Gravitys Angel | Page 2

realtime.
"I need Q-system time," she said. She meant time on QUARKER, the lab's simulation and imaging system. She said, "I've got some results, but they're incomplete-I've been working with kludged programs because at Los Alamos we're not set up for your work. I've got to get at yours. If my simulations are accurate, you need to postpone your runs."
I looked hard at her. "Right," I said. "That's great-just what Diehl wants to hear. That you want precious system time to confirm a hypothesis that could fuck up our schedule."
"Diehl is a bureaucrat," she said. "He doesn't even understand the physics."
Yeah, I thought, true, but so what?
Roger L. Diehl: my boss and everyone else's at the lab, also the SSC's guardian angel. He had shepherded the accelerator's mammoth budgets through a hostile Congress, mixing threat and promise, telling them strange tales about discoveries that lay just at the 200 TeV horizon. All in all, he continued the grand tradition of accelerator lab nobility: con men, politicians, visionaries, what have you. Going back to Lawrence at Berkeley, accelerator labs prospered under hard-pushing megalomaniacs whose talents lay as much in politics and PR as science, men whose labs and egos were one.
"Let's talk," I said. "Come inside; tell me your problem."
"All right," she said.
"Where are you staying?" I asked.
"I thought I'd find some place later, after we've talked."
"You can stay here. Where are your bags?"
"This is it." She pointed to the sidewalk beside her. At her feet was a soft, black cotton bag.
"Come on in," I said.
I figured she would be doing interesting work, unusual work-maybe even valuable work, if she'd gotten lucky. I wasn't the least bit ready for what she was up to.
We cranked up "The Thing," a recent development in imaging. It had a wall-mounted screen four feet in diameter; on it you could picture detector results from any of the SSC's runs. When it was running, the screen was a tangle of lines, the tracks of the particles, their collisions, disappearances, appearances; all the wonderland magic so characteristic of the small, violent world of particle physics, where events occur in billionths of a second, and matter appears and disappears like the Cheshire cat; leaving behind only its smile-in the form of brightly colored particle tracks across our screens.
Still, setting up and running simulations is an art, and at any accelerator lab there'll be one or two folk who have the gift. When a series of important shots is coming up, they don't get much sleep. At Los Alamos, Carol Hendrix, despite her status as group leader, was the resident wizard. At Texlab we had Dickie Boy.
She stretched, then sat at the swing-arm desk with its keyboard and joystick module and logged on to QUARKER with the account name and passwords I gave her. Her programs were number-crunching bastards, and QUARKER's Cray back end would be time-slicing like mad to fit them in.
"Tell me what this is all about," I said. "So I'll know what we're looking at when this stuff runs."
"Sure," she said.
While we waited for QUARKER, she drew equations and plots on my whiteboard in red, green, black, and yellow, and she explained that she was postulating the existence of a new kind of attractor that came into being in a region of maximum chaos, its physical result an impossible region of spacetime, where an infinite number of particle events occupied a single, infinitesimal point.
Mathematically and otherwise, it is called a singularity, and in cosmology something like it is assumed to be at the center of black holes. There were all sorts of theorems about singularities, few of which I knew, none rigorously. Why would l? This stuff went with astrophysics and the gravitational forces associated with huge chunks of mass.
When she finished her explanations and turned from the whiteboard, I could see that she was wired and sleepy at once. Mostly, though, she was exultant: She felt she'd hit the jackpot. And of course she had, if any of this made sense ... it couldn't, I thought.
The Thing gonged, to tell us we had our results. I pulled up a canvas-backed chair beside her as she sat at the console. "We'll walk through the simulation," she said. "If you have a question, ask."
At first there were just cartoon schematics of the detectors-line drawings of the big central detector and its surrounding EM boxes, hadron calorimeters, and gas chambers. Then the beam shots started coming, and in a small window at the top of the screen, the beam parameters reeled by. Running a Monte Carlo is one hell of a lot easier than doing an actual run; you don't have the experimental uncertainties about good beam, good vacuum, reliable detector equipment; it's a simulation, so everything works right.
As we watched, the usual sorts of events occurred, particles and