They were all nodding.
“Physicists continue to study these particles, and begin to realize they’re very strange entities. You can’t be sure where they are, you can’t measure them exactly, and you can’t predict what they will do. Sometimes they behave like particles, sometimes like waves. Sometimes two particles will interact with each other even though they’re a million miles apart, with no connection between them. And so on. The theory is starting to seem extremely weird.
“Now, two things happen to quantum theory. The first is that it gets confirmed, over and over. It’s the most proven theory in the history of science. Supermarket scanners, lasers and computer chips all rely on quantum mechanics. So there is absolutely no doubt that quantum theory is the correct mathematical description of the universe.
“But the problem is, it’s only a mathematical description. It’s just a set of equations. And physicists couldn’t visualize the world that was implied by those equations—it was too weird, too contradictory. Einstein, for one, didn’t like that. He felt it meant the theory was flawed. But the theory kept getting confirmed, and the situation got worse and worse. Eventually, even scientists who won the Nobel Prize for contributions to quantum theory had to admit they didn’t understand it.
“So, this made a very odd situation. For most of the twentieth century, there’s a theory of the universe that everyone uses, and everyone agrees is correct—but nobody can tell you what it is saying about the world.”
“What does all this have to do with multiple universes?” Marek said.
“I’m getting there,” Gordon said.
:
Many physicists tried to explain the equations, Gordon said. Each explanation failed for one reason or another. Then in 1957, a physicist named Hugh Everett proposed a daring new explanation. Everett claimed that our universe—the universe we see, the universe of rocks and trees and people and galaxies out in space—was just one of an infinite number of universes, existing side by side.
Each of these universes was constantly splitting, so there was a universe where Hitler lost the war, and another where he won; a universe where Kennedy died, and another where he lived. And also a world where you brushed your teeth in the morning, and one where you didn’t. And so forth, on and on and on. An infinity of worlds.
Everett called this the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics. His explanation was consistent with the quantum equations, but physicists found it very hard to accept. They didn’t like the idea of all these worlds constantly splitting all the time. They found it unbelievable that reality could take this form.
“Most physicists still refuse to accept it,” Gordon said. “Even though no one has ever shown it is wrong.”
Everett himself had no patience with his colleagues’ objections. He insisted the theory was true, whether you liked it or not. If you disbelieved his theory, you were just being stodgy and old-fashioned, exactly like the scientists who disbelieved the Copernican theory that placed the sun at the center of the solar system—and which had also seemed unbelievable at the time. “Because Everett claimed the many worlds concept was actually true. There really were multiple universes. And they were running right alongside our own. All these multiple universes were eventually referred to as a ‘multiverse.’”
“Wait a minute,” Chris said. “Are you telling us this is true?”
“Yes,” Gordon said. “It’s true.”
“How do you know?” Marek said.
“I’ll show you,” Gordon said. And he reached for a manila file that said “ITC/CTC Technology.”
:
He took out a blank piece of paper, and began drawing. “Very simple experiment, it’s been done for two hundred years. Set up two walls, one in front of the other. The first wall has a single vertical slit in it.”
He showed them the drawing.
“Now you shine a light at the slit. On the wall behind, you’ll see—”
“A white line,” Marek said. “From the light coming through the slit.”
“Correct. It would look something like this.” Gordon pulled out a photo on a card.
Gordon continued to sketch. “Now, instead of one slit, you have a wall with two vertical slits in it. Shine a light on it, and on the wall behind, you see—”
“Two vertical lines,” Marek said.
“No. You’ll see a series of light and dark bars.” He showed them:
“And,” Gordon continued, “if you shine your light through four slits, you get half as many bars as before. Because every other bar goes black.”
Marek frowned. “More slits mean fewer bars? Why?”
“The usual explanation is what I’ve drawn—the light passing through the slits acts like two waves that overlap. In some places they add to each other, and in other places they cancel each other out. And that makes a pattern of alternating light and dark on the wall. We say the waves interfere with each other, and that this is an interference pattern.”
Chris Hughes said, “So? What’s wrong with all that?”
“What’s wrong,” Gordon said, “is that I just gave you a nineteenth-century explanation. It was perfectly acceptable when everybody believed that light was a wave. But since Einstein, we know that light consists of particles called photons. How do you explain a bunch of photons making this pattern?”
There was silence. They were shaking their heads.
David Stern spoke for the first time. “Particles aren’t as simple as the way you have described them. Particles have some wavelike properties, depending on the situation. Particles can interfere with one another. In this case, the photons in the beam of light are interfering with one another to produce the same pattern.”
“That does seem logical,” Gordon said. “After all, a beam of light is zillions and zillions of little photons. It’s not hard to imagine that they would interact with one another in some fashion, and produce the interference pattern.”
They were all nodding. Yes, not hard to imagine.
“But is it really true?” Gordon said. “Is that what’s going on? One way to find out is to eliminate any interaction among the photons. Let’s just deal with one photon at a time. This has been done experimentally. You make a beam of light so weak that only one photon comes out at a time. And you can put very sensitive detectors behind the slits—so sensitive, they can register a single photon hitting them. Okay?”
They nodded, more slowly this time.
“Now, there can’t be any interference from other photons, because we are dealing with a single photon only. So: the photons come through, one at a time. The detectors record where the photons land. And after a few hours, we get a result, something like this.”
“What we see,” Gordon said, “is that the individual photons land only in certain places, and never others. They behave exactly the same as they do in a regular beam of light. But they are coming in one at a time. There are no other photons to interfere with them. Yet something is interfering with them, because they are making the usual interference pattern. So: What is interfering with a single photon?”
Silence.
“Mr. Stern?”
Stern shook his head. “If you calculate the probabilities—”
“Let’s not escape into mathematics. Let’s stay with reality. After all, this experiment has been performed—with real photons, striking real detectors. And something real interferes with them. The question is, What is it?”
“It has to be other photons,” Stern said.
“Yes,” Gordon said, “but where are they? We have detectors, and we don’t detect any other photons. So where are the interfering photons?”
Stern sighed. “Okay,” he said. He threw up his hands.
Chris said, “What do you mean, Okay? Okay what?”
Gordon nodded to Stern. “Tell them.”
“What he is saying is that single-photon interference proves that reality is much greater than just what we see in our universe. The interference is happening, but
we can’t see any cause for it in our universe. Therefore, the interfering photons must be in other universes. And that proves that the other universes exist.”
“Correct,” Gordon said. “And they sometimes interact with our own universe.”
:
“I’m sorry,” Marek said. “Would you do that again? Why is some other universe interfering with our universe?”
“It’s the nature of the multiverse,” Gordon said. “Remember, within the multiverse, the universes are constantly splitting, which means that many other universes are very similar to ours. And it is the similar ones that interact. Each time we make a beam of light in our universe, beams of light are simultaneously made in many similar universes, and the photons from those other universes interfere with the photons in our universe and produce the pattern that we see.”
“And you are telling us this is true?”
“Absolutely true. The experiment has been done many times.”
Marek frowned. Kate stared at the table. Chris scratched his head.
Finally David Stern said, “Not all the universes are similar to ours?”
“No.”
“Are they all simultaneous to ours?”
“Not all, no.”
“Therefore some universes exist at an earlier time?”
“Yes. Actually, since they are infinite in number, the universes exist at all earlier times.”
Stern thought for a moment. “And you are telling us that ITC has the technology to travel to these other universes.”
“Yes,” Gordon said. “That’s what I’m telling you.”
“How?”
“We make wormhole connections in quantum foam.”
“You mean Wheeler foam? Subatomic fluctuations of space-time?”
“Yes.”
“But that’s impossible.”
Gordon smiled. “You’ll see for yourself, soon enough.”
“We will? What do you mean?” Marek said.
“I thought you understood,” Gordon said. “Professor Johnston is in the fourteenth century. We want you to go back there, to get him out.”
:
No one spoke. The flight attendant pushed a button and all the windows in the cabin slid closed at the same time, blocking out the sunshine. She went around the cabin, putting sheets and blankets on the couches, making them up as beds. Beside each she placed large padded headphones.
“We’re going back?” Chris Hughes said. “How?”
“It will be easier just to show you,” Gordon said. He handed them each a small cellophane packet of pills. “Right now, I want you to take these.”
“What are they?” Chris said.
“Three kinds of sedative,” he said. “Then I want you all to lie down and listen on the headphones. Sleep if you like. The flight’s only ten hours, so you won’t absorb very much, anyway. But at least you’ll get used to the language and pronunciation.”
“What language?” Chris said, taking his pills.
“Old English, and Middle French.”
Marek said, “I already know those languages.”
“I doubt you know correct pronunciation. Wear the headphones.”
“But nobody knows the correct pronunciation,” Marek said. As soon as he said it, he caught himself.
“I think you will find,” Gordon said, “that we know.”
Chris lay down on one bed. He pulled up the blanket and slipped the headphones over his ears. At least they blotted out the sound of the jet.
These pills must be strong, he thought, because he suddenly felt very relaxed. He couldn’t keep his eyes open. He listened as a tape began to play. A voice said, “Take a deep breath. Imagine you are in a beautiful warm garden. Everything is familiar and comforting to you. Directly ahead, you see a door going down to the basement. You open the door. You know the basement well, because it is your basement. You begin to walk down the stone steps, into the warm and comforting basement. With each step, you hear voices. You find them pleasant to listen to, easy to listen to.”
Then male and female voices began to alternate.
“Give me my hat. Yiff may mean haht.”
“Here is your hat. Hair baye thynhatt.”
“Thank you. Grah mersy.”
“You are welcome. Ayepray thee.”
The sentences became longer. Soon Chris found it difficult to follow them.
“I am cold. I would rather have a coat. Ayeam chillingcold, ee wolld leifer half a coot.”
Chris was drifting gently, imperceptibly, to sleep, with the sensation that he was still walking down a flight of stairs, deeper and deeper into a cavernous, echoing, comforting place. He was peaceful, though the last two sentences he remembered gave a tinge of concern:
“Prepare to fight. Dicht theeselv to ficht.”
“Where is my sword? Whar beest mee swearde?”
But then he exhaled, and slept.
BLACK ROCK
“Risk everything, or gain nothing.”
GEOFFREY DE CHARNY, 1358
The night was cold and the sky filled with stars as they stepped off the airplane onto the wet runway. To the east, Marek saw the dark outlines of mesas beneath low-hanging clouds. A Land Cruiser was waiting off to one side.
Soon they were driving down a highway, dense forest on both sides of the road. “Where exactly are we?” Marek said.
“About an hour north of Albuquerque,” Gordon said. “The nearest town is Black Rock. That’s where our research facility is.”
“Looks like the middle of nowhere,” Marek said.
“Only at night. Actually, there are fifteen high-tech research companies in Black Rock. And of course, Sandia is just down the road. Los Alamos is about an hour away. Farther away, White Sands, all that.”
They continued down the road for several more miles. They came to a prominent green-and-white highway sign that read ITC BLACK ROCK LABORATORY. The Land Cruiser turned right, heading up a twisting road into the forested hills.
:
From the back seat, Stern said, “You told us before that you can connect to other universes.”
“Yes.”
“Through quantum foam.”
“That’s right.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense,” Stern said.
“Why? What is quantum foam?” Kate said, stifling a yawn.
“It’s a remnant of the birth of the universe,” Stern said. He explained that the universe had begun as a single, very dense pinpoint of matter. Then, eighteen billion years ago, it exploded outward from that pinpoint—in what was known as the big bang.
“After the explosion, the universe expanded as a sphere. Except it wasn’t an absolutely perfect sphere. Inside the sphere, the universe wasn’t absolutely homogeneous—which is why we now have galaxies clumped and clustered irregularly in the universe, instead of being uniformly distributed. Anyway, the point is, the expanding sphere had tiny, tiny imperfections in it. And the imperfections never got ironed out. They’re still a part of the universe.”
“They are? Where?”
“At subatomic dimensions. Quantum foam is just a way of saying that at very small dimensions, space-time has ripples and bubbles. But the foam is smaller than an individual atomic particle. There may or may not be wormholes in that foam.”
“There are,” Gordon said.
“But how could you use them for travel? You can’t put a person through a hole that small. You can’t put anything through it.”
“Correct,” Gordon said. “You also can’t put a piece of paper through a telephone line. But you can send a fax.”
Stern frowned. “That’s entirely different.”
“Why?” Gordon said. “You can transmit anything, as long as you have a way to compress and encode it. Isn’t that so?”
“In theory, yes,” Stern said. “But you’re talking about compressing and encoding the information for an entire human being.”
“That’s right.”
“That can’t be done.”
<
br /> Gordon was smiling, amused now. “Why not?”
“Because the complete description of a human being—all the billions of cells, how they are interconnected, all the chemicals and molecules they contain, their biochemical state—consists of far too much information for any computer to handle.”
“It’s just information,” Gordon said, shrugging.
“Yes. Too much information.”
“We compress it by using a lossless fractal algorithm.”
“Even so, it’s still an enormous—”
“Excuse me,” Chris said. “Are you saying you compress a person?”
“No. We compress the information equivalent of a person.”
“And how is that done?” Chris said.
“With compression algorithms—methods to pack data on a computer, so they take up less space. Like JPEG and MPEG for visual material. Are you familiar with those?”
“I’ve got software that uses it, but that’s it.”
“Okay,” Gordon said. “All compression programs work the same way. They look for similarities in data. Suppose you have a picture of a rose, made up of a million pixels. Each pixel has a location and a color. That’s three million pieces of information—a lot of data. But most of those pixels are going to be red, surrounded by other red pixels. So the program scans the picture line by line, and sees whether adjacent pixels are the same color. If they are, it writes an instruction to the computer that says make this pixel red, and also the next fifty pixels in the line. Then switch to gray, and make the next ten pixels gray. And so on. It doesn’t store information for each individual point. It stores instructions for how to re-create the picture. And the data is cut to a tenth of what it was.”
“Even so,” Stern said, “you’re not talking about a two-dimensional picture, you’re talking about a three-dimensional living object, and its description requires so much data—”
“That you’d need massive parallel processing,” Gordon said, nodding. “That’s true.”