“So you do understand what happened?” the President asked. “If this was a possible result, why would anyone do such a thing?”
“Well, the recognized negative results were very low order probabilities, Mr. President,” Weaver said. “They’d been studied over and over again and they were dismissed. I dismissed them and I still think I’m right. What would happen if you made a Higgs boson the normal way is a brief flash of light, some secondary particles and then it would be gone. Might not even be able to tell you’d done it. But that’s the normal way, which involves great big linear accelerators.”
“They had one in UCF,” the FBI briefer said, glancing at his notes. “We’d first put the explosion down to an accident with that.”
“Shows you don’t know high school physics, much less this stuff,” Weaver said in an equanimible tone. “Couldn’t get anything like that out of even a big collider much less the four meter or so that they had at UCF. And you can’t get a Higgs boson out of one normally at all. What we really needed was the super conducting supercollider they were building in Texas. That was one of the scheduled experiments. But Ray Chen wanted to make a Higgs boson.”
“Why, in God’s name?” the President asked. “If it was possible that it would erase all life on earth?”
“Why did you want your baseball team to win the World Series, Mr. President?” Weaver shot back. “Besides which, forming one and then watching it degrade would tell us a lot about how our universe really works. Understanding physics is the basis to everything, Mr. President. Everything from cellular telephones to the MOAB. And Ray was good at it. Very bright, very crazy in that way you have to be to understand quantum mechanics. And he thought, I’ve read the papers, that there was a way to shortcut to a Higgs boson. I won’t get into what it is, but he thought that under certain conditions it was possible to change physics in a very limited area. And with the physics changed you could make a Higgs boson. And I think that it was his shortcut that went wrong.”
“You think he changed the physics in a small area?” the national security advisor asked. “Would that have caused the explosion?”
“Possibly,” Weaver said. “But probably not. What we have now is some sort of gate. Bear with me here, and I’ll say that this is informed speculation, also known as a wild guess. But what we might have had was a universal inversion; we turned outside-in.”
“What?” the president said.
“Think about a balloon, Mr. President,” Weaver said, frowning as he tried to convert very complex theory into reasonable analogies. “You put a hole in the balloon and the air goes out. But you still have the balloon. Now, reach in and pull the balloon inside-out. We were actually the outside, now we’re on the inside.”
“That’s…” the Homeland Security director said, then stopped.
“Crazy, right,” Weaver replied. “The point is that if a Higgs boson was formed, it would be a universe. If the conditions were wrong, we’d be sucked into that universe and it would become the ‘outer’ universe. I could imagine some secondary effects would occur.”
“Such as a nuclear explosion,” the NSA said, dryly.
“Such as a very high end kinetic energy release,” Bill Weaver said with a nod. “Which would look an awful lot like a nuclear explosion. And at this point we get into pure speculation because there is no theory to support what we’re looking at. That big black ball could be a boson, but it does not meet the theory of a Higgs boson particle or its effects. Yes, something came through, that might have been from a Higgs boson universe but, again, it doesn’t fit the theory. Shouldn’t be able to get in or out of the universe. Also, its physics should be different, so different that it would have either died right away or, more likely, exploded. Like, another nuke type explosion but larger as the full mass of the creature converted to energy. Didn’t. What we’re looking at is a gate or a wormhole. Obviously to another planet. Maybe, probably, to a planet in this universe. Might be to the future, probably not. The big question is: is it stable? Is it going to just go away? Is it going to release energy from that planet or universe into this planet? Is it expanding? Contracting? And, most interesting overall, what’s on the other side? Another world? A world of gates maybe? Now I’m into skyballing which is the other side of speculation.”
“Okay, so we have a gate and no theory as to why it formed?” the national security advisor said.
“No, ma’am, but I do have an idea how it might have been formed, based on some of Ray Chen’s last papers, engineering rather than physics, and we might be able to figure out the physics before long. Once you know something’s possible, especially if you can study it, that’s nine tenths of the battle. Might, probably would, get the same explosion, though.”
“The explosion we can handle,” the defense secretary said, nodding. “Assuming it occurred somewhere like Los Alamos. On the ranges, not in the lab, obviously.”
“I’m going to say something,” the President intoned. “I do not want this followed up until we have a better handle on it. Not at MIT, not at California, not at Los Alamos. We have enough problems with terrorism. I do not want our cities popping like fireworks. I do not want another quarter of a million dead on our hands.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. President,” Weaver said, “if I was out of line.”
“Not at all,” the President said. “I just want that to be made clear.”
“Dr. Weaver, may I ask a question?” the national science advisor said. “Dr. Chen’s papers were open source, were they not?”
“No, sir, they weren’t,” Weaver said, shaking his head. “If they were, the President’s order would, obviously, be impossible.”
“Where did… ?” the science advisor said then stopped at a raised eyebrow from the defense secretary.
“Dr. Weaver, though his association with the Department of Defense, has access to restricted files…”
“Are you saying this was a DOD project?” the Homeland Security director asked, his fleshy face turning ruddy in anger. “That it actually was a bomb project?”
“No,” the defense secretary said, definitely. “Let’s try to leave the rumors to the press, okay? Dr. Chen had funding from the National Academy of Sciences,” he said, gesturing at the science advisor, who blanched. “From at least three nongovernmental agencies and from the DOD. Most of it was private funding. But for the DOD grant, and we pass them out for quite a few things, he had to make his reports and projections classified. I’m not sure that there’s no open source but everything in the last year or so is black. I don’t even, frankly, know why or how he got funding from us. But we fund quite a few purely theoretical projects because, sometimes, they pay off.”
“And it was these classified documents you saw?” the President asked.
“Yes, sir,” Weaver replied. “I was interested in the physics. If you can change physics in a limited area you might be able to do a lot of things, Mr. President. I hadn’t anticipated this sort of explosion or I would have rung the alarm bells. But there are other applications. Change gravity in a limited area and you’ve got a much better helicopter. Not to mention lightening the load on infantrymen. Change the physics another way and, yes, maybe you get a bang. I’d been thinking about some uses for the people who pay my salary, Mr. President. Besides being fascinated with the math. But I didn’t anticipate this at all.”
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