Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [108]
“‘Now that you mention it,’” Welles mimicked. His sarcasm was famous in the higher reaches of the school’s management. Deans fled at his approach. “There is nothing so well established as the constancy of light speed.”
It was the wrong thing to say, not only because there really were several other things better established, but because there is nothing guaranteed to get the back up of a no-fooling scientist than argument from authority. Neither Welles nor Sharon had been raised religiously and so neither of them realized that they were having a religious argument, but something atavistic rebelled in Sharon’s heart. “That’s the current paradigm,” she said. “But a more careful inspection of the data—”
“You mean until you can spin the data to prove what you want!” Welles said this with no sense of irony. Kuhn may have been a poor philosopher, but he was right about the cold, dead hand of the Paradigm. “I researched it myself when I heard what you were up to, and there has been no change in the measured speed of light for several decades.” He leaned back in his chair and linked his hands again under his breastbone, taking her silence as acknowledgement of the devastating impact of his rebuttal.
“Excuse me,” Sharon said with only a minor tremor in her voice. “A couple of decades? That’s like measuring continental drift for a few hours. Try a couple of centuries, like I did. You need a long enough baseline to—” And here her thoughts slip-slid away in an unexpected direction as her memory pulled a factoid from the hat. She examined the factoid top to botton, side to side, and around and around. Welles’s eyebrows rose at the sudden silence. It was so sudden and so silent that his ears hurt. But when he opened his mouth, she raised a hand to him. “Did you know that when Birge reported the decrease in light speed in Nature in 1934, he’d found no change whatsoever in wavelength?”
Welles, who hadn’t known the first, was equally in the dark on the second. “You mean when he reported an error in his measurement …”
“No, wait,” she told him, “this is really interesting.” She had forgotten that she was on the carpet in her department chairman’s office. She had found a glittering nugget in the ore and wanted to show it to everyone, supposing they would be as delighted as she was. “Think it through, Jackson. Light speed is frequency times wavelength. So if c is dropping and wavelength is constant, frequencies must be increasing.”
“So …?” Welles drew the question out. He was no ignoramus. He saw suddenly where Sharon’s thoughts were headed.
“So,” she said, her excitement building, “atomic frequencies govern the rate at which atomic clocks tick. Of course, the speed of light has been constant since they began using atomic clocks to measure it. The instrument is calibrated to the thing it’s measuring! Oh, my gosh!” She saw the chasm gaping before her; but unlike Welles, who would not step up to the lip, she leapt right into it. “Oh, my gosh! Planck’s constant isn’t!”
That is the way of it among heretics. They start questioning one doctrine and end up questioning everything. No wonder they used to burn them.
That grinding sound Welles heard was a paradigm shifting. But the gears were rusty. “Dr. Nagy,” he said with heavy formality. “You have tenure, and there is nothing I can do about that. But if I were you, I would not be surprised if your grant were not renewed next semester.”
There was the warning from the tribunal. Repent of your heterodoxy or be damned. But Sharon Nagy was on the scent of something very peculiar, and Jackson Welles knew nothing of Évariste Galois. Facing a duel at dawn, Galois had spent his last night on earth scribbling the foundations of algebraic group theory. A good night’s sleep, and he might have survived the duel; but there is a certain frame of mind that prizes discovery over life itself. If death