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GRAVITY’S ANGEL

By Tom Maddox

Here’s an informed and thoughtful look at the megabuck world of Big Science—and

a reminder that even with the very biggest of projects, you can’t afford to overlook

even the smallest of possibilities . . .

Born in Beckley, West Virginia, Tom Maddox is currently on sabbatical from

his position at Evergreen State University in Washington. Although he has sold only

a handful of stories to date, primarily to Omni and Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction

Magazine, he scored a major success last year with the publication of his

well-received first novel, Halo —and I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot more from him

as the decade progresses. Maddox currently lives in Oakland, California, and

contributes a monthly column of “Reports from the Electronic Frontier” to Locus .

* * * *

The Invisible Bicycle burned beneath me in the moonlight, its transparent wheels

refracting the hard white light into rainbow colors that played across the blacktop.

Beneath the road’s surface the accelerator tunnel ran, where the SSC—the

Superconducting Synchroton Collider—traced a circle 160 kilometers in

circumference underneath the Texas plains.

Depending on how you feel about big science and the Texas economy, the

SSC was either a superb new tool for researching the subatomic world, or

high-energy physics’ most outrageous boondoggle. Either way, it was a mammoth

raceway where subatomic particles were pushed to nearly the speed of light, then

crashed together as violently as we could contrive— smash-ups whose violence was

measured in trillions of electron volts.

Those big numbers get all the press, but it’s only when particles interact that

experiments bear fruit. The bunches of protons want to pass through each other like

ghosts, so we—the High Beta Experiment Team, my work group—had all sorts of

tricks for getting more interactions. Our first full-energy shots were coming up, and

when the beams collided in Experimental Area l, we would be rewarded for years of

design and experiment.

So I had thought. Now I rode a great circle above the SSC, haunted by

questions about infinity, singularity—improbable manifestations even among the

wonderland of quantum physics, where nothing was— quite —real. And more than

that, I was needled and unsettled by questions about the way we— not my group but

all of us, the high-energy physics community—did our business. I’d always taken

for granted that we were after the truth, whatever its form, whatever our feelings

about it. Now even that simple assumption had collapsed, and I was left with

unresolvable doubts about it all—the nature of the real, the objectivity of

physics—riddles posed by an unexpected visitor.

Two nights earlier I had returned from a ride to find a woman standing in front

of my house. “Hello,” I said, as I walked the Invisible Bicycle up the driveway

toward her. “Can I help you?”

“I’m Carol Hendrix,” she said, and from the sound of her voice. she was just

a little bit amused. “Are you Sax?”

“Yes,” I said. And I asked, “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”

Really I was just stalling, trying to take in the fact that this woman was the one I’d

been writing to for the past six months.

We had begun corresponding in our roles as group leaders at our respective

labs, me at SSC-Texlab, her at Los Alamos, but had continued out of shared

personal concerns: a mutual obsession with high-energy physics and an equally

strong frustration with the way big-time science was conducted—the whole

extra-scientific carnival of politics and publicity that has surrounded particle

accelerators from their inception.

Her letters were sometimes helter-skelter but were always interesting— reports

from a powerful, disciplined intelligence working at its limits. She had the kind of

mind I’d always appreciated, one comfortable with both experiment and theory. You

wouldn’t believe how rare that is in high-energy physics.

Women in the sciences can be hard and distant and self-protective, because

they’re working in a man’s world and they know what that means. They tell each

other the stories, true ones: about Rosalind Franklin not getting the Nobel for her

X-ray work on DNA, Candace Pert not getting the Lasker for the first confirmation

of opiate receptors in the brain. And so they learn the truth: in most kinds of science,

there are few women, and they have to work harder and do better to get the same

credit as men, and they know it. That’s the way things are.

Carol Hendrix looked pale and tired, young and vulnerable—not at all what

I’d expected. She was small, thin-boned, and her hair was clipped short. She wore

faded blue jeans, a shirt tied at the waist, and sandals over bare feet.

“I didn’t have time to get in touch with you,” she said. Then she laughed, and

her voice had a ragged, nervous edge to it. “No, that’s not true. I didn’t get in touch

with you because I knew how busy you were, and you might tell me to come back

later. I can’t do that. We need to talk, and I need your help . . . now —before you do

your first full-beam runs.”

“What kind of help?” I asked. Already, it seemed, the intimacy of our letters

was being transformed into instant friendship in real time.

“I need Q-system time,” she said. She meant time on QUARKER, the lab’s

simulation and imaging system. She said, “I’ve got some results, but they’re

incomplete—I’ve been working with kludged programs because at Los Alamos

we’re not set up for your work. I’ve got to get at yours. If my simulations are

accurate, you need to postpone your runs.”

I looked hard at her. “Right,” I said. “That’s great—just what Diehl wants to

hear. That you want precious system time to confirm a hypothesis that could fuck

up our schedule.”

“Diehl is a bureaucrat,” she said. “He doesn’t even understand the physics.”

Yeah, I thought, true, but so what? Roger L. Diehl: my boss and everyone

else’s at the lab, also the SSC’s guardian angel. He had shepherded the accelerator’s

mammoth budgets through a hostile Congress, mixing threat and promise, telling

them strange tales about discoveries that lay just at the 200 TeV horizon. All in all, he

continued the grand tradition of accelerator lab nobility: con men, politicians,

visionaries, what have you. Going back to Lawrence at Berkeley, accelerator labs

prospered under hard-pushing meg-alomaniacs whose talents lay as much in politics

and P.R. as science, men whose labs and egos were one.

“Let’s talk,” I said. “Come inside, tell me your problem.”

“All right,” she said.

“Where are you staying?” I asked.

“I thought I’d find someplace later, after we’ve talked.”

“You can stay here. Where are your bags?”

“This is it.” She pointed to the sidewalk beside her. At her feet was a soft

black cotton bag.

“Come on in,” I said.

* * * *

I figured she would be doing interesting work, unusual work; maybe even valuable

work, if she’d gotten lucky. I wasn’t the least bit ready for what she was up to,

We cranked up “The Thing,” a recent development in imaging. It had a

wall-mounted screen four feet in diameter; on it you could picture detector results

from any of the SSC’s runs. When it was running, the screen was a tangle of lines,

the tracks of the particles, their collisions, disappearances, appearances; all the

wonderland magic so characteristic of the small, violent world of particle physics,

where events occur in billionths of a second, and matter appears and disappears like

the Cheshire cat, leaving behind only its smile—in the form of brightly-colored

particle tracks across our screens.

Still, setting up and running simulations is an art, and at any accelerator lab

there’ll be one or two folk who have the gift. When a series of important shots is

coming up, they don’t get much sleep. At Los Alamos, Carol Hendrix, despite her

status as group leader, was the resident wizard. At Texlab, we had Dickie Boy.

She stretched, then sat at the swing-arm desk with its keyboard and joystick

module and logged on to QUARKER with the account name and passwords I gave

her. Her programs were number-crunching bastards, and QUARKER’S Cray back

end would be time-slicing like mad to fit them in.

“Tell me what this is all about,” I said. “So I’ll know what we’re looking at

when this stuff runs.”

“Sure,” she said.

While we waited for QUARKER, she drew equations and plots on my

whiteboard in red, green, black, and yellow, and she explained that she was

postulating the existence of a new kind of attractor that came into being in a region

of maximum chaos, its physical result an impossible region of spacetime, where an

infinite number of particle events occupied a single, infinitesimal point.

Mathematically and otherwise, it is called a singularity, and in cosmology

something like it is assumed to be at the center of black holes. There were all sorts

of theorems about singularities, few of which I knew, none rigorously. Why would I?

This stuff went with astrophysics and the gravitational forces associated with huge

chunks of mass.

When she finished her explanations and turned from the whiteboard, I could

see that she was wired and sleepy at once. Mostly, though, she was exultant: she felt

she’d hit the jackpot. And of course she had, if any of this made sense ... it

couldn’t, I thought.

The Thing gonged, to tell us we had our results. I pulled up a canvas-backed

chair beside her as she sat at the console. “We’ll walk through the simulation,” she

said. “If you have a question, ask.”

At first there were just cartoon schematics of the detectors; line drawings of

the big central detector and its surrounding EM boxes, hadron calorime-ters, and gas

chambers. Then the beam shots started coming, and in a small window at the top of

the screen, the beam parameters reeled by. Running Monte Carlos is one hell of a lot

easier than doing an actual run; you don’t have the actual experimental uncertainties

about good beam, good vacuum, reliable detector equipment; it’s a simulation, so

everything works right.

As we watched, the usual sorts of events occurred, particles and antiparticles

playing their spear-carrying roles in this drama, banging together and sending out jets

of energy that QUARKER dutifully calculated, watching the energy-conservation

books the whole time, ready to signal when something happened it couldn’t fit into

the ledger. Complex and interesting enough in its own way, all this, but just

background.

QUARKER shifted gears all of a sudden, signaling it had so many collisions it

could not track them accurately. The screen turned into what we called a

“hedgehog,” a bristly pattern of interactions too thick to count.

“We don’t care,” Carol Hendrix whispered. “Do it.” And she forced

QUARKER to plunge ahead, made it speed up the pictures of events. She didn’t

care about the meanings of the individual events; she was looking for something

global and, I thought, damned unlikely.

Events unrolled until we seemed to be in the middle of the densest particle

interactions this side of the Big Bang, and I almost forgot what we were there for,

because this stuff was the product of my work, showing that, as promised, we

would, give the experimenters higher beam luminosity than they’d dreamed of

having.

Then the numbers of collisions lessened, and that was the first time I believed

she was on to something. Things were going backward. The beam continued to pour

in its streams of particles, but all usual interactions had ceased: inside the beam

pipes, one utterly anomalous point was absorbing all that came its way. We both sat

in complete silence, watching the impossible. The screen cleared. then said:

END SIMULATION

Quantitative evaluation appears impossible

END SIMULATION

Quantitative evaluation appears impossible

employing standard assumptions. The conclu-sions

stated do not permit unambiguous physical

interpretation

interpretation.

We lay outside in reclining chairs and watched the sky. The moon was down,

and stars glittered gold against the black. Meteors cut across the horizon, particles

flashing through the universe’s spark chamber. We’d been drinking wine, and we

were both a little high—the wine, sure, both of us drinking on empty stomachs, but

more than that, the sense of discovery she had communicated to me.

“Finding the order behind the visible,” she said. “I’ve wanted to be part of

that for as long as I can remember. And at Los Alamos I’ve gotten a taste. They

Quantitative evaluation appears impossible

employing standard assumptions. The conclu-sions

stated do not permit unambiguous physical

interpretation

Tom Maddox - Gravity's Angel.pdf

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