Twistor (4 page)

'I tried to explain,' said Paul, 'that a theoretical physicist works mainly with paper, pencil, and brainpower, that I didn't need elaborate equipment. I'm not sure they bought my story. I told them about all the thousands of kilobucks that the misguided funding agencies take from our important theoretical work to lavish on your ill-conceived experiments. But they decided that the crystals and balloons provided sufficient justification for continued support of experimental physics.' Paul offered David a bowl of nuts. He looked closely at David, watching to make sure his teasing hadn't irritated his friend.

'Aw, come on, Paul,' countered David, joining the familiar game. He was clearly more cheerful and relaxed now. 'What would you theorists find to spend real money on, should someone be foolish enough to give you some? How many pencils and note pads do they have to buy you guys before you're happy, anyhow? Why, when you guys latch on to some money you promptly embarrass the rest of the physics community by gathering at phony institutes and conferences held at beach resorts and ski lodges to fritter away dollars that might be better used for experiments to demonstrate the holes in your partially baked
theoretical
ideas.' Paul had spent a month at the Aspen Institute for Theoretical Physics for the past several summers, and David frequently reminded him of this.

David leaned back and smiled, as though awaiting Paul's counterpunch, but at that point Elizabeth Ernst emerged from the dining room, wiping her hands on a towel. 'I hope you two aren't arguing about funding again,' she said. 'My God! The only thing more boring than listening to a radio interview with an athlete is listening to scientists talk about funding. And did I understand that you ham-handed experimentalists are out to put my poor husband out of business?'

'What's fun-ding?' asked Jeff, wrinkling his nose.

David turned to Jeff and said, 'Funding is money that governments and foundations give scientists like your dad and me every year so that we can have fun for the rest of the year. That's why it's called FUN-ding, Jeff!' He winked, then turned to Elizabeth and said, 'There is one thing that's more boring than either of those: have you ever heard an interview with the lawyer of an athlete?'

She grimaced.

'Anyhow, Elizabeth, you needn't worry about us experimentalists causing any problems for your husband. He's found himself a nice ecological niche that's well insulated from the harsh environment of the real world. His theories can probably survive indefinitely, unblemished by embarrassing confrontations with experimental reality.'

'Is that a virtue?' asked Elizabeth, raising her expressive eyebrows and looking at her husband. 'I thought physics theories were supposed to be testable.'

'What David's saying in his colorful but bombastic way,' said Paul, 'is that in my field of theoretical physics our pursuit of the underpinnings of nature has led us further and further away from anything that can be directly tested by doing experiments. The size scale is too small; the energy needed is too big. In the area of
theoretical
physics I'm looking at now, all the experimental work was over and done with before the Big Bang had expanded to the size of a pinhead. God has closed down the experimental laboratory until the next time around, if there is one.'

Elizabeth looked from David to Paul. This is all news to me,' she said.
'
I thought you guys had a hot line to the innermost secrets of the universe.'

'We do,' said Paul,
'
in a way. The lack of tests is a real problem, but what can we do except keep looking for ways to keep the theory honest. This work is what I do best . . . and the field is one of the most exciting in all of physics. We're predicting wonderful and outrageous things. We study model universes with spaces of ten or even twenty-six dimensions, all but four of them rolled up like submicroscopic snails. We use geometries made of tiny looping strings where points would be in ordinary Euclidian space. We've found unlikely symmetries that can explain all the forces of nature. We predict exotic particles with strange properties and enormous masses. We're doing many, many lovely things . . . but none of it seems to be relevant to here-and-now reality, because we can't make testable predictions. It may all be just mathematics. Sometimes I wonder if we're the successors of the old scholastics, doing the modern equivalent of calculating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.'

'
Can angels dance on a pin?' giggled Melissa, her interest kindled. Elizabeth grinned, shook her head, and disappeared in the direction of the kitchen.

'Sure they can, Melissa, if the pin is big enough and the angels are small enough!' said David, and winked.

A tinkle of glassware could be heard in the distance. 'Dinner is served,' announced Elizabeth with a fake English accent.

'
Now there's a higher reality we can get our teeth into,' said Paul, leading the way to the dining room.

2

Wednesday Evening, October 6

The electronics shop was located deep in the basement of Physics Hall along with the machine shop, the glass shop, the helium liquefier, and the other technical services for the experimental activities of the Department of Physics. Victoria was pleased to see that a light still burned behind the shop's frosted glass door panel. She opened it with her master key and entered. The room was lined with cluttered workbenches, now mostly unattended.

At one bench a broad-shouldered figure was at work. Sam Weston, seated on a high stool, was peering closely at a spotlit rectangle of green translucent circuit board, his straight black hair hanging down over his forehead. One side of the board was dotted with rectangular black integrated circuit chips and cylindrical resistors and capacitors bearing brightly colored stripes. But Sam seemed more interested in the other side of the board, which was covered only with silvery printed circuit traces.

'Problems, Sam?' Victoria asked.

'Oh, hi, Vickie,' said Sam, raising his head. 'Yeah, this module is from the FermiLab setup of the high energy guys. Their FastBus rig doesn't work, and they need it, like, yesterday. The ICs all check OK, so I think it must have a broken trace or maybe an open capacitor.'

'What does the diagnostic computer say?' Vickie asked.

'Diagnostic computer? Surely you jest! You'd need a data base of nominal parameters for that. These folk don't document anything, let alone enter the nominal circuit specs in the computer. So I get to check the damned thing
by
hand, like back in the Dark Ages. I don't even have a circuit diagram. And I don't get overtime for working nights, just comp time. My kids are beginning to have trouble remembering what Daddy looks like.'

'Poor Sam!' said Vickie. 'I've got sharp little eyes. Let me look.' She gently took the circuit board from Sam and held it so the spotlight illuminated it from behind, light showing through the translucent Fiberglas. After a few minutes of peering and poking, she said, 'Hmmm. What's this little line on the trace here, Sam?' Taking a felt-tipped pen from the workbench, she drew a black circle on the green-and-silver surface.

'Lemme see that!' said Sam, gently taking the board and simultaneously reaching for his digital ohmmeter. With a delicacy which belied his large blunt hands he carefully touched the red and black probes of the meter to points on either side of the almost imperceptible line within the black circle. The meter's silvery LCD readout read OFF SCALE. Then he moved one probe until it just touched the hairline crack. The readout jumped through a cascade of digits and settled on 0.007 OHMS. 'Vickie, you're an absolute marvel!' Sam exclaimed. As Vickie watched, he took a slightly smoking soldering iron from a bracket on the bench and touched it to the offending region, dabbing with the end of a silvery coil of solder.

As the solder flux melted, a smell of hot resin filled the air, conjuring in Victoria's memory a vivid world of piñon campfires, and mountain hikes in the Sierra, and Mark. No, she said sharply to herself, that was over a year ago; it's finished. She wrenched her attention back to the here and now.

Sam had clipped aluminum shielding to both sides of the board and was slipping it into a module slot in a nearby rack labeled FASTBUS. AS he flipped the power switch up, red, green, and yellow LED indicators began to dance behind tiny holes in the multimodule panel. He pushed a button labeled DIAGNOSTICS and the pace of the
dance
increased, then stopped as the legend CHECK OK appeared on a tiny liquid-crystal screen on one of the wider modules. 'It's fixed!' he said. 'By God, that lousy trace was the trouble! Vickie, I owe ya one.'

'And, as it happens, Sam,' said Victoria, giving him her most winning smile, 'I'm here to collect!'

David drained the last ruby drop from his wineglass, dabbed his lips with the white cloth napkin and smiled contentedly. The food had been excellent. He and Elizabeth shared an interest in gourmet cooking, and she had done particularly well this evening.

Paul looked from David to his wife and said, 'Elizabeth, you've outdone yourself this time. If the Moral Majority ever finds out about the hedonistic pleasures of doing physics and closes down basic research as a licentious and immoral activity, we can always open a restaurant. You can be the cook, I'll be the maitre d', and David can be the wine steward. We'll clean up, I tell you!'

'Yes, cleaning up is an excellent idea,' Elizabeth said, smiling. 'You four can start your training as busboys right now. Grab some of those dishes, and let's take them to the kitchen.'

'What about our story!' cried Jeff, looking concerned as he picked up his plate.

Melissa chimed in sternly with, 'Yes, Mother! David has to tell us our story before bedtime.' In the past ten months, as David's once-a-week dinner with the Ernsts had grown into a habit and a tradition, the event of the evening for the children had become a story from David before bedtime.

David had met the Ernsts when he was newly arrived from Los Alamos. He had gone on a hike in the Cascades with some other people from the physics department, including Elizabeth and Paul. They had all enjoyed the hike, and as they were driving back to Seattle, Elizabeth had invited David to come home with them for dinner.
After
the dinner that evening David had, on impulse, told the Ernst children a little Ozark folk tale about the Hobyas to help in persuading them to go off to bed. From then on David had been pegged as the Ernst family storyteller.

As a child, David had been fascinated by folklore and mythology and had been encouraged in this by his mother, a successful novelist. He was surprised now by how well he remembered the old fairy tales and how smoothly he was able to tell them for the Ernst children. He found that he enjoyed the opportunity to use this otherwise dormant talent. And there was another unexpected aspect of the arrangement. David usually felt uncomfortable around children. Never before had he had young children as his very good friends who were enormously delighted to see him whenever he appeared. This was a new experience, and he found that he rather liked it.

Elizabeth seated herself in the big chair and picked up the textbook on cognitive psychology that she had been working her way through, finding the place where she had stopped. After Jeffrey had started the first grade, she had found a part-time job doing psychological counseling. She'd earned an M.S. in psychology while Paul was in graduate school, but she needed to brush up on some of the basics.

Across the room David was sitting on the sofa between the children, and Paul had seated himself at the far end of the sofa and was looking at some physics preprints. 'All right, kids,' David said, 'this is a very old story, but I'm going to tell it my own way, not the old way. OK?' The children nodded solemnly. 'Once upon a time,' he began, 'in a faraway kingdom, there lived a young boy named Ton.'

Jeff giggled. Ton? That's a funny name!'

'It was a very common name where Ton lived,' David replied seriously. 'Now listen quietly if you want to hear the story.' He mugged a comic scowl at Jeff.

Ton's
mother and father loved him dearly, and he was very happy. His father had a prosperous business in their village, and his family owned three books.'

Jeff and Melissa looked at the book-lined living-room walls and giggled, apparently finding the notion of owning only three books a comical idea.

A bright clever boy, Ton learned very fast. His mother taught him how to read and write. Ton's father was a master armorer who made weapons and armor from steel. He taught Ton many things: how to make steel from red iron ore and coal, soften steel in the forge and shape it, rivet and weld pieces together, make weapons and armor, harden steel, and sharpen the edges of a new blade. As Ton grew and learned, he was able to be of more help to his father.

'One day when Ton was riding his pony along the seaside, leading a pack horse with a load of coal for his father's forge, he was captured by a band of corsairs.'

'David, what're cor-sairs?' asked Jeffrey, cocking his head.

'Corsairs were free-lance pirates, usually from northern Africa, who specialized in capturing people and selling them as slaves,' said David. 'Very bad guys!' He glanced at his audience, then continued: 'Struggling with his captors, Ton tried to escape. He bit one corsair on the arm and drew blood. He was beaten until he thought he would die. He was taken to a ship and thrown into a dark hold, where he was chained with other miserable prisoners. He was sick for days from the beating. The smell of the dirty prisoners was awful. The only food was rotten, with maggots squirming in it. The eternal rocking of the ship made him so seasick that he wanted to die.'

Classic format, observed Elizabeth, unable to concentrate on the textbook in her lap. It's a variant of the 'Jack and the Beanstalk' myth, right out of Bettelheim. A young boy with a peculiar education is thrust into a different world and confronted with seemingly insoluble problems.

'
After what seemed years but was only a few days, Ton was taken ashore in a strange, dry land. The corsairs put him in a cart with other captives and took them all to a great slave market in the center of a noisy, foul-smelling city. Ton was made to stand naked on a round stone block before ugly bearded men wearing strange robes and shouting in a language he could not understand. He was sold as a slave to the highest bidder.