Eifelheim

8. Now: Sharon

The subconscious is a wonderful thing. It never sleeps, no matter what the rest of the mind does. And it never stops thinking. No matter what the rest of the mind does. Sharon was in the middle of her galactic structure class — seven upper-class physics majors — when, in turning about after making a point, her eyes fell on the poster-sized chart of the distribution of red-shifts.

Of course.

She fell silent, and the student who had just answered her question shifted uneasily in his seat, wondering where his answer had gone wrong. He tapped his stylus staccato on the table top and looked for support to his classmates. “What I meant…,” he temporized, hoping for a hint.

Sharon turned around. “No, you were quite right, Girish. But I just realized… Class dismissed.”

Now the singular difference between the graduate species and his undergraduate cousin is that the graduate student may be discontent with such an unexpected boon. For the most part, they are there because they want to be, and not because society says they ought to be. And so they filed out of the seminar room buzzing to one another while Sharon fled to her office, where she scribbled furiously.

When Hernando entered half an hour later and tossed his cap on the book shelf and dropped his backpack beside his desk, she was so deep into it that she never noticed him. He stared at her for a while before he settled himself to sort out his lecture notes for his nucleonics lecture.

“It’s because time is quantized,” Sharon said, drawing Hernando out of his own contemplation.

“What? Time is quantized? Yeah, I suppose. Why not?”

“No, it’s the red-shifts. Why the galaxies are receding at discrete velocities. The universe sputters.”

Hernando spun his chair to face her. “Right.”

“Okay, vacuum energy. Einstein’s lambda, the one he called his biggest blunder.”

“The cosmic fudge factor he threw in so he could get the result he wanted.”

“Right. So, Einstein was a genius. Even when he made a mistake it was brilliant. Lambda is pushing the galaxies apart faster and faster. But the amount of energy in the vacuum depends on the speed of light — and vice versa.”

“That’s what your theory seems to suggest.”

She ignored his doubts. “If light speed drops, it reduces the amount of energy the vacuum can hold. So where does the excess energy go?”

Hernando pursed his lips and looked thoughtful. “Outside the universe?”

“No, inside the universe. Into ordinary radiation and matter. Into dust clouds and microwaves, stars and planets and galaxies, into whales and birds and college professors.”

The post-doc whistled. “The Big Bang itself…”

“And with no wacky inflaton field needed as an epicycle. Quantized time is the only thing that explains the redshift gaps.”

“Measurement resolution?” Hernando suggested. “Limited samples? Unrepresentative samples?”

“That’s what they told Tifft when he discovered it. And… they were right about a lot of it; but they were also champions of orthodoxy clinging to the existing dogma. Look, light is quantized, space is quantized, what makes time so special? It’s just another dimension of the continuum.”

“Oh, that’s a convincing argument. Besides, if you’re right, it’s not exactly a continu-um.”

“And that’s why there are gaps in the redshifts. What looks like a continuous motion picture is really just a series of frames. The universe has ‘cracks’ in it.”

The muscular young man laughed. “And what’s in those cracks?”

“Oh, wouldn’t we love to know! Whole other universes, I think. Parallel worlds.”

Hernando cocked his head and looked thoughtful. “Objective evidence?” he said after a time.

“That’s where you come in.”

“Me?” He looked alarmed, as if Sharon was about to send him into one of those parallel worlds.

“You need to build me a chronon detector.”

“Sure, my afternoon is free after my two o’clock lecture. I suppose a chronon is…”

“A ‘quantum’ of time.”

He thought about it. “Cool beans. But how do you detect something like that?”

“You and me, Hernando, we’re going to figure that out. Think of it. Someday, you may walk on another planet, or on a parallel world.”

The post-doc snorted. “I got something to do that weekend.”

Sharon leaned back in her chair, certain now that she had his skeptical mind hooked. Every enthusiast needs a skeptic, or she would run out of control.