Broken Symmetry

3. Spin Up

Kristin ran through the calculations for a fifth time. It couldn’t be right, she kept telling herself. There was no way that this could be right. And yet…

She rubbed her bleary eyes and picked up the phone to call Ray. He answered curtly. “Hello?”

“Ray, it’s Kristin. I think—”

He interrupted her. “Kristin, I don’t have time at the moment. Why don’t you—”

Ray cut himself off, and Kristin heard voices in the background. A moment later he got back on the line. “On second thought, why don’t you come to my office?” Click.

That was abrupt of him, Kristin thought. Something big must be going down.

She cradled the receiver, and nervously ambled over to Ray’s office. Her footsteps echoed as she walked down the empty corridor and around the corner. She opened the door.

Inside, Ray was talking with a dark-haired man in a two-piece suit. Kristin’s entrance had interrupted what looked like a heated conversation; Ray’s cheeks were flushed and the man looked distinctly uncomfortable.

“Kristin,” Ray said, “I’d like you to meet Louis Reichen, of the Department of Energy.”

Kristin closed the door behind her and approached Reichen. He was a small man, about the same height as Kristin, with a tiny mustache that looked like a chocolate stain, even up close. Kristin sensed trouble. Most people from the DOE showed up in plaid shirts and jeans, scientists interested in getting down to work on some project. This fellow looked like a businessman. He shook her hand firmly, then turned back to Ray, who sat behind his desk.

“As I was saying, Dr. Shwartz, the people back in Washington are getting restless, and they’ve sent me to look into things here.”

Ray looked at Kristin. “Dr. Anderson, would you please tell Mr. Reichen the current status of the SSC?”

Caught offguard, Kristin mumbled, “Uh, yeah,” and then filled Reichen in on their problems in getting data. “But I think I’ve—”

“Thank you, Doctor,” Ray interrupted. “Now, Mr. Reichen. I know this seems bad, but we’ve only been running it for about a year now. There’s bound to be problems until the accelerator has gone through a shakedown phase.”

“ ‘Shakedown phase,’ ” Reichen echoed. “You’ve had ten years to build this thing, Dr. Shwartz. Any problems you might have had during a ‘shakedown phase’ must surely have been foreseen.”

“Not necessarily,” Ray said. “When you’re dealing with an experiment as large as this, there are bound to be certain unknown factors—until you actually run the experiment, that is—that can’t be predicted beforehand.”

“In fact,” Kristin said, “that’s exactly how some of the greatest discoveries in science got made. X-rays. Vulcanized rubber. The—”

“Yes,” interrupted Reichen, “but none of those things cost as much as this contraption. Dr. Shwartz, do you know what they’re calling this—this fiasco in Congress? ‘The 10 Billion Dollar Hole in the Ground’ is the least of it. I wouldn’t want to tell you what I’ve heard them call it in back room discussions.”

Reichen picked up his briefcase. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m DOE; I support the collider, and want to see it working. But my hands are tied. If you can’t show me positive results, and demonstrate to Congress that this thing is more than just a big failure—well, I’ll have to tell them so, and they’ll kill it.”

Ray looked at the top of his desk. “What if I could show you those ‘positive results’ you want?”

“Well…”

“Look.” Ray consulted a small calendar at the top of his desk, then glared at Kristin. He said, “It just so happens that we have a run scheduled for tomorrow. Why don’t you come watch, and you can judge for yourself. I promise you that we’ll get ‘positive results,’ as you put it.”

Reichen nodded slowly. “That would be acceptable. I’ll leave the number of my hotel with the project secretary. I just hope you do have something to show me.”

They watched Reichen leave the room, and as soon as the door closed behind him Kristin glared back at Ray. “There is no run scheduled for tomorrow.”

“There is now.”

Kristin sat down. “How are you going to ensure positive results?”

“I’ll go out to the collider and tell it that Congress has ordered it to work smoothly tomorrow.” They laughed. Ray continued, “Hey, it worked for the space program once. One model of rocket kept failing on the launch-pad until someone from Washington told the chief engineer that it simply had to work the next time they launched it. The engineer went out to the rocket and ordered it to work. And it did.” Ray leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes for a moment. “You had something you wanted to talk to me about?” he finally asked.

“Oh! As a matter of fact, I do.” She smiled. “And come to think of it, I do need another run of the accelerator to test my idea.”

“Which is?” Ray prompted.

“Ah, yes. My idea. Ray, I know what I’m about to propose will sound even more far-fetched than the idea of the beams just disappearing, but I think I know where they’re going. And, more than that, I think I can predict when they’ll vanish.” She looked around for a moment, flustered. “I left my calculations in my office.”

“We’ll get them later. What’s the idea?”

Kristin took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Do you recall Hugh Everett’s many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics?”

Ray looked surprised. “Yes, I do. Whenever a decision has to be made, the Universe splits into two separate universes. Avoids the thorny problem of the observer’s role, even if it’s not as elegant. Although I tend to feel that Everett’s interpretation was rendered moot by John Cramer and Shu-Yuan Chu, in their transactional interpretation.”

“Moot doesn’t mean invalid. Everett’s interpretation could still be considered a valid one.”

“Oh, sure,” Ray said, smiling, “assuming you could prove it over all others. People have been trying to assert one view of quantum mechanics over all others since the Copenhagen interpretation. But that’s the one people seem to accept the most.”

“Yeah. Well. The thing is, I’ve always been uncomfortable with that one. I mean, it’s one thing to say that, for a subatomic particle we can’t see with the naked eye anyway, its spin is undetermined until an observer looks at it and it chooses to be either spin up or spin down.”

Ray nodded. “Wave-function collapse.”

“Yes. But it’s quite another thing on a macroscopic scale. Look at Schrödinger’s cat Does it really make sense to say that cat isn’t alive or dead until you open the box? I think Everett’s interpretation works a lot better. Schrodinger’s cat ends up alive in one universe and dead in another.”

“So what does Hugh Everett’s thesis have to do with the SSC?”

Kristin laughed. “Sounds like a riddle. Well, it’s like this. I’ve always been into studying the different interpretations of quantum mechanics, ever since that first course I took with Doug Strauss. And I must admit that I’ve always been fond of Everett’s idea—can’t you imagine what it would be like if every possible universe that ever could have been was really out there, somewhere?” She waved her hands in the air as if to demonstrate.

Ray shook his head. “I’ve tried to stay firmly planted in this Universe.”

“Your loss. Anyway, it always bothered me that Everett’s interpretation allowed for parallel universes, but ones that were inaccessible from ours. I mean, what’s the point of saying an alternate universe exists if you can’t get to it? It might as well not exist.”

“My point exactly.”

“Then something occurred to me. I read Everett’s original Princeton thesis, and noticed that he failed to take into account high energy interactions. I mean, extremely high energy interactions, on the order of a TeV.” She paused.

“Kristin, I’m not sure I see where this is leading. That is, I think I do, but—what exactly are you getting at?”

“I’m getting at the fact that at high energies, Everett’s theory predicts that a quantum mechanical ‘gate’ opens up, similar to an Einstein-Rosen bridge. For a split second, the barrier between different universes might be traversed. But we’ve never been able to create interactions of that magnitude until—”

“Until we built the SSC,” Ray finished for her.

“Yes.”

“Kristin, that’s utterly impossible.”

She felt her face flush. “So was splitting the atom,” she retorted.

Ray laughed. “So it was.”

“And look where it led us to today. Listen, Ray. You said that we have to do a run of the accelerator tomorrow anyway, to satisfy Reichen. Let me calibrate the detectors to verify my theory. In the meantime, you can go over my math and see if I missed anything.”