Broken Symmetry

4. Spin Down

“I’ve gone over your math, and can’t find anything wrong with it,” Roy Schwitters said. “As much as it galls me to admit it, you’re right.”

Harold Volin grinned sheepishly, the grin of a small boy caught with his hands in the cookie jar. Six weeks ago, Roy had called him in to help figure out the problem of the SSC explosions. Now, they sat in a first floor office of the old SSC Administration building, studying the equations Volin had written out on a chalkboard. The building, along with many others, had been taken over by the county when the Department of Energy had pulled out, as there was no sense in letting good office buildings and state-of-the-art computer equipment go to waste. Sheriff Kingsley had somehow managed to arrange this office for Roy, nowhere near as luxurious as the office he had occupied when he had been director, but “good enough for government work,” as the sheriff had told him.

Roy considered Harold for a moment before continuing. Harold was a theoretician, a good physicist, but had a quirky personality that made him look for solutions to problems from the strangest angles. His red hair, thick beard, and incongruously high voice fit his personality perfectly. But it was exactly because of Harold’s odd way of looking at the world that Ray had called him in. And now, here was Harold’s solution, too off-the-wall to be considered seriously, but the only one that fit the data. So far.

Roy spoke slowly, unsure of his words. “Your calculations do seem to indicate that someone’s running the collider.”

Harold nodded eagerly, still smiling. He tended to speak quickly, with one word running into another. “The first clue you gave me was the symmetric nature of the explosions. It was exactly what you’d get if an antimatter beam went off course—zing!—and hit the walls of the ring. And given that the magnets only work at a few degrees Kelvin, any beam sent through at the moment would naturally run off course. After all, the magnets aren’t operational at the moment.”

Roy gave his friend an incredulous look. “You’re missing the point, Harold. None of it is operational. Not the magnets, not the detectors—and most of all, not the injectors! The SSC was never turned on. The project was killed long before we even got to the stage where we could generate one proton-antiproton beam, let alone five! I admit that your calculations indicate that the SSC has been turned on, but how? If there are in fact antiprotons in the ring, where are they coming from?”

Harold eyes twinkled. “That is the big question, isn’t it? Not, ‘Who’s running the collider?’ but ‘Where are the beams coming from?’ ”

“I don’t understand.”

Harold’s voice took on a sober tone. “Look, Roy, I know as well as you do that the SSC isn’t operational. There is no way that those beams are being generated by our SSC. But maybe—just maybe—they’re being generated by some other SSC.”

“Some other SSC?”

“In another universe.”

It took all night, but Harold finally convinced Roy of the logic of his theory. It had been difficult, at first, as Roy was a strong supporter of the standard Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.

But the equations were incontrovertible.

“At least it gets rid of all those bizarre paradoxes,” Roy said.

Harold blinked. “Understated, as usual.”

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t seem to appreciate the magnitude of what I’ve proven here, Roy. Ever since the theory of quantum mechanics was developed, no one has been able to settle on one interpretation.”

“That’s because all were equally valid. Everything we observed fit any interpretation, from wave-function collapse to Bohm’s hidden variables.”

“But not anymore! Don’t you see? This discovery is so important, it’ll shake the foundations of philosophy as well as physics.”

Roy harrumphed and shook his head. “And it’s all due to a killed experiment. Don’t get me wrong, Harold, I am happy for you—”

“For us, you mean. It would be indecent not to list you as co-author.”

“All right, for us, then. But it still doesn’t change one annoying, undeniable fact. I was hoping that what we found would indicate a working collider.”

“Well, it does, in a sense,” Harold said. “It indicates a working SSC in some other universe. If it hadn’t been killed, it’s now about the time when we would have started running the machine. Think of it.”

Think of it. A universe where the SSC was never canceled. A universe where science never lost its way, where the government and the lay people understood the importance of this project, appreciated the need for basic research.

Perhaps in that universe, the other projects, like SETI and the human genome project, were also going strong. Perhaps in that universe, the space program hadn’t stopped at the Moon, but was even now moving humanity towards the stars. Perhaps…

“Harold,” Roy said softly, “can we use your theory to travel to that other universe?”

Harold looked wistful, and shook his head. “I’m afraid that’s unlikely. The energies are just too much. You’d have to be in the path of the beam, and that would probably kill you. Of course, we could get a resonance effect going, but I’m not sure how.”

Roy bit his lower lip and nodded. “It was worth asking. Too bad we can’t use your theory to our advantage.”

The two men sat in silence for a moment, and then Harold’s eyes glinted. “Actually, we can!”

“How?”

“Look,” Harold said, “What’s the most expensive part of the SSC?”

“The ring, of course,” Roy replied.

Harold nodded, excitement in his eyes. “Yes, the ring. The detectors and even the computers are cheap compared to that. But don’t you see? We don’t have to worry about funding the ring anymore!”

“You mean to say—” Roy began.

“I mean to say that someone else in another universe is paying to run the beams. We can just set up detectors and piggyback on their experiments, like when we do experiments on synchrotron radiation. We just have to wait for a crossover, and I believe I can calculate when those will occur. And when a beam comes through—zing!—and collides with the protons in the surrounding dirt, we take data.”

Roy pressed his fingers together and leaned back in his chair. “We could restart the SSC at a fraction of the original cost,” he said, “because the scientists in the other universe have already built it.”

“My point exactly.”

Roy picked up the phone to call the Department of Energy.