Broken Symmetry

8. Spin Down

Harold handed the sheet of paper to Roy, who leaned back in his office chair. “The beams haven’t been regular anymore,” he said, as Roy studied the data. “We’re not getting ‘Zing! Zing!’ now, but rather, ‘Pop! Pop!’” Harold demonstrated with his hands his interpretation of zinging and popping, and Roy found himself unable to keep from laughing.

But this was a serious matter. “Without proper beams, we can’t finish the experiment,” he lamented.

“You’re telling me?” asked Harold. “We re so close, so very close, and all we can do is hope that they send us what we need. I have to tell you, it’s got me real worried, Roy.”

The last time Roy had seen his friend so visibly distraught was when the proton decay experiments of the 1980s had failed to confirm Volin’s personal Grand Unification Theory, called SU(5). Its name had turned out to be as unimportant as the theory, since it had ended up disproved. Oddly enough, it was that same disproving of the theory that had led to the necessity of the SSC.

“Could the shorter beams be due to anything specific?” Roy asked.

“If so, it’s got me stumped. The beams aren’t cutting off the way my equations predict. It’s almost like they’re doing it deliberately. But why?”

Roy studied the data again, a listing of the different beam lengths. The shorter beam times did seem fairly self-consistent, as did the longer ones that were interspersed. But what could it all mean? He thought for a moment.

“Harold, let’s think this through. If the beams have been coming here, then what’s been happening in that other universe?”

Harold’s brow furrowed. “Trick question, right? If the beams are coming here, then they’re leaving there.”

“Which means that they haven’t been able to take any data. No beams.”

A shocked look appeared on Harold’s face. “That means that their experiment, as far as they know, is a failure. And—”

“And their government is probably just as unlikely to fund a failing experiment as ours is,” Roy concluded for both of them.

They were silent for a moment, then Harold said, “They can’t. They can’t shut down their collider. We’re so close.”

“Well, that just may be what they’re doing. Unless—”

“Unless what?”

“For the past few months, I’ve been trying to imagine what it would be like for me to live in that universe. What if I had gotten my collider, and then, just as it seems to be working, the beams keep vanishing? What would I do?”

“What you did in this universe. Keep fighting until the bitter end.”

“Right. But what if we were the ones losing beams? I would have called you in to examine the data, and what would you have found?”

It took Harold a few seconds. “The physics of the bridge is the same in either universe. I could probably have developed this theory in the other universe as well.”

Roy smiled. “Which means?”

Harold’s eyes lit up. “Which means that they know about us! So if their collider is in danger of being shut down, they would try to let us know about it!” He snatched the paper out of Roy’s hands, studied it for a moment, and whistled.

“It’s Morse code. See here, where the data begins to get loopy? It’s an SOS!”

“So what does the rest of the message say?”

“Give me a minute. It’ll be easier if we use the computer to graph the pulse length versus time…”

It was more like ten minutes until Harold had completely translated the message. Most of the message confirmed their ideas about the other universe. But it ended on a very ominous note.

Harold read, “ ‘Shutdown scheduled in few weeks. Must present data. Do you have any?’ ” He looked up at Roy, who rubbed his eyes.

“Well, yeah, we do,” Roy said, “but how do we share it with them?”

Harold got that twinkle in his eye again.

“You mean, how do we signal them back when we don’t have a beam?”

“Yes.”

Harold laughed. “Easy. Same way they signaled us, but in reverse. We set up the detectors to turn on and off very rapidly in Morse code, so when they send a beam over to us, they get a staggered disappearance instead of the usual ‘zing!’ kind. Our communication does depend on their sending us a beam, but we can still communicate. It’s a simple application of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and Bell’s Theorem. We’ll just need a SQUID.”

A Superconducting Quantum Interference Device. A tiny integrated circuit cell made with superconductors, about the size of a transistor. Roy nodded. That made sense. They needed to interfere with the quantum mechanical nature of the beams, and both ideas Harold had cited involved quantum interactions. Bell’s Theorem, in particular, involved the quantum nature of information transfer. “If you can figure it out—”

“I can.”

“Then let’s do it.”