Voyage From Yesteryear

Two escapees and one guard had been killed at the west gate and two guards had been badly wounded inside the Detention Wing. Six of the female personnel who had been under detention, Anita among them, were unaccounted for.

“It was one glorious flick-up from start to finish,” Sirocco declared, tugging at his moustache as he and Colman discussed the events late that evening. “Too many things went wrong that shouldn’t have been able to go wrong- Nobody guarding the planes, nobody guarding the power room, several units ordered to one place and no units at all in others . . . And how did they get hold of the guns? I don’t like it, Steve. I don’t like it at all There’s a very funny smell to the whole business.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

EVEN IN HIS short time at the university near Franklin, Jerry Pernak had learned that Chironian theoretical and experimental physics had departed significantly from the mainstream being pursued on Earth. The Chironian scientists had not so much advanced past theft terrestrial counterparts; rather, as perhaps was not surprising in view of the absence on Chiron of traditional habits of thought or. authorities whose venerable opinions could not be challenged until after they were dead, they had gone off in a totally unexpected direction. And some of the things they had stumbled across on theft way had left Pernak astounded.

Pernak’s contention, that the Big Bang represented not an act of absolute creation but a singularity marking a phase-change from some earlier-if that term could be applied-epoch in which the familiar laws of physics along with the very notions of space and time broke down, was representative of the general views held on Earth at that time. Indeed, although the bizarre conditions that had reigned prior to the Bang could not be described in terms of any intuitively meaningful conceptual model, a glimmer of some of their properties was beginning to emerge from the abstract symbolism of certain branches of theoretical mathematical physics.

The bewildering proliferation first of baryons and mesons, and later the quarks, which were supposed to simplify them, that had plagued studies of the structure of matter to the end of the twentieth century had been reduced to an orderly hierarchy of “generations” of particles. Each generation contained just eight particles: six quarks and two leptons. The first generation comprised the “up” and “down” quarks, each appearing in the three colorcharge variants peculiar to the strong nuclear force to give six in all; the electron; and the electron-type neutrino. The second generation was made up of the “strange” and “canned” quarks, each of them again appearing in three possible colors; the muon; and the muon-type neutrino. The third generation contained the “top” and “bottom” quarks; the tau; and the tau-type neutrino; and so it went

on.

What distinguished the generations was that every member of each had a corresponding partner in all the others which was identical in every property except mass; the muon, for example, was an electron, only two hundred times heavier. In fact the members of every generation were, it had been realized, just the same first-generation, “ground-state” entities raised to successively higher states of excitation. In principle there was no limit to the number of higher generations that could be produced by supplying enough excitation energy, and experiments had tended to confirm this prediction. Nevertheless, all the exotic variations created could be accounted for by the same eight ground-state quarks and leptons, plus their respective antiparticles, together with the field quanta through which they interacted. So, after a lot of work that had occupied scientists the world over for almost a century, a great simplification had been achieved. But were quarks and leptons the end of the story?

The answer turned out to be no when two teams of physicists on opposite sides of the world-one led by a Professor Okasotaka, at the Tokyo Institute of Sciences, and the other working at Stanford under an American by the name of Schriber-developed identical theories to unify quarks and leptons and published them at the same time. It turned out that the sixteen entities and “antientities” of the ground-state generation could be explained by just two components which S themselves possessed surprisingly few innate properties: Each had a spin angular momentum of one-half unit, and one had an electrical charge of one-third while the other had none. The other

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