“That was over twenty years ago, and for all I know they’re still waiting. Because neither Cabrera nor anyone else has yet detected another believable signal of a magnetic monopole. And if they did see another one today, they’d have trouble getting the result published, because the physics community now ‘knows’ that there are no magnetic monopoles. The current standard model of cosmology, the inflationary scenario, now explains why there are none.”
Alice wrote rapidly. “But what did Cabrera see?” she asked finally.
“Nobody knows,” said George, taking a sip of orange juice. “I guess he saw a Snark, just as we did last night.”
“This is new to me,” said Alice. “Does this happen all the time in science? Are there desk drawers full of unpublished data on spectacular measurements that only happened once and can’t be reproduced? It sounds like a dirty little secret of the field.” Maybe she should do a Search article about it, now that she had her foot in that magazine’s door. But she had to finish her Fire Ants novel first. Nobody can make much of a living writing freelance articles for science magazines.
“Perhaps it is,” said George. “When I was an undergraduate at MIT, I had a very good course on the philosophy of science. I did a paper on a famous essay by the French philosopher-scientist Poincare. He was an excellent physicist, but he had the problem that he was also a devout Catholic. Poincare was deeply concerned about the implicit conflict between divine miracles and the laws of physics. So he considered a hypothetical phenomenon that occurs, like a miracle, just once in the history of the universe. He argued convincingly that science has no way of dealing with a one-shot physical phenomenon. They have to be reproducible. Poincare believed that scientists would tend to ignore one-shot events, might even pretend that they didn’t exist.”
“It would seem, George,” said Alice, “that Poincare’s dilemma has been dumped in your lap. What are you going to do with it?” She smiled. She enjoyed listening to him talk and particularly enjoyed skewering him with his own logic.
He winced. “Dammit, Alice,” he said, “the paper I wrote for that class challenged the professor on that point and argued against Poincare’s conclusion. The Big Bang seemed to me to be a good counter-example of a one-tune event with great scientific significance. I guess that, basically, it goes against my grain to ignore data, particularly interesting data. But after what happened this morning and considering the alternatives, I must concede that perhaps Poincare had a good point.”
“You can’t just drop it!” said Alice. Her investigative nature was offended by the thought that she might never know what they had seen.
George inhaled deeply and sighed. “Believe me, Alice,” he said, “I won’t drop it. After I get a few hours of sleep, I have lots of work to do on the Snark. I have to study its kinematics. I have to find out if we’ve previously recorded anything similar that we didn’t notice. But as long as it’s just one event, it’s not going to be of much interest to my LEM colleagues.”
“Well, I’m interested,” she said and meant it.
25
GEORGE LOOKED DOWN ON THE PALACE FROM ABOVE, consulted an index that hung in midair before him, then pointed his pink wireframe hand in a direction that led along a diagonal track that led deep into the Palace. He sped above the endless rows of statues, past pools and stairways and atria, until he arrived at the icon that he had reserved as a repository for anomalous events recorded by LEM, a goat-headed figure with a male human body.
Just before eight this morning, he had returned to his room at the SSC hostel, but after about four hours of sleep he had come wide awake with an irresistible compulsion to know more about the bizarre event that had occurred in the LEM detector. Lying in the narrow bed, he had used his briefcase workstation to connect to the SSC network directly from his room. Now he was about to have a closer look at the Snark.
Months before, George himself had set up this system for identifying anomalous events selectively. Jake and most of the other principals of LEM were not particularly interested in anomalies. They had a clear vision of the object they wanted to find. It was the Higgs vector boson, the theoretically predicted mediating particle that, in the early universe, had split the strong interaction off from the electroweak interaction. The Higgs had a theoretically predicted range of possible masses centered around 200 GeV and a definite signature in the LEM detector that was clear and unambiguous. The whole idea of LEM, and indeed of the SSC, was to discover the Higgs and collect the Nobel prize.
Therefore, most of George’s LEM collaborators did not welcome any distractions from the unexpected. George, a maverick as usual, felt as a matter of principle that the whole point of experimental physics was to discover the unexpected, not to confirm the predictions of some theorist. Therefore, he had the anomaly territory all for himself.
“Output summary, please,” he said to the goat-headed statue. A cube appeared in the air before him. Its sides contained multicolored lists summarizing the progress made, enumerating the events scanned and recorded, tabulating and plotting their characteristics.
George reached out and turned the cube, studying the list of events that had satisfied the trigger criteria of LEM but showed anomalous behavior when processed by the analysis programs and categorized by the LEM neural network.
He quickly found the Snark event from this morning. He gestured in the air, there was a pop sound, and he was in darkened space. He floated in darkness before an intricate self-luminous structure, a multicolored starburst pattern of gently curved arcs emanating from a central vertex point. He reached out and touched a green-hued line that radiated upward from the vertex. It dimmed to a dotted line, retaining its place but revealing behind it a more complex structure. A violet line speared outward from the vertex, punctuated at almost regular intervals with clusters of red-fingered jets, like a straight vine with red blossoms.
So many jets. George had never seen anything like it. His fingers made a gesture and a column of figures appeared to the left of the structure.
The very heavy ionization of the undeviated particle was noted, along with the unusual production of jets. Interesting events usually showed one to four jets, always coming from the vertex. But the summary list showed that this event had twenty-nine jets, none from the vertex! That, of course, was not possible. Even with 40 TeV in the center of mass and colliding particles with forty thousand times the proton rest mass in available energy, there simply wasn’t enough energy to break loose twenty-nine quarks or gluons, to make twenty-nine jets.
George scanned the summary table more closely. There was also a problem with the momentum balance of the event. Usually jets, clusters of particles emitted in the same direction, are emitted nearly back-to-back because of momentum conservation. But these jets were systematically emitted in nearly the same direction that the massive particle was moving, almost as if they were being emitted to slow it down. In the process there was an apparent violation of the law of conservation of momentum, even if one left out the momentum of the heavy particle.