A Hole in Texas, page 5
Carpenter, however, was determined to leave, overwhelmed by a sudden sense that he had been listening to his own voice too long, that he was overstaying his welcome and mouthing off, that what he took for Myra Kadane’s admiration was merely her adroit coaxing out of him the information she wanted. The bourbon had gone to his head, and her charm too. The thing was to get the hell out with his dignity intact, and perhaps her good opinion as well.
“Myra, the Higgs is a brute, that’s all. I’ve got a long flight tomorrow. I’ll plug in my computer on the plane, bat off something, and e-mail it to you. Then we can talk on the phone all you want, maybe even tomorrow night —”
“Not the same thing —”
“Probably better. I’m not a bad writer on physics, I’ve had offers from publishers to expand some of my articles into books, but I hate writing. For you, I won’t mind.”
“Very well. I’m grateful, of course. I’ll call a cab.” As she picked up the phone, she gestured at the painting. “Just tell me this. Why do you think Walter voted to kill the Super Collider? Especially since, as you say, it was so far along?”
“Your husband was a party man, wasn’t he?”
“True blue.”
“Then he voted the party line, that’s all.”
Myra Kadane wrinkled up her face, and for a moment looked much older. She ordered a cab and hung up. “Too obvious. On a thing this important, he’d have voted his convictions.”
“You knew him. I didn’t. Possibly he felt Texas didn’t deserve the Super Collider.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Myra, I sometimes think the Super Collider was done in by politics masquerading as a budget cut. Bare-knuckles politics. Raw regional politics. We academic innocents should have seen it coming. We didn’t. We’d been toiling away for years, heads down, when Congress up and fired us all overnight. Shock of our lives. A colleague of mine said, ‘Well, our fifty-year ride on the Bomb is over.’”
“It wasn’t that simple, surely.”
Guy Carpenter threw up his hands. “Look, I can’t account for the killing of the SSC! Try asking four physicists and three politicians what happened, and you’ll get seven explanations. The Rock has the best answer I know, and even he —”
“The Rock?”
“Herman Rocovsky. Obscure genius behind the entire project. He’s emeritus now out at Stanford, influential as ever, you should talk to him —”
A horn honked outside. “There’s your cab. Send him away, Guy. Truly, I’m wide awake.”
Wry smile and headshake. “Thanks, Myra, for the omelet, the bourbon, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, everything. Very nice evening.” He got into an old blue taxi and waved good-bye.
In an upstairs bedroom Myra Kadane took off her earrings and her suit, and sat down at the dressing table in her slip to wipe away makeup. Interesting man, that Guy Carpenter! Brilliant, but remote. Why that melancholy air? Did he have some gnawing worry? That telescope budget, perhaps . . . ? Damn! She hit the dressing table with her fist. Bemused by all the science talk, she had failed to ask him the one question that mattered most! Too late now.
She was drawing water for a bath when the door knocker sounded below . . . rap, rap, rap. Throwing on a terry robe, she ran downstairs and peeked out through the chained door. The physicist stood there in the rain beside the same taxi. “We give up,” he called, “where’s the Georgetown Inn, exactly?”
“I don’t believe this. Come inside.”
“The driver’s an Ethiopian,” he said, brushing rain from his face. “Couldn’t be pleasanter. Plaited black hair down to his shoulders, very cheerful and religious. He just doesn’t quite know where the Georgetown Inn is.”
“Good Lord, it’s a landmark! Three blocks up and four blocks to the right. These D.C. cabdrivers! Think he could find the Washington Monument?”
“Well, he does seem somewhat new here, but a truly gentle soul. Sorry I disturbed you. Three blocks up and turn right. Good night again —”
“Oh no you don’t, Guy Carpenter. Now that you’re back, you’ll have a nightcap with me. No particle physics, I promise, just send him away.”
“I couldn’t do that, he’s too friendly and sweet natured. I’ll take that nightcap, though.” Carpenter was relieved by her welcoming manner. Maybe he had not made quite such an ass of himself as he feared.
“I won’t be a minute,” she said and dashed up the stairs. She fussed among her housecoats and put on an old print silk robe that Walter had brought back from a business trip to Shanghai. The physicist was on the sofa, leafing through The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse again. “Hooked on that book, eh?” She laughed. “Well, what now? Why the wild look?”
“Nothing, you startled me.” He sat up. “I was engrossed in figuring out which character was Rudy Valentino. Pretty robe.”
“Thanks.”
Myra Kadane was a little shorter than Wen Mei Li. Just as thin, eyes just as dark, just as keen. No steel-rimmed glasses. Probably a standard Shanghai pattern, that dragon robe. With one thing and another Mei Li was much on his mind. He was looking at an apparition from a weekend in Shanghai, years and years ago, though the Congresswoman’s skin without makeup was smooth and pale pink, nothing like Mei’s exquisite ivory tint.
“Now see here,” she said, pouring the drinks, “I’m glad you’ve come back, there’s something I certainly should have asked you. Does the Chinese discovery have any possible military application?”
Guy Carpenter blinked and hesitated. “That very question came up at a hearing about the Super Collider, shortly before it was killed.”
“Well?”
He shrugged, and tossed down the bourbon. After a pause she held out her hand. “Okay. By the bye, Dr. Porson mentioned your budget problem with the telescopes. I’m bearing it in mind.” Her handclasp was cool, dry, and strong.
What do you know, this woman’s a politician, at that. Mission accomplished! “I’ll tell her. She’ll be pleased.”
“It’s been an experience, Professor. A one-year physics course in one night.”
“Well, Myra, maybe those books will make a bit more sense now. The ones that didn’t turn me into Mr. Hyde.”
With the laugh he liked so much, she opened the door. “Wow. Will it ever stop raining in this town?”
As the taxi drove off with Dr. Carpenter, she closed the door and said to the painting, “Nice man, Walter, eh?”
The rich warm voice replied, “Very nice. Watch out.”
“What, dear? Don’t be silly. Two kids, twenty years apart, with the same wife?” She brushed a hand on the painted face. “That’s one uxorious physicist, sweetie. Good night.”
7. THE BOSON
Lunch, sir?” The flight attendant had to tap Carpenter’s shoulder, so intent was he on his laptop screen.
Glad of the break, Guy Carpenter fell to on a pasta dish, declining wine. Two hours of piling words on the screen, and he had yet to get to the Higgs boson! The computer was running away with him, or rather his memory was. A bitter screed was pouring out, full of buried anger and regret at the five years of his life “trashed by Washington troglodytes,” as he had just written.
Very vivid, Professor, very clever, but off the subject, all that stuff. Try again.
Aloft, en route L.A. via Dallas.
My dear Congresswoman —
I’ve been batting at my laptop too long about bygone Super Collider horrors. No reason to impose such stuff on you, when all you asked for was some light on the Higgs boson. I’ll probably delete the whole sour outpouring. Now I begin afresh, minus the personal vitriol.
Way back in 1983, the Super Collider idea was born when two elusive particles, long predicted by theory, were discovered at CERN, the big European collider outside Geneva. The Italian director got a Nobel Prize, and we American physicists had egg on our faces. Why, nobody beats the good old Red, White, and Blue in science! The home team was galvanized to plan the biggest goddamned collider of all time, which would without fail produce the next major predicted particle, the Higgs boson.
Well, designing the SSC took four years. Then our big guns in physics, the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel in the Department of Energy, marched into the Oval Office in a body and pitched the thing to President Reagan. He sat there behind his desk, so I’ve been told, fingering his inevitable three-by-five cards as he heard them out, then he grinned that beguiling grin and just said, “Throw deep.” That’s how it happened, Myra. That’s how America got committed to build the Superconducting Super Collider. Win one for the Gipper. There was even some talk of calling it the Reagan High Energy National Laboratory, though that faded off.
How I got into the SSC and how it got aborted is all in my previous diatribe, and if by some remote chance you’re interested, and we ever have another omelet evening, I can give you quite an earful about that complicated adventure.
(Here Carpenter halted, mulling over the reference to the omelet. Too cute? Beside the point? God save us, flirtatious? Decision: Delete that sentence. He did.)
So, about the Higgs. You recall that Greek question, “What’s the smallest thing that exists?” By seeking and finding an answer we got the Bomb, we got nuclear power plants and submarines, we learned how the sun and the stars shine, and there were huge benefits in medical fallout. Pretty good gain in understanding and manipulating Nature! Well, the question that points to the Higgs boson may turn out as richly productive. Or it may not. We don’t know. The question may strike you at first as trivial, or what is much worse, philosophical: “How come anything at all exists?” I can just hear you saying, “Professor, in what way does that question differ from “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” Well, Myra, nobody knows whether angels exist or dance, whereas we know that the big bang happened and that we exist. That’s the difference.
We have clues to the bang that add up to a near certainty. There’s no doubt—I say this as an astrophysicist now—that the universe is expanding, the galaxies racing away into the void. Calculating their distance and speed and reversing the numbers, we can run the film backward and arrive at the Beginning. That gives us a time frame. Clue one. Next clue. The big bang had to occur with an eruption of radiant HEAT beyond anything the human mind can conceive. Again, calculation shows that within such a time frame, there should still be a cool residue of that primal radiation, out there in the universe. Well, in 1965, Myra, in the observations of a couple of guys working for Bell Telephone, that radiation showed up. Serious scientists, mind you, not line repairmen. They nabbed a Nobel for it. World scientists have tested and retested for that background radiation ever since. It’s there, all right. Clue two.
Therefore we’re not dealing with dancing angels but with reality, with substance, with matter, with the stuff of all things. In short, with MASS, and the Higgs boson has to do with mass.
So let’s rephrase the question more precisely: “How does mass come to exist?” Because what came boiling out of the bang, Myra, was not mass but a “plasma”—not even a gas, nothing as definable or stable even as hydrogen or helium, nothing but an unimaginable swirl of pure radiant energy and evanescent particles. How did that fiery stuff ever simmer down to mass, to familiar substances and things? That’s the mystery. How come everything about us here on our little earth is so stable that you and I just get up in the morning and go about our business? How did we get to such a reliable comfortable state from that wildfire Genesis, ten to fifteen billion years ago? How account for tigers, trees, skyscrapers, sitcoms, and Myra Kadane?
Here again Guy Carpenter paused, wondering how to proceed and savoring the line about tigers and Myra Kadane. Rather nifty, that. He could picture her smiling over it in the dumpy house, lounging on the sofa that faced the portrait, maybe even wearing the Shanghai robe. But the next part could well lose her. Conveying this stuff was a lot tougher in e-mail than face-to-face.
Okay, let’s go to the idea of “force fields,” specifically the Higgs field, and look, Myra, don’t let your eyes glaze over, what comes now really isn’t that hard. In your high school physics class, remember, you got knocked across the room by an electric shock. Right there you encountered a “force field,” a bit too close up, the electromagnetic field. It pervades the universe, runs your hair dryer, conveys the starlight, and also, unfortunately, the sitcoms. So you’re familiar with one force field. There’s another you know just as well, the gravitational field. Let go the hair dryer, and it drops to the floor. Step on the bathroom scale, and a pointer moves. Gravitational force field. It governs the moon swinging around the earth, and indeed every single thing in the universe, from dust motes to rotating galaxies. So that’s two force fields.
Still with me? We plunge into yet a third one, the Higgs field. It differs from the other fields in a right simple way, to wit, there’s no evidence that it exists. Peter Higgs, a Brit physicist, came up with his theoretical field some years ago to account for mass. Assuming that (a) the Higgs field is there, a force field with very odd quantum characteristics, and (b) all particles interact with that field, then (c) the tiger and Myra exist because your molecules have acquired mass through the famous Higgs boson, interacting with the particles that make up your molecules.
I’ll try to clarify that and we’ll be done. Don’t despair, Myra, and allow me a bow because I haven’t drowned you in an off-putting jumble of nomenclature. Fermi once said about pions, muons, and the rest, “If my brain could retain all those names, I’d have been a botanist.”
So what are bosons, exactly, and what do they do? Here we go. Up here in “real life,” where we spend our days, gravity acts by keeping the moon in place and breaking your elbow if you fall downstairs. You know all too well how electricity acts, it shocked you out of any interest in physics. Now way down there in subatomic reality, a weird underworld with weird laws, a force acts by means of certain interacting particles, “messenger particles”—BOSONS—that convey the force. There! Hold on to that, and you’ve just about got it. You can’t picture it, you just have to believe it.
What the Higgs boson does is TRANSMIT the force of the Higgs force field to give each particle its mass as that particle interacts—via the boson—with the field. Mass exists, substance exists, you and I exist, because as the horrendous plasma cloud cooled down, the Higgs field kicked in, the swirl of particles slowed and clumped, and the matter of everyday reality gradually came to exist, the ninety-two elements in Nature from hydrogen to uranium, endowed with mass by the star-making process throughout the universe. One of those elements was carbon, and with carbon you’re into the life sciences, the other frame of mystery that produced you and me.
That’s about the best I can do, in a crude dash at the Higgs for a Congresswoman with an inquiring mind. Just as well. I have to close the computer. I’m landing in Dallas for a two-hour stopover.
Carpenter had not been back to Dallas since the collapse of the SSC. The airport now seemed twice as big and five times as crowded and rackety, otherwise the same, haunted by mournful recollections and ten-gallon hats. To blank out the recollections, he bought a paperback thriller and took it to the waiting lounge, but hardly followed the plot as he turned the pages, thinking back on the e-mail to Myra. He decided that he had to write more, and once settled in his seat on the plane to Los Angeles, he got straight at the laptop again.
Hi, I’m on my way home.
Last night I left unanswered your question, Is there any military application of the Chinese discovery? I suspect, Madame Congresswoman, that that was the whole point of your arranging to meet me. I don’t blame you one bit. As I told you, that very question was asked in Congress about the Super Collider. No serious scientist could then have answered that yes, in a sense there was a military aspect. If I now tell you nevertheless that yes, there was and is, you have to understand that it’s utterly theoretical, years if not centuries down the road, and may never materialize.
Myra, when James Chadwick, another Brit, discovered the neutron in 1932, no reputable scientist would have connected it with Sunday-supplement piffle about driving the Queen Mary around the world with the atomic energy locked in a glass of water. Lord Rutherford himself, Chadwick’s mentor and perhaps the greatest of particle scientists, declared around that time, “Any talk of harnessing the energy in the atom is moonshine.” Yet in 1945, only thirteen years after Chadwick’s discovery, we set off the first atomic bomb on a mesa in New Mexico!
It’s the essence of basic research, you see, Madame Congresswoman, that its outcome is unknowable. Should you, as a Science Committee member, ask me at a hearing, “What benefit to the American people can we expect if we revive the Super Collider?” you’re asking for targeted research. Chadwick didn’t know what to expect when he smoked out the neutron. If he and scientists like him had been assigned to do only targeted research, Hiroshima might not have happened. Not in 1945, for sure. Better for the world? Who knows? What you’re asking, what you’re probing for, is the possible threat of yet more powerful weaponry.
Well, once the Higgs boson is discovered (if it exists!), defined, and controlled to the point of manipulating mass—and I’m not saying it’s possible, I don’t even believe in the Higgs field as yet, it remains for me a beguiling conjecture (one of several) to explain a lot of anomalies—but if the Chinese have really done what they claim, then it’s more than a conjecture, we’re in the postnuclear world, the Higgs world, and in the very very long run, it could be Katie bar the door. Because mass, remember, is only (as you yourself quoted) “E=mc2,” energy compressed by an unbelievably gargantuan factor, the square of the speed of light. Manipulating and controlling the awesome energy in mass verges on the conceptual field of weaponry. I’ll say no more. I’ve already said more than I would among my fellow scientists. Speaking seriously, it’s moonshine. The narrow sliver of doubt, excitement, and worry consists of this, it may be Lord Rutherford’s brand of moonshine.
