Massey retreated abruptly.
“Sure—whatever you say. It was just a thought.”
Clifford noted with no surprise that Massey had been simply testing to see which way the wind was blowing. He would go along with whatever the other two decided.
“Dr. Clifford,” Edwards resumed. “You state that even the stable particles possess only a finite duration in normal spacetime.”
“Yes.”
“You’ve proved it . . . rigorously . . . ?”
“Yes.”
“I see . . .” A pause. “But tell me, how do you reconcile that statement with some of the fundamental laws of physics, some of which have stood unchallenged for decades or even for centuries? It is well known, is it not, that decay of the proton would violate the law of conservation of baryon number; decay of the electron would violate conservation of charge. And what about the conservation laws of mass-energy and momentum, for example? What happens to those if stable particles are simply allowed to appear and vanish?”
Clifford recognized the tone. The professor’s attitude was negative. He was out to uncover the flaws—anything that would justify going no further for the present and sending Clifford back to the drawing board. The mildly challenging note was calculated to invoke an emotive response, thus carrying the whole discussion from the purely rational level to the irrational and opening the way for a choice of counterproductive continuations.
Clifford was on his guard. “Violation of many conservation laws is well known already. Although the strong nuclear interactions do obey all the laws listed, electromagnetic interactions do not conserve isotopic spin. Furthermore, the weak nuclear interactions don’t conserve strangeness, nor do they conserve charge or parity discretely but only as a combined product of C and P. As a general principle, the stronger the force, the greater the number of laws it has to obey. This has been known as an experimental fact for a long time. In recent years we’ve known that it follows automatically from Maesanger wave functions. Each conservation principle is related to a particular order of resonance. Since stronger interactions involve more orders, they obey more conservation laws. As you reduce the number of orders involved, you lose the necessity to obey the laws that go with the higher orders.
“What I’m saying here . . .” he gestured toward the paper “is that the same pattern holds true right on through to the weakest force of all—gravity. When you get down to the level of the gravitational interaction—determined by lo-order resonances only—you lose more of the conservation laws that come with the hi-orders. In fact, as it turns out, you lose all of them.”
“I see,” said Edwards. “But if that’s so, why hasn’t anybody ever found out about it? Why haven’t centuries of experiments revealed it? On the contrary, they would appear to demonstrate the reverse of what you’re saying.”
Clifford knew fully that Edwards was not that naive. The possibility that conservation principles might not be universal was something that scientists had speculated about for a long time. But forcing somebody to adopt a defensive posture was always a first step toward weakening his case. Nevertheless, Clifford had no option but to go along with it.
“Because, as I mentioned earlier, the so-called stable particles have extremely long average lifetimes. Matter is created and extinguished at an infinitesimally small rate—on the everyday scale anyway; it would be utterly immeasurable by any laboratory experiment. For matter at ordinary density, it works out at about one extinction per ten billion particles present per year. No experiment ever devised could detect anything like that. You could only detect it on the cosmological scale—and nobody has performed experiments with whole galaxies yet.”
“Mmm . . .” Edwards paused to collect his thoughts. Massey sensed that things could go either way and opted to stay out.
Clifford decided to move ahead. “All interactions can be represented as rotations in k-space. This accounts for the symmetries of quantum mechanics and the family-number conservation laws. In fact, all the conservation laws come out as simply different projections of one basic set of k-conservation relationships.
“Every rotation results in a redistribution of energy about the various k-axes, which we see as forces of one kind or another. The particular set of rotations that correspond to transitions of a particle between hi-space and normal space—events of creation and extinction—produces an expanding wave front in k-space that projects as a gravitational pulse. In other words, every particle creation or extinction generates a pulse of gravity.”