"Exactly how do you find something that blew up in an explosion millions of years ago?"
McCaul answered Liz, "After a terrorist blows up a car or a building, how do you know what type of explosive was used?"
Gant answered, "You look through the debris to find explosive residue."
"Honestly, that's not the best metaphor," McCaul admitted. "But it will do for our purposes. Think of the very first particle at the heart of the big bang as the explosive. Residue from that explosive — from that first particle — should be scattered throughout the debris. In this case, the debris is all the matter of the universe."
Gant said, "So he gets out a powerful microscope and looks for it."
"You may want to stick to urban combat, Major. Particles such as the Higgs boson exist in an observable state for only short periods of time and under extreme conditions — that is, if they exist at all."
"Wait a second." Liz wagged a finger. "I thought they found that thing, over in Europe. Just this year."
McCaul said, "I've steered clear of particle physics for the last decade or so, at least as best I can. I've moved out of the hard sciences and more into archeology. But yes, I read that they have found evidence of the Higgs boson. The verification of its discovery would be a bigger deal for science than walking on the moon, by a wide stretch."
Thunder said, "They use some sort of giant, um, it was a big—"
"Particle accelerator, yes," McCaul answered for her. "Accelerators stretch for miles in a big circle and are used to slam particles together. Those collisions reveal other particles for fractions of a second, but just long enough to observe their existence. They needed a really big collision to find Higgs, and even then it's a question of poring through the data for months."
Neither visitor said a word; they just stared at her.
"Let's take our terrorist bomb example. Now let's say the bomb is on a car going at the speed of light and it hits another car going just as fast head=on and it blows up in the collision. Now imagine that whatever the bomb is made out of, it will disappear a split second after exploding. Again, not a great metaphor, but it will have to do."
"I do not understand. If something is there, it’s there. What do collisions have to do with anything?" Gant felt far out of his league.
"Yes, it can be quite confusing. That’s something that astronomy and quantum physics have very much in common — a lot of our so-called observations are really mathematical guesses. We see some force acting upon an object like a planet or electron and we hypothesize as to what is causing the force. The Higgs boson — the God Particle — is theorized to be the mechanism that produces mass."
"Whoa, wait a second." Gant waved his hand. "I thought you people figured all this out years ago. Are you telling me that we are sending probes to Mars but we still do not know everything there is to know about … about …"
McCaul finished for him, "Matter?"
"Yes. Or, well, maybe. I mean everything. The basics. The stuff that makes us, us. The stuff that makes this desk solid." He rapped on the desktop for effect.
"Believe it or not, Major, that desktop is not nearly as solid as you think."
"Dr. McCaul," Thunder interrupted the theoretical discussion, "this all sounds very interesting, but we need to know more about the Briggs experiment, specifically. Something went wrong and has remained wrong to this day."
Their host massaged her chin as if considering her words. After a few seconds she spoke. "I said before that you can always cut something in half, right? That real infinity is the infinitesimal. Consider this, then." She appeared pleased to have found the right way to explain. "Let’s say this room is the universe. One way to explore would be to head toward the ceiling — to reach into the distance. Like we do with those Mars probes and gigantic telescopes and so forth. Understand?"
Both soldiers nodded.
"Briggs was trying to dig through the floorboards. He wanted to find the secrets of the universe by finding the basic building block — the God Particle. The Higgs boson."
"How?" Thunder asked.
"That is a very interesting question. During my time with Briggs I was technically a research assistant. In truth, everyone who worked with Briggs was a gofer. He gave us tasks to do, buttons to push, and readings to relay, but he guarded his secrets closely. In some ways, I can't blame him. This is a cutthroat company; Wall Street raiders and inside traders have nothing on the scientists and administrators here. Like the rest of us, Briggs knew a number of researchers whose life work was stolen by co-workers or bosses. That's why he worked very hard to get his experiment moved to a government facility."
"Dr. McCaul," Liz said, "I mean, Doreen, there is no particle accelerator at the Red Rock complex."
"No, particle accelerators are normally rather large; you would have noticed. Ronald Briggs felt he could accomplish the same idea using the concentrated power of several lasers with the idea of actually tearing apart the fabric of space to study the building blocks of our universe. Now understand, we're talking about a project I worked on twenty years ago, so my memory may be a little off. From what I could see at the time, Briggs had managed to work around the massive amounts of power required to produce that type of energy and he confined the entire experiment to an area the size of an average laboratory." She considered and added, "Honestly, whether or not he succeeded in his experiment, his project offered a great deal of promise in regard to maximizing energy use."
"How so?" Gant asked. He knew something about energy and felt compelled to contribute at least one intelligent question to the discussion.
"Well, right now there's a facility planned for construction in Great Britain named the, oh, now what was the name? Something like the Extreme Light High Field complex or the like. I suppose that's close enough to Google. Anyway, the plan is to use these lasers to produce several hundred petawatts of power for a split second to then mine the vacuum of space, pulling apart particles of matter and antimatter. They aren't using this technique to look for Higgs; that's solely in the arena of particle accelerators now. However, the idea is to discover dark matter, another theorized building block of our universe."
"First a God Particle, now dark matter." Gant shook his head. "I still have no idea where this is going."
McCaul showed her first sign of real frustration as she snapped, "I’m sorry, Major, but there are people who spend decades studying the elemental forces and who never come close to comprehending what they’re studying. I can’t teach you in ten minutes what some of us can’t learn in a lifetime."
Liz spoke for them both when she said, "We understand that, Doctor. We’re not asking for the background and the theories or even the principles of his research. We’re trying to find out what may have gone wrong and why. We need to know because we need to go in and clean up the mess Dr. Briggs made."
McCaul's eyes widened. "That was over twenty years ago. Surely his research has been furthered by now?"
"Doctor McCaul," Thunder spoke. "Something went wrong with the Briggs experiment on that day back in 1992. Containment was initiated and no one knows why. You were cleared for Red Lab work; you understand what can happen."
"Yes, but certainly the follow-up teams were able to retrieve some of his notes and documents. As I said, his research into Higgs was interesting, but how he was going to get there — through the use of lasers — was far too valuable to abandon. Imagine suspending particles and ripping them apart. Like pulling the wings off a fly. Unless, of course, his entire contraption was a total failure."