The SSC Cafeteria
ALICE had learned that the SSC Cafeteria, along with the SSC Visitor’s Center and Science Museum, was perched atop a small artificial hill made of dirt that had been excavated from the tunnels during the construction. On the flat Central Texas landscape it seemed to be the highest viewpoint for three hundred miles. Her gaze swept across the golden prairie and the blue and gold sky. They had arrived while the fading colors of a spectacular sunrise were still visible.
Alice felt exhilarated. Although she had been up all night, she didn’t feel tired. She could not recall when she had felt more alive. “George,” she said as they sat down at a window table for breakfast, “I still don’t understand. If what we saw this morning was some unprecedented new physical phenomenon, why isn’t that important news, a big scientific breakthrough?”
George shrugged as he cut a piece of ham. “Because we can’t explain it, we can’t reproduce it, and we can’t eliminate the possibility that it was the result of faulty equipment. Therefore, we can’t publish it. It will have to remain as a big one that got away.”
“You said something like that at the run meeting,” she said, “but you can’t just ignore what happened.”
He chewed thoughtfully for a while. “Let me recall a little piece of physics history for you, Alice,” he said, finally. “There is a might-be particle called a magnetic monopole that was suggested by certain theories of Dirac and others but had never been observed. It’s supposed to be a fundamental particle like an electron or a proton, except that instead of having an electric charge, it ‘s supposed to have a magnetic charge, like the north pole of a bar magnet that has been cut off and isolated, with the south pole completely gone.”
From force of habit Alice took her notebook from her purse and began to take notes.
“In the early 1980’s,” said Professor George, slipping into lecture mode, “a physicist at Stanford named Blas Cabrera designed and built a very clever detector for finding magnetic monopoles using some tricks involving superconductors. And a few months after he turned on the apparatus, on Valentine’s Day, February 14, 1982, nature sent Cabrera a special valentine. In the middle of the night the apparatus recorded the perfect signal of a magnetic monopole passing through the sensitive volume of the detector.”
“That sounds like our Snark,” said Alice.
“Actually, his situation was a bit better than ours,” said George. “He had a fairly respectable theory that predicted the particle he had apparently detected, right down to the observed signal. And so, with considerable fanfare, he published a paper describing his monopole observation in a very prestigious journal. Cabrera’s paper produced a kind of physics gold rush. Dozens of laboratories set up various types of monopole detectors. Cabrera himself received a big National Science Foundation grant and built a much bigger version of his original detector. And they all waited ...
“That was over twenty years ago, and for all I know they’re still waiting. Because neither Cabrera nor anyone else has yet detected another believable signal of a magnetic monopole. And if they did see another one today, they’d have trouble getting the result published, because the physics community now ‘knows’ that there are no magnetic monopoles. The current standard model of cosmology, the inflationary scenario, now explains why there are none.”
Alice wrote rapidly. “But what did Cabrera see?” she asked finally.
“Nobody knows,” said George, taking a sip of orange juice. “I guess he saw a Snark, just as we did last night.”
“This is new to me,” said Alice. “Does this happen all the time in science? Are there desk drawers full of unpublished data on spectacular measurements that only happened once and can’t be reproduced? It sounds like a dirty little secret of the field.” Maybe she should do a Search article about it, now that she had her foot in that magazine’s door. But she had to finish her Fire Ant novel first. Nobody can make much of a living writing freelance articles for science magazines.
“Perhaps it is,” said George. “When I was an undergraduate at MIT, I had a very good course on the philosophy of science. I did a paper on a famous essay by the French philosopher-scientist Poincaré. He was an excellent physicist, but he had the problem that he was also a devout Catholic. Poincaré was deeply concerned about the implicit conflict between divine miracles and the laws of physics. So he considered a hypothetical phenomenon that occurs, like a miracle, just once in the history of the universe. He argued convincingly that science has no way of dealing with a one-shot physical phenomenon. They have to be reproducible. Poincaré believed that scientists would tend to ignore one-shot events, might even pretend that they didn’t exist.”
“It would seem, George,” said Alice, “that Poincaré’s dilemma has been dumped in your lap. What are you going to do with it?” She smiled. She enjoyed listening to him talk and particularly enjoyed skewering him with his own logic.
He winced. “Dammit, Alice,” he said, “the paper I wrote for that class challenged the professor on that point and argued against Poincaré’s conclusion. The Big Bang seemed to me to be a good counter-example of a one-time event with great scientific significance. I guess that, basically, it goes against my grain to ignore data, particularly interesting data. But after what happened this morning and considering the alternatives, I must concede that perhaps Poincaré had a good point.”
“You can’t just drop it!” said Alice. Her investigative nature was offended by the thought that she might never know what they had seen.
George inhaled deeply and sighed. “Believe me, Alice,” he said, “I won’t drop it. After I get a few hours of sleep, I have lots of work to do on the Snark. I have to study its kinematics. I have to find out if we’ve previously recorded anything similar that we didn’t notice. But as long as it’s just one event, it’s not going to be of much interest to my LEM colleagues.”
“Well, I’m interested,” she said, and meant it.