Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [109]
IT WAS late when she left the university grounds. The semester had started and she had papers to grade and discussion notes to prepare. It was one of those schools that put great store in teaching and even its most prestigious scholars were required in the trenches. She held two graduate seminars and taught an upper division course in galactic structure that was well-subscribed, though her students thought her a cold fish. On a Monday she was likely to resume precisely where she had left off the previous Friday, and sometimes that meant in media res, while her students, bleary from weekend partying, squinted at the whiteboards and the projections from her computer, trying to remember from where the derivation had started.
It was during her preparation for the galactic structure class that she noted a further anomaly.
“Hernando,” she asked the young post-doc who worked with her. “Why should cars all drive down a highway at speeds in multiples of five?”
Hernando Kelly was from Costa Rica, a “tico,” as they call themselves. He was bronze, distressingly well-built, and climbed sheer rock faces for recreation. With his arm in a sling—sometimes the rock faces win—Sharon had put him to work mining databases and compiling the results. He scratched his head and tried to imagine what the question had really been about. “At multiples of five,” he said, hinting for clarification.
“Right. The cars are going fifty, fifty-five, sixty, sixty-five, and so on.”
“You haven’t reached the speeds on the Blue Route yet.” White teeth showed beneath a black moustache. “So nobody’s going like sixty-two or fifty-seven or something?” At Sharon’s nod, he shook his head. “Okay, I’ll bite. Why?”
“I don’t know,” she answered happily. “I thought you knew because you were the one who told me.” She held up a frequency distribution, one of several dozen he had printed off of Minitab from the “galactic empire” database. “Distribution of Galactic Redshifts,” read the title above the chart. “Notice anything?”
“Well, yeah. It’s comb-shaped. That means the measurement resolution is coarser than the plotting scale so you get empty bins in the histogram. I’ll rescale the chart.”
“Measurement resolution,” she said.
“Right …” he said, a bit wary, for he recognized the manic tone in her voice.
“Unh-unh,” she answered. “Quantized. Redshifts are quantized. Galaxies are receeding at certain speeds, and not at speeds in between.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” she enthused. “That would only be an answer, and I’ve got something much more precious. I’ve got a question.”
Kelly didn’t see the big deal. It was like the light speed business. That had been a real bitch, because not all the literature was of equal quality. Some reports lacked the original data, some reworked previous data, some were duplicates. In some, the measurement method had been poor or the techniques for using it had not yet been perfected. Just compile all the data, the Ice Queen had told him. Oh, yeah, nothing easier.
It was all measurement error, he was convinced. Light speeds, now red shifts. He had seen “comb-shaped” histograms when he had worked summers at a metal fabricator in San Jose. The gauge had read out in increments of 0.002’ and the plotting scale had increments of 0.001’. Odd numbers need not apply. He hoped the rumor wasn’t true and Dr. Nagy wouldn’t lose her grant because of her religious obsession. He liked working with the Ice Queen.
IT WAS a few weeks later that Sharon saw the answer, and it was a stunner.
XIV
FEBRUARY, 1348
Candlemas to the Ember Days
CANDLEMAS DAY was a work holiday. At primes, the villagers gathered on the green and Joachim distributed candles to all, including the two baptized Krenken. The other Krenken stayed to themselves or watched from the edge of the green with fotografic devices. Dietrich blessed the candles while Joachim sang the Nunc dimittis. When all was ready, they formed up in procession.