Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [176]
“That only makes nine,” he pointed out. He did not point out that he probably knew the subatomic zoo better than she did.
“Plus three ‘meta-dimensions’ that link the three triplets on a higher level.” She doodled while she talked. A triangle with a smaller triangle at each corner. It was only an icon, really.
“I call it the polyverse. Our universe is the subset that we can sense. A warp in the polyverse can intersect the universe in various ways, depending on its orientation. Like the blind men and the elephant, we think we’re seeing different forces, but they’re just different ‘cross sections’ of a single warp.”
“Hmm. We can’t see these ‘hidden dimensions,’ can we?”
“No. The extra dimensions form the inside of a balloon. The original monoblock was slightly asymmetrical. When it expanded in the Big Bang, some of its dimensions were rolled up. They’re still there: inside the quarks; inside you, me, everything.”
“Maybe,” said Hernando, “but the simplest explanation for not seeing them is that they’re not there.”
SHARON TRIED to patch things up with Tom over dinner. She waited until he came home from the library—was he planning to read every book in that place?—and announced that she was treating him to goulash and palatschinken at Belváros Café. Tom, who had already eaten cheesesteak hoagies with Judy at the Pigeon Hole, knew that there were times when a few extra calories was a bargain price, and agreed with as much cheer as he could muster. “Jo!” he said, getting into the mood. “Paprikás csirkét kérek galuskával és uborkával. És palacsinta!”
She even let him chatter on about long-dead people in ghost towns, the gist of which was that there had been a hospice called St. Laurence somewhere in the Black Forest in the late fourteenth century dedicated to Plague victims and operated by a small order of friars named after “St. Johan of Oberhochwald.” What that had to do with anything, Sharon did not know. He started to show her the emblem of the Order, but her patent disinterest stopped him. Instead, he asked about her own work.
That was her cue. “What’s wrong with the sequence nineteen, fourteen, two?”
“Umm … The gap between fourteen and two is too great?”
“Right. In the Beginning, there was just a single Superforce, because the extra dimensions hadn’t rolled up yet. As the energy levels dropped, the polyverse warped and the individual forces, ah, ‘froze’ out of the soup. Gravity became separate at Planck scale energy, 1019 proton masses; the strong nuclear force at unification scale, or 1014 proton masses; and the weak force at Weinberg-Salam scale, ninety proton masses, which is about 102.”
For once in his life, Tom was able to leap ahead of her. “And you think your chronity ‘froze out’ somewhere in between.”
She grinned. “My guess is about 108 proton masses. I call that Nagy-scale energy because I’m just so freaking modest. CERN can’t reach that; but maybe the new L4 accelerator will. Even back in the 1980s, they could reach Weinberg-Salam scale. They fused the weak force with electromagnetism and created the electroweak force.”
“Wait, I remember. That’s the breakthrough that gave us the antinuclear shield, right?”
“Eventually. The weak force governs atomic decay. Once we could hitch it to electromagnetism, the fission suppression field was only a matter of time. Holy shit!”
Tom blinked. Perhaps it was from the flash of insight. “What?”
“We know how to manipulate electromagnetism. If we can fuse chronity with the electroweak force … that should be able to manipulate the time force.”
“Time travel?”
“No, no. But time is three dimensional. Nagy-scale energy gets us inside the balloon, and we could … well, go anywhere. Light speed is still the upper limit; but if we go far enough in the right direction, the kilometers become