If you want to get a sense of Fermilab’s heyday, this is a fun page: http://history.fnal.gov/botqrk.html. It describes the discovery of the bottom quark and has several 1970s-era photos of the scientists involved and the equipment they used. By the way, Fermilab is open to the public with tours available. Batavia, Illinois. Go, and bring all the little quarks with you.
As I write (2017), the accelerator at CERN is the premier location where protons smash into atoms, but that may not last much longer. The Chinese really are building a new accelerator, and it really is named “The Higgs Factory” (who knows how they came up with that?). The information in Chapter 23, “Chinese,” is as accurate as I could make it. China is a terrible country when it comes to scientific research because they encourage students and scientists to plagiarize and the Central Committee can overrule any discovery to enforce the “truth.” This is not science, it’s the classic argument from authority. We’ll soon see what the Chinese do with The Higgs Factory. It’s expected to go online in the early 2020s and it will dwarf the size of CERN in Geneva. I’ve heard some physicists say the whole facility may be a huge waste of money because there are now doubts that higher energy will discover anything new. We’ll see.
So, when do we leave the real world? Is string theory real? Are extra dimensions of space complete fantasy? Surprisingly, most of this is still reality. String theory has been around for decades and many science fiction writers have relied on it. It speculates that there are additional dimensions of space, ten to be exact. This is far beyond what our simple minds can contemplate, and I decided to just focus on one of those extra dimensions, the fourth dimension, and use the directional names of ana and kata. These names, by the way, are also reality. Some scientists do talk about pointing in the kata direction, which of course we can’t do because we’re three-dimensional creatures. If you want to read a fun book about dimensions, try The 4th Dimension by Rudy Rucker. One of my all-time favorites.
Are there really quantum-sized extra dimensions of space? Certainly, this is where the fiction starts, right? Wrong. String theory is tied to quantum physics because these extra dimensions exist only down at the string level. A string is extraordinarily tiny, so tiny… well, it’s tiny, let’s leave it at that. It’s entirely possible that extra dimensions of space really exist down there, but we have no way of measuring them, so there’s no evidence today.
The fiction of this story comes in when Bradley explains to Daniel and Marie that CERN scientists who discovered the Higgs boson also discovered evidence of string dimensions. They didn’t. I wish they had. That’s not to say that we won’t eventually find evidence of extra dimensions. We might. In fact, finding extra dimensions is completely plausible. Some would say it’s just a matter of time. I’m in that camp.
Additional fiction comes in Chapter 10, “Science.” Dr. Park explains to Daniel and Marie about coherent neutrinos. He says that they’ve learned how to control the phase oscillation, just like a laser. In the real world, neutrinos do indeed have a phase, and they really do oscillate between phases. That’s what gives us the three flavors. But, alas, there is no such thing as a coherent beam of neutrinos locked in the same phase.
The scientists at Fermilab are today conducting several experiments to understand how neutrinos oscillate as they travel. I hope the NOvA team or the LBNF team discovers that neutrinos pop in and out of the extra string dimensions, solving the puzzle about why neutrinos have little interaction with normal matter. Yeah, that might happen.
And then there’s Chapter 20, “Collaboration.” Nala explains to Daniel all about the expansion of a quantum dimension and the resulting compression of another physical dimension. She tells him that the universe behaves like a balloon. You expand in one direction and it compresses in another. Okay, I admit it, I made all that up. Nala writes the “Spiegel equation” and the “Spiegel graph” on a napkin and tells Daniel it will be as famous as E = mc2 someday. Yeah, I made all that up too. There is no Spiegel equation; in fact, there is no Spiegel.
Chapter 20 and beyond were fun to write. As an author, once you’ve left the tracks of reality, you can go wherever your imagination takes you. I wanted the story to remain believable, but I also needed the technology to be able to compress space by 99.99 percent or more. It’s the only way we humans will ever get to the stars.
Traveling to the stars is ridiculously difficult. The Milky Way is a hundred thousand light years across. Even our arm, the Orion Spur, is ten thousand light years long. Our “local” area, where the star VY Canis Majoris is located (yes, it’s a real star), is five thousand light years across. Even with huge advances in our spaceflight technology, we’d need tens of thousands of years to get to VY Canis Majoris. As Daniel points out, a light-speed radio “conversation” would be: “Hi, how are you?” Wait four thousand years. “We’re doing well, how are you?” Wait another four thousand years… It’s absurd. No civilization would do this. The limit imposed by the speed of light is crippling to both travel and communication.
Which brings me to the main premise of the book. The chance that humans are ever going to communicate with alien civilizations using radio communication is slim, maybe none. Sorry, SETI, but you’re not likely to hear anything—ever. We’re listening, but nobody is broadcasting. We’ve been searching large portions of the sky and millions of frequencies, yet SETI hasn’t yet heard a peep. Why? Possibly there is no one out there; we’re alone. Possibly space is just too big, and anyone out there has utterly given up any hope of communication.
But another answer is that radio, or anything based on electromagnetism, is a technology that simply doesn’t fit the requirements. Nobody is broadcasting because at interstellar distances, radio is far too slow, and more importantly—they’ve found some other way.
We’ll need to find that way too, a mechanism to avoid the cosmic speed limit altogether. In this book, compressing space was my way, but there are certainly others (quantum entanglement?). For now, this is science fiction, but if we stay curious and keep exploring, we may yet uncover some aspect of the universe that will solve the problem. When we do, I hope we’ll find that many other civilizations have figured it out too. It’s possible that the galactic conversation is already happening, right now, and that someday it will be our turn to join.
If you’d like more details about the story, plus a lot of pictures that couldn’t possibly fit into the book, please go to my web page: http://douglasphillipsbooks.com.
Did you like this story? There’s more! (You knew there would be, right?) Quantum Void is the next book in the series and is available now. I’ve included the first chapter below to whet your appetite.
And finally, books live or die on reviews. If you enjoyed the story, please consider writing a short review. It only takes a minute, and your review helps both future readers as well as the author.
Thanks for reading! Douglas Phillips.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to all the help from authors at Critique Circle, especially Travis Leavitt, Stephanie Cory, Kathryn Hoff and P Mathison. There’s nothing like a critique from someone who’s down in the trenches writing their own book. Your comments were incredibly valuable in helping me shape the plot and characters, and your ability to consistently locate my numerous mistakes was a humbling (but helpful) experience!
Thanks to my editor, Eliza Dee, who taught me all about novel architecture and point of view. You can read a thousand books, but many of the shared traits among them can still remain hidden until someone else explicitly points them out. Now, I see those structural features everywhere.
Thanks also to Rena Hoberman for the beautiful book cover. I loved it when I first saw it, and I’m looking forward to exploring new concepts for the next book.
Many thanks to my friends and family (John, Phil, Rachel, Jeff, Dave, Jim, Todd, Trevor and others) for your time and feedback on the early versions. I hope you recognize the final story, but if you don’t, it was all your fault.
And finally
, thank you to my wife, Marlene, for helping to shape the female characters of the story and for putting up with months of me droning on and on about four-dimensional space and Fermilab.
Box Set Table of Contents
Quantum Space
Quantum Void
Quantum Time
Quantum Void
Book Two in the Quantum Series
By Douglas Phillips
Text and images copyright © 2018 Douglas Phillips
All Rights Reserved.
This is a work of fiction. References to actual places assist in setting a level of realism, however all characters, businesses and events portrayed in the book are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses or actual events is purely coincidental.
Quantum Void Table of Contents
1Ripples
2PVC
3Briefing
4Katanauts
5Murphy’s Law
6Bosons
7Caps
8Gateway
9Dancers
10Beextu
11Decoherence
12Workers
13Brainwaves
14Singularity
15Electricity
16Regulators
17Fermilab
18Isolation
19Thoughts
20Void
21Florida
22Core
23Eigenstates
24Messages
25Partners
26Visualization
27Duty
28Huddle
29Flickers
30Apparition
31Austin
32Interdimensional
33Particles
34Bluebonnets
35Resolve
36Rabbit Hole
37Probabilities
38Ratios
39Evacuation
40Density
41Non Sequitur
42Intersection
43Rupture
44Passageway
45Kata Zero
46External Observer
Afterword
Critical Density
Nothingness
Quantum Superposition
Acknowledgments
The science presented in this story is real.
Mostly.
1 Ripples
Friday, May 20
Nala Pasquier slid the bangle bracelet off her wrist and placed it on the security table. The metal detector at the entrance to Wilson Hall was a new addition, a sign of changing times. Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory was once a place known only to the locals of Chicago, but its relative anonymity had disappeared eight months ago. First contact. Life beyond Earth. These days everyone knew about Fermilab and the secrets of the universe uncovered there.
Nala waved to the security guard. “What’s my new word today, Angel?” She correctly pronounced his Spanish name, An-hel.
“Descubrir,” the guard answered with a tight smile.
A particle physicist is not easily stumped, but Nala was forced to pause as she gathered her belongings. “Use it in a sentence.”
“Él descubrió una mosca en la sopa.” Angel crossed his arms, challenging her capacity to learn the language one word at a time. With dark brown skin and a last name that was often confused as Hispanic, most people were surprised when Nala told them she was half Haitian and that French was the language of Haiti, not Spanish.
“Discover?” she asked tentatively. “He discovered a fly in the soup?”
The guard nodded with approval. “Está bien. You got it.”
Nala laughed. “Descubrir. Discover. That’s a good word to know in my business. Thanks Angel. Yo quiero descubrir algo nuevo hoy.”
“You want to discover something new today,” Angel echoed in English. “Your Spanish is getting better, Nala.” His pride was obvious.
“I have a good teacher.” She waved once more and continued into the building’s interior atrium, an open space that soared to skylights far above, mirroring the expansive ambitions of the scientists who worked here.
Perhaps she would discover something today. Her work in the new science of quantum space had advanced by leaps and bounds thanks to a few tips from an alien source. It was an exciting time in particle physics, in part because there was still much more to learn. At their heart, all scientists are lifelong students of nature.
Nala took the elevator to basement level three and then descended two flights of stairs even deeper into the Earth. She walked a long concrete hallway and rounded a corner. The sign on the door hadn’t changed—Diastasi Lab, Authorized Personnel Only—but it no longer took a top-secret security clearance to become one of the authorized few.
Their work with extra dimensions of space was now public knowledge. Government classification had finally been lifted, and Nala was back in touch with colleagues at other labs, former friends who’d thought she’d disappeared off the face of the earth. Her stunned friends, even her mother, had been kept in the dark for years. Um, yeah, Mom, we figured out how to reach into a fourth dimension and compress distances by a factor of a billion.
Spatial compression had already made unmanned spaceflight obsolete. The stars were now within easy reach for any probe, camera or radio link. Interstellar travel for humans was not yet possible, but one step at a time. Earth was now connected into a vast web of alien civilizations. The future was wide open.
Nala tapped her badge on the security pad and pushed open the door. “Morning, Thomas. Sorry I’m late,” she said to the stout red-haired young man at the lab’s workbench. Thomas, her lab assistant, was hunched over a signal generator, one of a hundred electronic components that covered the bench and filled every available shelf and niche in the overcrowded lab.
Thomas looked up with a grin on his bearded face. “Och, you’re a wee scunner, you are.” The accent was fake, but it was also pretty good.
She pulled a chair close to the workbench and turned on a computer. “That’s a new one. Are we Scottish today?”
“For a wee spell, lassie. Perhaps ’til midday lunch,” Thomas replied.
“Or as long as you can keep the Sean Connery accent going?”
“Possibly ’til then, aye.”
Thomas wasn’t Scottish. Or Irish. Or German. He was Russian on most Wednesdays. And every Monday, he became a strange cross between Ricardo Montalbán and the swashbuckling Spanish cat from Shrek. A bit wacky, most definitely an oddball, but mostly Thomas was fun. Anyone with a rebellious streak and a touch of drama was okay in Nala’s book.
“We’ll amp it up a wee bit today, my friend.” She settled into her normal position in front of a set of three large computer displays at one end of the workbench. She tapped the keyboard, a panel with gauges appeared on one display and she moved a slider labeled tau to her chosen value. It was a simple command, but potent, backed by the largest particle accelerator in the United States.
Four floors above in the Fermilab main control room, colleagues who operated the accelerator would be at this very moment awakening the giant machine, inserting protons into its heart, and initializing the powerful magnets that formed the two-mile ring of the Main Injector loop. Soon, those protons would be screaming down a curved pipe at close to the speed of light—eighty thousand laps every second. Most people had a hard time wrapping their head around that kind of speed, so someone had installed a digital counter on the Main Injector tunnel wall, a sort of odometer that ticked once for every thousand laps. As the protons reached full speed, the counter’s digits became a blur.
One hundred twenty-five gigaelectron volts. A beam of protons with that kind of power could burn a hole through your head. It had happened once before in Russia—to a visitor who’d accidentally peered into an opening with a live beam. The results were not pretty.
Nala and Thomas ran down an operational checklist together, validating system status and checking their lab equipment. Thomas adjusted the alignment of a pink pipe that pointed
straight into a clear plexiglass box above the workbench. The box was ground zero for the neutrino beam that would shoot through their lab at near light speed. Thomas placed a compact webcam inside the box and inserted a rubber tube through a hole, the other end of the tube connected to a large tank of nitrogen.
Finishing her checklist, Nala looked up. “Shall we?”
“All systems are go for launch,” Thomas said, temporarily lapsing into his NASA ground controller’s voice.
Nala picked up a handheld radio from its cradle. “Is Cody working today?”
Thomas nodded. “Aye. That he is.”
She keyed the transmit button. “Cody, Nala. Got anything flying around the loop yet?” The question was purely a courtesy. She could feel a slight vibration in the floor, which meant the accelerator was already spinning particles around its racetrack.
The radio hissed, followed by a man’s voice. “Where’ve you been, Nala? Hell, we’ve been on standby pretty much forever.”
Five minutes late to the lab today. Taunts were just part of the game with these guys. “Okay, that’s enough, smart-ass. We’re ready down here when you are.”
“Stand by.” A few seconds later, a high-pitched hum reverberated from the overhead pipes—the sound of protons, ramping up to obscene energy levels. “One-twenty-five gig,” Cody said. “We’re up to full speed. You’ve got targeting control, but I’ll manage the neutrino oscillation.”
“Gotcha.” She clicked a few times on her computer. “Let ‘em fly.”
“Protons away.”
Somewhere behind a thick concrete wall, a magnetic gate opened and a stream of fast-moving protons blasted through. The particles smashed into their target—a disc of graphite no bigger than a coin. A stream of pions ripped out the other side, decaying in picoseconds to neutrinos and headed straight into Nala’s lab.
The background hum increased dramatically to a loud buzz that filled the room. Thomas put on sunglasses and focused on the webcam inside the plexiglass box. As the pitch of the buzzing reached an irritating level, a brilliant blue flash blasted from the box, accompanied by a loud pop. Thomas didn’t flinch.
The Quantum Series Box Set Page 31