Tony Daniel (14 page)

Finally, the bead reached its maximum acceleration and they returned to free fall conditions. Sint and Aubry tumbled around a bit within the bead’s generous confines, then settled down and “stuck” themselves to one of the curving walls. Kelly remained on the “floor,” although the letters marking it as such had been automatically absorbed back into the surface.

Kelly sighed and felt a little of the tension go out of him that had been building once again after he and Danis made love. At least they were away from Mercury. He wouldn’t really feel at ease until they were aboard a cloudship that had passed the asteroid belt and was headed on past Jupiter to the reaches beyond.

from

Old Left-handed Time

Raphael Merced and the Genesis of the Merced Effect

a short history

by Andre Sud, D. Div.

Triton

On Mars, after years of academic travail, Raphael Merced finally found a sympathetic instructor in the physics department of Bradbury, Chen Wocek. And it was Wocek who first suggested to Merced that he might look into the famous
renormalization
problem that had been plaguing quantum physics for generations.

Merced attacked the problem with a vengeance, and, as Wocek recalls, one day his young protégé came sheepishly into his office, and said in a low voice, “I think I figured something out.”

What Merced had “figured out” was the link between quantum phenomena and gravity.

For years, quantum theorists had puzzled over what to do with the mathematics involved when a quantum particle interacted with itself. Various ad hoc solutions had called for two infinite solutions to be subtracted from each other, and, since one was “more infinite” than the other, the result was a finite value—such as an electron’s spin or a photon’s momentum. This process was called renormalization, and it only worked if you knew the value you were trying to derive in the first place from experimental data. The twentieth-century theoretician Richard Feynman, who firmly established renormalization as a technique in quantum computations, himself claimed that the practice “is what I would call a dippy process.”

Merced was pondering this problem one day in his student carrel at the Bradbury library when he absentmindedly began dropping two dice that he is said to have obtained on a trip to Las Vegas with his friend Beat Myers. One of these dice was big and fuzzy, as light as a feather. The other was hard and compact and illegally weighted with lead.

“I was sitting there wondering why the hell inertial mass and gravitational mass were exactly equivalent—in other words, why both these dice fell onto my desk at exactly the same rate, at exactly the same time—when I happened to notice that the little die kept coming up snake eyes. Two, I mean. Of course, it was a cheater’s die and was designed that way, but I had forgotten about that at that moment. Suddenly all these thoughts about quanta and gravity and craps suddenly came together in my head. I spent a few hours transcribing what I was thinking onto a pressure pad then I walked over to Wocek’s office and asked him whether I was crazy or not. He still hasn’t given me a satisfactory answer.”

Of the three fundamental forces known to science, two had, until Merced’s time, revealed themselves to have particles which, in a sense, carried the force. The photon was the force carrier for the electroweak interaction and the family of gluons served as the elastic between the quarks in an atomic nucleus. But where was the force carrier for gravity, the graviton? Its existence had been predicted, and plenty of indirect evidence for its presence had piled up, but so far no one had been able to actually find one. At first the reason was thought to be because it was so small—perhaps as small in comparison with atoms as atoms are in comparison with the solar system. But the particle accelerators of even the late twenty-first century were able to gauge such minute distances, and, alas, no graviton emerged. A plethora of explanations arose to explain this lack, the most interesting being a kind of modern reintroduction of the Newtonian idea of the “ether” as a kind of invisible substrate through which gravity propagated. Most scientists, including Merced, rejected such thinking. But where was the graviton?

“Where it was,” Merced wrote, “was in the immediate past and the immediate future. We were looking in the right place, but not at the right time.”

In order to understand this reasoning, we must consider one more odd component of quantum physics—the so-called quantum leap. In two classic experiments performed in the twentieth century, scientists confirmed that there was indeed what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance” that occurred on the atomic level. The first experiment is known as the double-slit demonstration and it works like this: A beam of light is shot through an opening, one photon at a time. On the opposite side of the hole, at some distance away, is another barrier, this one with two holes—the double slit.

You would expect the photon, being a particle, to travel through one of the holes or the other—and that is exactly what it does. On the other side of the two slits is a detector—say a computer screen—that records, as a dot of light, where each proton strikes it. Now you would expect the photons, being particles, to pile up in a clump directly in front of the two slits. That is exactly what they do, forming two bright circles of light right in line with the slits that they passed through.

They do this, that is, with one other special condition to the experiment: You have to have a detector at either slit that either confirms or denies that a photon has passed through that slit. The detector in no way affects the flight of the photon; it just says whether or not a photon passed by it. So, with two slits, and a method of detecting which slit a particular photon passed through, you get two clumps of light.

What happens when you take away the detector?

Remember that you are still firing one photon at a time. You might put another detector near the light source to confirm this—as long as it is before the double slit. One photon at a time one after another. And what pattern builds up on the final screen?

If you said two clumps of light you would be absolutely
wrong.
Instead, what builds up is an interference pattern, just as a wave would make.

The greatest concentration of light is not in front of the two slits, but actually
between
them, where no particle could possibly hit. If the light were a particle. But waves travel around sharp corners all the time.

“So what?” you say. “Light is both a wave and a particle.”

But the fact is that you know with a certainty that the photon you are shooting is a single entity. The only thing you have changed is where you chose to look at it. And, by that change, you get a completely different buildup pattern on your final display screen. It is as if the photon “knows” whether or not you are watching it in flight. If it “sees” that you are trying to trick it into being a particle by having a look at it as it passes through one of the other slits, why then, it will behave as a particle to suit you, and pile up, one particle at a time, right in front of the slit after it has passed through. But if you’re not looking at it, the photon “decides” to be a wave, and does its part to create an interference pattern, as if it were two particles that had gone through each of the slits simultaneously.

There’s more. Say you put a detector after the slits, but before the final display screen. Rig your detector to turn on randomly—but only after the photons have passed through the slits, and they’ll pile up in clumps. Turn it off, and an interference pattern forms.

You are forced to the conclusion that each single particle of light “knows” about your whole experiment, past and future. Before it even leaves the light source, it “knows” whether or not you are going to try to detect it, and changes its flight path accordingly.

In the early twenty-second century, a version of this experiment was done with single photons from a quasar at the edge of the known universe. The results were the same. It seems that the photons “knew” ten billion years ago exactly whether or not the experimenter was going to switch on his detection apparatus ten billion years into the future. Clumps of light formed with it on, interference patterns with it off.

Things get weirder yet. The other crucial experiment of the twentieth century was first performed by the scientist Alain Aspect and his colleagues, all Earthlings, of course. In the Aspect experiment, two photons are created in the same quantum process. Several of the properties that each photon possesses must be a mirror image of the other. One of these properties is the polarization of the light. You can think of it as being something like a compass direction. If one photon has 90 degrees of polarization, the other must have 270. The photons are said to be “entangled” on a quantum level. So both of these “entangled” photons go shooting off in different directions, and they both have an equal chance of having any particular polarization. In fact, if you measured either photon separately, you would find that its polarization was entirely random. But if you measure one photon first and determine its polarization, then the polarization of the other photon is instantly determined. How do we know? Because photon B, the one you didn’t measure, will pass through a filter and pile up in a
different
pattern than it would have had you not measured its counterpart. Furthermore, it wouldn’t matter if the photons were separated by many millions of miles when you took the measurement. Changing photon A instantly changes photon B. Not at the speed of light. Not faster than the speed of light.

Instantly
. The photons “know” before they leave their light source whether or not you are going to measure one of them and when and where, and they set out on a different path accordingly.

Again, these facts were well-known to scientists of the late twentieth century. Einstein thought of them as “spooky action at a distance” that was seemingly faster than light, but they were not mysterious at all to the quantum theorists. They were predicted by the equations of quantum physics. In fact, the experiments were done to confirm what theory had already called for.

But it took Raphael Merced to reconcile the absolute violation of common sense (and General Relativity), which Einstein had sensed, with the obvious facts of the matter.

“It turns out,” says Merced, “that atoms—all of elementary particles, that is—are little time machines. After you accept that madness, it’s fairly simple to explain the rest, including the relationship of the strong force and electromagnetism to gravity.”

Gravity, said Merced, is the same thing as the other two forces when considered as a wave function not
in
time, but
of
time. The graviton is time’s “messenger particle,” and, as such, it doesn’t ever exist in the present. The only trace it leaves in the now is a record in space-time of its passing. Its “purpose”—if it can be said to have such a thing—is to mediate between basic particles separated in space. Or, conversely, to mediate
space
to conform to the properties of each and every particle in it. The residual effects of this mediation are what holds the galaxies together and sets the planets in their orbits. The present is a “symptom” of the past and the future.