Quarks

Jeff’s new quantum research was revolutionary. He’d discovered a new way to observe the smallest-known subatomic particles in high resolution.

He had split the last three years of his life in two; during the day he’d played around with expensive and bulky hardware. During the night he’d refined his image-processsing algorithm. His lab was a mess of computer screens, liquid helium canisters, mirrors, large lenses and a periphory of bulky electornic equipment.

Jeff logged in to his super-computer cluster. He had primed his liquid helium tanks and the delecately angled sensors were currently just 3°K. He nervously typed a command onto his greasy keyboard and hit enter. As soon as he’d pressed the button, some unassuming text popoped up on screen

IMAGING SUCCESS
duration:   1ps
apperture:  1am
disk_space: 4.62ZB

Jeff held his breath. A bead of sweat fell on his keyboard. This experiment had failed hundreds of times previously and he’d never seen this success message before. Maybe it had worked!

A previously-black computer monitor went gray. Either the program had crashed, or he’d assumed the wrong vibration frequency - the particles could be vibrating too fast for his screen. Jeff frantically mashed two keys to tell the cluster that he wanted to slow the playback on the monitor by another 1000 times. The screen flashed once and was gray again.

Still not breathing, Jeff slowed the recording again and again until the vibrating particles came into focus. He zoomed in to one particle and slowed the recording right down again. Suddenly the particle disappeared. Jeff rewinded and slowed down the playback even more. There was a large explosion which caused the quark to disappear with a bright flash overwhelming the screen. In the quark’s place there was a rapidly expanding and dissipating into a sort of dust. This overthrew some of fundamental theories about particle physics. The dust gradually settled, condensing into small bright dots that continued to attract more dust and grow brighter.

At first glance it looked like that quark was simulating the universe. He’d seen what looked like the big-bang. And there was some definite galaxy formation there too. Numb and refusing to give into the almost-unbearable excitement growing within him, he leaned back in his chair and sense-checked the results. Was his testing equipment all working correctly? Could his experiment reflected background radiation somehow and the echo of the big bang?

Suppose, for arguments sake, that this experiment was correct. Suppose that the quarks were universes. Did that mean there were an infinite number of concurrent universes? Were they all same one? Did the quark’s universe have infinite of its own universes? Was Jeff’s universe just a minuscule part of another giant universe? How far did it go? Had he just discovered another spacial dimension? Had he just witnessed multiverses? Were there an infinite number of Jeffs looking at a computer screen amazed at his new results?

Sweating, Jeff tried to process this news. He’d win the Nobel Prize. Everyone would know his name. They would praise him. What other research had he just unlocked?

A sad but resolved voice startled Jeff. “Once agin, we’re not ready for this yet. Try again in twenty years”. Jeff felt a searing cold pain in the back of his head. “If you try this once more, I’ll have to resort to more permament measures”.

Jeff stared in horror, unable to move as the dark figure deleted his latest experimentation results and then seemed to added a fine powder to his sensors.

Jeff felt hazy, unsure where he was. The world made no sense to him. Why was he here? In a flash of lucidity, he remembered. He was back in his lab, about to run his experiment.

Jeff logged in to his super-computer cluster.

He had primed his liquid helium tanks and the delecately angled sensors were currently just 3°K. He nervously typed a command onto his greasy keyboard and hit enter. As soon as he’d pressed the button, some unassuming text popoped up on screen

IMAGING Failure