(Program note: I originally intended this “History of the Colonies” series to be weekly posts, but I’ve fallen into more of an every-other-week schedule. That probably makes more sense, since I have actual novel-writing to do as well, not to mention teaching other people how to write novels, so I think one post every two weeks is likely to be the schedule going forward. And now, on with the show…)
April 3, 2183
Linda Ryder paused in the corridor just short of Professor Schaller’s office. She didn’t have an appointment, she was dropping by during his regular office hours. So she could just turn around and leave, with no one the wiser.
She knew it was not really right for her to be so reluctant to admit she was good at physics. It didn’t make much sense either, given where she lived. But the days when everyone offworld was a highly-trained “astronaut” were long past, by a century or so. The offworld population were just regular folks, with all sorts of jobs and educations, and the particular district of Aurora where Linda grew up… well, it wasn’t the intellectual center of Colonial life, that was certain. In her school the “brains” were a severely downtrodden clique, and Linda had learned early on to hide the fact she was one of them.
She wasn’t proud of that, and things were different here at Star City University anyway, but it was still a hard habit to break. She’d had to work up her courage to declare Physics her major in the first place, even though it was the only thing she really wanted. Her friends even knew she had a straight-A average— in her major classes at least. But she’d carefully hidden how easily that average came to her. She tried to at least act like it was as hard for her as for her roommate, Jenny.
But now she was about to walk into Professor Schaller’s office and ask his opinion on a pet project she knew very well few PhD candidates could have come up with. She was about to admit everything.
Unless she turned around, headed back to the dorm, and forgot about it.
Come on, the last person in the world who’s going to criticize you for working out a physics problem is a physics professor, she told herself. Then she thought he might tell her she was all wrong, and somehow that would be simultaneously a relief and a horrible disappointment, and she wound up not knowing what she was feeling.
Except that she was being silly. Go on or go back, don’t just stand here fluttering in the corridor.
She took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and marched the last few meters to Professor Schaller’s door.
It was open for his office hours but she hit the chime anyway. Professor Schaller looked up from his desk screen and smiled.
“Linda, hi. What can I do for you?” He waved her in.
Linda moved rather slowly into the office. “Hello, Professor Schaller, I was, um, wondering if I could get your opinion on something I’ve been working on.”
“Sure. What is it?”
“Well, I’ve been looking at the data from the thing that happened to the Sun last fall. You know, the Hiccup.”
“Yes?” Professor Schaller waved her to one of the chairs facing his desk, and Linda sat down.
She pulled her handscreen out of her backpack and called up her project file. She spoke in a quick rush. “You remember in our class that day, you put up a graph of the Sun’s energy output during the event. Well, I thought the shape of the curve looked familiar. I was sure I recognized it. Then, people were noticing that the energy released in the flash that came after exactly matched the amount of energy the Sun didn’t produce while it darkened— I mean, if you take its average output as what it would have— so it was as if the energy got… I don’t know, diverted somewhere else, stored and then released again in one big burst.”
“Yes, I do recall the event,” Schaller said with a dry smile. “Why don’t you slow down, take a couple of deep breaths, and tell me what you’ve worked out.”
“Well, it just kept nagging at me, that sense I recognized the shape of that curve but I couldn’t remember where. The idea that energy was going somewhere else and then was released again, that seemed like a clue but I just couldn’t place it. I started looking back through my old lectures notes, and textbooks, trying to see what I recognized. I finally found it— it’s Marshenko’s hyperspace theory. They talked about it back in freshman year, the professor did a section on the history of physics and talked about several rejected theories. They didn’t go over the math in detail but I remember I was curious and looked it up.”
She’d surprised him with that: his rather indulgent smile shifted to an expression of interest, and he straightened up a bit in his chair. “Marshenko’s theory? I don’t see the connection.”
“Okay. Marshenko attempted to explain some quantum phenomena in terms of a domain of hyperspace with a high energy density, constantly exchanging energy at the quantum level with subatomic particles in normal space.”
“But those phenomena were later explained in terms of quantum relativity, without needing to posit an otherwise unobservable domain,” Schaller said.
“Yes, and Occam’s razor is a wonderful thing up until new evidence does require a new entity.” Linda was warming to her topic now, her former reluctance melting away. “And the thing is, what happened to the Sun fits Marshenko’s theory. Or— well, the shape of the energy curve matches, if you extended the theory to a macroscopic scale. If you look at Marshenko’s equations, it could be possible for a very specific arrangement of electromagnetic fields to actually create a connection between normal space and hyperspace. I couldn’t find any way to derive from the theory exactly what that arrangement would be, and I went looking through the library net to see if anyone had worked on it, but it doesn’t look like anyone ever did. But you can derive from the equations a proof that such an arrangement is at least possible.”
“You can?” asked Schaller, cocking an eyebrow.
“Sure, it’s pretty easy to see. Anyway, because of the high energy density of hyperspace, such a connection would release a flood of energy into normal space. But creating the connection in the first place, that would cost a lot of energy, and if you play with the numbers you find that when such a connection collapses again, it would release all the energy that went into creating it in one big burst.”
“And you played with the equations and found all this out?”
“Well, at first it just seemed like it made sense when I looked at the equations. It took a lot of work to before I could derive the equations to actually show it. Look!”
She was on fire now. Linda called up her work on her handscreen, made as if to show it to the professor, then thought better of it and looked at the large screen on one wall of the office. “Can I?” she asked.
“Go ahead.” Schaller waved at the screen.
Linda jumped to her feet and synced her handscreen to the wall, then threw her equations onto the large display. “See? This really just extends what Marshenko thought happens at the quantum level to a macroscopic scale. If some natural magnetic fields happened to align right— and again, none of this says what sort of arrangement you need, only that it’s possible one could exist— nothing would happen, because there’s no influx of energy to punch the, um, let’s call it a ‘hyperfield’ through. If you were creating the fields artificially, you’d see a massive power drain when you hit the right arrangement. Now— the Sun is a huge mass of electromagnetic fields in enormously complex and chaotically shifting patterns. What if, by chance, those fields happened to arrange themselves briefly into the right shape to create a hyperfield? One on a scale nearly the size of a star. The sudden energy drain, for a hyperfield on that scale, would easily be enough to divert almost the Sun’s entire energy output. But it doesn’t actually make a connection because before it can, the chaotic fields have shifted again— and so the diverted energy gets returned, in a flash.”
She actually found herself slightly out of breath when she paused, waiting for Professor Schaller’s reaction. After all the nervousness, actually taking the plunge and telling someone about her idea felt like going down the first hill of the rollercoaster in Midway Park.
Schaller paused, looking at the screen thoughtfully. “Interesting,” he finally said, “but it’s a pretty fanciful idea. You say you got all this from the shape of the drop in the Sun’s output during the Hiccup?”
“Oh, right, yes! Look at this!” Linda had meant to show the graph together with the equations. “This shows the predicted energy requirements when creating a macroscopic hyperfield, if my equations are right. Now, we invert it to show it as a drain on an existing energy supply, and superimpose it over the astronomical data…” She worked her handscreen and brought up the graph. Her theoretical prediction, and the shape of the Sun’s energy output during the Hiccup.
The two lines weren’t exactly the same, but they were similar. Two complex sequences of dips and transient plateaus, running parallel enough that their kinship was obvious.
“My math didn’t give me any specific numbers for total magnitude or for duration,” Linda said. “I think all of that would depend on the specific geometry of the fields creating the connection to hyperspace, which I don’t know. I just scaled the magnitude and duration arbitrarily to match the Hiccup, which means it’s only the shape of the curve that came from the equations.”
Schaller was silent for another long moment. He picked up his own handscreen and used it to scroll through the equations Linda had put up. After a moment she sat back down, waiting for his verdict.
“This is very impressive work, Linda,” Schaller said at last. “You’re sure your math is correct?”
Linda shrugged. “Well, I checked it all through the computer. The derivations are right, anyway.”
“I don’t recall seeing that curve before. You say you’d seen it somewhere? You got onto this because you recognized the shape in the astronomical data?”
“No.” Linda frowned. “I went looking through the library, and didn’t see anyone had ever worked on Marshenko’s equations that way. I just… I just thought it would fit, from looking at it. It actually took me a long time before I managed to solve the equations to confirm it.”
Schaller stared at her intently enough to make her feel uncomfortable. “You looked at that curve, and just knew it would fit Marshenko’s theory, based only on the original equations— no, based only on remembering the original equations? Even before you’d worked out this hyperfield idea?”
All of Linda’s past hesitation crowded back into her mind. She’d done too well. She found herself squirming. “Yes… well, yes, I thought the curve seemed familiar, but, it’s not like I really knew, I—”
“That kind of ability to visualize, to make that kind of intuitive leap, is a valuable talent that few have— assuming it’s reliable, and you didn’t just get lucky this time. And for that, you did the right thing: you sat down and did the hard work of verifying your intuition, rather than just leaping to your conclusion. I’m impressed. I’d be impressed seeing this in the Journal of Theoretical Physics, let alone from a third-year undergrad.”
Linda felt her face redden, and she stammered out, “It wasn’t really all that—”
“Don’t apologize for your abilities,” Schaller interrupted sharply. “You should be in my honors classes, and if you can do this kind of work you ought to already be taking some graduate courses as well.”
“I hadn’t really decided yet if I want to go to grad school,” Linda said.
“You do,” Schaller answered, with finality. Then he leaned back in his chair. “Now, all that said— I wouldn’t be too sure you’ve actually explained the Hiccup yet. You know that Marshenko’s theory was rejected for more reasons than just parsimony, yes?”
“Yes, it also implied causality violations. Marshenko’s theory requires that quantum hyperspace phenomena happen both before and after the events that cause them.”
“Right, and the theory doesn’t work without that.” Schaller assumed his giving-a-lecture expression. “Before quantum relativity, both general relativity at the large scale and classical quantum mechanics at the small included the possibility of inverse causality, in different ways. But when they were brought together, quantum relativity ruled that out completely, at all scales. And quantum relativity is very well supported by all the evidence we have.”
“But the way the curves line up—”
“Is suggestive, certainly. But you said yourself you had to arbitrarily set the magnitude and duration of the curve to match the Hiccup. You didn’t match a thousand independent data points between the Sun’s behavior and the theory; you derived a curve of a certain mathematical shape and showed the Sun’s behavior had a similar mathematical shape. But two different phenomena might both produce, say, a sine wave when plotted on a graph, and yet have different causes. Now this—” he pointed at the wall screen— “is a good deal more complicated than a sine wave, and that would make it an impressive coincidence. But given the other problems in Marshenko’s theory, I suspect it’s no more than that.”
“I see.” Linda wilted slightly. What Professor Schaller said made perfect sense.
“But do not get discouraged by that.” Schaller wagged a finger. “You still did some amazing mathematical work here, and showed a tremendous intuition in getting onto it in the first place. Having ideas and checking them out is what working scientists do. I can’t wait to see your next one, and I mean it about moving you into my honors classes next semester.”
# # #
Professor Schaller kept Linda talking for another hour, going over her idea in more detail and leading off into a discussion of other issues in theoretical physics. It was only when she was walking back to the dorm that it occurred to her he’d been sounding her out on whether her intuition for the subject was as good in general as it had been in massaging Marshenko’s theory. If so, she had to wonder how she’d come across. Everything they talked about seemed straightforward enough, but…
When she got back to her room she found Jenny sitting at her desk, staring at her handscreen with a strange expression.
“What’s up?” Linda asked.
Jenny looked up. “MIT accepted my transfer application.”
“Jenny! I didn’t even know you’d applied. You’re not really thinking of going Down, are you?”
Jenny frowned unhappily. “You know what everyone’s saying. What if the government forces them to close the Colonies? Then everyone has to go Down. I thought I’d better have options, so I can at least graduate somewhere.”
“But they haven’t announced anything yet. Even if they do, it’ll probably take so long to arrange we’ll have time to finish our senior year.”
“But if I don’t transfer now, and then we have to evacuate before our senior year is over, it’ll be too late to transfer.”
Linda sat down on her bed. “Don’t do it, Jenny. It’s miserable down there, you see all the news reports, and who know how offworlders will be treated, with the politics the way it is.”
“I don’t know,” said Jenny, staring at the message on her screen. “I just don’t know what to do.”
TO BE CONTINUED
