The problem was that the code was not in any known computer language. In fact, it didn’t appear to be in any recognizable language at all.
Professor Hilbert’s particular area of interest was dimensions. Specifically, he was fascinated by the possibility that there might be a great many universes out there, of which ours was only one. He was part of a group of scientists who believed that our universe might exist in an ocean of other universes, some being born, some already in existence, and others about to come to an end. Instead of a universe, he believed in the possibility of a multiverse.
His life’s work had been devoted to this belief, which he hoped the collider might help him to prove. If a mini black hole, one that did not swallow up the earth, say 1,000 times the mass of an electron and existing for only 10-23 seconds, were created in the collider, Professor Hilbert believed that it would provide evidence for the existence of parallel universes.
Now, as he sat at his desk, he looked at the strange code, written in symbols that seemed at once modern yet very, very old and wondered: Is this the proof that I have been seeking? Is this a message from another universe, another dimension?
And if it is, then what does it mean?
some of you may know who Albert Einstein was. For those who don’t, here is a picture of him:
Einstein was a very famous scientist, the kind of scientist even people who know nothing about science can probably name. He is most famous for his General Theory of Relativity, which concluded that mass is a form of energy, and goes e = mc2 (or energy = mass by the speed of light squared), but he also had a sense of humor. He once said that we were all ignorant, but each of us was ignorant in a different way, which is very wise when you think about it. [14]
It was Einstein who predicted the existence of black holes (there is one at the heart of our Milky Way, but it’s obscured by dust clouds; otherwise, it would be visible every night as a fireball in the constellation of Sagittarius), but Einstein’s black holes came with their own in-built problem. They had, at their center, a singularity (there’s that word again: remember footnote 1?), a point at which time came to an end and all known rules of physics broke down. You can’t make a rule that breaks all the rules. Science just doesn’t work that way.
Einstein wasn’t happy about this at all. He liked things to work according to the rules. In fact, the whole point of his life’s work was to prove that there were rules governing the known universe, and he couldn’t very well leave things like singularities hanging about making the place look untidy.
So, like any good scientist, Einstein went back over his work and tried to find a way to prove the singularities didn’t exist or, if they did, that they played by the rules. So, after a bit of fiddling with his sums, he came to the conclusion that the singularities might in fact be bridges between two different universes. This solved the problem of the singularities as far as Einstein was concerned, but nobody really believed that this bridge, known as an Einstein-Rosen bridge, could actually be used to travel between the universes, mainly because, if it existed at all, it would be very unstable, like building a bridge made from chewing gum and bits of chocolate over a very long drop, then suggesting that someone in a big truck might like to give it a try. The bridge would also be very small-10-34 meters, or so small that it would hardly be there at all-and it would exist for only an instant, so driving a truck across it (a space truck, obviously) would be both difficult and, frankly, fatal.
Mathematicians have also suggested the possibility of what are known as “multiply-connected spaces,” or wormholes- literally tunnels between universes-that exist at the center of black holes. [15] In 1963 a New Zealand mathematician named Roy Kerr suggested that a spinning black hole would collapse into a stable ring of neutrons because the centrifugal force pushing out would cancel the inward force of gravity. The black hole wouldn’t fall in on itself, and you wouldn’t be crushed to death, but it would be a one-way trip, as the gravity would be sufficient to prevent you from returning the way you had come.
Nevertheless, the whole debate was another stage in the great discussion about wormholes, and black holes, and parallel universes, places where the rules of physics might not be quite the same as ours but might work perfectly well in that universe.
Now Professor Hilbert was wondering if something in a universe other than our own might have found a way of breaking through, using a hole or a bridge as yet unthought of in our science, and tried to make contact. If that was the case, then, if the bridge still existed, there would be an opening in its world, and another opening in ours.
The questions that followed from this were: where was that opening, and what exactly was going to emerge from it?
Back in the basement of 666 Crowley Road, four figures stood staring at where there had been, until recently, a spinning circle of blue. Mrs. Abernathy had returned from her visit to Samuel Johnson’s house to find her three companions in a state of some distress.
“The portal has closed,” said Mr. Renfield, who no longer looked or sounded quite like the Mr. Renfield of old. His voice emerged from his throat in a series of hoarse clicks, and his skin had already taken on the wrinkled, unhealthy appearance of a rotting apple. The change in his appearance had begun almost as soon as the blue light had disappeared, and a similar decay could be seen in Mrs. Renfield and Mr. Abernathy. Only Mrs. Abernathy remained unaffected.
“They have shut down the collider,” said Mrs. Abernathy, but there was a strange expression on her face as she spoke, which she hid from the Renfields, “as the Great One predicted that they would. But now we know that travel between this world and ours is possible. Even now, our master is assembling his great army, and when he is ready the portal will open once again, and he will cross over and claim this place as his own.”
“But we grow weak,” said Mrs. Renfield. Her breath smelled bad, as if something inside her was festering.
“You grow weak,” said Mrs. Abernathy. “You are here only to serve my needs. Your energy will fuel me, and when the portal opens once more, you will be renewed.”
This was not entirely true. Mrs. Abernathy was a more extraordinary demon than her three companions, older and wiser and more powerful than ever they could have imagined. The portal had not closed, not entirely. Mrs. Abernathy’s great will and strength were keeping it open just a crack. Nevertheless, she was content to suck energy from the others as required, and to use the portal only when necessary. She would be the one to explore this new world in advance of her master’s coming, and it was important that she blend in without attracting attention. After so long in the darkness, she wanted to experience something of the Earth before it was turned to ash and fire.
[14] As you can see from his picture, Einstein didn’t take himself too seriously, at least not all of the time. In general, it’s a good idea to avoid people who take themselves too seriously. As individuals, we have only so much seriousness to go round, and people who take themselves very seriously don’t have enough seriousness left over to take other people seriously. Instead they tend to look down on them, and are secretly pleased when they get stuff wrong, because they just prove to the too-serious types that they were right not to take them seriously to begin with.
[15] In Alice Through the Looking Glass, the book by Lewis Carroll, the looking glass is, in effect, a wormhole. Carroll, whose real name was Charles Dodgson, was a mathematician, and was aware of the theory of wormholes. He liked injecting puzzles into his math classes. One of his most famous goes as follows: A cup contains 50 spoonfuls of brandy, and another contains 50 spoonfuls of water. A spoonful of brandy is taken from the first cup and added to the second cup. Then a spoonful of that mixture is taken from the second cup and mixed into the first. Is there more or less brandy in the second cup than there is water in the first cup? If you’d like to know the answer-and, I warn you, it will make your head ache more than drinking all of the brandy would-it’s at the end of this chapter…
Okay, back to Lewis Carroll’s brandy and water problem. Mathematically speaking, the answer is that there will be just as much brandy in the water as there is water in the brandy, so both mixtures will be the same. But-and this is where your head may start to ache-when equal quantities of water and alcohol are mixed, the sum of them is more compact than their parts because the brandy penetrates the spaces between the water molecules, and the water penetrates the spaces between the brandy molecules, a bit like the way two matching pieces of a jigsaw puzzle fit together so that they occupy less space than if you just laid the same pieces side by side. In other words, the mixture becomes more concentrated, so if you add 50 spoonfuls of water and 50 spoonfuls of brandy, you actually end up with about 98 spoonfuls of the mixture in total. Adding a spoonful of brandy to 50 spoonfuls of water will give you less than 51 spoonfuls of the mixture, because, like we said earlier, it’s more concentrated. If you take a spoonful from that mixture, it will leave less than 50 spoonfuls in the cup. Then, if you add that spoonful from the concentrated mixture to the cup of brandy, it means that there’s more brandy in the brandy cup than there is more water in the water cup. I warned you…