John Cramer - Einstein's Bridge

Just before eight this morning, he had returned to his room at the SSC hostel, but after about four hours of sleep he had come wide awake with an irresistible compulsion to know more about the bizarre event that had occurred in the LEM detector. Lying in the narrow bed, he had used his briefcase workstation to connect to the SSC network directly from his room. Now he was about to have a closer look at the Snark.

Months before, George himself had set up this system for identifying anomalous events selectively. Jake and most of the other principals of LEM were not particularly interested in anomalies. They had a clear vision of the object they wanted to find. It was the Higgs vector boson, the theoretically predicted mediating particle that, in the early universe, had split the strong interaction off from the electroweak interaction. The Higgs had a theoretically predicted range of possible masses centered around 200 GeV and a definite signature in the LEM detector that was clear and unambiguous. The whole idea of LEM, and indeed of the SSC, was to discover the Higgs and collect the Nobel prize.

Therefore, most of George’s LEM collaborators did not welcome any distractions from the unexpected. George, a maverick as usual, felt as a matter of principle that the whole point of experimental physics was to discover the unexpected, not to confirm the predictions of some theorist. Therefore, he had the anomaly territory all for himself.

“Output summary, please,” he said to the goat-headed statue. A cube appeared in the air before him. Its sides contained multicolored lists summarizing the progress made, enumerating the events scanned and recorded, tabulating and plotting their characteristics.

George reached out and turned the cube, studying the list of events that had satisfied the trigger criteria of LEM but showed anomalous behavior when processed by the analysis programs and categorized by the LEM neural network.

He quickly found the Snark event from this morning. He gestured in the air, there was a pop sound, and he was in darkened space. He floated in darkness before an intricate self-luminous structure, a multicolored starburst pattern of gently curved arcs emanating from a central vertex point. He reached out and touched a green-hued line that radiated upward from the vertex. It dimmed to a dotted line, retaining its place but revealing behind it a more complex structure. A violet line speared outward from the vertex, punctuated at almost regular intervals with clusters of red-fingered jets, like a straight vine with red blossoms.

So many jets. George had never seen anything like it. His fingers made a gesture and a column of figures appeared to the left of the structure.

The very heavy ionization of the undeviated particle was noted, along with the unusual production of jets. Interesting events usually showed one to four jets, always coming from the vertex. But the summary list showed that this event had twenty-nine jets, none from the vertex! That, of course, was not possible. Even with 40 TeV in the center of mass and colliding particles with forty thousand times the proton rest mass in available energy, there simply wasn’t enough energy to break loose twenty-nine quarks or gluons, to make twenty-nine jets.

George scanned the summary table more closely. There was also a problem with the momentum balance of the event. Usually jets, clusters of particles emitted in the same direction, are emitted nearly back-to-back because of momentum conservation. But these jets were systematically emitted in nearly the same direction that the massive particle was moving, almost as if they were being emitted to slow it down. In the process there was an apparent violation of the law of conservation of momentum, even if one left out the momentum of the heavy particle.

George shook his head in wonder as he orbited the structure, viewing it from above, from below. With another gesture he quadrupled its size. He pointed and flew to the starburst, then moved into it. Radiating lines seemed to pass through his wireframe body. George placed his eye at the vertex and sighted out along the long violet trajectory of the Snark. It showed no curvature at all in crossing the 2 Tesla toroidal magnetic field.

What if…? With quick motions he bracketed the violet structure and its jets, shaping the boundaries of the surface around it with his hands until only the violet line and its attendant red blossoms were within. Then he gestured and the envelope was empty, the violet structure gone.

The column of figures reappeared. After correction for the energy and momentum removed by expected but unobserved neutrinos, the laws of conservation of energy and momentum had been reestablished. The violet line and its jets were the problem.

A double hit? George wondered. He gestured and the violet line reappeared. Once again he expanded the starburst. And again. And again. Then he propelled himself close to the vertex, the center from which all the lines radiated. Within the position resolution of the detector, the violet line came from the vertex. There was no hint of an offset that might indicate event pileup.

Finally George scanned the database for other similar events that might have been previously recorded but overlooked. There was not much there. A couple of events showed unusually large missing mass and momentum, probably from very energetic neutrinos. A few were obviously the result of electronic glitches in the detector. He deleted these, implicitly telling the neural net that similar ones should, in the future, be recognized as uninteresting.

This would require further thought, he decided. He gestured for hardcopy of the characteristics of the Snark, the output directed to the color laser printer in the hostel lobby, then gestured again and the starburst vanished.

He was standing before the goat-headed form. Under the event serial number engraved on the pedestal he added new text, writing with a white-hot finger. He carved SNARK TALK TO JAKE! into the milk-white marble. Another gesture sent him into blackness. He was lying in bed in his room at the SSC hostel.

He removed the magic glasses and data cuffs and put them into the briefcase beside the bed, then walked through the dimness to the room window and raised the blackout blind installed for day sleepers like himself. He blinked into the early afternoon sunlight that now streamed through the window. Then he stretched, took off his pajamas, and went to the bathroom for a shower.

The warm water felt wonderful. He turned his body slowly under the stream, thinking. He would need to talk to someone about this Snark thing very soon. Alice was fine, it had been nice having breakfast with her and discussing the Snark. She was excited and acted almost proprietary about the thing, and she was going to come to his office this afternoon to discuss it further. And they had another dinner date for tomorrow night. But at the moment George needed to talk to someone who knew some physics. Preferably, more physics than himself, which narrowed the choices considerably. Who…?

Then he remembered Roger Coulton, the new member of the SSC Theory Group who had just arrived from CERN. Roger had struck him as a person who had the flexibility and playfulness to be interested in a problem like this. The theory building wasn’t far from the hostel. Yes, he’d look up Roger as soon as he dressed and grabbed a bite of lunch.

AN UNDULATING SURFACE OF MANY BLENDED COLORS was displayed in 3-D on the workstation screen, a fairy landscape of red-topped broad rolling hills and blue-violet shadowed valleys. Toward the right end of the slowly changing surface, however, it disintegrated into a jungle of wild fluctuations. Roger stared at the screen of his workstation and pounded his desk. The damned perturbation series had diverged again.