experiments, now back on track; others were parts of the ongoing attempts
to find a proper theoretical basis for the temporal displacement. Theo took a break
from going over computer logs from ALICE and CMS to check his email. "Additional
Nobel winners announced," said the subject line of the first message.
Of course, Nobels aren't just given in physics. Five other prizes are awarded each
year, with the announcements staggered over a period of several days: chemistry,
physiology or medicine, economics, literature, and the promotion of world peace. The
only one Theo really cared about was the physics prize --although he had a mild
curiosity about the chemistry award, too. He clicked on the message header to see
what it said.
It wasn't the chemistry Nobel --rather, it was the literature one. He was about to
click the message into oblivion when the laureate's name caught his eye.
Anatoly Korolov. A Russian novelist.
Of course, after that man Cheung in Toronto had recounted his vision to Theo,
mentioning someone called Korolov, Theo had researched the name. It had turned
out to be frustratingly common, and remarkably undistinguished. No one by that
name seemed to be particularly famous or significant.
But now someone named Korolov had won a Nobel. Theo immediately logged onto
Britannica Online; CERN had an unlimited-use account with them. The entry on
Anatoly Korolov was brief:
Korolov, Anatoly Sergeyevich. Russian novelist and polemicist, born 11 July 1965,
in Moscow, then part of the USSR --
Theo frowned. Bloody guy was a year younger than Lloyd, for God's sakes. Of
course no one had to replicate the experimental results outlined in a novel. Theo
continued reading:
Korolov's first novel Pered voskhodom solntsa ("Before Sunrise"), published in
1992, told of the early days after the collapse of the Soviet Union; his protagonist,
young Sergei Dolonov, a disillusioned Communist Party supporter, goes through a
series of serio-comic coming-of-age rituals, fighting to make sense of the changes in
his country, ultimately becoming a successful businessperson in Moscow. Korolov's
other novels include Na kulichkakh ("At the World's End"), 1995; Obyknovennaya
istoriya ("A Common Story"), 1999; and Moskvityanin ("The Muscovite"), 2006. Of
these, only Na kulichkakh has been published in English.
He'd doubtless get a bigger write-up in the next edition, thought Theo. He
wondered if Dim had read this fellow during his studies of European literature.
Could this be the Korolov Cheung's vision had referred to? If so, what possible
connection did he have to Theo? Or to Cheung, for that matter, whose interests
seemed commercial rather than literary?
Michiko and Lloyd were walking down the streets of St. Genis, holding hands,
enjoying the warm evening breeze. After a few hundred meters passed with nothing
but silence between them, Michiko stopped walking. "I think I know what went
wrong."
Lloyd looked at her, his face a question.
"Think about what happened," she said. "You designed an experiment that should
have produced the Higgs boson. The first time you ran it, though, it didn't. And why
not?"
"The neutrino influx from Sanduleak," said Lloyd.
"Oh? That might indeed have been part of what caused the time displacement -but
how could it have possibly upset the boson production?"
Lloyd shrugged. "Well, it --it ... hmm, that is a good question."
Michiko shook her head. They began walking again. "It couldn't have an effect. I
don't doubt that there was an influx of neutrinos at the time the experiment was
originally conducted, but it shouldn't have disrupted the production of the Higgs
bosons. The bosons should have been produced."
"But they weren't."
"Exactly," said Michiko. "But there was no one to observe them. For almost three
whole minutes there wasn't a single conscious mind on Earth --no one, anywhere, to
actually observe the creation of the Higgs boson. Not only that, there was no one
available to observe anything. That's why all the videotapes seem to be blank. They
look blank --like they've got nothing but electronic snow on them. But suppose
that's not snow --suppose instead that the cameras accurately recorded what they
saw: an unresolved world. The whole enchilada, the entire planet Earth, unresolved.
Without qualified observers --with everyone's consciousness elsewhere --there was
no way to resolve the quantum mechanics of what was going on. No way to choose
between all the possible realities. Those tapes show uncollapsed wave fronts, a kind
of staticky limbo --the superposition of all possible states."
"I doubt that wave front superposition would look like snow."
"Well, maybe it's not an actual picture; but, regardless of whether it is or isn't, it's
clear that all information about that three-minute span was censored, somehow; the
physics of what was happening prevented any recording of data during that period.
Without any conscious beings anywhere, reality breaks down."
Lloyd frowned. Could he have been that wrong? Cramer's transactional
interpretation accounted for everything in quantum mechanics without recourse to
qualified observers ... but maybe such observers did have a role to play. "Perhaps,"
he said. "But --no, no, that can't be right. If everything was unresolved, then how
did the accidents occur? A plane crashing --that is a resolution, one possibility made
concrete."
"Of course," said Michiko. "It's not that three minutes passed during which planes
and trains and cars and assembly lines operated without human intervention. Rather,
three minutes passed during which nothing was resolved --all the possibilities
existed, stacked into shimmering whiteness. But at the end of those three minutes,
consciousness returned, and the world collapsed again into a single state. And,
unfortunately but inevitably, it took the single state that made the most sense, given
that there had been three minutes of no consciousness: it resolved itself into the
world in which planes and cars had crashed. But the crashes didn't occur during
those three minutes; they never occurred at all. We simply went in one jump from
the way things were before to the way they were after."
"That's ... that's crazy," said Lloyd. "It's wishful thinking."
They were passing a pub. Loud music, with French lyrics, spilled through the
heavy closed door. "No, it's not. It's quantum physics. And the result is the same:
those people are just as dead, or just as maimed, as if the accidents had actually
taken place. I'm not suggesting there's any way around that --as much as I wish
there were.
Lloyd squeezed Michiko's hand, and they continued walking, up the road, into the
future.
BOOK III
TWENTY-ONE YEARS LATER
AUTUMN 2030
Lost time is never found again.
--John H. Aughey
28
Time passes; things change.
In 2017, a team of physicists and brain researchers mostly based at Stanford
devised a full theoretical model for the time displacement. The quantum-mechanical
model of the human mind, proposed by Roger Penrose thirty years earlier, had
turned out to be generally true even if Penrose had gotten many of the details
wrong; it was perhaps not surprising, then, that sufficiently powerful quantum
physics experiments could have an effect on perception.
Still, the neutrinos were a key part of it, too. It had been known since the 1960s
that Earth's sun was, for some reason, disgorging only half as many neutrinos as it
should --the famous "solar-neutrino problem."
The sun is heated by hydrogen fusion: four hydrogen nuclei --each a single
proton --come together to form a helium nucleus, consisting of two protons and two
neutrons. In the process of converting two of the original hydrogen-provided protons
into neutrons, two electron neutrinos should be ejected ... but, somehow one out of
every two electron neutrinos that should reach Earth disappears before it does so,
almost as if they were somehow being censored, almost as if the universe knew that
the quantum-mechanical processes underlying consciousness were unstable if too
many neutrinos were present.
The discovery in 1998 that neutrinos had a trifling mass had made credible a
long-standing possible solution to the solar-neutrino problem: if neutrinos have
mass, theory suggested that they could perhaps change types as they traveled,
making it only appear, to primitive detectors, that they had disappeared. But the
Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, which was capable of detecting all types of neutrinos,
still showed a marked shortfall between what should be produced and what was
reaching Earth.
The strong anthropic principle said the universe needed to give rise to life, and the
Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics said it requires qualified observers;
given what was now known about the interaction of neutrinos and consciousness, the
solar-neutrino problem seemed to be evidence that the universe was indeed taking
pains to foster the existence of such observers.
Of course, occasional extrasolar neutrino bursts happened, but under normal
circumstances they could be tolerated. But when the circumstances were not normal
--when a neutrino onslaught was combined with conditions that hadn't existed since
just after the big bang --time displacement occurred.
In 2018, the European Space Agency launched the Cassandra probe toward
Sanduleak -69o202. Of course, it would take millions of years to reach Sanduleak,
but that didn't matter. All that mattered was that now, in 2030, Cassandra was 2.5
trillion kilometers from Earth --and 2.5 trillion kilometers closer to the remnant of
Supernova 1987A --a distance that light, and neutrinos, would take three months to
travel.
Aboard Cassandra were two instruments. One was a light detector, aimed directly
at Sanduleak; the other was a recent invention --a tachyon emitter --aimed back at
Earth. Cassandra couldn't detect neutrinos directly, but if Sanduleak oscillated out of
brown-hole status, it would give off light as well as neutrinos, and the light would be
easy to see.
In July 2030, light from Sanduleak was detected by Cassandra. The probe
immediately launched an ultra-low-energy (and therefore ultra-high-speed) tachyon
burst toward Earth. Forty-three hours later, the tachyons arrived there, setting off
alarms.
Suddenly, twenty-one years after the first time-displacement event, the people of
Earth were given three months' notice that if they wanted to try for another glimpse
of the future, they could indeed do so with a reasonable chance of success. Of
course, the next attempt would have to be made at the exact moment the Sanduleak
neutrinos would start passing through Earth --and it couldn't be a coincidence that
that would be 19h21 Greenwich Mean Time on Wednesday, October 23, 2030 --the
precise beginning of the two-minute span the last set of visions had portrayed.
The UN debated the matter with surprising speed. Some had thought that because
the present had turned out to be different from what the first set of visions
portrayed, people might decide that new visions would be irrelevant. But, in reality,
the general response was quite the opposite --almost everybody wanted another
peek at tomorrow. The Ebenezer Effect still was powerful. And, of course, there was
now a whole generation of young people who had been born after 2009. They felt
left out, and were demanding a chance to have what their parents had already
experienced: a glimpse of their prospective futures.
As before, CERN was the key to unlocking tomorrow. But Lloyd Simcoe, now sixtysix,
would not be part of the replication attempt. He had retired two years ago, and
had declined to come back to CERN. Still, Lloyd and Theo had indeed shared a Nobel
prize. It had been awarded in 2024, not, as it turned out, in honor of anything
related to the time-displacement effect, or the Higg's boson, but rather due to their
joint invention of the Tachyon-Tardyon Collider, the tabletop device that had put
giant particle accelerators at places ranging from TRIUMF to Fermilab to CERN out of
business. Most of CERN was abandoned now, although the original Tachyon-Tardyon
Collider was housed on the CERN campus.
Maybe it was because Lloyd's marriage to Michiko had crumbled after ten years
that Lloyd didn't want to be involved with this attempt to replicate the original
experiment. Yes, Lloyd and Michiko had had a daughter together, but always, down
deep, not even acknowledged by her at first, there was a feeling on Michiko's part
that Lloyd had somehow been responsible for her first daughter's death. She'd
surprised herself, no doubt, the first time that charge had come out during an
argument between her and Lloyd. But there it was.
That Lloyd and Michiko loved each other there was no doubt, but they ultimately
decided that they simply couldn't go on living together, not with that hanging,
however diffusely, over everything. At least it hadn't been a painful divorce, like that
of Lloyd's parents. Michiko moved back to Nippon, taking their daughter Joan with
her; Lloyd got to visit with her only once a year, at Christmas.
Lloyd wasn't crucial to the replication of the original experiment, although his help
would have been a real asset. But he was now happily remarried --and, yes, it was
to Doreen, the woman he'd seen in his vision, and, yes, they did now own a cottage
in Vermont.
Still, Jake Horowitz, who had long since left CERN to work at TRIUMF with his wife
Carly Tompkins, did agree to come back for three months. Carly came as well, and
she and Jake endured the gentle kidding of people asking them which labs at CERN
