“Was it some kind of breakdown of the equipment?” she asked.
“Perhaps,” he said, “but I doubt it. Except for the obvious problems with violated conservation laws, it behaved like a real event. I saw a particle producing a huge ionization and with more momentum than both beam particles put together. It made a jet of particles every few centimeters. It was like a machine gun that was spitting quarks.”
Several people had gathered around George as he talked. “But if it’s real…” said a graduate student.
“Even if it’s real, folks,” said George, “there isn’t much we can do about it tonight. It must have been a rare event. It isn’t likely to repeat soon, and unless it does it’s an unpublishable fluke, a glitch in the apparatus due to causes unknown. We should examine it carefully and train the trigger net to watch for more. For now, I want everyone who noticed something unusual to write an entry about it in the logbook and sign their entry. We’ll discuss this with the next shift at the 6 a.m. run meeting. Before that, we need everything that everyone observed written out in full detail.”
As the crew members dutifully wrote their entries, animated discussion erupted among the physicists. They batted about speculations and ideas on what they had seen, what it might mean, and how they might analyze the data from the event. Finally, however, the discussion deflated from lack of focus. As it tailed off, one by one the participants drifted back to their consoles and workstations.
Alice stood by George for a moment longer, smiled, then walked back to her lapstation. She began to type very rapidly.
It was going to be a long night, George thought, but he was glad she had been here for the excitement.
23
WHEN THE SUMMONER HAD ACTIVATED, TUNNEL Maker had been deep in transtemporal meditation. He hurried out of his personal enclosure, hurled himself down a deep inertial shaft, and accelerated through a maze of access conduits to the enclosure of the Bridge Generator.
A glance told him that there had been a massive discharge. The energy receptacles in the long row had been fully drained of their antimatter and stood cold and empty. He accessed the data stream from the nearest neural node. His sensorium translated along the time axis until he came to the discharge event.
A feeling of relief overlaid with deep satisfaction suffused his. emotion center. The apparatus had performed flawlessly. A microscopic Bridge with the right characteristics had been snatched from the quantum vacuum, establishing a connection between his universe and a point of ultra-high-energy density in the target Bubble. The Bridge Generator had successfully brought the new Bridge to a stable energy balance.
He studied the data stream further. The Bridgehead had appeared in the new Bubble while traveling at a high velocity relative to the matter medium there. It had appeared in a vacuum, passed through a region of pure element 4 and several layers of element 14, then moved to a gaseous medium consisting mainly of element 10, with traces of elements 1 and 6. It had traveled some distance in that and various solid media, which analysis showed to consist of layers of elements 14, 26, 29, 82, and 92. A momentum flow through the Bridge consisting mainly of massive neutral dark matter particles, with a few quarks entrained, had been established and used to decelerate its Bubble end until it had come to rest. The Bridge had stopped in a medium made of elements 82, 14, and 8. The ambient temperature of the medium was between the freezing and boiling points of water. The data on the medium made of element 92 were particularly interesting. It was essentially pure isotope 238, with only faint traces of the other expected isotopes.
The message implicit in these data was very good news. The new Bubble was an accessible matter universe. The combination of materials encountered was clearly a product of technology. Element 10 was an inert gas and was never found naturally in high concentrations.
There was also a puzzle. The isotopic composition of the element 92 medium through which the Bridgehead had passed was difficult to explain. Element 92 was the most massive and highly charged of the stable chemical elements, with good structural properties, and so it was a commonly used material. That much was to be expected. Because of its high nuclear charge and mass, it was excellent for slowing or stopping charged particles. But why did the medium consist of pure isotope 238, with only parts per hundred thousand of the other two stable isotopes? Isotope separation was technologically very difficult, particularly for so massive a nucleus, and there seemed little point in it.
Was it possible that the processes of nucleosynthesis in the new Bubble were sufficiently different as to suppress the natural occurrence of the other two stable isotopes of element 92? Tunnel Maker had no idea. The Individuals specializing in astrophysics and cosmology should be alerted immediately to these data. Perhaps when contact was established, they could learn the answer by asking.
24
ALICE HAD LEARNED THAT THE SSC CAFETERIA, ALONG with the SSC visitors’ center and science museum, was perched atop a small artificial hill made of dirt that had been excavated from the tunnels during the construction. On the flat Central Texas landscape it seemed to be the highest viewpoint for three hundred miles. Her gaze swept across the golden prairie and the blue and gold sky. They had arrived while the fading colors of a spectacular sunrise were still visible.
Alice felt exhilarated. Although she had been up all night, she didn’t feel tired. She could not recall when she had felt more alive. “George,” she said as they sat down at a window table for breakfast, “I still don’t understand. If what we saw this morning was some unprecedented new physical phenomenon, why isn’t that important news, a big scientific breakthrough?”
George shrugged as he cut a piece of ham. “Because we can’t explain it, we can’t reproduce it, and we can’t eliminate the possibility that it was the result of faulty equipment. Therefore, we can’t publish it. It will have to remain as a big one that got away.”
“You said something like that at the run meeting,” she said, “but you can’t just ignore what happened.”
He chewed thoughtfully for a while. “Let me recall a little piece of physics history for you, Alice,” he said finally. “There is a might-be particle called a ‘magnetic monopole’ that was suggested by certain theories of Dirac and others but had never been observed. It’s supposed to be a fundamental particle like an electron or a proton, except that instead of having an electric charge, it’s supposed to have a ‘magnetic’ charge, like the north pole of a bar magnet that has been cut off and isolated, with the south pole completely gone.”
From force of habit Alice took her notebook from her purse and began to take notes.
“In the early 1980s,” said Professor George, slipping into lecture mode, “a physicist at Stanford named Blas Cabrera designed and built a very clever detector for finding magnetic monopoles using some tricks involving superconductors. And a few months after he turned on the apparatus, on Valentine’s Day, February 14,1982, nature sent Cabrera a special valentine. In the middle of the night the apparatus recorded the perfect signal of a magnetic monopole passing through the sensitive volume of the detector.”
“That sounds like our Snark,” said Alice.
“Actually, his situation was a bit better than ours,” said George. “He had a fairly respectable theory that predicted the particle he had apparently detected, right down to the observed signal. And so, with considerable fanfare, he published a paper describing his monopole observation in a very prestigious journal. Cabrera’s paper produced a kind of physics gold rush. Dozens of laboratories set up various types of monopole detectors. Cabrera himself received a big National Science Foundation grant and built a much bigger version of his original detector. And they all waited…