The Trouble with Singularities.

Future History.

I was there. I saw how little weight the professor’s opinions carried against the institutional forces that make the decisions. I needed no further convincing on the futility of his protests.

“I hate to bore you all with the same set of facts again,” the professor began, “but the problem with this project, is that the theory predicts a second singularity, of unknown coordinates, somewhere outside the facility. Which means it could pop up anywhere.”

“We’re all aware of that professor.”

“And this committee finds such a possibility acceptable?”

The Chairman replied on behalf of the assembly, “It’s a very small event in a very big universe, professor. The odds of anything—like that, appearing anywhere near the earth, or even in this solar system, are so astronomically high, that it damn near fried a few CPU’s in the process of doing the calculations. Your devotion to caution is admirable professor, but a little misguided here, we think.”

March 30, 2001

Milton Hagenbechner pronounced his name while watching his lips move in the bathroom mirror. It was a mouthful. He was in the washroom fastening the last button on his shirt when his stomach lurched. It felt like the entire house bounced. A distortion in the mirror was gone before his mind could register the image, but it imparted a subliminal dread. He waited, half expecting some further consequence: the sound of tinkling glass, or wood cracking or groaning. Instead, the bounce was followed by an uncanny continuity of normal sounds. A house full of people waking up, water running; cupboards closing; toilets flushing.

He accepted a kiss from his mom, hugged his dog, stuffed the sandwich and orange into his backpack with his books, swung it over his shoulder, and stepped out into a moist and frigid Florida morning. A short walk brought him to the bus stop, which left him standing with three other kids in the pre-dawn fog.

Danny, the tallest of the other kids said, “Anybody else feel that earthquake this morning?”

One of the shorter boys said, “We don’t get earthquakes in Florida, dork.”

“I felt it, Danny.”

This was the first time Milton had spoken to any of them. He was still new to the area, and shy.

Danny nodded, and said, “I wasn’t sure if I was imagining it, or what, ‘cuz…”

“Oh, it was real.” Milton said.

The bus arrived, the doors opened, and the kids lined up with Milton bringing up the rear. Something tugged at him from behind. He attempted to spin around, but whoever it was had a firm grip on his backpack so he adroitly slipped out of the shoulder straps and turned to face the troublemaker.

A black ball, the size of a dinner plate, hung in the air at the same approximate height of his own head, about five-feet above the ground. It had a hold of Milton’s backpack. He tried to pull it free but doing so only seemed to produce more resistance.

Frightened at first, but curious, he sensed that the thing was just a thing: Not aware, or hostile, or even intelligent.

The autonomous bus beeped a departure warning, the sun cleared the horizon and the object was illuminated by the first rays of dawn. It looked like the light—went right down into it. Forever. He reached for the pocket containing his sandwich and regretted it the next instant. The slight increase in mass to the proximity of the object, multiplied by infinity, felt like an invisible force that grabbed Milton’s hand and would not let it go.

The bus beeped a second departure warning. He heard Danny’s voice yelling for him to ‘Leave that thing alone.’ ‘Thanks for the advice’ he felt like saying, as he struggled to pull himself away, shoes scuffing at the ground frantically. He screamed for help, desperate at last, but was drowned out by the bus’s warning beep, the doors closing and the sound of the engine. He was left with the image of Danny’s anguished face through the side window as the bus lumbered away; leaving the helpless boy struggling to escape what looked like the grasp of his own backpack.

January 24, 2023

“Did you hear? I won approval for the project.” It was the ‘brash, young researcher’ the professor had warned me about.

I watched as the professor allowed the paper he was reading to drop to the desk. “Yes sir, I heard, and I don’t like it.”

His young colleague cheerfully assured him that whether he liked it or not, he would most likely find good use for all the quarks and muons the research would generate.

“Is that some kind of joke?” The professor said. “I’m sorry, I just don’t feel like there’s much room for humor in particle physics.”

“No, I’ll grant you that, professor, but there’s still plenty of room for hard research, and, if I may speak plainly, the collider’s just sitting there, doing nothing.”

The professor was irritated, at what, I didn’t know. He said something like, ah, “There’s a ton of atomic bombs laying around doing nothing. You want to play around with some of them too? See what happens?” This drew no response from the buoyant young physicist.

After his younger counterpart had gone, the professor stewed for a while, sifting through stacks of old file folders. Considering his retirement, perhaps. When he had calmed down a bit, he wanted to talk about it and I was a convenient ear. Of course, I’m merely a technical writer and what transpired in their personal affairs did not belong in the paper I was researching, and that’s why I’m putting it all down here.

What the professor said next was, “Do you know what a collimator is?”

I had heard the term, but was forced to admit, I did not know what it was.

“It’s a device that helps keep a particle beam focused.”

“And?”

“Every physicist and engineer will swear that these things, (he gestured at the door you went through to physically inspect the cyclotron), these things are useless without them.”

“And that’s not true?” I asked.

“The problem is, it’s not false.” He opened a lower cabinet drawer and retrieved a bottle and a tumbler and set them on the desk. “Would you care for a drink?

I had a feeling I was going to need one. “Sure,” I said. “Just a splash.” He poured one, I tossed it down, and it felt like I’d swallowed a comet.

“You know all about this facility,” he said, “I gave you the tour myself, you’ve seen the technology, the complexity, my God, the sheer size of it, a circular tunnel 17 miles in diameter.”

He was referring to the LHC. Of course. The Large Hadron Collider: A marvel of modern technology and a spectacular piece of scientific ingenuity, also the subject of my paper. Considering how boring that paper was going to be, I was intrigued at the prospect of some alcohol induced candor about professional backstabbing.

“Tell me more,” I said.

After he poured both of us another drink, he went on to explain that the problem with quantum physics and the attempt to create an artificial singularity, was that it predicted a duplicate, matching, or twin singularity, somewhere else in space. A small, temporary black hole at the other end of a wormhole. Quantum calculations required it.

I think we all understood as much, by this time. But he went on to explain a little-known event in the collider’s history, which I can relate in his own words because I recorded it. It goes like this: “When it was freshly built and new, the engineers needed to run some tests to help calibrate and tune the huge machine. But they hadn’t installed the collimators yet. The Hadron collider can create streams of particles going in both directions, but without the collimators, there was so much sub-atomic distance between the individual particles of both streams, that the chance of a collision was effectively nil. That’s what they all said. It was the only thing that the engineers and the physicists agreed on. And you can quote me on that, they agreed on nothing else. But they both knew that there was no chance of a particle collision. Without collimators, those particles were like two handfuls of peas thrown at each other from opposite ends of the solar system.”

The professor poured himself a third drink and leaned back in his chair. “And yet, they fired up this here collider, this one right here behind me, sent two swarms of particles in opposite directions, and to prove that there would be no collisions, one of the engineers put a detector in the tank as a practical joke. They can only be used once and they damn near fired him for wasting one, but when they finished the test, lo and behold, it recorded not one collision, but two: With no collimators.”

I looked it up later, it was a factual account.

“The universe is opportunistic,” he said. “It makes things happen.”

March 30, 2001.

The thought that he might die never occurred to Milton at the time. As the bus drove away, he was sure that at least one of the kids knew he was in trouble. How that might help, he wasn’t sure. When you’re eleven years old, there’s not much life to flash by in those final seconds, and as the futility of his predicament settled over him, he grew calm, still, and studied the thing from an arm’s length away. His hand was still about nine inches away from the object, and uncompressed, but held in an unbreakable grasp.

It looked like a ball, not what it really was: A hole in reality. One that was trying to drag him in. But if that was so, then why hadn’t it swallowed the backpack yet?

The logical answer to that question, since it surely wanted to pull both of them in, was that it couldn’t. For whatever reason, it lacked the force, the density, or some other singular property, to absorb even the backpack—but it wanted to. It wanted him and the backpack very badly, but something was preventing it.

And then it disappeared.

It simply winked out of existence. Leaving him and the backpack to drop to the ground. He was physically and mentally in shock but otherwise unharmed. The backpack was shredded. (The food, the sandwich and the orange? Still being studied.) But young Milton staggered to his feet, dusted off his favorite blue pants, picked up the backpack, held it out and examined it. It was a moment in time that he would never forget.

And then all hell broke loose. Police, school resource officers, neighborhood watch volunteers, older kids, his parents arrived too. But it was all over and done with.

The Present.

That’s the story. I know because I interviewed him too. The fact that I follow physics and didn’t know about this guy is a failure on my part. The incident is well-known world-wide, among physicists. The kid was an instant celebrity, the only person in the world to have experienced a singularity up close while they were still theoretical. So he already knew they existed, but he also had the insight to guess that a twin singularity might not be bound by time. He spent the following twenty-two years developing the theory that allowed him to create the singularity that nearly killed him when he was eleven.

How do I know? Because that brash young researcher that the professor hates? That’s Milton Hagenbechner.