The Gates (Samuel Johnson vs. the Devil #1)(12)

“You say that a particle of some kind separated itself from the beams in the collider?”

“That’s right,” said Ed.

“Then passed through the walls of the collider itself, and the solid rock around it, before disappearing.”

“Right again,” said Ed.

“Then the system began rewriting itself to eliminate any evidence of this occurrence?”

“Yes.”

“Fascinating,” said Professor Hilbert.

What was strange about this conversation was that at no point did Professor Hilbert doubt the truth of what Ed and Victor were telling him. Nothing about the Large Hadron Collider and what it was revealing about the nature of the universe was surprising to Professor Hilbert. Delightful, yes. Troubling, sometimes. But never surprising. He was not a man who was easily surprised, and he suspected that the universe was a much stranger place than anyone imagined, which made him anxious to prove just how extraordinary it really was.

“What do you think it might be?” asked Ed.

“Evidence,” said Professor Hilbert.

“Of what?”

“I don’t know,” said Professor Hilbert, and rambled off sucking his pencil.

? ? ?

Hours later Professor Hilbert was still at his desk, surrounded by pieces of paper on which he had constructed diagrams, created complex equations, and drawn little stick men fighting one another with swords. He had also gone over the system records for the past few hours and had discovered something curious. The system had overwritten itself, as Ed and Victor had suggested, but it had not done so perfectly. Like someone rubbing out a couple of lines written in pencil, the shadow of what had been there before still remained. Slowly, Professor Hilbert had begun reconstructing it. While he was not able to re-create it completely, he found that, at the precise moment Ed and Victor had witnessed what was now being termed “the Event,” a batch of strange code had found its way into the system. It was this code that Professor Hilbert was now attempting to reconstruct.

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.