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was the chemical energy of a car's full tank of gasoline--all concentrated in
a single particle. A quantum state like
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COSM
that might be possible, she supposed, but... "So what? That doesn't prove an
accident at RHIC could conceivably--"
"No, something else does." He stopped leaning against the blackboard and came
toward her. "Your data."
"How?"
"That hydrogen recombination line. Your detectors saw the moment when
electrons and protons settled down into marriage, making hydrogen."
"Meaning what?"
"The sphere is a window into a whole other universe--one just created."
Alicia frowned. "A whole universe... ?"
"This 'Mini Bang' of yours made a separate, tiny space-time. Not vacant, but
with mass, just like ours. Then it expanded. That's why you kept getting that
spectrum of a hot blackbody. The mini-universe was expanding, cooling, but the
radiation was still getting reabsorbed by the matter. That's what gave the
simple spectrum. When the mini-universe got big enough, the matter thinned
out, the radiation cooled.
As soon as things were mild enough, the electrons found the protons, they got
hitched, and the wedding announcement was a burst of photons.''
She saw it now. "That's what we detect now in our night sky?
The relic radiation. It's been rattling around the universe ever since the
atoms formed."
"Exactly. When it was emitted, it was hot stuff: 3,000 degrees. It's been
cooling off ever since, so now it's just weak microwaves in our sky. The
hydrogen recombination line, that we can't see at all anymore.
It's masked by infrared from dust clouds. But you saw it, right here, coming
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from that sphere."
"Look, I don't remember much of the cosmology course I took, but I do recall
that matter combined into hydrogen long after the Big
Bang."
He nodded. "For us, yes. You're right about the era when hydrogen formed; I
looked it up. A lot of things were suspiciously going on then. For example,
the energy density of light was about equal to
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the energy density of mass then. When light lost out to matter and the atoms
were free to form, well, that might affect the other end of this window we
have here."
She didn't let him dodge her question. "When did it happen?"
Grudgingly he said, "In our universe, the relic radiation came from about four
hundred thousand years after the Big Bang."
She could always smell a theorist ducking a crucial point.
"Doesn't that kill your theory? The sphere is only weeks old."
"True." He tossed his chalk into the tray. "There's more to learn, then. If
that sphere is a peephole into a universe, then time is running faster on the
other side."
She waved away the time issue; the main idea was still dawning on her. "A
whole universe?" She stared at the sphere, gleaming innocuously.
"And we have a window on it?"
"Yeah, a window held open by negative energy density tension.
It's recapitulating our whole history, but faster."
"How much?" She was having trouble with all this. "How fast?"
"Uh, I'll have to work on that." His fragile air of certainty collapsed;
he shrugged. Theory in such rarefied realms was as fragile as a butterfly's
wing, its flight sustained by bravado.
"We'd better be sure we even know what we're talking about,"
she said uncertainly.
He gave her a wobbly grin. "Can't go to the experts--there aren't any."
She glimpsed in his face something she knew all too well: what it was like to
work on hard problems and have them take up all the space in you, leaving
nothing for the soft word of people and pleasantries.
You had to live with an awful uncertainty, not just the obvious nugget problem
but the suspicion that you were wrong all down the line, asking the wrong
question of reality, and would get from Mother Nature the nonreply you
deserved.
Something in the swing of his shoulders, an unthinking confidence, moved her. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]