things had gone. Would want to know immediately if not sooner. That is why he did not wait for his advisor’s summons. Best to avoid the scolding that would occur if he delayed until later. Don’t make any stupid mistakes while trying to capitalize on the opportunity for some educational funding.
He put his ear to the door and heard Chalice’s voice. He was there. Evidently, he was talking to someone.
Yes, Professor Chalice was bristly. Always concerned about proper protocol — the respect due to a full professor — even one from a place like Wagonbrook. And he did push the image of sainthood to the limit. Suits a car salesman would be proud to wear. A business card with the tag line ‘Searcher for the holy grail of physics.’
But if there was conversation, then perhaps his advisor would not mind hearing his report now rather than later. Cautiously, Fig grasped the knob and turned. The door was not locked. He slowly started to open it. Only darkness showed in the slit that had been revealed. Although the corridor was dim, the darkness of the office wall on the right now looked striped with a vertical ribbon of soft light.
He could hear Chalice more clearly. “Everyone, pay attention. My third-stage trigger has found another event, and I have computed the changes to be made.”
Fig extended his head into the partially open door and waited until his eyes adjusted. Chalice was sitting at a desk near the opposite wall, absorbed with whatever he was looking at on the computer screen. He had not noticed the door was ajar.
“First, the initial pixel detector,” Chalice said. “I will give you the new ID.” A keyboard in front of the professor began to clatter, and one of the windows before him started to scroll.
Fig puzzled until he made out the band of metal circling the top of Chalice’s head and the positioning earphones over his ears. A headset. Whomever Chalice was talking to must not be in the room.
“Two, one, seven, three,” Chalice said. “Convert it to binary as you have been taught.”
Fig cracked the door slightly more and snaked himself into the office. As silently as he had opened it, he closed the door behind. Waiting for the right moment to announce his presence, he let his eyes adjust to the almost total darkness. Several of the windows on the screen were for entering text commands, and Fig recognized the image in the center one. It was a reconstruction of an event from the Atlas Toroidal Apparatus, one of the two high-energy detectors of proton-proton collisions.
What was it above Chalice’s head? Tiny specks of many colors, each one too small to resolve individually, but together they formed an iridescent cloud, almost like an aurora but not quite — churning in restless motion.
“Closer to the microphone when you are done,” Chalice said. “I can’t tell you what to do next until I know you are finished with the last.” The advisor waited a moment. “Slower and more clearly. And speak up, speak up.”
“Ah, professor,” Fig ventured softly. “I do not mean to inter — ”
Chalice bolted from his chair and whirled about as if bit by a snake. “How long have you been here?” he commanded. “What did you hear?”
His headset was not wireless but connected to another device on the desk. The cord had pulled out of its jack when he rose, and a second voice spoke from a nearby speaker. “The first ID has been changed and the error correcting code modified to compensate. What is next? Another pixel detector, a semiconductor tracker, the calorimeter, the muon spectrometer?” To Fig, it sounded like one of the high falsetto chipmunk characters from years ago.
“Silence!” Chalice shouted. “Silence! All of you. Factor some large numbers or something while you await my next command.”
He walked to the wall and flicked on the lights. Striding menacingly toward Fig, he growled, “I told you to wait until summoned.”
“Yes, but, I though you would want to know as soon as — ”
Chalice glowered down at Fig. “You did not hear anything, understand?”
“Hear anything? Only you talking to someone.”
Fig pushed his glasses upward on his nose. “Well that, and the funny cloud over your head.” He craned his neck to look upward. There was no glow, but the air shimmered in a subtle way. He noticed his ears now were buzzing faintly as well. This was quite curious. Was he imagining things? Wasn’t there a bunch of colored dots before?
“Say, those events showing on the screen,” he said. “Are they ones being collected in real time right now?”
“I will make a bargain with you,” Chalice’s expression grew even grimmer. “You keep quiet about this, and, as the reward, … you will get some tuition relief.” Chalice scowled. “Or perhaps to make it even more c
lear — you will still get a degree.”
Fig felt his stomach protest again. He was only hanging on by a thread with Chalice anyway. And if now he got the boot, the last three years were a total waste. Out on the street. No advanced degree. No postdoc anywhere.
“Okay, Okay. I will not talk about what I heard — whatever it was.”
FIG SCOOTED the chair a little closer to the table. The IT staff had been quite helpful. As another visiting scholar, he had obtained an account and a desk — in a public area rather than a private office, but it certainly would do. He had done this many times before remotely from the States, of course, but he felt a thrill using the exploration tools on data that was so fresh. As he had witnessed Chalice doing a few hours before, he would be working with events shortly after they were obtained, not months later.
Fig brought up a level three trigger. It performed complicated queries on events reconstructed from the raw data.
He set the criteria to save the same type of events his advisor had been studying for the last two years. Low probability final states from marginal observations. The ones ambiguous and possibly corrupted by error. He and Chalice were bottom feeders, trying to squeeze new physics out of material no one else wanted to bother with.
Of course, the first plot he brought up was the crucial one. If there were a bump not explained by known particles, then he, well, Chalice actually, would be the discoverer. And since his advisor had predicted it before…
It was fascinating to watch the histogram on the screen begin to fill up in real time. In general, lower level triggers filtered out what happened with most of the collisions. Only a few hundred per second were processed further. And of those, only every minute or so would there be one passing Chalice’s level three.
An hour passed, but there was no unexplained bump at the right-hand edge of the plot. In fact, it looked much worse than the data from the last two years. Where had the effect of Chalice’s predicted particle gone?
Then the screen flickered and refreshed. The histogram redrew. Now, there was a bump at the edge. He was sure there was no such instants before. What was going on here?
Fig looked at his watch. It was exactly 11 AM, Central European Time. A coincidence? He cleared the graph and started over. The histogram again started filling.
A minute before twelve, he made a screenshot of the display. Again, there was no bump on the right. Again, there was a flicker and refresh. When the histogram was repainted, the bump was there. Fig superimposed the two graphs and flickered them back and forth like an astronomer looking for a planet moving against a starry background. There was no doubt about it. The raw data collected in the last hour now was showing results that had changed.
Fig pondered. He knew that all sorts of recalibrations were performed on the raw data all the time. One lecture he had Skyped said there were almost as many modifications as there were new additions. But there should be nothing as dramatic as what he had just seen. What strange phenomena was happening to the raw data? What was making it change?
Professor Chalice. He needed to interrupt him again.
The Basis of Truth
THIS TIME, Fig slammed open the door to Chalice’s guest office. The room was again dark. His advisor stared at the computer screen, his head surrounded by the twinkling cloud.
Fig did not wait for Chalice to react to his entrance. “How are you doing it?” he asked. “How are you changing what shows up on the data plot?”
“I asked you once before, but you did not answer,” Chalice said. “Do you really want to get your degree?”
“Of course,” Fig answered. “But, Professor, what you are doing is wrong. When they find out, your career will be ruined.” He adjusted his glasses. “And I will be tarred with the same brush. I will be ruined, too.”
“They won’t find out.”
Fig could not believe that he was lecturing his own advisor, a senior scientist who must know how the game was played. “Your super-symmetry idea will be subjected to the most rigorous scrutiny. You know that. It is one of the most basic mantras of science. ‘Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof.’“
“There is no way for anyone to check the results by another means,” Chalice said calmly. “There is only one CERN. No other accelerator can reach the same energies.”
“CERN data is distributed all over the world,” Fig rebutted. “More than a hundred places. A slew of others will look at their copies of the same information and see no bump is there. Then they will examine yours and recognize the discrepancy. What you are claiming is not physical truth. You will be accused of fraud.”
“That will not happen.”
“Why not?”
“Look, in the early twentieth century, we observed small particles dancing around in a liquid and postulated the theory of atoms and molecules explained what was happening, right? Then we saw actual tracks in photo plates and cloud and bubble chambers and decided there must be moving particles that explained them, too.
“All of this was Okay,” Chalice continued. “Any reasonable person would accept what was causing these phenomena. There was no doubt. No alternate explanation making any sense. But the physics of the sixties, produced statistical plots that did not agree with the theories of the time. So, we postulated more particles to explain the differences — new little bits of matter for which there was no direct evidence at all.”
“Yeah, so?”
“Fig, I am not ‘editing’ the event reconstructions in my own dataset that is derived from the raw data. I am changing the raw data itself. And when there is a change, software automatically updates additional copies wherever they happen to be throughout the world. The data from CERN is the truth, Fig. When anyone anywhere makes the same plots as I do, they will see the same results. There is nothing to contradict what I have produced.”
“Then the audit trails. That software will indicate that changes have been made to the raw data.”
“I do not use a computer to edit the data,” Chalice said. “The data bits on the disks are directly manipulated instead by my little helpers. There will be no trace of what they do.”
“Little helpers?” Fig asked. “You are not making sense.”
For a moment, Chalice stared at Fig but did not speak. Finally, he said, “You are not going to keep quiet about this are you? Very well. You force my hand. I will have to make more clear the reward.” He motioned to a chair near the wall. “Sit. This is going to take a while.”
“LET ME get this straight,” Fig said. He felt as if he had been drinking from a fire hose. “You use the PYTHIA software to construct the events you want and GEANT to simulate what the Atlas detector responses would be — the responses for all of them, individual pixels, the calorimeter, the muon detector, everything. Then you find events in the real data close to the ones you want and substitute those detector outputs with the artificial replacements you have created.”
“Yes, that is correct.”
“Okay, theoretically possible,” Fig said. “I guess I understand that part of it. As implausible as it may be. But the rest… pure fantasy, Professor, impossible to believe.”
“An accident, I admit.” Chalice smiled. “As so many great scientific discoveries are.”
Chalice stood and clasped his hands behind his back as if he were lecturing to a rapt audience of new students.
“After the first long shut down, I went down to the Atlas experiment bay. Got as close as I could. After all, even for a senior physicist, a marvelous thing to behold — almost 50 meters long, 25 meters high and wide, six types of detectors arranged in concentric layers about the central proton beams.
“It was after midnight. Everyone else had gone. For some reason, there was a power surge somewhere, and the breakers tripped. The huge device plunged into darkness. Only a few emergency lamps provided some light. I looked around, trying to remember the way I had come, and saw something in the dimness, a small glowing cloud of tiny twinkling lights.�
��
“Like what was over your head in this office?” Fig asked.
“You said you saw them, too, didn’t you? I had thought I was the only one.” He scowled. “That is the reason for the path we now are on.”
“The cloud of lights?” Fig persisted.
“Yes, exactly the same as what you saw,” Chalice answered. “They are what I call imps, for want of a better name. Tiny creatures from somewhere else in the multiverse. My guess is they were transported here in the bursts of ionization produced when the protons collide.
“Their explanation is total nonsense, of course,” the professor continued. “Something about what the imps call wizardry — The Law of Ubiquity — ’Flame Permeates All.’“
Fig’s jaw dropped at what he was hearing. Chalice explaining how he altered the data was due to the work of imps? Had his advisor gone insane?
As he pondered, another tiny thought crept into Fig’s head. The reality of ‘imps’ was nonsense, of course. More intriguing was ‘from somewhere else.’ His favorite books from childhood had been about magical lands beyond one’s reach — Oz, Narnia, Neverland.
An unexpected excitement within him began to awaken. He felt the warm glow that had been absent for, well, for too long a time. It was the sense of wonder, the delicate flower that, when it bloomed, was oh-so-sweet. Imps from another part of a multiverse was foolishness, of course, but if only they indeed were real…
“As I waited for light to be restored, I got to know them,” Chalice ignored the far-away look flickering for a moment in Fig’s eyes. “They were sentient. We were able to communicate, and somehow I got them to obey my commands. Almost immediately I saw my way to the Nobel Prize.”
“Professor, please take this in the spirit it is given,” Fig said.