George shook his head in wonder as he orbited the structure, viewing it from above, from below. With another gesture he quadrupled its size. He pointed and flew to the starburst, then moved into it. Radiating lines seemed to pass through his wireframe body. George placed his eye at the vertex and sighted out along the long violet trajectory of the Snark. It showed no curvature at all in crossing the 2 Tesla toroidal magnetic field.
What if…? With quick motions he bracketed the violet structure and its jets, shaping the boundaries of the surface around it with his hands until only the violet line and its attendant red blossoms were within. Then he gestured and the envelope was empty, the violet structure gone.
The column of figures reappeared. After correction for the energy and momentum removed by expected but unobserved neutrinos, the laws of conservation of energy and momentum had been reestablished. The violet line and its jets were the problem.
A double hit? George wondered. He gestured and the violet line reappeared. Once again he expanded the starburst. And again. And again. Then he propelled himself close to the vertex, the center from which all the lines radiated. Within the position resolution of the detector, the violet line came from the vertex. There was no hint of an offset that might indicate event pileup.
Finally George scanned the database for other similar events that might have been previously recorded but overlooked. There was not much there. A couple of events showed unusually large missing mass and momentum, probably from very energetic neutrinos. A few were obviously the result of electronic glitches in the detector. He deleted these, implicitly telling the neural net that similar ones should, in the future, be recognized as uninteresting.
This would require further thought, he decided. He gestured for hardcopy of the characteristics of the Snark, the output directed to the color laser printer in the hostel lobby, then gestured again and the starburst vanished.
He was standing before the goat-headed form. Under the event serial number engraved on the pedestal he added new text, writing with a white-hot finger. He carved SNARK TALK TO JAKE! into the milk-white marble. Another gesture sent him into blackness. He was lying in bed in his room at the SSC hostel.
He removed the magic glasses and data cuffs and put them into the briefcase beside the bed, then walked through the dimness to the room window and raised the blackout blind installed for day sleepers like himself. He blinked into the early afternoon sunlight that now streamed through the window. Then he stretched, took off his pajamas, and went to the bathroom for a shower.
The warm water felt wonderful. He turned his body slowly under the stream, thinking. He would need to talk to someone about this Snark thing very soon. Alice was fine, it had been nice having breakfast with her and discussing the Snark. She was excited and acted almost proprietary about the thing, and she was going to come to his office this afternoon to discuss it further. And they had another dinner date for tomorrow night. But at the moment George needed to talk to someone who knew some physics. Preferably, more physics than himself, which narrowed the choices considerably. Who…?
Then he remembered Roger Coulton, the new member of the SSC Theory Group who had just arrived from CERN. Roger had struck him as a person who had the flexibility and playfulness to be interested in a problem like this. The theory building wasn’t far from the hostel. Yes, he’d look up Roger as soon as he dressed and grabbed a bite of lunch.
26
AN UNDULATING SURFACE OF MANY BLENDED COLORS was displayed in 3-D on the workstation screen, a fairy landscape of red-topped broad rolling hills and blue-violet shadowed valleys. Toward the right end of the slowly changing surface, however, it disintegrated into a jungle of wild fluctuations. Roger stared at the screen of his workstation and pounded his desk. The damned perturbation series had diverged again.
Surely God must have it in for QCD!
The basic problem with quantum chromodynamics, the fundamental theory of quark behavior, was that the forces were simply too strong. All the mathematical tricks developed by generations of theoretical physicists, all the dodges and gimmicks and workarounds that had worked with weaker forces, were useless. The color force was the strongest in the universe, and it stoutly refused to be perturbed.
While he was still at CERN, Roger had invented a new approach, a convoluted expansion based on canonical variables that became smaller as the strength of the force increased. He had been so sure that it was the key to making reliable QCD predictions. But the lousy series wouldn’t converge!
The calculation on the screen had been his final hope, one last straw to be grasped at. Several months of work were down the drain. It should have worked, dammit. He couldn’t understand why it hadn’t. He combed his fingers through his thick brown hair. The trouble with taking on difficult problems that no one previously has ever been able to solve, he thought, is that you feel like such a fool when you can’t solve them, either.
Roger’s father had been a baker in King’s Lynn. It had been his custom to spend much of his free time and earnings at the corner pub near their terrace house. Roger had three older sisters, and it seemed that the family had never had enough money. At least, many an evening he had fallen asleep listening to his mother and father arguing about it.
Roger’s grandmother, he learned later, had intervened to change his life. She had never approved of her daughter’s marriage and had always kept her distance. However, she was fond of Roger, whom she said resembled her late husband. She had recognized his intelligence and arranged for him to take competitive examinations that had won him a generous scholarship to Harrow. When he was admitted, she had arranged to pay for his uniforms and the other costs out of her modest savings.
When Roger went up to Harrow, it had seemed a miraculous escape from a dreary and constricted life. For the first time he had classmates with interests somewhat like his own. Classmates who read books. Who, when they weren’t yammering about sports, could talk intelligently about astronomy and rockets and chemistry and electronics and computers and particle physics, all in the course of an evening. Harrow had computers and an enormous and venerable library. For the first time in his life — , Roger found that he had more interesting books available to him than he could read.
Of course, there were the “initiations” and the bullying and the snobbery. Roger had been tall for his age, but painfully thin. It was well known at the school that he was one of the “dole” students, there on charity because his working-class family could not afford the standard tuition. And there was also his East Country accent, which marked him as different more clearly than a brand on the forehead. Several bullies among the older boys had turned some of their attention in his direction. At first he had accepted it as inevitable unpleasantness and had learned to avoid certain people and places and times.
But then one rainy evening Greg Rutlege, a senior boy who was on the school rugby team and who seemed to have it in for Roger, had caught him as he was leaving the rooms of his math tutor. Roger was carrying a beautiful book on projective geometry, just lent to him by his tutor. It contained vivid pictures, along with the equations for projecting any three-dimensional object onto the two-dimensional plane of a computer screen. Roger was hurrying back to his quad, his head full of ideas that he wanted to try, when he found Greg blocking his way on the dark path. Greg had shoved him several times and then knocked the book from his hand. It tumbled with a splash into a puddle.
Roger became very, very angry. Through a red haze of rage he saw that he was now holding a brick from the walkway in his hand. It was as if he was watching from a distance the actions of someone else, someone who was bent on homicide. That person fully intended to kill his adversary. However, due to a general lack of coordination, he managed only to place a three-centimeter split in Greg’s scalp, just above the hairline. It was sufficient. The quantity of blood was most impressive to both of them. So were the six stitches that were used to close the wound after Roger had helped Greg to the infirmary.