Confrontation
GEORGE blinked and turned his head to the right, hearing as he did so the motor whirr of the remote he had just linked into. He recognized his new location as the charging dock of the LEM counting house. He looked in the wall mirror, saw his own familiar features on the headscreen, and adjusted the height of the remote to six feet, matching his own. Across the room he could see Jake Wang, impeccably attired in a pearl gray business suit. He was talking to and gesturing at Murray, clad as usual in yellow SSC coveralls.
“You have to get those new transputer chips for us, Murray,” Jake said. “There’s no alternative. The machine people are improving the luminosity, and as the data rate goes up, we’re getting more and more dead time. It would be a great embarrassment if I had to ask them to turn down the luminosity to keep our electronics from hanging. We must have those faster transputer chips.”
“Sure, Jake,” said Murray. “Maybe I should call up the Secretary of the Navy and tell him that his jets don’t need fast transputer VLSIs in their radar. Maybe ...” He stopped talking and looked thoughtful. “You know, I do have a friend in the testing and quality control department at Inmos. We used to work together at Motorola. Last time I talked to him, he was complaining about how much trouble they were having with testing their new transputer chips for radiation damage. Their sources weren’t hot enough or didn’t have the right spectrum or something. Maybe, we could, uh, volunteer to help him out with some of the testing. Any transputer chip that can survive in the middle of the LEM detector should have no problem at all in a nuclear war.”
Jake paused and seemed to be absorbing the idea, then grinned. “Superb thinking, Murray,” he said, clapping him on the back. “Do it! I’ll check with you later.” He turned to the remote.. “Hello, George,” he said. “You were on the owl shift last night, and I didn’t expect to see you until tomorrow. You should be sleeping. Where are you?”
George wondered if Jake had heard about the Snark event yet. He put on what he hoped was a charming grin. “I’m upstairs in my office,” he said. “I’ll sleep later, Jake. I was giving Ms. Lang a demonstration of the use of remotes, and I found you here. Jake, I need to talk to you about an event we recorded early this morning. It’s now our leading candidate for weird event of the year,” he said.
Jake frowned. “Weird in what way?” he asked.
Apparently the news hadn’t reached him, George thought. The students and postdocs were afraid of Jake and didn’t talk to him if they could avoid it. “Well,” he began, “in most ways it’s a normal collision. The Fermi motions of both interacting quarks must have boosted the collision energy a bit, but otherwise it’s very much like our other central collisions except for one thing. There’s an extra particle coming from the vertex. A most unusual extra particle.”
“Unusual?” Jake said. George noticed that the brightness of his brown eyes seemed to intensify. He was interested. “Exactly what kind of unusual particle, George?”
George gestured with the remote’s right arm and metal hand. “First, it’s not a Higgs, Jake,” he said quickly and watched as the brightness faded. “It’s not any particle that you could hang a theorist’s label on. It came straight out of the vertex, leaving a huge ionization trail but not a trace of any deflection in the magnetic field. It made a new jet every few millimeters, 29 jets in all, and all of them pointing roughly forward in the momentum direction of the particle. But the inner time-of-flight system claims the thing was only moving at about 2% of the speed of light when it went by. It has to be massive as hell.”
“Couldn’t you get its mass from the missing energy?” Jake asked.
George shook his head, hearing the remote’s motors whirr as he did so. “No missing energy, Jake. The event conserves energy and momentum only when the extra particle is removed from the analysis.”
Jake stared in George’s direction for a moment, then broke into a peal of ironic laughter. “You mean ...” he said, then stopped to laugh again. “You mean that you’ve not only discovered a new particle of great mass, George, but you’ve also discovered a violation of energy conservation! And momentum conservation too, no doubt!” He lapsed into laughter again, stopped abruptly to frown at George, then turned on the Stare.
Then, quite abruptly, the Stare was transformed into a broad smile. “We shall call a press conference immediately to announce your great discovery, George. We must give a name to this remarkable new particle of yours. I know! We’ll name it after you! We’ll announce to the assembled multitudes of reporters that you’ve discovered the ...” He broke into laughter again. “... the George-on! Or wait! Perhaps it’s neutral. We could call it the George-ino!”
He turned the Stare on George again, his gaze seemingly focused some distance behind the remote’s head. This lasted for what seemed a full minute.
George waited for what he had learned was the appropriate length of time, enduring the Stare as he patiently monitored the seconds on the telepresence chronometer floating at the upper right of his field of view. Finally he spoke. “You’re the LEM Spokesman, Jake.” he said quietly. “You need to look at the data on this thing yourself. If you don’t, you aren’t doing your job.”
Jake’s frown deepened. “George, you’re wasting my time,” he said. “You’re looking at a cosmic ray or a fission fragment or some glitch in the detector electronics and trying to make it into something important. Face it, George. If it doesn’t conserve energy, it isn’t physics.”
“At least think about it, Jake,” said George. “Let’s not get too hung up on conventional wisdom. There is a possible mechanism. I have a theorist friend who suggested ...”
“George, ... No! You’re wasting my time,” Jake said, his voice smooth but very deep and low.
“OK, Jake,” said George, “but I think it’s important. I’m going to follow up on it, and I’m going to use LEM resources.”
Jake uttered a deep sigh. “Just what do you want to do with this wonderful magic event you’ve discovered, George?”
“I’ll use processor time to do a detailed scan of all the event tapes to see if there are any more like it that the anomaly system missed. And I want to retrain the neural net of the event-trigger to be more sensitive to anything similar in the next run. Jake, I have a feeling about this event. It’s important.”
Jake frowned. “You don’t have enough to do already, George? You’re in need of new projects? You don’t have enough to do in discovering why our vertex detector is dying? The tens of millions of dollars invested in that vertex detector are going down the drain while you pursue fantasies. You need to retrain the trigger, too? That’s a month’s work, George. Every time we try to retrain that trigger network, it does ugly things to us. It’s working now, George. Leave it alone!”
“Jake,” said George, “I want you to look at this event. Please. It’s important.”
“No!” Jake shouted. “Absolutely not. I have better things to do. You have better things to do. The whole damned experiment is collapsing around us, and you want to repeal conservation of energy. Get some sleep, George. Tomorrow this will all seem like a bad dream.”
Jake looked at his watch, then moved his hand in a dismissive manner. “I must go, George. I have to go talk to Roy again. Now those SDC imbeciles have done something to the sextupoles that is destroying our beam quality. We have the next group meeting on Monday morning, George. Be there, with your report on your progress toward understanding and fixing the pixel problem and without this event you found in the garbage can.” He spun on his heel and stalked out of the room.
George angrily wheeled the remote, its motors howling, to the nearest charging dock and disconnected.