Earth

1.

Back when he was still a student, Stan Goldman and his friends used to play a game of make-believe.

“How long do you think it would take Isaac Newton to solve this homework set?” they would ask each other. Or, “If Einstein were alive today, do you think he’d bother with graduate school?”

It was the same sort of lazy, get-nowhere argument he also heard his musician friends debate on occasion: “What d’you figure Mozart would make of our stuff,” they’d pose over bottles of beer, “if we snatched him from his own time to the 1990s? Would he freak out and call it damn noise? Or would he catch on, wear mirror shades, and cut an album right away?”

At that point, Stan used to cut in. “Which Mozart do you mean? The arriviste social climber? The craftsman of the biographies? Or the brash rebel of Amadeus?

The composers and players seemed puzzled by his non sequitur. “Why, the real one, of course.” Their reply convinced him that, for all their closeness, for all their well-known affinity, physicists and musicians would never fully understand each other.

Oh, I see. The real one… of course…

But what is reality?

Through a thick portal of fused quartz, mediated by a series of three hundred field-reinforced half mirrors, Stan now watched the essence of nothingness. Suspended in a sealed vacuum, a potential singularity spun and danced in nonexistence.

In other words, the chamber was empty.

Soon, though, potentiality would turn into reality. The virtual would become actual. Twisted space would spill light and tortured vacuum would briefly give forth matter. The utterly improbable would happen.

Or at least that was the general idea. Stan watched and waited, patiently.

Until the end of his life, Albert Einstein struggled against the implications of quantum mechanics.

He had helped invent the new physics. It bore his imprint as fully as Dirac’s or Heisenberg’s or Bohr’s. And yet, like Max Planck, he had always felt uncomfortable with its implications, insisting that the Copenhagen rules of probabilistic nature must be mere crude approximations of the real patterns governing the world. Beneath the dreadful quantum ambiguity, he felt there must be the signature of a designer.

Only the design eluded Einstein. Its elegant precision fled before experimentalists, who prodded first atoms, then nuclei, and at last the so-called “fundamental” particles. Always, the deeper they probed, the fuzzier grew the mesh of creation.

In fact, to a later generation of physicists, ambiguity was no enemy. Rather it became a tool. It was the law. Stan grew up picturing Nature as a whimsical goddess. She seemed to say — Look at me from afar, and you may pretend that there are firm rules — that here is cause and there effect. But remember, if you need this solace, stay back, and squint!

If, on the other hand, you dare approach — should you examine my garments’ weft and warp — well, then, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

With this machine, Stan Goldman expected to be looking closer than anyone ever had before. And he did not expect much security.

“You ready down there, Stan?”

Alex Lustig’s voice carried down the companionway. He and the others were in the control center, but Stan had volunteered to keep watch here by the peephole. It was a vital job, but one requiring none of the quickness of the younger physicists… in other words, just right for an old codger like himself. “I’m ready as I’ll ever be, Alex,” he called back.

“Good. Your timer should start running… now!”

True to Alex’s word, the display to Stan’s left began counting down whirling milliseconds.

After the end of the Gaia War, when things had calmed down enough to allow a resumption of basic science, their efforts had soon returned to studying the basic nature of singularities. Now, in this lab far beyond the orbit of Mars, they had received permission to embark on the boldest experiment yet.

Stan wiped his palms on his dungarees and wondered why he felt so nervous. After all, he had participated in the manufacture of bizarre objects before. In his youth, at CERN, it had been a zoo of subatomic particles, wrought out of searing heat at the target end of a great accelerator. Even in those days, the names physicists gave the particles they studied told you more about their own personalities than the things they pursued.

He recalled graffiti on the wall of the men’s room in Geneva.

Question: What do you get when you mix a charmed red quark with a strange one that’s green and a third that’s true blue?

Underneath were scrawled answers, in various hands and as many languages:

I don’t know, but to hold them together you’ll need a gluon with attitude!

Sounds like what they served in the cafeteria, today.

Speaking of which, anyone here know the Flavor of Beauty?

Doesn’t it depend on who’s on Top and who’s on the Bottom?

I’m getting a hadron just thinking about it.

Hey! What boson thought of this question, anyway?

Yeah. There’s a guy who ought to be leptonl

Stan smiled, remembering good times. They had been hunters in those days, he and the others, chasing and capturing specimens of elusive microscopic species, expanding the quarky bestiary till a “theory of everything” began to emerge. Gravitons and gravitinos. Magnetic monopoles and photinos. With unification came the power to mix and match and use nature’s ambiguity.

Still, he never dreamed he might someday play with singularities — micro black holes — using them as circuit elements the same blithe way an engineer might string together inductors and resistors. But young fellows like Alex seemed to take it all in stride.

“Three minutes, Stan!”

“I can read a clock!” he shouted back, trying to sound more irritated than he really was. In truth, he really had lost track of the time. His mind now seemed to move at a tangent to that flow… nearly but not quite parallel to the event cone of the objective world.

We’re told subjectivity, that old enemy of science, becomes its ally at the level of the quantum. Some say it’s only the presence of an observer that causes the probability wave to collapse. It’s the observer who ultimately notes the plummet of an electron from its shell, as well as the sparrow in a forest. Without observers, not only is a falling tree without sound… it’s a concept without meaning.

Of late Stan had been wondering ever more about that. Nature, even down to the lowliest quark, seemed to be performing, as if for an audience. Arguments raged between adherents of the strong and weak anthropic principles, over whether observers were required by the universe or merely convenient to it. But everyone now agreed that having an audience mattered.

So much, then, for the debate over what Newton would say if he were snatched out of his time and brought to the present. His clockwork world was as alien to Stan’s as that of a tribal shaman. In fact, in some ways the shaman actually had it hands down over prissy old Isaac. At least, Stan imagined, the shaman would probably make better company at a party.

“One minute! Keep your eye on—”

Alex’s voice cut off suddenly as automatic timers sent the crash doors hissing shut. Stan shook himself, hauling his mind back and making an earnest effort to concentrate. It would have been different were there something for him to do. But everything was sequenced, even data collection. Later, they would pore over it all and argue. For now, though, he had only to watch. To observe…

Before man, he wondered, who performed this role for the universe?

There appears to be no rule that the observer has to be conscious. So animals might have served without being self-aware. And on other worlds, creatures might have existed long before life filled Earth’s seas. It isn’t necessary that every event, every rockfall, every quantum of light be appreciated, only that some of it, somewhere, come to the attention of someone who notices and cares.

“But then,” Stan debated himself aloud, “Who noticed or cared at the beginning? Before the planets? Before stars?”

Who was there in the pre-creation nothing to watch the vacuum fluctuation of all time? The one that turned into the Big Bang?

In his thoughts, Stan answered his own question.

If the universe needs at least one observer in order to exist. Then that’s the one compelling argument for the necessity of God.

The counter reached zero. Beneath it, the panel of fused quartz remained black. Nevertheless. Stan knew something was happening. Deep in the bowels of the chamber, the energy state of raw vacuum was being forced to change.

Uncertainty. That was the lever. Take a cubical box of space, say a centimeter on a side. Does it contain a proton? If so, there’s a limit to how much you can know about that proton with any sureness. You cannot know its momentum more precisely than a given value without destroying your chance of knowing where it is. Or if you find a way to zoom in on the box until the proton’s location is incredibly exact, then your knowledge of its speed and direction plummets toward zero.

Another linked pair of values is energy and time. You may think you know how much or little energy the box contains. (In a vacuum it tends toward baseline zero.) But what about fluctuations?. What if bits of matter and anti-matter suddenly appear, only to abruptly disappear again? Then the average would still be the same, and all account books would stay balanced.

Within this chamber, modern trickery was using that very loophole to pry away at Nature’s wall.

Stan glanced at the mass gauge. It sped upscale rapidly. Femtograms, picograms, nanograms of matter coalesced in a space too small to measure. Micrograms, milligrams… each newly born hadron pair shimmered for a moment too narrow to notice. Particle and antiparticle tried to flee, tried to annihilate. But before they could cancel out again, each was drawn into a trap of folded space, sucked down a narrow funnel of gravity smaller than a proton, with no more personality than a smudge of blackness.

The singularity began taking on serious weight. The mass gauge whirled. Kilograms converted into tons. Tons into kilotons. Boulders, hillocks, mountains poured forth, a torrent flowing into the greedy mouth.

When Stan was young, they said you weren’t supposed to be able to make something from nothing. But nature did sometimes let you borrow. Alex Lustig’s machine was borrowing from vacuum, and instantly paying it all back to the singularity.

That was the secret. Any bank will lend you a million bucks… so long as you only want it for a microsecond.

Megatons, gigatons… Stan had helped make holes before. Singularities more complex and elegant than this one. But never had anyone attempted anything so drastic or momentous. The pace accelerated.

Something shifted in the sinuses behind his eyes. That warning came moments before the gravimeters began singing a melody of alarm… full seconds in advance of the first creaking sounds coming from the reinforced metal walls.

Come on, Alex. You promised this wouldn’t run away.

They had come to this lab on a distant asteroid on the off chance something might go wrong. But Stan wondered how much good that would do if their meddling managed to tear a rent in the fabric of everything. There were stories that some scientists on the Manhattan Project had shared a similar fear. “What if the chain reaction doesn’t stay restricted to the plutonium,” they asked, “but spreads to iron, silicon, and oxygen?” On paper it was absurd, but no one knew until the flash of Trinity, when the fireball finally faded back to little more than a terrible, glittering cloud.

Now Stan felt a similar dread. What if the singularity no longer needed Lustig’s machine to yank matter out of vacuum for it? What if the effect carried on and on, with its own momentum… ?

This time we might have gone too far.

He felt them now. The tides. And in the quartz window, mediated by three hundred half mirrors, a ghost took shape. It was microscopic, but the colors were captivating.

The mass scale spun. Stan felt the awful attraction of the thing. Any moment now it was going to reach out and drag down the walls, the station, the planetoid… and even then would it stop?

“Alex!” he cried out as gravitational flux stretched his skin. Viscera migrated toward his throat as, uselessly, he braced his feet.

“Dammit, you—”

Stan blinked. His next breath wouldn’t come. Time felt suspended.

Then he knew.

It was gone.

Goosebumps shivered in the tidal wake. He looked at the mass gauge. It read zero. One moment it had been there, the next it had vanished.

Alex’s voice echoed over the intercom, satisfaction in his voice. “Right on schedule. Time for a beer, eh? You were saying something, Stan?”

He searched his memory and somewhere found the trick to breathing again. Stan let out a shuddering sigh.

“I…” He tried to lick his lips, but couldn’t even wet them. Hoarsely, he tried again. “I was going to say… you’d better have something up there stronger than beer. Because I need it.”

2.

They tested the chamber in every way imaginable, but there was nothing there. For a time it had contained the mass of a small planet. The black hole had been palpable. Real. Now it was gone.

“They say a gravitational singularity is a tunnel to another place,” Stan mused.

“Some people think so. Wormholes and the like may connect one part of spacetime with another.” Alex nodded agreeably. He sat across the table, alone with Stan in the darkened lounge strewn with debris from the evening’s celebration. Everyone else had gone to bed, but both men had their feet propped up as they gazed through a crystal window at the starry panorama. “In practice, such tunnels probably are useless. No one will ever use one for transportation, for instance. There’s the problem of ultraviolet runaway—”

“That’s not what I’m talking about.” Stan shook his head. He poured another shot of whiskey. “What I mean is, how do we know that hole we created hasn’t popped out to become a hazard for some other poor bastards?”

Alex looked amused. “That’s not how it works, Stan. The singularity we made today was special. It grew too fast for our universe to contain it at all.

“We’re used to envisioning a black hole, even a micro, as something like a funnel in the fabric of space. But in this case, that fabric rebounded, folded over, sealed the breach. The hole is just gone, Stan.”

Stan felt tired and a little tipsy, but damn if he’d let this young hotshot get the better of him. “I know that! All causality links with our universe have been severed. There’s no connection with the thing anymore.

“But still I wonder. Where did it go?

There was a momentary silence.

“That’s probably the wrong question, Stan. A better way of putting it would be, What has the singularity become!”

The young genius now had that look in his eyes again — the philosophical one. “What do you mean?” Stan asked.

“I mean that the hole and all the mass we poured into it now ‘exists’ in its own pocket universe. That universe will never share any overlap or contact with our own. It will be a cosmos unto itself… now and forever.”

The statement seemed to carry a ring of finality, and there seemed to be little to say after that. For a while, the two of them just sat quietly.

3.

After Alex went off to bed Stan stayed behind and played with his friends, the numbers. He rested very still and used a mental pencil to write them across the window. Equations stitched the Milky Way. It didn’t take long to see that Alex was right.

What they had done today was create something out of nothing and then quickly exile that something away again. To Alex and the others, that was that. All ledgers balanced. What had been borrowed was repaid. At least as far as this universe of matter and energy was concerned.

But something was different, dammit! Before, there had been virtual fluctuations in the vacuum. Now, somewhere, a tiny cosmos had been born.

And suddenly Stan remembered something else. Something called “inflation.” And in this context the term had nothing to do with economics.

Some theorists hold that our own universe began as a very, very big fluctuation in the primordial emptiness. That during one intense instant, superdense mass and energy burst forth to begin the expansion of all expansions.

Only there could not have been anywhere near enough mass to account for what we now see… all the stars and galaxies.

“Inflation” stood for a mathematical hat trick… a way for a medium or even small-sized bang to leverage itself into a great big one. Stan scribbled more equations on his mental blackboard and came to see something he hadn’t realized before.

Of course. I get it now. The inflation that took place twenty billion years ago was no coincidence. Rather, it was a natural result of that earlier, lesser creation. Our universe must have had its own start in a tiny, compressed ball of matter no heavier than… no heavier than…

Stan felt his heartbeat as the figure seemed to glow before him.

No heavier than that little “pocket cosmos” we created today.

He breathed.

That meant that somewhere, completely out of touch or contact, their innocent experiment might have… must have… initiated a beginning. A universal beginning.

Fiat lux.

Let there be light.

“Oh my God,” he said to himself, completely unsure which of a thousand ways he meant it.