Gregory Benford - Timescape

We now have enough evidence to believe Tommy Gold’s old idea—that there are parts of our universe which have enough clustered galaxies to form their own closed geometry. They won’t look like much to us—just small areas with weak red light coming out of them. The red is from matter still falling into those clumps. The shocker here is that these local density fluctuations qualify as independent universes. The time for forming a separate universe is independent of the size. It goes like the square root of Gn, where G is the gravitational constant and n the density of the contracting region. So it’s independent of the size of the miniuniverse. A small universe will close itself off just as fast as a large one. This means all the various-sized universes have been around for the same amount of “time.” (Defining just what time is in this problem will drive you to drink, if you’re not a mathematician—maybe if you are, too.)

The point here is that there may be closed-off universes inside our own. In fact, it would be a remarkable coincidence if our universe was the largest of all. We may be a local lump inside somebody else’s universe. Remember the old cartoon of a little fish being swallowed by a slightly larger one, in turn about to be swallowed by another bigger one, and so on, ad infinitum? Well, we may be one of those fishes .

The last few weeks I’ve been working on the problem of getting information about—or out of—these universes inside our own. Clearly, light can’t get out of one universe into the next. Neither can matter. That’s what a closed geometry means. The only possibility might be some type of particle that doesn’t fit into the constraints set by Einstein’s theory. There are several candidates like this, but Thorne (the grand old man around here) doesn’t want to get into that morass. Too messy, he says .

I think tachyons are the answer. They can escape from smaller “universes” inside our own. So the recent discovery of tachyons has enormous implications for cosmology. It’s hard to detect tachyons, so we don’t know much about them. They give, us a direct link to the sealed-off space-times inside our universe, though, which is why I’m working so hard on the problem. There’s a chance of a first-class discovery in this. We’ve had the devil of a time pursuing things, with the food strike and the big fire in LA. Probably nobody will give much of a damn, with the world in its present state. But that’s what the academic life is for .

I’m sorry I’ve gone on about this at such length and probably made no sense, but the whole thing is tremendously exciting to me and I tend to get carried away. Anyway, I’m sorry about Baja. Hope to see you both soon. Love, Cathy

Peterson felt a momentary twinge of guilt at reading a private letter. The Council used such methods routinely now, of course, to get quickly round the recalcitrant interests who had not accepted the necessity for quick action. Still, he was a gentleman and a gentleman does not read another’s mail. His reluctance soon, submerged beneath his interest in the implications of what was said by “Cathy.” Subuni-verses? Incredible. The landscape of the scientist was ultimately unreal.

Peterson leaned back in his seat and studied Canadian wastes slipping by below. Yes, perhaps that was it. For decades now the picture of the world painted by the scientists had become strange, distant, unbelievable? Far easier, then, to ignore it than try to understand. Things were too complicated. Why bother? Turn on the telly, luv. Right.

COOPER LAID THE RED-GRIDDED SHEETS OUT IN A long line across the lab countertop. He stood back, balancing on his toes like a sprinter preparing to go the distance, and surveyed his work. The subdued hum of the laboratory underlined the expectation in the air. “That’s it,” Cooper said slowly. “They’re in the right order.”

“That’s our best data?” Gordon murmured.

“Best I’ll ever get,” Cooper said, frowning at something in Gordon’s voice. He turned, hands on hips. “It’s all consecutive, too. Three hours worth.”

“It looks good and clean,” Gordon said in a conciliatory tone. “Sharp.”

“Yeah,” Cooper admitted. “Nothing funny about this. If there was a clear resonance there, I’d see it.”

Gordon traced his finger along the green data lines. There were no standard resonances at all. Inside their sample, cooled down to 3 degrees absolute in the bubbling helium, were atomic nuclei. Each was a tiny magnet . They tended to line up along the magnetic field Cooper had applied to the sample. The standard experiment was simple: apply a brief electromagnetic pulse, which tipped the nuclear magnets away from the magnetic field. In time, the nuclei would line up with the field again. This nuclear relaxation process could tell the experimenter much about the environment inside the solid. It was a relatively simple way to learn about microscopic features of the complex solid structure. Gordon liked the work for its clarity and directness, aside from any applications to transistors or infrared detectors it might eventually have. This branch of solid state physics didn’t have the high visibility of things like quasars or high-energy particle research but it was clean and had a kind of simple beauty.

The jagged traces before him, though, were neither simple nor beautiful. Here and there were fragments of what they should be getting: nuclear resonance curves, smooth and meaningful. But in most of the gridded traces there were sudden jagged line bursts of electromagnetic noise, appearing abruptly for an instant, then disappearing just as suddenly.

“The same spacings,” Gordon murmured.

“Yeah,” Cooper said. “The one-centimeter ones—” he pointed “—and the shorter ones, half a centimeter. Regular as hell.”

Both men looked at each other, then back at the data. Each had hoped for a different result. They had done these experiments over again and again, eliminating all possible sources of noise. The ragged bursts would not vanish.

“It’s a goddam message,” Cooper said. “Must be.”

Gordon nodded, fatigue seeping through him. “There’s no avoiding it,” he said. “We’ve got hours of signal here. Can’t be coincidence, not this much.”

“No.”

“Okay then,” Gordon said, summoning up optimism in his voice. “Let’s decode the fucking thing.”

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