Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [174]
Tom shrugged and sat back in his chair. He had heard “half-witty,” anyway. “All right. Apples fall because of the force of gravity. Wasn’t that already discovered?”
“And why do currents flow?”
“Electromagnetism. Do I get a prize?” Surliness had crept into his voice.
“Why does time run faster?”
He opened his mouth to reply, closed it, and grew thoughtful. “Some sort of force,” he said slowly, almost to himself.
Gotcha! she thought. No smart-ass comeback for that one. “Exactly. Accelerations require forces. Uncle Isaac said so. Look at it this way. We don’t ‘move forward’ through time; we ‘fall downward,’ pulled by a sort of temporal gravity. I call it chronity.” Pulled by what? she wondered. Something at the end of time? How Aristotelian! Jackson would have a cow. Or something at the beginning. God. Hah! No, better make that the Big Bang. No sense pushing the chair’s hot buttons. “Or maybe we’re pushed,” she continued. “I haven’t decided on plus or minus signs yet.”
“So,” Tom mused. “Tempus fugit, after all.” Sure, he had promised no witty remarks. He hadn’t broken that promise.
She sighed. It was hard to remain cross with Tom. He was so damned cheerful when his own work was going well. “I know my equations are true,” she mused aloud. “I need to know if they are fact.”
MORE PEOPLE should make that distinction. It’s one thing to have a bird in an equation; quite another to have a bird in your hand. A fact is an accomplishment, factum est. In German, “deed-matter.” Tom, who had been reading more Latin and Middle German lately than English, knew immediately what she meant.
But it was easier to hypothesize occulted forces lurking behind the walls of the world than it was to find them. After all, she couldn’t just tear down those walls, could she?
Could she?
Never underestimate a determined woman. Universes are flimsy things in their hands.
“CERN CAN rent me some time in about four months,” she told Tom a week later as she bustled in the door feeling pleased with herself. “Meaning they will give me chickens if I supply the eggs.”
Tom nodded, figuring this was one of those right places. He was at his desk, reading a copy of the manorial accounts of Oberhochwald that I had sent him from Freiburg. It was missing many pages, and it stopped several years short of the crucial time; but who knew where gold might lie buried?
“It would just be preliminary, of course,” Sharon went on. “CERN can’t go back in time far enough.”
He might have nodded at that one, too; but it really demanded more. “Say what?”
“The really big accelerators recreate conditions as they were in the first seconds after the Big Bang. We can stick our noses a little way into the balloon and see a world in which the seconds were longer and the kilometers shorter.”
“And this is helpful because …?”
“Chronity. I need to detect it, verify it. And I can’t as long as I’m stuck in the present with all the forces frozen out. You see, a fifth force upsets the paradigm. Forces were classified on two axes: strong versus weak and long range versus short range. The schema was so neat that everyone figured there could only be four forces.”
“Heh, sounds like the four Aristotelian elements Judy told me about. The two axes were hot versus cold and wet versus dry. Hot and dry gave you fire—”
There were only two people in the apartment. How did Judy manage to squeeze in? “This isn’t the Middle Ages,” she snapped. “We’re not prisoners of superstition!”
Tom said, “Uh?” wondering where that remark had come from. Sharon set her briefcase on her desk and opened it, stared at its contents. After a while, Tom said, “So, like, which force is, umm, strong and long range?”
Sharon took her notebook out and turned it absently. “Electromagetism,” she said. “And the weak long-range force is gravity.”
“Maybe I’m putting on weight, but gravity doesn’t feel so weak