“We’d see one or two of them appear from nowhere,” she observed at once. “Hey, this is fun. More, please.”
“Yes, exactly. In fact that machine that Al Morelli built does both those things. It makes lots of particles flip from normal space into hi-space . . . vanish . . .”
“Which makes gravity.”
“Right. And it also generates a big output of pure hi-space particles that aren’t detectable—or weren’t until Aub made his detector . . .” He paused as he realized that Sarah was signaling again.
“Uh?”
“How does that thing work?” she asked. “I thought you said that nothing in the hi-space place could be detected by senses or instruments. . . . Doesn’t Aub’s thing do just that?”
“You’re right,” Clifford conceded. “But before that there was no known way of doing it. What Aub found was that he could set up a system of spinning particles—appearing and disappearing in the way you said a minute ago—and that the way in which they spin . . . the spin mode . . . changes when pure hi-particles interact with it. That’s what we call hi-radiation. By monitoring the changes in spin modes, Aub can measure certain things about the hi-radiation that’s causing the changes.”
“Okay,” Sarah said slowly. “I don’t get all of that, but I see the general idea. Where were we?”
“Morelli’s GRASER makes lots of hi-radiation.”
“Yes, that was it,” she said. “So this machine of Al’s is throwing out these hi-particle things that nobody can know about except by using Aub’s detector thing. Joe told me that you’d calculated what the detector should have detected, and sure enough it did. So what’s the problem?”
“Up to that point, no problem,” Clifford agreed. “I worked out a math model of black-hole conditions and you’re quite right—as far as the predicted hi-radiation went, sure, it checked out fine with what we measured when Aub finally got the detector working.”
“So?”
“But pure hi-radiation wasn’t the only thing that the model predicted. Remember the collisions . . . ?” Clifford repeated the action of colliding and flipping over the coasters. “The hi-particles can interact among themselves to produce particles that we can detect by ordinary methods . . . in other words, ordinary, conventional radiation. So we ought to see conventional radiation—apparently coming from nowhere—around Morelli’s black holes.”
“And you don’t,” she guessed.
“We do, but the pattern and the amount are wrong. The frequency spectrum is wrong, and there’s more of it than the model says there should be.”
Sarah looked slightly disappointed.
“Is that all?” she said, raising her eyebrows. “I mean, that doesn’t sound like the end of the world. You’ve proved the main point. Are the exact numbers that important?”
“Yes, they are,” Clifford told her. “For one thing, the only way you can be sure you’ve got the theory right is if the numbers come out the way the theory says they should. If they don’t, that means there’s something there you don’t understand that you should understand. And the second thing is that there is another possible explanation for the radiation around the black holes that doesn’t require k-theory at all; it’s called ‘Hawking Effect’ and involves just conventional physics. You have to get the numbers right to be able to choose which explanation fits. Otherwise you’ll never know. Right now we’ve tested both predictions and neither fits. K-theory comes closer to the number that we actually measure, but it still predicts less radiation than is there. That’s the problem.”
“But you’re closer, you said,” Sarah pointed out. “Isn’t that good enough for you to choose?” Clifford shook his head.
“‘Fraid not,” he said. “The error’s too big. Until we know why, both theories could be equally wrong and the fact that one comes nearer could be just a coincidence . . . certainly not grounds for saying it’s right.” He sighed. “As I said, you have to get the numbers right.”
Chapter 13
Aub, however, was as usual completely unperturbed by such academic details. Leaving Clifford to ponder them, he abandoned himself ecstatically to the task of fully mastering and further refining his latest toy. Gradually he found ways of improving the sensitivity of the instrument so that it would register reliably the levels of annihilation-generated hi-radiation even when the GRASER was running at comparatively moderate power, and the mass concentrations simulated inside the reactor sphere were nowhere near black-hole intensities.