Blue Mars (47 page)

All very well; indeed, exciting. But the problem, for Sax and many
other skeptics, came with the difficulty of confirming any of this beautiful
math by experiment, a difficulty caused by the very, very, very small sizes of
the loops and spaces being theorized. These were all in the 10~33 centimeter
range, the so-called Planck length, and this length was so much smaller than
subatomic particles that it was hard to imagine. A typical atomic nucleus was
about 1(T13 centimeter in diameter, or one millionth of a billionth of a
centimeter. First Sax had tried very hard to contemplate that distance for a
while; hopeless, but one had to try, one had to hold that hopelessly
inconceivable smallness in the mind for a moment. And then remember that in
string theory they were talking about a distance twenty magnitudes smaller
still—about objects one thousandth of one billionth of one billionth the size
of an atomic nucleus! Sax struggled for ratio; a string, then, was to the size
of an atom, as an atom was to the size of ... the solar system. A ratio which
rationality itself could scarcely comprehend.

Worse yet, it was too small to detect experimentally. This to Sax
was the crux of the problem. Physicists had been managing experiments in
accelerators at energy levels on the order of one hundred GeV, or one hundred
times the mass energy of a proton. From these experiments they had worked up,
with great effort, over many years, the so-called revised standard model of
particle physics. The revised standard model explained a lot, it was really an
amazing achievement, and it made predictions that could be proved or disproved
by lab experiment or cosmological observations, predictions that were so varied
and had been so well fulfilled that physicists could speak with confidence
about much of what had gone on in the history of the universe since the Big
Bang, going as far back as the first millionth of a second of time.

String theorists, however, wanted to make a fantastic leap beyond
the revised standard model, to the Planck distance which was the smallest realm
possible, the minimum quantum movement, which could not be decreased without
contradicting the Pauli exclusion principle. It made sense, in a way, to think about
that minimum size of things; but actually seeing events at this scale would
take experimental energy levels of at least 1019 GeV, and they could not create
those. No accelerator would ever come close. The heart of a supernova would be
more like it. No. A great divide, like a vast chasm or desert, separated them
from the Planck realm. It was a level of reality fated to remain unknown to
them in any physical sense.

Or so skeptics maintained. But those interested in the theory had
never been dissuaded from studying it. They searched for indirect confirmation
of the theory at the subatomic level, which from this perspective now seemed
gigantic, and from cosmology. Anomalies in phenomena that the revised standard
could not explain, might be explained by predictions made by string theory
about the Planck realm. These predictions had been few, however, and the
predicted phenomena very difficult to see. No real clinchers had been found.
But as the decades passed, a few string enthusiasts had always continued to
explore new mathematical structures, which might reveal more ramifications of
the theory, might predict more detectable indirect results.

This was all they could do; and it was a very chancy road for
physics to take, Sax felt. He believed in the experimental testing of theories
with all his heart. If it couldn’t be tested, it remained math only, and its
beauty was irrelevant; there were lots of bizarrely beautiful exotic fields of
mathematics, but if they weren’t modeling the phenomenal world, Sax wasn’t interested.

Now, however, after all the decades of work, they were beginning
to make progress in ways that Sax found interesting. At the new supercollider
in Rutherford Crater’s rim, they had found the second Z particle that string
theory had long predicted would be there. And a magnetic monopole detector,
orbiting the sun out of the plane of the ecliptic, had captured a trace of what
looked to be a fractionally charged unconfined particle with a mass as big as a
bacterium—a very rare glimpse of a “weakly interacting massive particle,” or
WIMP. String theory had predicted WIMPs would be out there, while the revised
standard did not call for them. That was thought provoking, because the shapes
of galaxies showed that they had gravitational masses ten times as large as
their visible light revealed; if the dark matter could be explained
satisfactorily as weakly interacting massive particles, Sax thought, then the
theory responsible would have to be called very interesting indeed.

Interesting in a different way was the fact that one of the
leading theorists in this new stage of development was working right there in
Da Vinci, part of the impressive group Sax was sitting in on. Her name was Bao
Shuyo. She had been born and raised in Dorsa Brevia, her ancestry Japanese and
Polynesian. She was small for one of the young natives, though still half a
meter taller than Sax. Black hair, dark skin, Pacific features, very regular
and somewhat plain. She was
 
shy with
 
Sax,
 
shy with everyone;
 
she even
sometimes stuttered, which Sax found extremely endearing. But when she stood up
in the seminar room to give a i
      
presentation, she became quite firm in hand if not in voice, [
      
writing her equations and notes on the
screen very quickly, j
      
as if doing
speed calligraphy. Everyone in these moments -
       
attended to her very closely, in effect mesmerized; she had
been working at Da Vinci for a year now, and everyone ;
      
there smart enough to recognize such a
thing knew that they were watching one of the pantheon at work, discovering
reality right there before their eyes.

The other young turks would interrupt her to ask questions, of
course—there were many good minds in that group—and if they were lucky, off
they would all go together, mathematically modeling gravitons and graviti-nos,
dark matter and shadow matter—all personality and indeed all persons forgotten.
Very productive exciting sessions; and clearly Bao was the driving force in
them, the one they relied on, the one they had to reckon with.

It was disconcerting, a bit. Sax had met women in math and physics
departments before, but this was the only female mathematical genius he had
ever even heard of, in all the long history of mathematical advancement, which,
now that he thought of it, had been a weirdly male affair. Was there anything
in life as male as mathematics had been? And why was that?

Disconcerting in a different way was the fact that areas of Bao’s
work were based on the unpublished papers of a Thai mathematician of the
previous century, an unstable young man named Samui, who had lived in Bangkok
brothels and committed suicide at the age of twenty-three, leaving behind
several “last problems” in the manner of Fermat, and insisting to the end that
all of his math had been dictated to him by telepathic aliens. Bao had ignored
all that and explained some of Samui’s more obscure innovations, and then used
them to develop a group of expressions called advanced Rovelli-Smolin
operators, which allowed her to establish a system of spin networks that meshed
with su-perstrings very beautifully. In effect this was the complete uniting of
quantum mechanics and gravity at last, the great problem solved—if it were
true. And true or not, it had been powerful enough to allow Bao to make several
specific predictions in the larger realms of the atom and the cosmos; and some
of these had since been confirmed.

So now she was the queen of physics—the first queen of physics—and
experimentalists in labs all over were on-line to Da Vinci, anxious to have
more suggestions from her. The afternoon sessions in the seminar room were
invested with a palpable sense of tension and excitement; Max Schnell would
start the meeting, and at some point call on Bao; and she would stand and go to
the screen at the front of the room, plain, graceful, demure, firm, pen flying
over the screen as she gave them a way to calculate precisely the neutrino
mass, or described very specifically the ways strings vibrated to form the
different quarks, or quantized space so that gravitinos were divided into three
families, and so on; and her colleagues and friends, perhaps twenty men and one
other woman, would interrupt to ask questions, or add equations that explained
side issues, or tell the rest of them about the latest results from Geneva or
Palo Alto or Rutherford; and during that hour, they all knew they were at the
center of the world.

And in labs on Earth and Mars and in the asteroid belt, following
her work, unusual gravity waves were noted, in very difficult delicate
experiments; particular geometric patterns were revealed in the fine
fluctuations in the cosmic background radiation; dark-matter WIMPs and
shadow-matter WISPs were being sought out; the various families of leptons and
fermions and leptoquarks were explained; galactic clumping in the first
inflation was provisionally solved; and so on. It seemed as if physics might be
on the brink of the Final Theory at last. Or at least in the midst of the Next
Big Step.

Given the significance of what Bao was doing, Sax felt shy about
speaking to her. He did not want to waste her time on trivial things. But one
afternoon at a kava party, out on one of the arc balconies overlooking Da
Vinci’s crater lake, she approached him—even more shy and stumbling than he
was—so much so that he was forced into the very unusual position of trying to
put someone else at ease, finishing sentences for her and the like. He did that
as best he could, and they stumbled along, talking about his old Russell
diagrams for gravitinos, useless now he would have thought, though she said
they still helped her to see gravitational action. And then when he asked a
question about that day’s seminar, she was much more relaxed. Yes, clearly that
was the way to put her at ease; he should have thought of it immediately. It
was what he liked himself.

After that, they got in the habit of talking from time to time. He
always had to work to draw her out, but it was interesting work. And when the
dry season came, in the fall helionequinox, and he started going out sailing
again from the little harbor Alpha, he asked her haltingly if she would like to
join him, and they stuttered their way through a deeply awkward interaction,
which resulted in her going out with him the next nice day, sailing in one of
the lab’s many little catamarans.

When day sailing, Sax stayed in the little bay called the
Florentine, southeast of the peninsula, where Ravi Fjord widened but before it
became Hydroates Bay. This was where Sax had learned to sail, and where he
still felt best acquainted with the winds and currents. On longer trips he had
explored the delta of fjords and bays at the bottom end of the Marineris
system, and three or four times he had sailed up the eastern side of the Chryse
Gulf, all the way to Mawrth Fjord and along the Sinai Peninsula.

On this special day, however, he confined himself to the
Florentine. The wind was from the south, and Sax tacked down into it, enlisting
Bao’s help at every change of tack. Neither of them said much. Finally, to get
things started, Sax was forced to ask about physics. They talked about the ways
in which strings constituted the very fabric of space-time itself, rather than
being replacements for points in some absolute abstract grid.

Thinking it over, Sax said, “Do you ever worry that work on a
realm so far beyond the reach of experiment will turn out to be a kind of house
of cards—knocked over by some simple discrepancy in the math, or some later
different theory that does the job better, or is more confirmable?”

“No,” Bao said. “Something so beautiful as this has to be true.”

“Hmm,” Sax said, glancing at her. “I must admit I’d rather have
something solid crop up. Something like Einstein’s Mercury—a known discrepancy
in the previous theory, which the new theory resolves.”

“Some people would say that the missing shadow matter fills that
bill.”

“Possibly.”

She laughed. “You need more, I can see. Perhaps some kind of thing
we can do.”

“Not necessarily,” Sax said. “Although it would be nice, of
course. Convincing, I mean. If something were better understood, so that we
could manipulate it better. Like the plasmas in fusion reactors.” This was an
ongoing problem in another lab at Da Vinci.

“Plasmas might very well be better understood if you modeled them
as having patterns imposed by spin networks.”

“Really?”

“I think so.”

She closed her eyes—as if she could see it all written down, on
the inside of her eyelids. Everything in the world. Sax felt a piercing stab of
envy, of—loss. He had always wanted that kind of insight; and there it was,
right in the boat beside him. Genius was a strange thing to witness.

“Do you think this theory will mean the end of physics?” he asked.

“Oh no. Although we might work out the fundamentals. You know, the
basic laws. That might be possible, sure. But then every level of emergence
above that creates its own problems. Taneev’s work only scratches the surface
there. It’s like chess—we might learn all the rules, but still not be able to
play very well because of emergent properties. Like, you know, pieces are
stronger if they’re out in the center of the board. That’s not in the rules,
it’s a result of all the rules put together.”