Eifelheim

5. Now: Sharon

During the Middle Ages, they used to burn heretics.

Now, it was never so many or so often as has been supposed. There were rules, and most of the penalties were acquittals, pilgrimages, or other impositions. If you wanted to burn, you really had to work at it; and it may say something about human nature that so many did.

Sharon did not know she was a heretic until she whiffed the smoke.

Her department head lit the first faggot. He asked her if it were true that she was investigating Variable Light Speed theories and she, with the innocence and enthusiasm of anyone filled with the holy spirit of scientific inquiry, said, “Yes, it seems to resolve a number of problems.”

Now, she meant the cosmological problems: flatness, the horizon, lambda. Why the universe is so finely tuned. But the department head — his name was Jackson Welles — was dead to the spirit and was justified by the law — the law in this case being the constancy of the speed of light. Einstein said it, he believed it, and that settled it. So he had intended a completely different set of problems. “Like Noah’s flood, I suppose.”

The sarcasm surprised Sharon a great deal. It was if she had been talking about auto mechanics and he had responded with a jibe about pinochle. It didn’t process right away and because thought in her always induced reflection, Welles took this to mean that his arrow had sunk home, and he leaned back in his chair with his hands interlaced over his stomach. He was a lean man, hardened by treadmills, universal machines, and academic politics. He dyed his hair with great art, maintaining enough gray to suggest wisdom, but not so much as to suggest age.

They were sitting in his office, and it struck Sharon how spare the office was. Twice the girth and depth of her own, it contained only half the clutter. Text books, shelved and looking new, journals, photographs and certificates, all forbidding in their orderly ranks. His chalk board held not equations or diagrams, but budgets and schedules.

It was not that Welles did not think, but that he thought about things beside physics. Budgets, grants, tenure, promotions, the administration of the department. Someone must think of such things. Science doesn’t just happen. It’s a human activity, performed by human beings, and every circus needs a ring-master. Once, a very long time ago, a younger Welles had written three papers of exceptional merit deriving quantum mechanics from Maxwell’s equations, the contents of which were still emitting doctoral dissertations around the world; so don’t think he was a Krawattendjango — a “tie dude,” as our kids say in Germany. It is not given many men to write even one such paper. Perhaps a longing for those heady days, and an understanding that a fourth was not in him, informed his attitude.

“I’m sorry,” said Sharon. “But what has VLS to do with Noah’s Ark?” Even then, she thought that maybe it was some abstruse joke on the head’s part. He did have a deadpan sense of humor, and Sharon was more accustomed to clowns.

“Do you really think you can prove young earth creationism?”

Perhaps it was the earnest expression on his face. The grim-set line of his mouth. Inquisitors may have had such an expression when they relaxed their charges to the mercy of the secular arm. But Sharon finally realized that he was serious.

“What,” she asked, “is young earth creationism?”

The department head did not credit such innocence. He thought everyone as attuned as he to the vagaries of legislatures, school boards, and other such sources of madness. “That God created the universe only six thousand years ago? Tell me you never heard about that.”

Sharon knew how Tom would have answered that, and fought hard to keep his words from her lips, saying instead, “Now that you mention it, I have heard that.” She really had needed the reminder. She spent most of her waking hours in Janatpour space. There were no creationists there, young or otherwise. It would have confused them and they would have gotten lost along one of those nameless dimensions of hers.

“’Now that you mention it,’” Welles mimicked. His sarcasm was famous in the higher reaches of the school’s management. Deans fled at his approach. “There is nothing so well established as the constancy of lightspeed.”

It was the wrong thing to say, not only because there really were several other things better established, but because there is nothing guaranteed to get the back up a no-fooling scientist than argument from authority. Neither Welles nor Sharon had been raised religiously and so neither of them realized that they were having a religious argument, but something atavistic rebelled in Sharon’s heart. “That’s the current paradigm,” she said. “But a more careful inspection of the data -.”

“You mean until you can spin the data to prove what you want!” Welles said this with no sense of irony. Kuhn may have been a poor philosopher, but he was right about the cold, dead hand of the Paradigm. “I researched it myself when I heard what you were up to, and there has been no change in the measured speed of light for several decades.” He leaned back in his chair and linked his hands again under his breastbone, taking her silence as acknowledgement of the devastating impact of his rebuttal.

“Excuse me,” Sharon said with only a minor tremor in her voice. “A couple of decades? That’s like measuring continental drift for a few hours. Try a couple of centuries, like I did. You need a long enough baseline to -.” And here her thoughts slip-slid away in an unexpected direction as her memory pulled a factoid from her hat. She examined the factoid top to bottom, side to side, and around and around. Welles’ eyebrows rose at the sudden silence. It was so sudden and so silent that his ears hurt. But when he opened his mouth, she raised a hand to him. “Did you know that when Birge reported the decrease in light speed in Nature in 1934, he’d found no change whatsoever in wavelength?”

Welles, who hadn’t known the first, was equally in the dark on the second. “You mean when he reported an error in his measurement…”

“No, wait,” she told him, “this is really interesting.” She had forgotten that she was on the carpet in her department chairman’s office. She had found a glittering nugget in the ore and wanted to show it to everyone, supposing they would be as delighted as she was. “Think it through, Jackson. Light speed is frequency times wavelength. So if c is dropping and wavelength is constant, frequencies must be increasing.”

“So…?” Welles drew the question out. He was no ignoramus. He saw suddenly where Sharon’s thoughts were headed.

“So,” she said, her excitement building, “atomic frequencies govern the rate at which atomic clocks tick. Of course, the speed of light has been constant since they began using atomic clocks to measure it. The instrument is calibrated to the thing it’s measuring! Oh, my gosh!” She saw the chasm gaping before her; but unlike Welles, who would not step up to the lip, she leapt right into it. “Oh, my gosh! Planck’s constant isn’t!”

That is the way of it among heretics. They start questioning one doctrine and end up questioning everything. No wonder they used to burn them.

That grinding sound Welles heard was a paradigm shifting. But the gears were rusty. “Dr. Nagy,” he said with heavy formality. “You have tenure, and there is nothing I can do about that. But if I were you, I would not be surprised if your grant were not renewed next semester.”

There was the warning from the tribunal. Repent of your heterodoxy or be damned. But Sharon Nagy was on the scent of something very peculiar, and Jackson Welles knew nothing of Évariste Galois. Facing a duel at dawn, Galois had spent his last night on earth scribbling the foundations of algebraic group theory. A good night’s sleep, and he might have survived the duel; but there is a certain frame of mind that prizes discovery over life itself. If death had not daunted young Évariste, what terror had loss of funding over Sharon? She was not as young as he had been, but she knew how to take a bullet.

It was late when she left the university grounds. The semester had started and she had papers to grade and discussion notes to prepare. It was one of those schools that put great store in teaching and even its most prestigious scholars were required in the trenches. She held two graduate seminars and taught an upper division course in galactic structure that was well-subscribed, though her students thought her a cold fish. On a Monday she was likely to resume precisely where she had left off the previous Friday, and sometimes that meant in media res, while her students, bleary from weekend partying, squinted at the whiteboards and the projections from her computer, trying to remember from where the derivation had started.

It was during her preparation for the galactic structure class that she noted a further anomaly.

“Hernando,” she asked the young post-doc who worked with her. “Why should cars all drive down a highway at speeds in multiples of five?”

Hernando Kelly was from Costa Rica, a ‘tico,’ as they call themselves. He was bronze, distressingly well-built, and climbed sheer rock faces for recreation. With his arm in a sling — sometimes the rock faces win — Sharon had put him to work mining data bases and compiling the results. He scratched his head and tried to imagine what the question had really been about. “At multiples of five,” he said, hinting for clarification.

“Right. The cars are going 50, 55, 60, 65, and so on.”

“You haven’t reached the speeds on the Blue Route yet.” White teeth showed beneath a black moustache. “So nobody’s going like 62 or 57 or something?” At Sharon’s nod, he shook his head. “Okay, I’ll bite. Why?”

“I don’t know,” she answered happily. “I thought you knew because you were the one who told me.” She held up a frequency distribution, one of several dozen he had printed off of Minitab from the “galactic empire” database. Distribution of Galactic Redshifts, read the title above the chart. “Notice anything?”

“Well, yeah. It’s comb-shaped. That means the measurements resolution is coarser than the plotting scale so you get empty bins in the histogram. I’ll rescale the chart.”

“Measurement resolution,” she said.

“Right…” he said, a bit wary, for he recognized the manic tone in her voice.

“Unh-unh,” she answered. “Quantized. Redshifts are quantized. Galaxies are receeding at certain speeds, and not at speeds in between.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” she enthused. “That would only be an answer, and I’ve got something much more precious. I’ve got a question.”

Kelly didn’t see the big deal. It was like the light speed business. That had been a real bitch, because not all the literature was of equal quality. Some reports lacked the original data, some reworked previous data, some were duplicates. In some, the measurement method had been poor or the techniques for using it had not yet been perfected. Just compile all the data, the Ice Queen had told him. Oh, yeah, nothing easier.

It was all measurement error, he was convinced. Light speeds, now red shifts. He had seen “comb-shaped” histograms when he had worked summers at a metal fabricator in San Jose. The gauge had read out in increments of 0.002″ and the plotting scale had increments of 0.001″. Odd numbers need not apply. He hoped the rumor wasn’t true and Dr. Nagy wouldn’t lose her grant because of her religious obsession. He liked working with the Ice Queen.

It was a few weeks later that Sharon saw the answer, and it was a stunner.