White mars by Brian W. Aldiss & Roger Penrose. Chapter 10, 11

Euclid. ‘So they built an even bigger super-duper collider, did they? Where this time? Siberia?’

‘On the Moon.’

He showed a vidslide of a gleaming section of tube crawling across the Mare Imbrium.

‘A collider that formed a ring completely round the lunar surface. Alas for ambition! The Luna project turned out to be a total failure, at least with regard to finding the gamma-smudge. It did produce some data, relatively minor but useful. But no new smudge.’

Euclid: ‘A costly mistake, wasn’t it? Why did it fail?’

‘The bill all merged into Lunar expenses, when the Moon was the flavour of the year, in the late 2030s. After a host of teething troubles, the Luna Collider appeared to do more or less what it was intended to do.

‘I guess the final disaster rested with nature herself. She just didn’t come up with a smudge – not even with the fantastic energy range available to a collider of that size.’

Euclid: ‘Why didn’t that kill off the whole idea? But you are about to tell us that after that disaster, funding was found to start all over again here – on Mars?’

‘Politics came into it. The fact that Mars was a UN protectorate made it tempting. Also, there is the precept that even pure science, however expensive it may seem, pays off in the unforeseen end. Consider the case of genetically mutated crops, and how they have contributed to human longevity. Some people are willing to pay for ever-widening horizons, for freeing the human mind from old shibboleths.

‘And there were two further chunks of scientific progress to encourage them – and another different kind of development which had been brewing away for some while earlier.’

Euclid: ‘They were?’

‘Even last century, a number of theoreticians had realised that the enigma of mass could not be resolved at the energy levels relevant to the Higgs. Why? Well, the very concept of mass is all tied up with gravitation. Gravitation … Let me give you an analogy, Euclid.

‘Another long-standing “mystery” in particle physics is the mystery of electrical charge. It’s a mystery of a sort let’s say, although a good number of physicists would claim they understand why electric charge comes about.

‘The trouble is that although there are good reasons why electric charge always comes in whole-number multiples of one basic charge – which is one twelfth of the charge of an electron – there’s no real understanding why the basic charge has the particular value it happens to have.

‘I should say there was a time, late last century, when this basic value was believed to be one third of the electron’s charge. Before that it was held to be the electron’s charge itself. But the one-third value is the quark charge, and it was still thought that quarks were fundamental. Only after Henry M’Bokoko’s theory of leptons and pseudo-leptons was it realised there were yet more elementary entities. Things called kliks and pseudo-kliks underlay these particles in the same way quarks underlie the hadrons.

‘These kliks, pseudo-kliks and quarks, taken together, gave rise to the basic one-twelfth charge that we know today. A diagram will make that clear.’

He flashed a vidslide in the air. It hung before the audience, a skeletal Rubik’s cube in three dimensions.

‘Now, there are certain fundamental “natural units” for the universe – the units Nature herself uses to measure things in the universe. Sometimes these are called Planck units, after the German physicist who formulated them in the early years of last century.

‘You see how one finding builds on the previous one. That’s part of the fascination which keeps scientists working. In terms of these units, the basic value of the electric charge turns out to be the number 0.007, or thereabouts. This number has never been properly explained. So we don’t, even yet, properly understand electric charge. There is, indeed, still a charge mystery. End of analogy!’

Euclid, unblinkingly: ‘So what follows?’

‘The point about the mass mystery – a point made by a few physicists even as long ago as last century – was that no one would seriously attempt to find a fundamental solution to the charge mystery without bringing the electric field into consideration. Electric charge is the source of the electric field. In the same way, so the argument went, it made little sense trying to solve the mystery of mass without bringing in the gravitational field. Mass is, of course, the source of the gravitational field.

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