Brian Aldiss - White Mars

“Just keep her out of my hair, Belle. Let Thorgeson go ahead.”

Belle’s image remained. With her head on one side, she regarded Tom. Then she asked, “Do you know of anything odd going on in the science unit?”

“No. It’s true I haven’t heard from Dreiser just recently. Why do you ask?”

“Oh, simply the feeling something was in the air when I was speaking to Thorgeson. Could be the oncoming marathon, I suppose.”

By the time their images faded I was worried. What did he mean by keeping me out of his hair? He was always so good and kind. He relied on me, didn’t he? It was true he had become rather grumpy recently.

Perhaps it was simply that he disliked hearing Alpha cry—such a beautiful sound! I pitied him.

In a rotation of jobs, I was allocated to the synthetic foods department. I preferred it to the biogas department. The smells were better. Here I helped in time to develop something which resembled a Danish pastry. We always glossed over the fact that our foods were created from everyone’s manure. Nevertheless, my friends teased me about it.

One of my closest friends, Kathi Skadmorr, had adopted a teasing approach to me since I had danced naked before her and her lover. She rang me unexpectedly in serious vein and invited me on a short expedition to view what she called the “Smudge experiment”. I was always ready to learn. Although baby Alpha was so small, I left her in the care of Paula Gallin for a few hours while I joined Kathi.

Behind the science unit, Amazonis sprawled brokenhearted under a layer of dusty colour which seemed to be sometimes pink, or rose, or sometimes orange. A swan’s feather of cloud vapour overhead reflected these hues.

Kathi and I had suited up before leaving the science unit. As we walked along a netted way, where latticed posts supported overhead cables, a slight agoraphobia attacked me. I clutched Kathi’s hand: she was more used to open spaces than I. Yet at the same time I found something closed about the Martian outdoors. Perhaps it was the scarcity of atmosphere; or perhaps it was the indoor feeling of dust lying everywhere, dust much older than ever dimmed the surface of a table back on Earth.

To our left, the ground rose towards the heights that would culminate in Olympus Mons. There, I caught movement out of the side of my eye. A small boulder, dislodged by the morning heat, rolled downhill a few metres, struck another rock, and became still. Again, it was a motionless world we walked through.

The horrors got at me. Was it wise to have brought Alpha into this world? Granted that it was passion rather than wisdom which fathered babies, yet I had experienced no passion. And supposing our fragile systems broke down… then the dread world of the unmoving would prevail over everything … even over my dear baby. The past would snap back into place like the lid of a coffin.

As if she had read my thought, Kathi began talking about another kind of past, the past of a scientific obsession. She said I would see the latest produce of a line of research stretching back into the previous century.

“Dreiser is teaching me the history of particle physics. It begins before this century,” she told me. “It’s a tale of reasoning and unreasonable hopes. Last century, American physicists proposed to build a giant accelerator beneath the state of Texas. The accelerator was planned to measure many kilometres in diameter. They christened it a superconducting supercollider, SSC for short. The SSC was designed to detect what they referred to as the ‘Higgs particle’. It would cost billions of tax-payers’ money, and take an enormous chunk out of the science budget.

“This was the twentieth century’s idea of Big Science.” She gave a sardonic chuckle. “US Congress kept asking why anyone would think it legitimate to believe that so much money should go in a search for a single particle. After three billion dollars had been spent, the whole project was scrapped.”

I asked why it had been thought necessary to find this Higgs particle.

“The physicists who were searching for these basic ingredients which comprise the universe argued that finding the elusive Higgs would supply them with vital answers. It would complete their picture of the fundamental units.

They were like detectives seeking the solution of a mystery.

“The mystery remains. Hence the whole purpose of the Mars Omega Project. You might say the mystery is why we are here. The more deeply we probe nature, the clearer it becomes that these basic units have to be things without mass. There’s the mystery—where does mass originate? Without mass, nothing would hold together. Our bodies would disintegrate, for instance.”

I could not help asking what the Higgs particle had to do with mass. Kathi replied that it was still unclear to her, but the physicists of the time had an idea in their heads that the highly symmetrical scheme of the universe would have that symmetry spoilt according to what they termed “spontaneous symmetry breaking”. The Higgs was tied up with that idea.

“You see, for the pure unbroken scheme with exact symmetry, it was necessary to have all particles without mass. When Higgs enters the picture, everything changes. Most particles acquire mass. The photon is a notable exception.”

“I see. The Higgs was to be a kind of magic wand. As soon as it enters the stage, ‘Hey presto!’ mass comes along.”

“A rhymester said it in a nutshell:

“Because of this rather magical property, Higgs was christened by journalists ‘the God particle’.”

“And the physicists of that time believed that the SSC would enable them to catch a glimpse of this God.” I found I had lost most of my fears and let go of Kathi’s hand.

“According to the theory current at the time,” she said, “there had to be a certain limited range of possibilities for the mass of the Higgs. Otherwise, there would be an inconsistency with other things which had already been established by experiment. The God particle must deign to live among its subjects, just as if it were an ordinary mortal massive particle.”

I had to ask her what she meant by that.

“In accord with Einstein’s famous equation, E=mc 2, the Higgs particle, it was believed, would correspond to a certain energy. That energy was supposed to lie within the range of what the SSC would have been capable of. But—the SSC was never built, as I have told you.

“As luck would have it, a rival project was already at the planning stage. This was at the international research centre, CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland.

“The CERN project was greatly cheaper than the cancelled SSC would have been. It employed a tunnel already in use for an earlier experiment. The new project was the Large Hadron Collider, the LHC.”

I imagined a great tube, with a vanishing perspective into circular darkness.

“In the late twentieth century, the earlier experiment on the CERN site had yielded a great deal of information about leptons. But the energy used to produce leptons was not nearly enough to produce a Higgs. A lepton, by the way, is a member of the lightest family of subatomic particles, such as an electron or a muon. However, the clever group who constructed the LEP, as the tunnel was called, foresaw that it would be possible comparatively cheaply to modify their experiment, so that protons replaced the positrons and electrons of the original experiment.

“Protons, neutrons, and their anti-particles, belong to the family of more massive particles known as hadrons. Hence the terminology, the Large Hadron Collider.”