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.