“There, in the shape of a ring,” Abhijat said, “you will see the outline of the accelerator, which exists many feet below ground, four miles in circumference.” He traced the shape of the circle on the glass with his finger. “Looking out even farther, you will see how vast the campus of the Lab is. We are nearly seven thousand acres.”
Rose looked out over the land she remembered as neighboring farms, prairie grasses now reclaiming the soil. The Nicolet Lily would grow up thinking of as home was so different from the Nicolet Rose had known — so different, she thought, as to be almost unrecognizable.
“And now, may I please turn your attention to this exhibit—” Abhijat gestured at a large segment of metal tubing stretching the length of the hallway, “—which shows a replica of the magnets used to power the accelerator. Here at the Lab,” he explained, “we are searching for tiny parts of the world we believe may exist. To do this, we use an accelerator, in which we send two particles around and around in a circle, going faster and faster until — smash!” He clapped his hands together and held them there for a moment. “We have crashed them!”
“Why?” Meena asked, her voice coming from beside him where she stood next to Lily, watching as Abhijat spoke. Hearing her father describing his work, her curiosity had overpowered her sense that these were things she ought already to know. But her father so rarely talked with her or her mother about his work. She knew the Lab as a facility with a lovely butterfly garden, a cross-country ski path, a dog park, lectures, arts events, and symphonies — not as her father knew it.
“Ah, yes. A useful question from our colleague, Miss Mital,” Abhijat said, looking surprised. “It is, to put it simply, to see what happens.”
“And what does happen?” Meena asked.
Abhijat looked at his daughter, intrigued by her curiosity. He felt for a moment as though he were speaking only to her. “You see,” he explained, “when they collide, they break apart into even smaller particles. Particles so small we can’t even see them. All we can see are the paths they make as they go spinning and flying out into the world. And those paths help us to know what kind of a particle it is we are looking at.”
A chattering in the corner, which Mrs. Hamilton quickly shushed, broke the illusion and brought Abhijat back to the group of students.
“Now, you may be wondering, why should we want to do such a thing,” he continued. “Why build such a facility just to look at such tiny, tiny things? Who among us is wondering this?”
A few timid hands went up into the air.
He smiled. “Well, my distinguished guests, it is for a very good reason. These tiny, tiny particles help us to learn what the world was like at the very beginning of time.” He paused here for effect, his eyes wide.
“Like Adam and Eve?” one of the children, a pale, blonde-haired girl, asked.
“Oh, no, long before then,” Abhijat said, smiling.
“And what was it like?” Lily asked.
Abhijat looked out at them, eyebrows raised, his face animated. “Very curious indeed.” He clapped his hands together. “Now, if you will please follow me.”
Lily and Meena trotted along at the head of the group, close to Abhijat. As they passed the offices of the physicists, Rose noticed the chalkboard walls filled with equations, a beautiful script that reminded her for a moment of the hieroglyphs she and Randolph had seen in the temple of Karnak.
“You see,” Abhijat continued, “every particle gives an energy signal. As Miss Winchester suggested, you might think of the particle accelerator as a kind of microscope. When the protons collide, they create mass in the form of other particles, and here, sometimes, are new particles we have before only ever imagined. In order to see these, we must use a quite ingenious machine called a detector, which is watching all day, every day for the signals from these particles. It gives us, in a nutshell, a tsunami of data. Because, you see, the accelerator is creating over a million collisions per second. So someone must look at these collisions and see what they’re telling us.”
“And what are they telling you?” Lily asked.
Abhijat smiled. “Well, you must be patient with us, Miss Winchester, as we work to discover that. Now, if you will please follow me, here we will look at part of the detector.” Abhijat led the children over to a bank of computers, where a number of young men sat glued to their screens. “Birali is the colleague who is making sure the machine is running correctly,” Abhijat said, indicating a younger man, who looked up from his computer screen and smiled at the children. “And he will today show us what the paths of some particles look like after a collision.”
On his screen, the young technician pulled up an image of a collision event, the paths of the particles outlined against a black background, arcing and spiraling off by way of announcing their existence.
Rose thought of how the paths of the particles, inked out against the dark background looked like chrysanthemums, like the explosions she and Randolph had watched blooming against a dark sky during the fireworks festivals of Japan.
“What we will do next,” Abhijat continued, “if you please, is to visit the experiment hall. Please, I think this you will find most exciting. So with your permission, we will head in this direction.” He led the snaking line of students back through the atrium to a nearby building, the docent trotting along at the back of the group to help herd the strays. “On the way,” Abhijat continued, “we will pass a very interesting part of our facility, the neutron therapy department. Here, with experimental medical treatments connected to our work, we are treating patients with very serious conditions.” He gestured at the building as they passed and crowded together at the door of their destination. “Now in the experiment hall, I must ask you please not to touch anything. We must all keep our curious fingers to ourselves.”
Inside, silver canisters of liquid nitrogen stood along the walls surrounded by strange machinery, and Rose thought it seemed more like being inside a factory than anything else. How, she wondered, did one connect the delicate image of the particle paths she had just seen, so like a flower, to this noisy, hissing, chuffing room?
“My colleagues you see working here are experimental physicists,” Abhijat continued, his voice raised over the hum of the machines. “They work with the equipment we will see today, conducting experiments and gathering data.”
Abhijat did not share this opinion with the students, but he had always felt that there was something ugly about all that tinkering, all that machinery. He privately felt that a good idea ought to be able to be sorted out in his head, on paper, or on the crowded chalkboard in his office. He thought of it as an untidy business — building and operating these accelerators. But it was a necessary business, he knew. For without this machinery, what were his theories, the argument went, but elegant ideas, grand guesses at the shape of the world?
“I, on the other hand, am a theoretical physicist,” he continued. “We concern ourselves mainly with the philosophy and mathematics behind the physical world as it exists around us. If you will permit me a little joke, to quote Sir Arthur Eddington, ‘I hope it will not shock experimental physicists too much if I say that we do not accept their observations unless they are confirmed by theory.’”
Here Abhijat waited what seemed to him a rather long time for the group’s laughter. Finding it not forthcoming, he plowed onward.