Alice was amused. George had spent long hours fetching papers on wormholes from electronic preprint databases, studying the papers in great detail, complaining about the unintelligible math, and bombarding Roger with questions. Now, a week later, he sounded like an expert who had been working in the field for years. Perhaps he had learned something from his association with Jake.
“In 1962,” George continued, “Fuller and Wheeler showed that a wormhole is so dynamically unstable that it would pinch closed before any light, matter, or information could pass through it. Then in 1988, Morris, Thorne, and Yurtsever demonstrated that a Casimir-effect capacitor could stabilize a wormhole, preventing its pinch-off. Subsequent work of Visser and others demonstrated that the same stability could be achieved in other ways. From what we now gather from the Snark diagrams, there are ways of stabilizing a wormhole that we had not previously considered. Professor Home will discuss this later.”
“But what’s at the other end of the wormhole? In particular, what’s this ‘other universe’ business you mentioned?” the questioner persisted. “Are we talking Everett-Wheeler probability branches or shadow-matter worlds or what?”
“None of the above,” said George. “Professor Axel will address the cosmological aspects of the Snark message later today, but let me attempt a lowbrow experimentalist’s answer to your question. The ‘inflationary scenario’ describing the early history of the Big Bang is a synthesis of cosmology and particle physics. But up to now, there seemed no hope of attempting any experimental verifications of its predictions. The scenario described the very early universe as a region of expanding space saturated with an almost unimaginably large quantity of energy. As that space expands, a local irregularity occurs, perhaps around a single magnetic monopole, and a sort of bubble forms. Inside that bubble is what we would call normal space, while outside is the energy-saturated space in which the strong, electroweak, and gravitational forces are indistinguishable. The walls of the bubble, driven by the energy liberated in this transition from one kind of space to another, move outward faster than the speed of light. That bubble of space is what became our universe. We and all the space we can reach, all the planets, stars, galaxies, and galactic clusters are inside it. But a larger megauniverse, the true cosmos, remains outside the bubble.”
Not bad, thought Alice, taking notes. Now George is an expert on cosmology, too.
“The inflationary scenario,” George continued, “allows for the possibility of many such bubble universes, each isolated from the rest, each walled off in its own pinched-off isolation from the others and from the greater megauniverse in which they all exist. It now appears that through the Snark, we are receiving a message from intelligent life that inhabits another bubble universe. Apparently it’s easier to contact intelligent life in other universes than it is in your own. That’s the conclusion we’ve reached from studying the Snark diagrams. Inflationary cosmology seems to have been experimentally confirmed.” The questioner nodded and sat down.
Alice observed that there were fewer hands raised now; the audience must be running out of questions. The director called on Jake. He stood and slowly turned to face the audience. “There is a time to push your own work, to toot your own horn,” Jake began. “This, however, is not such a time. A leading member of my LEM team, my friend and colleague Professor George Griffin has made a momentous, unprecedented, and completely unexpected discovery. A discovery which, as he has graciously pointed out, was made possible because of this great accelerator and because of the remarkable sensitivity and measurement capabilities of our LEM detector. I would like to congratulate Professor Griffin on his work. Two weeks ago he tried to interest me in this Snark event, and I blush to admit that I dismissed it as uninteresting background.” He turned to the stage and smiled at George.
“And background it is, in a certain sense,” he continued. “The Snark is not a fundamental particle, not an object of the kind this great facility was built to study. It is something unique, something far stranger. It is an alien artifact, an object whose very nature we can only guess at from the meager clues that their messages have so far provided.”
I can’t believe it, Alice thought. Jake is actually being magnanimous. Could he have had a personality transplant over the weekend? But what did he mean about the Snark not being the kind of object the SSC was built to study?
“Some might argue that Professor Griffin’s discovery lies outside the realm of particle physics. That it more properly belongs in the domain of astrophysics, SETI studies, or even extraterrestrial biology.” Jake paused and looked at the audience.
Okay, here it comes, Alice thought.
“But I feel that this great discovery was made in this laboratory and it should remain in this laboratory. I would like to suggest to the SSC director and the SSC executive committee, with all due respect for their prerogatives, that they should create a Snark task force to investigate this new phenomenon as fully and rapidly as possible, that significant laboratory resources be committed to this project, that additional external support be immediately sought from the funding agencies and foundations, and that Professor Griffin be asked to take a leave of absence from his university so that he can head this task force and devote his full effort to this project.” Again he turned to George. “And I want to congratulate Professor Griffin again for his remarkable achievement.”
Facing George, Jake began to clap, and soon the audience of the entire auditorium rose in a standing ovation.
The director strode up on the stage and warmly shook George’s hand. “We’ll take our break now,” he said into the microphone.
When she could get George’s attention, Alice, balancing her coffee cup and cinnamon roll, said quietly to him, “Was that really Jake Wang who said those things? Or was this a changeling swapped for Jake in the night by the elves?”
George laughed. “You have to be able to read your Jake,” he said. “Allow me to interpret. First, he saw no way of blocking work on the Snark, so he got out in front to lead the parade, radiating whatever reflected glory he could in the process. Second, he claimed as much credit as he could for the LEM detector as a device for discovering wormholes, and I’m sure he’ll continue to do so with rising intensity for the indefinite future. Third, he has effectively moved all work on the Snark as far from LEM as possible, sending me with it. And finally, he’s suggested that general laboratory funds and external funds be used to support whatever work is done on the Snark, meaning that LEM funds will not be spent on it. Understand now?”
“He’s moved you out of his road, so he can get on with discovering the Higgs?” Alice asked.
“Exactly,” said George. “I suppose I might have done something similar in his place.” He winked at her.
A tone sounded in the hallway, indicating that the second part of the seminar was about to begin. Together they walked back into the lecture theater.
39
THE DISTINGUISHED VISITORS WHO HAD PARTICIPATED in the Snark seminar this morning stood clumped together, their attention directed at the large flatscreen mounted on the Snark laboratory wall. It displayed the bit-stream from the Snark, rendered as a 1728 by 1728 pixel bit-map image. The display changed as the bit-stream came in, cycling through the same twelve images every two hours. A nearby oscilloscope showed the changing waveform of the transmission.