Snark Seminar
THE TIME had passed so rapidly. Alice couldn’t quite believe that it had only been nine days since they had isolated the Snark. She recalled how George had commandeered a new laboratory room for them to work in and set up the recording and display hardware, how Roger had quickly scanned electronic conference proceedings, identified SETI experts on alien contact, and persuaded them to come to the Laboratory, how the subtleties of the Snark’s pictorial messages had slowly been decoded. It seemed like months of events compressed into a handful of days.
She looked around SSC’s large lecture theater. It was absolutely packed. Alice suspected that its occupancy probably exceeded the fire-code limit by 25%. The front row was occupied by the Laboratory hierarchy, with Roy Schwitters, the SSC Director, seated in the center. Jake Wang sat immediately to his left, and occasionally delivered a whispered comment in the director’s ear. Also scattered along the first and second rows were the group leaders, Nobel laureates, and distinguished physicists that Alice had come to know and recognize in the past two weeks.
George had wanted Alice, as a participant in the Snark discovery, to sit on the front row also, but as a reporter she had preferred to sit half-way back in the lecture theater where she could experience the reactions of the audience around her. She had arrived forty minutes before the seminar was scheduled to begin, and she was glad that she had. Late arriving graduate students and others sat on the floors, filling the aisles and the space on the floor in front of the first row of seats. Both walls were lined with remotes. Alice had heard from some of the late arrivals that all the telepresence units and couches in the Laboratory had been commandeered for the special seminar, bringing all interactive data analysis at the SSC to a dead stop.
George had been speaking for over half an hour, and was now getting to the final conclusions of his talk, which had been designed to provide an overview of the past week’s work on the Snark. The seminar schedule, projected at the beginning, had indicated that George would speak first for 45 minutes, followed by a question period and a break, followed by 30 minute talks by four other speakers. Roger Coulton, seated now at the far right of the front row next to his boss, Bert Barnes, would discuss the twelve Snark diagrams and their interpretation. Professor Angelo Axel, distinguished cosmologist from the University of Chicago, would discuss inflationary cosmology and bubble universes. Professor Rudyard Horne of Cal Tech would discuss general relativity and quantum gravity as applied to stable microscopic wormholes. And Professor Wilson Mulligan, George’s friend from the University of Washington Astronomy Department and a long-time leader of SETI efforts in radio astronomy, would discuss strategies for establishing two-way contact using the Snark.
There had been some discussion of coupling the seminar to a press conference, but George had vetoed that idea, preferring to wait until the two-way contact attempt had been made. Alice was delighted with this decision. She had a major news scoop, the discovery of the Snark, ready to break to an unsuspecting world later this afternoon. Alice took digital camera shots of the arrangement on the front row and made detailed notes of everything. She was thinking of the news release, the Search article she would write on the Snark, and the popular level science book that would follow it. The Snark was a historic event, and she was in a unique position to write its history.
George started his talk by projecting several multi-colored and rotating views of the now-famous “Snark event” on the large computer-driven flatscreen at the front of the room. He mentioned several important features of the LEM detector that had been essential in discovering the event. He graphically traced the path of the Snark through the various layers of the detector, projecting diagrams that showed in detail the region where the Snark had stopped. He then described how he and Alice had come in the middle of the night and removed the scintillator bar containing the Snark from the LEM detector. He held up a unit like the one they had removed.
Alice smiled. George made it sound as if their actions that Saturday night had been a thoroughly planned course of action, a careful set of logical steps, rather than the slightly beery culmination to an evening of dancing at P.J.’s. And he didn’t mention that after they’d found the thing, they’d gone to Alice’s house and screwed like demented weasels. He seemed to imply that at least half of the insights that had led to finding the Snark had been hers. George was a gentleman, but he was unduly generous. She felt embarrassed, thinking about her half-finished techno-thriller.
George showed a close-up image of the lead-glass scintillator that held the Snark, made at a sufficiently low light level that the blue glow was visible. This was followed by graphs showing the wavelength spectrum of the light and its time structure. Then he described the encoded message, including all twelve of the bit-map images it contained. Finally, George described the plan for transmitting a message in the other direction, mentioning that one of the following speakers would describe the plan in more detail.
There was thunderous applause in the auditorium as George concluded. The SSC Director stood and asked if there were questions. Alice shifted in her seat, wondering what the question period would bring. She could see that Jake was holding his hand stiffly in the air.
The director called on the first questioner, a theorist in the front row who asked a detailed question about the energy and momentum balance in the reconstruction of the Snark event. George answered the question and projected a new diagram which provided additional information.
Another questioner, an experimentalist for the LEM group whom Alice recognized, asked skeptically about the mass and charge of the Snark and how these related to its stopping power. George quickly admitted that there was a problem here, and projected a graph showing an analysis of the Snark’s ionization track in the various parts of the LEM detector. He followed this with a graph of the time-of-flight analysis of the Snark event. “If we assume the Snark is an object having a Planck-scale mass with a velocity of beta equals point-oh-two,” he finished, “then the observed ionization should have been insufficient to bring it to rest. We suspect that the previously unknown color ionization process, the process that produced the 29 jets we saw, also served to decelerate the Snark. Roger has suggested that there may have been neutral particles involved in the deceleration, which we wouldn’t track. We would be interested in other suggestions bearing on this issue.”
The third questioner, one of the accelerator engineers, wanted a more complete explanation of what had been learned from the bit-map diagrams. In particular, what could be learned about wormholes and about the location from which the message was being sent. “First let me deal with the wormhole question,” said George. “The wormhole or ‘Einstein-Rosen bridge’ as we used to call it when I was in graduate school, is almost as old as Einstein’s general theory of relativity itself. The mathematics of general relativity indicates that when space becomes sufficiently curved and distorted, a three dimensional tube can form that connects one region of space-time with another, a sort of spatial shortcut.” George projected a diagram of a surface curved back on itself, with a tube connecting one region of the surface to another.
Alice was amused. George had spent long hours fetching papers on wormholes from electronic preprint databases, studying the papers in great detail, complaining about the unintelligible math, and bombarding Roger with questions. Now, a week later, he sounded like an expert who had been working in the field for years. Perhaps he had learned something from his association with Jake.
“In 1962,” George continued, “Fuller and Wheeler showed that a wormhole is so dynamically unstable that it would pinch closed before any light, matter, or information could pass through it. Then in 1988, Morris, Thorne, and Yurtsever demonstrated that a Casimir-effect capacitor could stabilize a wormhole, preventing its pinch-off. Subsequent work of Visser and others demonstrated that the same stability could be achieved in other ways. From what we now gather from the Snark diagrams, there are ways of stabilizing a wormhole that we had not previously considered. Professor Horne will discuss this later.”
“But what’s at the other end of the wormhole? In particular, what’s this ‘other universe’ business you mentioned?” the questioner persisted. “Are we talking Everett-Wheeler probability branches or shadow-matter worlds or what?”
“None of the above,” said George. “Professor Axel will address the cosmological aspects of the Snark message later today, but let me attempt a low-brow experimentalist’s answer to your question. The ‘inflationary scenario’ describing the early history of the Big Bang is a synthesis of cosmology and particle physics. But up to now, there seemed no hope of attempting any experimental verifications of its predictions. The scenario described the very early universe as a region of expanding space saturated with an almost unimaginably large quantity of energy. As that space expands, a local irregularity occurs, perhaps around a single magnetic monopole, and a sort of bubble forms. Inside that bubble is what we would call normal space, while outside is the energy-saturated space in which the strong, electro-weak, and gravitational forces are indistinguishable. The walls of the bubble, driven by the energy liberated in this transition from one kind of space to another, move outward faster than the speed of light. That bubble of space is what became our universe. We and all the space we can reach, all the planets, stars, galaxies, and galactic clusters are inside it. But a larger mega-universe, the true cosmos, remains outside the bubble.”
Not bad, thought Alice, taking notes. Now George is an expert on cosmology too.
“The inflationary scenario,” George continued, “allows for the possibility of many such bubble-universes, each isolated from the rest, each walled off in its own pinched-off isolation from the others and from the greater mega-universe in which they all exist. It now appears that through the Snark, we are receiving a message from intelligent life that inhabits another bubble universe. Apparently it’s easier to contact intelligent life in other universes than it is in your own. That’s the conclusion we’ve reached from studying the Snark diagrams. Inflationary cosmology seems to have been experimentally confirmed.” The questioner nodded and sat down.
Alice observed that there were fewer hands raised now, the audience must be running out of questions. The director called on Jake. He stood and slowly turned to face the audience. “There is a time to push your own work, to toot your own horn,” Jake began. “This, however, is not such a time. A leading member of my LEM team, my friend and colleague Professor George Griffin has made a momentous, unprecedented, and completely unexpected discovery. A discovery which, as he has graciously pointed out, was made possible because of this great accelerator and because of the remarkable sensitivity and measurement capabilities of our LEM detector. I would like to congratulate Professor Griffin on his work. Two weeks ago he tried to interest me in this Snark event, and I blush to admit that I dismissed it as uninteresting background.” He turned to the stage and smiled at George.
“And background it is, in a certain sense,” he continued. “The Snark is not a fundamental particle, not an object of the kind this great facility was built to study. It is something unique, something far stranger. It is an alien artifact, an object whose very nature we can only guess at from the meager clues that their messages have so far provided.”
I can’t believe it, Alice thought. Jake is actually being magnanimous. Could he have had a personality transplant over the weekend? But what did he mean about the Snark not being the kind of object the SSC was built to study?
“Some might argue that Professor Griffin’s discovery lies outside the realm of particle physics. That it more properly belongs in the domain of astrophysics, SETI studies, or even extraterrestrial biology.” Jake paused and looked at the audience.
OK, here it comes, Alice thought.
“But I feel that this great discovery was made in this laboratory, and it should remain in this laboratory. I would like to suggest to the SSC Director and the SSC Executive Committee, with all due respect for their prerogatives, that they should create a Snark Task Force to investigate this new phenomenon as fully and rapidly as possible, that significant laboratory resources be committed to this project, that additional external support be immediately sought from the funding agencies and foundations, and that Professor Griffin be asked to take a leave of absence from his university so that he can head this task force and devote his full effort to this project.” Again he turned to George. “And I want to congratulate Professor Griffin again for his remarkable achievement.”
Facing George, Jake began to clap, and soon the audience of the entire auditorium rose in a standing ovation.
The director strode up on the stage and warmly shook George’s hand. “We’ll take our break now,” he said into the microphone.
When she could get George’s attention, Alice, balancing her coffee cup and cinnamon roll, said quietly to him, “Was that really Jake Wang who said those things? Or was this a changeling swapped for Jake in the night by the elves?”
George laughed. “You have to be able to read your Jake,” he said. “Allow me to interpret. First, he saw no way of blocking work on the Snark, so he got out in front to lead the parade, radiating whatever reflected glory he could in the process. Second, he claimed as much credit as he could for the LEM detector as a device for discovering wormholes, and I’m sure he’ll continue to do so with rising intensity for the indefinite future. Third, he has effectively moved all work on the Snark as far from LEM as possible, sending me with it. And finally, he’s suggested that general laboratory funds and external funds be used to support whatever work is done on the Snark, meaning that LEM funds will not be spent on it. Understand now?”
“He’s moved you out of his road, so he can get on with discovering the Higgs?” Alice asked.
“Exactly,” said George. “I suppose I might have done something similar in his place.” He winked at her.
A tone sounded in the hallway, indicating that the second part of the seminar was about to begin. Together they walked back into the lecture theater.