John Cramer - Einstein's Bridge

He fell to the floor of his cage, his back arching, his mouth stretched in a rictus grin. An electrical fire danced in his brain.

Elvis was having his first petit mat epileptic fit.

GEORGE LOOKED AT THE LARGE WALLSCREEN DISPLAY mounted on the SSC counting house wall. The beam luminosity was stabilizing nicely. The SSC beam had been late in the ramp-up on Tuesday evening and was not at full energy until well after midnight. LEM had limped into operation but now was finally recording data smoothly.

He glanced over at Alice, who was seated at a nearby table, busily transcribing handwritten notes into her laptop workstation. It was almost 3 a.m. She seemed to be holding up very well. He realized that he really liked having her here with him.

He looked at the colorful flatscreens of the LEM counting room. The data acquisition computers continuously sampled the data stream and selected a few of the events for display. All events were also recorded on ultra-high-density holographic optical platters for later analysis.

The displays showed several views of the LEM detector and the paths of the reconstructed particle tracks that signaled the occurrence of a head-on collision between two 20 TeV protons, particles so highly accelerated that their rest mass represented only a part in twenty thousand of their mass-energy. The beam monitors showed that tonight the twin proton beams had been ramped to a new SSC record for luminosity.

A brushlike fan of varicolored particle tracks from a new event was traced on the screen, while numerals below the picture indicated the quantities of energy deposited in the various calorimeters. George smiled. The LEM experiment, constructed with the efforts of almost a thousand physicists and perhaps two thousand technicians, for once seemed to be functioning properly.

He seated himself at one of the consoles and studied the oscilloscope traces of signals from electronics units thirty stories below that were processing the massive flow of data from each event. Everything seemed okay.

He directed the signals from the vertex detector into the analog signal bus and checked the overview monitor of the pixel detectors. The number of dead pixels from radiation damage had increased slightly since the beam had come on. Well, at least the chips should be usable through the end of this data collection period.

Without warning, the digital oscilloscope signal trace changed. The smooth up-and-down bump of a single particle passing through the detector was replaced by a rise to the saturation level of the amplifier chip, as a section of the pixel detector was overwhelmed with ionization and charge.

“What the…?” he said aloud. The numerical display showing the number of tracks in the detector, which normally registered the few hundred tracks from a normal event, was now registering over a thousand. And from the tracking display, most of them were not coming from the vertex of the collision. One particle, indicated in purple because of its heavy ionization, traced across the detector in a path that was almost undeflected by the 2 Tesla field of the toroidal magnet. Emanating from this particle were jets of secondary particles that seemed to occur every centimeter or so along the path.

George glanced at the numerals along the bottom edge of the display. The calorimeters were indicating an impossibly high energy. They had received far more energy than could be supplied by any proton-proton collision, more even than from several superimposed collisions.

“What the hell is that?” George demanded in a loud voice. The dozen physicists and technicians also in the counting room all reacted at once.

“Holy shit! Was that a spark?”

“Could that have been a computer glitch?”

“How did it get past the fucking trigger?”

“You should have seen what the straw tubes just did!”

George blinked. He was sure that this had not been a detector failure. He was all too familiar with detector glitches and knew how they looked. This was not a glitch. He had just witnessed the law of conservation of energy being violated with extreme prejudice.

He walked to the central console, sat down, and began to write in the logbook. Then he looked across the room. “Ralph,” he said, “run the diagnostics! Quick! If that was an equipment glitch, we need to know as much as possible about what happened.” The technician strode to an equipment rack and began to move switches.

Alice was suddenly beside George. “What just happened?” she asked.

“As Lewis Carroll might have put it, Alice, we just saw a Snark,” he said. “An impossible event. Something just lit up the LEM detector in a way that, according to our conventional wisdom, could not, should not have happened. The collision event, according to our readouts, had more energy, more momentum, and more particles than the laws of physics can allow. It could not have happened, yet it did.”

“Was it some kind of breakdown of the equipment?” she asked.

“Perhaps,” he said, “but I doubt it. Except for the obvious problems with violated conservation laws, it behaved like a real event. I saw a particle producing a huge ionization and with more momentum than both beam particles put together. It made a jet of particles every few centimeters. It was like a machine gun that was spitting quarks.”

Several people had gathered around George as he talked. “But if it’s real…” said a graduate student.

“Even if it’s real, folks,” said George, “there isn’t much we can do about it tonight. It must have been a rare event. It isn’t likely to repeat soon, and unless it does it’s an unpublishable fluke, a glitch in the apparatus due to causes unknown. We should examine it carefully and train the trigger net to watch for more. For now, I want everyone who noticed something unusual to write an entry about it in the logbook and sign their entry. We’ll discuss this with the next shift at the 6 a.m. run meeting. Before that, we need everything that everyone observed written out in full detail.”

As the crew members dutifully wrote their entries, animated discussion erupted among the physicists. They batted about speculations and ideas on what they had seen, what it might mean, and how they might analyze the data from the event. Finally, however, the discussion deflated from lack of focus. As it tailed off, one by one the participants drifted back to their consoles and workstations.

Alice stood by George for a moment longer, smiled, then walked back to her lapstation. She began to type very rapidly.

It was going to be a long night, George thought, but he was glad she had been here for the excitement.

WHEN THE SUMMONER HAD ACTIVATED, TUNNEL Maker had been deep in transtemporal meditation. He hurried out of his personal enclosure, hurled himself down a deep inertial shaft, and accelerated through a maze of access conduits to the enclosure of the Bridge Generator.

A glance told him that there had been a massive discharge. The energy receptacles in the long row had been fully drained of their antimatter and stood cold and empty. He accessed the data stream from the nearest neural node. His sensorium translated along the time axis until he came to the discharge event.

A feeling of relief overlaid with deep satisfaction suffused his. emotion center. The apparatus had performed flawlessly. A microscopic Bridge with the right characteristics had been snatched from the quantum vacuum, establishing a connection between his universe and a point of ultra-high-energy density in the target Bubble. The Bridge Generator had successfully brought the new Bridge to a stable energy balance.

He studied the data stream further. The Bridgehead had appeared in the new Bubble while traveling at a high velocity relative to the matter medium there. It had appeared in a vacuum, passed through a region of pure element 4 and several layers of element 14, then moved to a gaseous medium consisting mainly of element 10, with traces of elements 1 and 6. It had traveled some distance in that and various solid media, which analysis showed to consist of layers of elements 14, 26, 29, 82, and 92. A momentum flow through the Bridge consisting mainly of massive neutral dark matter particles, with a few quarks entrained, had been established and used to decelerate its Bubble end until it had come to rest. The Bridge had stopped in a medium made of elements 82, 14, and 8. The ambient temperature of the medium was between the freezing and boiling points of water. The data on the medium made of element 92 were particularly interesting. It was essentially pure isotope 238, with only faint traces of the other expected isotopes.