Read Ripped Apart: Quantum Twins – Adventures On Two Worlds Online
Authors: Geoffrey Arnold
Ripped Apart: Quantum Twins – Adventures On Two Worlds (20 page)
Damping down his mixture of concern and excitement, Romain issued his command. ‘Miki, see what you can do with data retrieval. I’ll run a systems diagnostic.’
Miki swept her long hair behind her head, tying it into a knot as she sat at the other large screen and called up the latest data.
Romain went around behind the two large screens. He unlocked a drawer and pulled out a curved keyboard with numeric touchpads at either end. Another of his inventions. The left-hand set of numbers and symbols all carried special programming.
‘David, the data is all jumbled up. This is weird.’
‘Let me see what I can find.’ He nibbled at his moustache in agitation.
The soft humming of equipment and air conditioning. An occasional grunt a ‘?’ or a ‘!’
‘You’ve found something?’ Tyler asked as, similarly clad in green, he brought into the room a container of cold drinks, its round shape adorned by a picture of an array of colourful plants.
Miki looked over her shoulder. ‘Problems. Too big a data feed. It’s all over the place.’
‘Tyler,’ Romain called out, ensuring he kept his agitation out of his voice. ‘Will you check the connections. I can’t make sense of what I’m finding.’
The Jamaican-American went in to a small room that was buried even deeper into the mountain. He returned a few moments later, the streaks of grey in his curly, dark hair seemed to add to his puzzled expression. ‘It looks like a fuse has blown.’
Romain’s heart leapt. ‘A purple spiral?’
‘Yes.’
‘Please bring it here. It disconnects easily. Don’t try to reconnect the ends of the cables, just leave a gap,’ Romain said as he turned to Miki.
‘The garden,’ she said, smiling in acknowledgment.
*
It was said that NASA had a quantum computer with a power of five hundred and twelve qubits which was used to explore for exoplanets. How that had been created was still a secret. Developing work done by Nobel prize-winner Richard Feynman, Romain’s design comprised eight perfectly balanced groups of eight qubits operating sequentially, and was dedicated to exploration of the quantum field. Its capability was derived from a magnificent array of healthily photosynthesising plants that covered a large part of the top of the building. Miki loved her time tending the Quantum Garden. Although at times a hard-nosed scientist, she found the spooky and weird world of quantum mechanics often reminded her of ancient teachings on human life.
‘Konnichiwa, Benten-Ro’o,’ she said softly as she entered the garden and greeted her colourful friends. She was sure the plants rustled a little more than the gentle breeze required as she added to her “hullo”, the name she had given the garden: the Japanese Goddess of good fortune and the Polynesian God of Agriculture.
For a few moments she let her gaze rest on the vivid red flowers of the several Caricature Plants. As she examined the others she was concerned at the drooping red stamen of a group of white-petalled Hibiscus Arnottianus. Using her fingers, she checked their soil moisture and gently inspected their leaves. It was clear that the quantum computer had been shut down unexpectedly. ‘Shitsurei shimashita,’ she said, expressing her sorrow that the plants had suffered, and left the garden, promising to return as soon as possible.
Meanwhile in the laboratory, Romain had walked round to where Miki hasd been sitting and examined what was showing on the monitor screen. Pouring a glass of juice, he sat down on an adjacent chair, taking deep breaths to calm himself.
Tyler returned holding what looked like a child’s toy. A rounded pyramid that seemed to be made of translucent acrylic. Inside was a purple tube that spiralled from the base to the summit. Running through the centre of that was a fine thread of silver surrounded by multi-coloured streaks, with the whole device ending in a black, burnt top.
‘As you know, that’s the Logic Filter,’ Romain said softly, taking it from his assistant. ‘I suppose it is a sort of fuse. I’ve never thought of it like that.’ He waived to Tyler. ‘Sit down.’
Romain’s mind went back to the first time he had shown his assistants the intricate workings of the Fifth Room, and the key component.
*
‘This contains a series of seven mathematical formulae,’ he had explained. ‘When the Detector receives a signal that data is passed though this Filter. If, and only if, the data passes all seven tests, is it accepted as a fluctuation in the Earth’s quantum field. It then goes into a discrete part of the storage system and only then is the alert triggered.’
‘How…?’ Tyler had asked.
‘The formulae are contained within a nanomatrix. When the data passes the first test, red, the nanos act like tumblers in a lock and allow the data to pass to the next test, orange.’
‘Then on through to violet,’ Miki had added.
‘Just so.’
‘Why the spiral?’ again Tyler had asked .
‘Each test is another Logical Level. I liked the idea of a physical setup that looked like that. Also I found it easier to organise the nanos that way.’ He lifted it up to look at it more closely. ‘My Purple Python.’ He smiled, at himself, as his fantasies.
‘A David Niven film,’ Miki had commented.
‘Yes. He was in the first two of three films, “The Curse” and “The Trail”, about a diamond called the Pink Panther. When held up to the light you could see a Pink Panther within. The spiral shape reminds me of a python all coiled up. Purple to rhyme.’
‘And the Sahasrara, the Crown Chakra,’ Miki had added gently.
‘Yes,’ Romain had agreed softly. He had nodded to himself with pleasure at the connections that were rapidly growing between them.
‘Space-Time-Consciousness,’ Tyler had almost whispered, voicing what was to become a mantra.
Romain had nodded. He was happy. He knew that Tyler had a definition of consciousness that was different from his own. That did not matter. The connection with his team was deepening, and Romain needed that as much as he needed to keep his secrets safe from them.
*
Miki’s return brought Romain out of his reverie. ‘Look at the pattern of discolouration,’ he said, holding out the Python and slowly turning it around. ‘See the clear channel through the centre, right through all the logical levels. Our psien arrived and passed all the tests. Hence the screen data. But something massive followed so close behind that the Python was ruptured before the alert could be triggered.’
There was silence as all three looked at the Logic Filter, then each other. The message was clear. The psien had passed through the seven levels meaning there had been a perturbation in the Earth’s quantum field. With the time delay the only conclusion was that they had travelled through another dimension.
‘The white Hibiscus have suffered a serious shock,’ Miki said. ‘I will spend time in the garden. They will recover.’
‘The Tiare Apetahi?’ Romain asked after the unique white flower that in the whole world grew only on Raiatea’s Mount Temehani, yet had self-seeded in the centre of the quantum garden.
‘They are well,’ Miki replied with a serious countenance. She shared Romain’s belief that it was the presence of that plant that ensured the unbelievable success of the botanical quantum computer. An opinion they agreed never to share with Miki’s very prosaic husband.
‘Thank you, Miki,’ Romain said. ‘Now, we need to find out what we’ve got and why it burnt my poor Python. You two work with the data from storage. I’ll carry on with my diagnostic.’
Time passed and they called out to one another as discoveries were made. The biggest problem was the ghost imaging, badly affecting the screen showing the world map.
‘The ghosting’s gone,’ Tyler called out. ‘The map is stabilising. No, not really, it’s flickering. I think it’s trying to show two locations.’
‘The co-ordinates for one of them are at CERN,’ Miki explained.
‘OK. I’ll cancel that data stream,’ Romain said.
‘The map’s now stabilised,’ Tyler said. ‘The other location is in Finland.’
‘Miki. Input the other set of co-ordinates manually. That should not cause a problem.’
Romani heaved a sigh of relief. He had been aware of three streams of data. He had concentrated on the ghost image as that had been the most puzzling. The location had been dithering around an area fairly central in the southern part of Africa. But there was something else, he couldn’t say what.
He walked around to the map. If the ghost image had been a little to the left of where he was guessing, then it was due south of the mark in Finland.
‘That ghosting was due south. A reflection. Undoubtedly that’s a computer glitch. I never designed this to handle three different streams of data at once. I’m delighted that it has almost managed two. Remember, this detection system is working at the very fringes of quantum energies. The second set definitely is for CERN.’
Fully in command of his emotions, his natural secrecy asserted itself. He filed away in his mind what he had glimpsed as the coordinates of the ghosting image for further thought and research. It had faded so quickly he was not sure that he had been able to capture all the data.
The basic information would have been stored in the main database. What he had been able to extract with his special keyboard was locked away in special storage. If necessary in the future he could transfer that into the main database.
‘I’ll go and see what I can find from my contacts at CERN. What we are seeing does not accord with their explanation that the Large Hadron Collider was shut down because of the failure of a pair of magnets and incidental damage to monitoring equipment. In the meantime, find out everything you can about the new location and anything, no matter how small, that might be relevant. I don’t need to tell you how thorough to be.’ He turned to leave, thought for a moment, then turned back.
‘As I’ve mentioned before, there was more than one scientist CERN who used to support my ideas. They would not say so publicly for fear of ruining their careers. They are prepared to provide what help they can so that if, and when, I succeed…’ He smiled. ‘They hope that I will remember them favourably. If I were to return to CERN, they would become part of my team.’
His two assistants exchange glances. Working with him they had come to realise just how far out on a limb they were going with some of the research. They feared they could damage their own careers.
‘I realise your concerns. Let me reassure you. The system I have set up whereby you are grant-aided from a university in the USA is perfectly valid. The Americans are as keen as anyone to provide research grants where there is a proven track record of commercial products being developed as a spin-off from the research.
‘As we’ve agreed, your names only appear on papers that relate to mainstream research. That is to protect you and your futures. When we are successful, you will not be excluded from credit for all the work you are doing. We shall have major projects to work on here. And, if I do return to CERN, you would be the key members of whatever team I build there.’
He paused to let that fact sink in. ‘I presume you have taken the precaution of recording work you have done on my, shall I say, more adventurous ideas.’
The two doctors exchanged meaningful looks.
Romain smiled to himself. He would certainly not value their intelligence and acumen had they not done so. ‘Right. Let’s get to it.’
BREAKTHROUGH
Romain was buzzing with excitement as he headed for the room he and Franz had carefully concealed so many years before. Franz had been the chief maintenance engineer at CERN whilst Romain had been working there. They had become good friends when Romain had discovered the engineer’s interest in the newly developing field of Noetic Science.
Romain’s whole body was taut and he felt as though he was vibrating. He just knew that something different had happened this time. The trace on the computer screen that marked CERN was not unusual. It was the trace in Scandinavia that caused his excitement.
His assistants knew nothing of his secret room and how he obtained the information from the research centre. His explanation about former colleagues and their hopes was all very logical and accepted by his assistants. Yet far from the truth.
It was with difficulty that he kept to a steady walk as he made his way to the elevator and ascended to his suite. One wall in his study was used for storage of all sorts, the only indication being the lines of the discreet panelling and the small infra-red receptors that opened the doors.
Having locked the door to his study, Romain opened one of the panels, revealing a bookcase. Inserting his signet ring into one of the many depressions in the trim, the whole bookcase swung open, revealing a very small room carved out of the bare rock.
As Romain stepped onto the floor, it descended noiselessly to the third floor. Once again using his infra-red key and signet ring he opened a door into a room behind the Fifth Room. That was as much a geek’s delight as the main laboratory. The walls were full of the equipment that monitored what was happening at CERN, recorded what was displayed on their monitoring equipment, and enabled Romain to time his experiments with absolute precision.
Sitting at a console, he ran his fingers lightly across the screen as he keyed in the secret encryptions that accessed the equipment he and Franz had so very carefully installed and concealed a few months before Romain had left CERN. A series of different displays flickered across the screen, accompanied by the soft hum of printers spewing out reams of technical data.
He did know one thing for absolute certain. The information he was seeing had to be totally wrong, or…
His practised eye rapidly scanned the print-outs. Impossible! The data said exactly the same thing. Amongst an unbelievable and inexplicable background event, CERN had lost two streams of photons! The sheets of data fell from his hands as he slumped back in his chair, his mind a complete blank. The old joke of: “The impossible on demand, miracles take a little longer,” running around inside his mind.
Miracles did not happen in the world of science. There was always a rational explanation. Each time there was something inexplicable, a scientist eventually found an explanation. Newton, in the world of everyday things like apples falling from trees, Einstein, at the level of the atom, and now himself and hundreds of other scientists descending deeper into the sub-atomic world.
Slowly his thoughts marshalled themselves into order. A lot of the exploration of quantum mechanics was by pure mathematics. Physics, the testing of it, the seeing of it, followed long afterwards. This was magnitudes greater than knowing that, by travelling faster than three hundred thousand kilometres per second, photons must slip between dimensions.
The experiment was all his own idea. He had left CERN because the directorate had refused to listen to him. CERN was only involved because he needed the immense power of the LHC, many magnitudes greater than anything he was able to produce, onto which to piggy-back his own experiment. There was no way they could know that he had found the missing streams of photons in Scandinavia.
In the far corner of his mind another fact was added to that ghost image. If CERN had lost two streams, had one arrived in Scandinavia and another in southern Africa?
He asked the computer to repeat the variety of screen shots. What he had was the same raw data available at CERN. It still made no sense. He told the computer to run the special programmes he had designed for a very different series of experiments.
As the results flowed, it began to look as though a lightening bolt had ripped around what was affectionately called ‘The Donut’. Impossible. Further analysis revealed two bolts, trillions of protons in coherent streams shooting in opposite directions and disappearing – to where? Scandinavia? And no collisions!
Slowly, very slowly, he dared to admit to himself the possibility that he might have found signs of the first ever matter transportation. He had to clear his throat to repeat clearly his commands to the computer to run programmes he had only ever dreamt of using.
He could hardly contain himself. He fidgeted, he sweated. Nervously chewed his pencil-thin moustache.
Finally the data stopped scrolling across the screen. The humming of the printers died away. His eyes widened at the headlines on the main screen telling him that, after running the algorithms extrapolating the extremes of what was theoretically possible, there was a statistical chance better then fifty percent that the first stage of his dream had come true.
‘
Beam me up, Scottie,’ he murmured to himself, smiled and shook his head. Since his youth, he had been drawn to the Sci-Fi genre that dealt with possibilities of advanced science and the superconscious. For decades, scientists had been successfully experimenting. Electrons changing places across astronomical distances, photons carrying meaningful amounts of data between Earth and the orbiting space station, neutrinos eventually travelling faster than the speed of light between CERN and the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy, thus demonstrating that other dimensions must exist. But his psien carrying a massive amount of – what?
He was angry with himself. Because of the very reasonable explanation for the closure of the LHC for the short period over Christmas and the New Year, he had accepted the surface displays on his equipment confirming what CERN had announced publicly. He had not carried out a deeper analysis. He calmed down as he pointed out to himself that it was this morning’s event that was the real excitement and not that of the twentieth.
It was difficult to accept the possibility that had been revealed. His algorithms were designed to calculate the probability of a mathematical theory. In many ways a dream. No-one really knew whether the maths was actually valid in practice. That was why places such as CERN, Firmilab in the USA and many others had been built. Yet here, before his very eyes, there appeared to be hard, physical proof of those theories.
Publish his results now? When he was so close? The word ‘honourable’ played through his mind. He took a deep breath and steadied himself.
‘I made a commitment to you, Sir David… I will honour that… I may even have my proof before the next Nobel announcements!’
He looked at his watch and was surprised at the time that had passed. In a calm and reflective mood he returned to the laboratory to be greeted by the puzzled looks on the faces of his two assistants.
‘CERN has been more than economical with the truth,’ he said. Whatever happened on twenty December was more than they announced. Something went very badly wrong. My contacts say there is total confusion and no-one yet knows exactly what happened.’
I bet there is confusion.
They don’t have my programmes and they won’t even have thought of that possibility. Their minds will be so focussed on what they are researching.
‘What have you found?’
His calm mood almost deserted him as he heard his two research assistants say that they had not been able to find anything of use. Lots of basic facts about Finland, the village of Kotomäki and the Research Institute at Jyväskylä. Nothing at all about any major event, or even freak happening, apart from an exceptionally vivid display of the Aurora Borealis much further south than usual.
‘Impossible. It must have been a major event. Late afternoon, someone must have seen something. They needn’t even have taken a mobile out of a pocket!’ he said as he swung his left arm up, wrist turned so his RonaldSon watch faced his assistants. ‘Film,’ he said, swinging his arm around steadily. ‘Play,’ he said as his arm stopped swinging.
The video he had just taken with a watch of his own design played clearly on the wall. He had previously demonstrated how, with a few verbal commands, the video could be uploaded onto any one or more of the video channels in The Cloud and that communicated via whatever social media he choose.
‘We’ve rechecked the data. The two locations are clear. But…’ Tyler said.
‘What we’ve detected at Kotomäki occurred some ten hours ago. Four am our time, four pm in Finland,’ Miki said. ‘We’ve checked and can reconfirm what we already know. The event which caused CERN to shut down was mid-morning on twenty December. The same time as our first data-recovery trial run.’
‘And there’s nothing on the internet to say that the LHC has restarted,’ Tyler added.
Romain sat down.
Quantum entanglement across dimensions. A difference in time – why not!
Miki hesitantly offered: ‘There are reports on the internet of meteor showers over north Finland at Lakes Lappajärvi and Karikkoselkä, not expected at this time of year. It seems more than a coincidence that they were over those lakes where gravity is different to normal as a result of major meteor strikes so long ago.’
‘A combination of meteor showers and the difference in gravity disrupting our experiment so that the transmission failed,’ Tyler suggested.
‘Or the coincidence that CERN restarted the LHC at four pm their time,’ Romain dropped his bombshell to open-mouthed silence. ‘I did not tell you at first as I wanted to hear what you had discovered. And for all of us to keep open minds.’
Mouths now closed, Miki and Tyler nodded their appreciation. At times, being in ignorance was the best way to work.
‘We know our experiment worked to the extent that some of the psien returned from another dimension and that was registered. If our theories are correct, that is because they had been successfully attached to a stream of protons. Presumably those protons also returned,’ Miki said, starting with the basics.
Romain narrowed his eyes, the cool scientist in control. ‘Not all the psien carried data as we used the first few without data as a hook onto the proton stream. If they returned first as expected then, as you say Miki, it is those which were registered. But why should those carrying the data have ruptured the Python?’
‘Because a lot more data was returning than we had loaded,’ Tyler said.
‘An inference being that the psien without data were travelling faster than the others,’ Romain said slowly. ‘In fact, several orders of magnitude faster as they had travelled several thousand kilometres to here in the same time as the sandwiched psien travelled only a few hundred to Finland.’ He turned to the computer monitor where the map had been changed to display the immediate area around Kotomäki, and pointed to the bright green light. ‘To here, on the edge of this little town?’
‘Because what was returning was not merely the chain of sandwiched psien we sent, but something more. A coherent package. Which dropped off when the carrier wave ceased,’ Miki suggested.
‘But if that data-package arrived here, why is the event not showing here but at that village?’ Romain knew he was floundering. However extraordinary they might be, one logical hypothesis was contradicting another.
‘A dimension rift,’ Tyler said thoughtfully ‘The protons returned from that other dimension. The first few psien they were carrying passed through the filter. But there were not enough. Insufficient energy to trigger the alert. What was following was additional data, outside the sandwich psien. That overloaded the Python at almost the same moment. That severed the link to the other dimension and the rift closed. Whatever that data represents… it coalesced around something like an energetic centre of gravity, causing the disturbance by that village.’
For a moment Romain had a crazy picture of olden days when mail was dropped off from trains into nets at the side of the railway tracks. His mind reasserted itself. ‘Or a version of the double slit experiment where one electron goes through both apertures. Here, the psien travelled across dimensions emerging at different times? And carrying vastly more data than we’ve ever tried?’ He shook his head. ‘Too many theories.’ But if one of them was true? With great effort of mind, he stopped himself from clenching his hands and teeth and almost groaning in anger at the thought that someone might get there before him.
‘I must think,’ he said in a harsh voice. ‘Take a break.’ He left the room, his whole body was quivering with inner turmoil as he went to his study. It was with sweating hands he picked up the telephone and called the agency he used for all his travel arrangements.
He had been so surprised at what his equipment had revealed that he had set the system to run a set of self-diagnostics. He returned to his secret room and ran off a print-out. He checked carefully. Everything with his system was correct. That was not surprising. He had designed, built and programmed it himself. He had no false modesty about his skills.
He turned to the print-outs from his equipment at CERN. Again everything checked out. Had someone interfered with it? He ran a check looking for that. No, again all was satisfactory. That was not surprising. Any engineer checking the systems would find what appeared to be, what in fact was, a third back-up.
They would realise that it was overkill. Administrative errors, not unknown in any large organisation. Perhaps authorised by a scientist with a background of rocketry, where three back-ups were standard procedure. Those were just two of several reasons why that might have happened. Only if it was completely dismantled and someone decided to explore further might it be discovered that the system relayed its data outside CERN. But even then not the destination.
The phone extension from his study rang. The travel agent had good news, he could get Romain to Helsinki by late on thirty December, then a flight to Jyväskylä. It would be a circuitous route with several changes and taking longer than usual. And it would cost. Romain was delighted. He’d feared a much longer delay and was happy to pay what he guessed included the agent’s extra commission for working during his holiday.
