Nestor looks down again – at my file no doubt. Then he raises his eyes and continues, “So. Fourteen billion years ago, your brane, having become three-dimensional, swelled into a huge bubble, on which seas of the smallest building blocks of matter were boiling, emerging and immediately destroying each other. At that time, once again, imperfection made itself felt: all the births and annihilations didn’t add up, like cards in the hands of a card sharp. Some of the quarks remained intact; they happened to outnumber the antiquarks – one part in every billion. Not much, it would seem, but this was enough – and this asymmetry determined your fate, Theo. Not only did it allow for the creation of everything material, but it also enthralled you as a researcher. It was the predominance of matter over antimatter that became your first obsession!”
In the upper-right corner of the screen, a figure appears consisting of three different colored circles connected by wavy lines. Below the figure is a table filled with numbers.
“A unitary mixing matrix,” I mutter.
“Yes, yes,” Nestor nods at me, “It’s something one never forgets,” and then he produces a very strange sound. I don’t realize it at first, but this is the sound of him laughing.
“I’m joking,” he says. “But you were in no mood for jokes. You’d really sunk your teeth into the properties of the earliest matter that emerged in the first few moments after the beginning of the universe. Try to remember: quarks, which had only a fleeting existence, formed protons, surprisingly stable units – no longer just toy bricks, but real building blocks, the most reliable construction material. Other hadrons[7] were also created along with their mirrorlike antipodes; they all boiled together in a sizzling hot cauldron, colliding with and destroying each other and emitting new particles, more and more of them. The gigantic particle zoo was populated by its inhabitants. Everything was born of nothing – which is an exquisite, incredible notion, but there is something else we must not forget. In that hot, turbulent time, another perfection was destroyed. The forces of nature separated from each other – and that diversified your career, Theo! At first, gravity fell away; then, almost immediately, the force glueing together the atomic nuclei began to obey its own special laws – although there were no nuclei yet. And then, once matter had already become abundant, the final separation of influences occurred. All known electromagnetism detached itself from weak interactions – and this was the event of all events. In addition to the separation of fundamental forces, it led to a phase transition: matter gained mass. And you, Theo, earned a bit of a reputation, and we have to admit not the finest either!”
Nestor’s eyes narrow, “Yes, yes, don’t look at me so innocently.” Then, once again, I hear him produce a strange sound – his version of laughter. Having calmed down, he becomes serious and says, “Concentrate, this is important” – and again looks somewhere to the side. The figure with the circles disappears from the screen, and a diagram consisting of spirals and arrows emerges.
“This was a beautiful hypothesis,” says Nestor, nodding to himself. “A viscous field, in which the scattering particles are slowed down, and its agents, the Higgs bosons,[8] the evasive carriers of new properties. A great many people rushed to study the mysterious boson, which lives for such a short time that it can’t be seen directly. As with any hunt, the main thrill lay in capturing it – the finest minds struggled, searching for ways to detect the traces of its collapse in detectors the size of a multistory building. As a talented specialist, you were invited to a laboratory with access to the latest collider – a dream come true for any theoretical physicist at that time. Your team was considered one of the favorites in the race, and your colleagues spared no effort. Only you, Theo, threw in your hand – quickly stating that you weren’t interested and wanted to leave. You preferred – surprise, surprise – the freedom of alternative models and your own fields and particles. Your colleagues considered you a traitor – what else could they have thought, engaged in an unforgiving scientific race as they were? In the middle of a contest for professorships, grants and, at the end of the day, Nobel prizes.”
Nestor falls silent and fixes me with a look. I feel uncomfortable under his gaze. “However, I understand what repelled you,” he continues. “Perhaps, the populist press was to blame – for sensationalizing the hunt to such an obscene degree. They indulged the masses and reduced everything down to the shameful label of ‘God’s particle’ – probably, for you, that was the last straw. As far as I can judge, you surmised that God could have as many favorite particles as he wanted. You were not interested in his toys; you were looking for a gesture, a trace of an intervention made by a higher will in the ‘magic tricks’ of the universe. Perhaps the three-dimensionality and the quarks that had managed to survive annihilation had not yet left your head. You remembered them for a long time, Theo – you are probably the sort of person who never forgets a grudge!”
“Is that stated in my file too?” I say curiously.
“No,” Nestor admits, “but don’t think all I can do is read what has been written down by others. I may not have discovered new fields like you, but I am capable of putting two and two together and drawing certain conclusions too. Of course, you aren’t obliged to agree with me…”
He snorts, feigning indifference, but I can see he feels offended. Here is a character – with no small ego – but quarreling with him will get me nowhere. “Forget it,” I say in a conciliatory manner, “That’s not what I was implying. And, moreover, I don’t remember anything about the new fields.”
“You will,” Nestor declares. “You will remember – the fields and how you were torn to pieces over some of them. For the time being, I will only note that despite your obstinacy, you gained a lot from that ‘separation story.’ I mean the actual separation of the fundamental forces – you worked on its secrets very hard. Was it not this that later helped you describe the activation of true consciousness? The immature brain as an unstable vacuum – I think the analogy is fairly transparent. And in general, it was very useful for you to look at the spontaneous symmetry breaking from various different angles…”
A new figure appears on the screen – it resembles a sombrero – with two equations next to it. I take them in with a single glance and a presentiment of recognition, recalling the words, one by one.
7
Subatomic particles that are composed of quarks and interact by the “strong” force. Examples of hadrons include protons and neutrons.
8
Elementary particle predicted by Peter Higgs and responsible for the mass of other elementary particles.