Another linked pair of values is energy and time. You may think you know how much or little energy the box contains. (In a vacuum it tends toward baseline zero.) But what about fluctuations?. What if bits of matter and anti-matter suddenly appear, only to abruptly disappear again? Then the average would still be the same, and all account books would stay balanced.
Within this chamber, modern trickery was using that very loophole to pry away at Nature’s wall.
Stan glanced at the mass gauge. It sped upscale rapidly. Femtograms, picograms, nanograms of matter coalesced in a space too small to measure. Micrograms, milligrams… each newly born hadron pair shimmered for a moment too narrow to notice. Particle and antiparticle tried to flee, tried to annihilate. But before they could cancel out again, each was drawn into a trap of folded space, sucked down a narrow funnel of gravity smaller than a proton, with no more personality than a smudge of blackness.
The singularity began taking on serious weight. The mass gauge whirled. Kilograms converted into tons. Tons into kilotons. Boulders, hillocks, mountains poured forth, a torrent flowing into the greedy mouth.
When Stan was young, they said you weren’t supposed to be able to make something from nothing. But nature did sometimes let you borrow. Alex Lustig’s machine was borrowing from vacuum, and instantly paying it all back to the singularity.
That was the secret. Any bank will lend you a million bucks… so long as you only want it for a microsecond.
Megatons, gigatons… Stan had helped make holes before. Singularities more complex and elegant than this one. But never had anyone attempted anything so drastic or momentous. The pace accelerated.
Something shifted in the sinuses behind his eyes. That warning came moments before the gravimeters began singing a melody of alarm… full seconds in advance of the first creaking sounds coming from the reinforced metal walls.
Come on, Alex. You promised this wouldn’t run away.
They had come to this lab on a distant asteroid on the off chance something might go wrong. But Stan wondered how much good that would do if their meddling managed to tear a rent in the fabric of everything. There were stories that some scientists on the Manhattan Project had shared a similar fear. “What if the chain reaction doesn’t stay restricted to the plutonium,” they asked, “but spreads to iron, silicon, and oxygen?” On paper it was absurd, but no one knew until the flash of Trinity, when the fireball finally faded back to little more than a terrible, glittering cloud.
Now Stan felt a similar dread. What if the singularity no longer needed Lustig’s machine to yank matter out of vacuum for it? What if the effect carried on and on, with its own momentum… ?
This time we might have gone too far.
He felt them now. The tides. And in the quartz window, mediated by three hundred half mirrors, a ghost took shape. It was microscopic, but the colors were captivating.
The mass scale spun. Stan felt the awful attraction of the thing. Any moment now it was going to reach out and drag down the walls, the station, the planetoid… and even then would it stop?
“Alex!” he cried out as gravitational flux stretched his skin. Viscera migrated toward his throat as, uselessly, he braced his feet.
“Dammit, you—”
Stan blinked. His next breath wouldn’t come. Time felt suspended.
Then he knew.
It was gone.
Goosebumps shivered in the tidal wake. He looked at the mass gauge. It read zero. One moment it had been there, the next it had vanished.
Alex’s voice echoed over the intercom, satisfaction in his voice. “Right on schedule. Time for a beer, eh? You were saying something, Stan?”
He searched his memory and somewhere found the trick to breathing again. Stan let out a shuddering sigh.
“I…” He tried to lick his lips, but couldn’t even wet them. Hoarsely, he tried again. “I was going to say… you’d better have something up there stronger than beer. Because I need it.”
2.
They tested the chamber in every way imaginable, but there was nothing there. For a time it had contained the mass of a small planet. The black hole had been palpable. Real. Now it was gone.
“They say a gravitational singularity is a tunnel to another place,” Stan mused.
“Some people think so. Wormholes and the like may connect one part of spacetime with another.” Alex nodded agreeably. He sat across the table, alone with Stan in the darkened lounge strewn with debris from the evening’s celebration. Everyone else had gone to bed, but both men had their feet propped up as they gazed through a crystal window at the starry panorama. “In practice, such tunnels probably are useless. No one will ever use one for transportation, for instance. There’s the problem of ultraviolet runaway—”
“That’s not what I’m talking about.” Stan shook his head. He poured another shot of whiskey. “What I mean is, how do we know that hole we created hasn’t popped out to become a hazard for some other poor bastards?”
Alex looked amused. “That’s not how it works, Stan. The singularity we made today was special. It grew too fast for our universe to contain it at all.
“We’re used to envisioning a black hole, even a micro, as something like a funnel in the fabric of space. But in this case, that fabric rebounded, folded over, sealed the breach. The hole is just gone, Stan.”
Stan felt tired and a little tipsy, but damn if he’d let this young hotshot get the better of him. “I know that! All causality links with our universe have been severed. There’s no connection with the thing anymore.
“But still I wonder. Where did it go?
There was a momentary silence.
“That’s probably the wrong question, Stan. A better way of putting it would be, What has the singularity become!”
The young genius now had that look in his eyes again — the philosophical one. “What do you mean?” Stan asked.
“I mean that the hole and all the mass we poured into it now ‘exists’ in its own pocket universe. That universe will never share any overlap or contact with our own. It will be a cosmos unto itself… now and forever.”
The statement seemed to carry a ring of finality, and there seemed to be little to say after that. For a while, the two of them just sat quietly.
3.
After Alex went off to bed Stan stayed behind and played with his friends, the numbers. He rested very still and used a mental pencil to write them across the window. Equations stitched the Milky Way. It didn’t take long to see that Alex was right.
What they had done today was create something out of nothing and then quickly exile that something away again. To Alex and the others, that was that. All ledgers balanced. What had been borrowed was repaid. At least as far as this universe of matter and energy was concerned.
But something was different, dammit! Before, there had been virtual fluctuations in the vacuum. Now, somewhere, a tiny cosmos had been born.
And suddenly Stan remembered something else. Something called “inflation.” And in this context the term had nothing to do with economics.
Some theorists hold that our own universe began as a very, very big fluctuation in the primordial emptiness. That during one intense instant, superdense mass and energy burst forth to begin the expansion of all expansions.
Only there could not have been anywhere near enough mass to account for what we now see… all the stars and galaxies.
“Inflation” stood for a mathematical hat trick… a way for a medium or even small-sized bang to leverage itself into a great big one. Stan scribbled more equations on his mental blackboard and came to see something he hadn’t realized before.