The result has electrified, terrified, astonished, according to temperament. The children at this New York school may the first to attract serious attention from the academic and business communities and the federal government as a potential national resource.
And they have also become the first to require round-the-clock armed guards.
The news of this obscure mathematical result has crystallized the fear some people seem to be forming over these superkids. Police were forced to head off a mob that marched out to the schooclass="underline" angry, scared, evidently with ugly intent, a mob that had even included some of the parents and older brothers and sisters of the children themselves.
Emma Stoney:
Fermilab turned out to be thirty-five miles west of Chicago, close to a town called Batavia. From the air Illinois was a vast emptiness studded by lost-looking little towns. Disoriented, jet-lagged, she glimpsed Fermilab itself, the perfect circle of the collider ring set amid green tallgrass prairie, presumably replanted.
She wasn’t sure what she had expected of a superscience lab like this. Something futuristic, maybe: a city of glass and platinum where steely eyed men in white suits made careful notes on super-advanced softscreens. What she found was an oddly parklike campus littered by giant constructions, like the abandoned toys of some monster child.
This artificial landscape, the huge constructions, made a startling contrast with the bare bleakness of Africa. But the concrete was cracked and streaked with rust and mold. This was an aging, underfunded place, she thought, a lingering dream of a more expansive age.
But here and there she saw the sleek, cool curves of the Teva-tron itself, a three-mile-wide torus within which subatomic particles were accelerated to a substantial fraction of the speed of light.
The main hall was called Wilson Hall, a surreal sixteen-story sculpture of two towers connected by crisscrossing bridges. Inside there was a gigantic atrium stocked with trees and shrubs. Malenfant was waiting for her there. There were black stress rings around his eyes, but he was agitated, excited. “What do you think? Quite a place.”
“It’s a technocrat’s wet dream.”
“They rebuilt the prairie afterward, you know. They even have a herd of buffalo here.”
“We’re not here for the buffalo, Malenfant. Shall we get this over with?”
He grinned. “Wait until you see what we got here, babe.”
He led her deeper into the complex, and into the cramped and jumbled technical areas. She found herself squirming past gigantic, unrecognizable pieces of apparatus. There were steel racks everywhere, crammed with badly packed electronic instrumentation, and cable bunches over the floor, walls, and ceilings; in some places the cables were bridged by little wooden ladders. There was a smell of oil, shaved metal, cut wood, cleaning solvents, and insulation, all overlaid by a constant, clamoring, metallic noise. There was none of the controlled cool and order she’d expected.
Malenfant brought her to what he called the muon laboratory. This was some way away from the accelerator ring itself; it seemed that beams of high-speed protons were drawn off from the ring and impacted into targets here.
And here they found Dan Ystebo, wearing a smeared white coat over a disreputable T-shirt, hunched over softscreens spread out on a trestle table. The screens were covered with particle-decay images and charts of counts, none of which Emma could understand.
Dan’s broad face split into a grin. “Yo, Emma. Have you
heard?”
“One step at a time,” Malenfant said. “Tell her what you’re
doing here, Dan.”
Dan took a breath. “Making neutrinos. We’re slamming the
Tevatron’s protons into a target to make pions.”
“Pions?”
“A pion is a particle, a combination of a quark and its antiquark, and it is unstable. Pions decay into, among other things, neutrinos. So we have our neutrino source. But it should also be a source of advanced neutrinos, neutrinos coming from the future, arriving in time to make our pions decay.” “Backward ripples,” Emma said.
“Exactly — hopefully modified, and containing some signal.”
“How do you detect a neutrino?”
Malenfant grunted. “It isn’t easy. Neutrinos are useful to us in the first place because matter is all but transparent to them. But we have a full-scale neutrino detector: a ton of dense photographic emulsion, the stuff you use on a camera film. When charged particles travel through this shit they leave a trail, like a jet contrail.”
“I thought neutrinos had no charge.”
“They don’t,” Dan said patiently. “So what you have to look for is a place where tracks come out but none go in. That’s where a Tevatron neutrino has hit some particle in our emulsion. You get it? You have a mass of counters and magnets downstream of the emulsion, and you measure the photons with a twenty-ton lead-glass detector array, and the results are storedon laser discs and analyzed by the data-acquisition software.”
He talked on, lapsing continually into jargon she couldn’t follow.
But then they started talking about the neutrinos themselves. Neutrinos, it seemed, barely existed: no charge, no mass, just a scrap of energy with some kind of spooky quantum-mechanical spin, fleeing at the speed of light. Spinning ghosts indeed. Most of them had come out of the Big Bang — or the time just after, when the whole universe was a soup of hot subatomic particles. But neutrinos didn’t decay into anything else. And so there were neutrinos everywhere. All her life she would be immersed in a sea of neutrinos, a billion of them for every particle of ordinary matter, relics of that first millisecond.
At that thought she felt an odd tingle, as if she could feel the ancient, invisible fluid that poured through her.
Now humans had sent waves rippling over the surface of that transparent ocean. And the waves, it seemed, had come reflecting back.
Dan talked fast, as excited as she’d ever seen him. Malenfant watched, rigid with interest. “Essentially we’ve been producing millisecond neutrino pulses,” Dan said. He produced a bar chart, a scrappy series of pillars, uneven in height. “Anyhow, up until yesterday, we were just picking up our own pulses, unmodified. Then… this.”
A new bar chart, showing a long series of many pulses. Some of the pulses, now, seemed to be missing, or were much reduced in size.
Dan picked out the gaps with a fat finger. “See? On average, these events seem to have around half the neutrino count of the others. So half the energy.” He looked at Emma, trying to see if she understood. “This is exactly what we’d expect if somebody downstream has some way of suppressing the advanced-wave neutrinos. The apparent retarded neutrinos then would have only half the strength—”
“But it’s such a small effect,” Emma said. “You said yourself neutrinos are hard to detect. There must be other ways to explain this, without invoking beings from the future.”
“That’s true,” Dan said. “Though if this sustains itself long enough we’re going to be able to eliminate other causes. Anyhow, that’s not all. We have enough data now to show that the gaps repeat. In a pattern.”
“This is new to me,” Malenfant growled. “A repeating pattern. A signal?”
Dan rubbed his greasy hair. “I don’t see what else it could be.”
“A signal,” Malenfant said. “Damn. Then Cornelius was right.”
Emma felt cold, despite the metallic stuffiness of the chamber.