CERN in actuality had nothing to do with what happened before. In which case ...
"In which case, you're off the hook," the reporter said bitterly.
Lloyd frowned, considering. Of course, he probably already was off the hook
legally for what had happened the first time. But morally? Without the absolution
provided by a block universe, he had indeed been haunted --ever since Dim's
suicide --by all the death and destruction he had caused.
Lloyd felt his eyebrows rising. "I guess you're right," he said. "I guess I am off the
hook."
26
Like every physicist, Theo waited with interest each year to see who would be
honored with the Nobel Prize --who would join the ranks of Bohr, Einstein, Feynman,
Gell-Mann, and Pauli. CERN researchers had earned more than twenty Nobels over
the years. Of course, when he saw the subject header in his email box, he didn't
have to open the letter to know that his name wasn't on this year's list of honorees.
Still, he did like to see which of his friends and colleagues were getting the nod. He
clicked the OPEN button.
The laureates were Perlmutter and Schmidt for their work, mostly done a decade
ago, that showed that the universe was going to expand forever, rather than
eventually collapsing down in a big crunch. It was typical that the award was for
work completed years previously; there had to be time for results to be replicated
and for the ramifications of the research to be considered.
Well, thought Theo, they were both good choices. There'd doubtless be some
bitterness here at CERN; rumor had it that McRainey was already planning his
celebratory party, although that was doubtless just scurrilous gossip. Still, Theo
wondered, as he did every year at this time, whether he'd someday see his own
name on the list.
Theo and Lloyd spent the next few days working on their paper about the Higgs.
Although the press had already (somewhat halfheartedly) announced the particle's
production to the world, they still had to write up their results for publication in a
peer-reviewed journal. Lloyd, as was his habit, doodled endlessly on his datapad;
Theo paced back and forth.
"Why the difference?" asked Lloyd, for the dozenth time. "Why didn't we get the
Higgs the first time, but did get it this time?"
"I don't know," said Theo. "We didn't change anything. Of course, we couldn't
match everything exactly, either. It's been weeks since the first attempt, so the
Earth has moved millions of kilometers in its orbit around the sun, and of course the
sun has moved through space, as it always does, and ... "
"The sun!" crowed Lloyd. Theo looked at him blankly. "Don't you see? Last time
we did this, the sun was up, but this time it was down. Maybe the first time the solar
wind was interfering with our equipment?"
"The LHC tunnel is a hundred meters below ground, and it's got the best radiation
shielding money can buy. There's no way any appreciable quantity of ionized
particles could have gotten through to it."
"Hmmm," said Lloyd. "But what about particles that we can't shield against? What
about neutrinos?"
Theo frowned. "For them, it shouldn't make any difference if we're facing the sun
or not." Only one out of every two hundred million neutrinos passing through the
Earth actually hits anything; the rest just come on through the other side.
Lloyd pursed his lips, thinking. "Still, maybe the neutrino count was particularly
high the day we did it the first time." Something tickled his mind; something Gaston
Béranger had said, when he was enumerating all the other things that had been
happening at 17h00 on April 21. "Béranger told me the Sudbury Neutrino
Observatory picked up a burst just before we ran our experiment."
"I know someone at SNO," said Theo. "Wendy Small. We were in grad school
together." Opened in 1998, the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, located beneath two
kilometers of Precambrian rock, was the world's most sensitive neutrino detector.
Lloyd gestured at the phone. Theo walked over to it. "Do you know the area
code?"
"For Sudbury? It's probably 705; that's the one for most of northern Ontario."
Theo dialed a number, spoke to an operator, hung up, then dialed again. "Hello,"
he said, in English. "Wendy Small, please." A pause. "Wendy, it's Theo Procopides.
What? Oh, funny. Funny woman." Theo covered the mouthpiece and said to Lloyd,
"She said, 'I thought you were dead.' " Lloyd made a show of suppressing a grin.
"Wendy, I'm calling from CERN, and I've got someone else with me: Lloyd Simcoe.
You mind if I put you on the speaker phone?"
"The Lloyd Simcoe?" said Wendy's voice, from the speaker. "Pleased to meet
you."
"Hello," said Lloyd, weakly.
"Look," said Theo, "as you doubtless know, we tried to reproduce the timedisplacement
phenomenon yesterday, and it didn't work."
"So I noticed," said Wendy. "You know, in my original vision, I was watching TV -except
it was three-dimensional. It was the climax of some detective show. I've been
dying to find out who did it."
Me, too, thought Theo, but what he said was, "Sorry we weren't able to help."
"I understand," said Lloyd, "that the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory picked up an
influx of neutrinos just before we did our original experiment on April 21. Were those
neutrinos due to sunspots?"
"No, the sun was quiet that day; what we detected was an extrasolar burst."
"Extrasolar? You mean from outside the solar system?"
"That's right."
"What was the source?"
"You remember Supernova 1987A?" asked Wendy.
Theo shook his head.
Lloyd, grinning, said, "That was the sound of Theo shaking his head."
"I could hear the rattling," said Wendy. "Well, look: in 1987, the biggest
supernova in three hundred and eighty-three years was detected. A type-B3 blue
supergiant star called Sanduleak -69o202 blew up in the Large Magellanic Cloud."
"The Large Magellanic Cloud!" said Lloyd. "That's a hell of a long way away."
"A hundred and sixty-six thousand light-years, to be precise," said Wendy's voice.
"Meaning, of course, that Sanduleak really blew up back in the Pleistocene, but we
didn't see the explosion until twenty-two years ago. But neutrinos travel unimpeded
almost forever. And, during the explosion in 1987, we detected a burst of neutrinos
that lasted about ten seconds."
"Okay," said Lloyd.
"And," continued Wendy, "Sanduleak was a very strange star; you normally
expect a red supergiant, not a blue one, to go supernova. Regardless, though, after
exploding as a supernova, what normally happens is that the remnants of the star
collapse either into a neutron star or a black hole. Well, if Sanduleak had collapsed
into a black hole, we never should have detected the neutrinos; they shouldn't have
been able to escape. But at twenty solar masses, Sanduleak was, we thought, too
small to form a black hole, at least according to the then-accepted theory."
"Uh-huh," said Lloyd.
"Well," said Wendy, "back in 1993, Hans Bethe and Gerry Brown came up with a
theory involving kaon condensates that would allow a smaller-massed star to
collapse into a black hole; kaons don't obey Pauli's exclusion principle." The exclusion
principle said that two particles of a given type could not simultaneously occupy the
same energy state.
"For a star to collapse into a neutron star," continued Wendy, "all the electrons
must combine with protons to form neutrons, but since electrons do adhere to the
exclusion principle, as you try to push them together they instead just keep
occupying higher and higher energy levels, providing resistance to the continued
collapse --that's part of the reason why you need to start with a sufficiently massive
star to make a black hole. But if the electrons were converted to kaons, they could
all occupy the lowest energy level, putting up much less resistance, and making the
collapse of a smaller star into a black hole theoretically possible. Well, Gerry and
Hans said, look, suppose that's what happened at Sanduleak --suppose its electrons
became kaons. Then it could have collapsed into a black hole. And how long would it
take for the conversion of electrons into kaons? They mapped it out at ten seconds -meaning
that neutrinos could escape for the first ten seconds of the supernova event
but, after that, they'd be swallowed up by the newly formed black hole. And, of
course, ten seconds is how long the neutrino burst lasted back in 1987."
"Fascinating," said Lloyd. "But what's this got to do with the burst that happened
when we were running our experiment the first time?"
"Well, the object that forms out of a kaon condensate isn't really a black hole,"
said Wendy's voice. "Rather, it's an inherently unstable parasingularity. We call them
'brown holes' now, after Gerry Brown. It in fact should rebound at some point, with
the kaons spontaneously reconverting to electrons. When that happens, the Pauli
exclusion principle should kick in, causing a massive pressure against degeneracy,
forcing the whole thing to almost instantaneously expand again. At that point,
neutrinos should again be able to escape --at least until the process reverses, and
the electrons turn back into kaons again. Sanduleak was due to rebound at some
point, and, as it happens, fifty-three seconds before your original time-displacement
event, our neutrino detector registered a burst coming from Sanduleak; of course,
the detector --or its recording equipment --stopped working as soon as the timedisplacement
began, so I don't know how long the second burst lasted, but in theory
it should have lasted longer than the first --maybe as long as two or three minutes."
Her voice grew wistful. "In fact, I originally thought that the Sanduleak rebound
burst was what caused the time displacement in the first place. I was all ready to
book a ticket to Stockholm when you guys stepped forward and said it was your
collider that did it."
"Well, maybe it was the burst," said Lloyd. "Maybe that's why we weren't able to
replicate the effect."
"No, no," said Wendy, "it wasn't the rebound burst, at least not on its own;
remember, the burst began fifty-three seconds before the time displacement, and
the displacement coincided precisely with the start of the your collisions. Still, maybe
the coincidence of the burst continuing to impact the Earth at the same time you
were doing your experiment caused whatever bizarre conditions created the time
displacement. And without such a burst when you tried to replicate your experiment,
nothing happened."
"So," said Lloyd, "we basically created conditions here on Earth that hadn't existed
since a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, and simultaneously we were hit by a
whack of neutrinos spewing out of a rebounding brown hole."
"That's about the size of it," said Wendy's voice. "As you can imagine, the chances
of that ever happening are incredibly remote --which is probably just as well."
"Will Sanduleak rebound again?" asked Lloyd. "Can we expect another neutrino
burst?"
"Probably," said Wendy. "In theory, it will rebound several more times, sort of
oscillating between being a brown hole and a neutron star until stability is reached
and it settles down as a permanent, but non-rotating, neutron star."
"When will the next rebound occur?"
"I have no idea."
"But if we wait for the next burst," said Lloyd, "and then do our experiment again
at precisely that moment, maybe we could replicate the time-displacement effect."
"It'll never happen," said Wendy's voice.
"Why not?" asked Theo.
"Think about it, boys. You needed weeks to prepare for this attempt at replicating
the experiment; everyone had to be safe before it began, after all. But neutrinos are
almost massless. They travel through space at virtually the speed of light. There's no
way to know in advance that they're going to arrive, and since the first rebound
burst lasted no more than three minutes --it was over by the time my detector
started recording again --you'd never have any advance warning that a burst was
going to occur, and once the burst started, you'd have only three minutes or less to
crank up your accelerator."
"Damn," said Theo. "God damn."
"Sorry I don't have better news," said Wendy. "Look, I've got a meeting in five
minutes --I should get going."
"Okay," said Theo. "Bye."
"Bye."
Theo clicked off the speaker phone and looked at Lloyd. "Irreproducible," he said.
"The world's not going to like that." He moved over to a chair and sat down.
"Damn," said Lloyd.
"You're telling me," said Theo. "You know, now that we know the future isn't
fixed, I'm not that worried, I guess, about the murder, but, still, I would have liked
to have seen something, you know. Anything. I feel --Christ, I feel left out, you
know? Like everyone else on the planet saw the mothership, and I was off taking a
whiz."
27
The LHC was now doing daily 1150-TeV lead-nuclei collisions. Some were longplanned
