Glimpses of Infinity

The destruction of the Earth was a high price to pay for proving Einstein Wrong. I know because I saw it happen. Two hours ago I witnessed the end of my world. How?

How could they destroy an entire planet just to prove a theory? And could I yet prevent it from happening? I will find out in the next two hours.

The story of the end of our world begins about 10 years ago. I was a student at the time; My Name is Zak Jedburg or Zee-Jay to my friends. Back then I was a student studying Physics at London University. QMC to be precise.

There’d been rumors about the lecture for weeks beforehand. Jim, that’s Jim Sandor, head of particle physics research, was going to present the results from the CERN2 experiment he had been running for the last year. The rumors said that Jim’s experiment was going to blow the world of high-energy particle physics research apart. “Blow the world apart,” how apt that was going to be. If only he knew what he was about to unleash. The lecture theater was crowded – standing room only – much more than was on his course normally. Journalists were shepherded to the pressroom at the back of the theater. This had been built especially for such occasions because this wasn’t the first time that this theater had been used for momentous announcements. Chintoh Ting had announced his proof of the Friedburg Conjecture (which still stands today and won him the $10Million Knubi prize for mathematics) from this very room.

The rest of the theater had filled with the Prof.’s regular students supplemented by students from other London colleges and beyond. The lecture was scheduled to be a regular relativistic particle analysis. The usual stuff as laid out by Einstein years ago concerning the time dilation and mass accretion effects. As you accelerate matter it gets heavier making it harder to accelerate it even more. Faster, Heavier. Faster, Heavier. All because you cannot exceed the speed of light and the speed of light is the same for all.

It was rumored that the professor had got some anomalous results at the top end. Put simply, the graph showing how the mass piled on as speed approached ever-greater percentages of cee started to curve away from the vertical. It seemed that you could accelerate mass so much that it eventually began to rip itself free from the space-time continuum and no longer had to obey Einstein’s smooth and ordered universe.

When it came, in the lecture, it was almost missed. Jim had got to the graph and, instead of it shooting off to infinity, it stopped and there were a couple of question marks. Luckily he paused to give everyone time to take it in. then the questions came – slowly at first and then thick and fast. After the uproar had died down he showed another slide which was a photocopy of a roughly sketched graph. The error bars were wider at the top end but a trend could definitely be seen. They showed that the curve was beginning to flatten out. It meant that some of his particles were gaining speed at a rate that didn’t slow down the harder he pushed. He hadn’t yet gone super-luminal but the tantalising prospect was there. He explained that his calculations enabled him to say that super-luminal velocities would be achievable only with an accelerator the size of the Earth.

That seemed to put it into fantasy land – the money for CERN2 had been hard enough to come by. No Government was going to cough up for what such an accelerator would cost even if it could be built – which seemed impossible with the engineering that we had in those days.

They should have stopped there and then but nobody was to know how it was going to develop. Maybe it was the press. They can kill a story or they can make a story. Perhaps it was because it was a quiet time, news-wise or perhaps this was a story whose time really had come. Anyway, what happened was this…

The press loved the story – “Man’s great new endeavour” they called it. They said that we had to know what lay out there beyond the last frontier.

Personally, I think that it was the solving of the energy crisis that was to blame. Once the secret of fusion energy was found and made public there was little left to capture the imagination anymore. Making it public was the masterstroke. Suddenly everyone found that they could afford unlimited energy and a zero cost energy. In other words, warmth for all. The world’s economies shifted. Suddenly the west didn’t need a presence in the oil soaked Middle East and they pulled out and left them to themselves. Terrorism dried-up because the West could simply separate themselves from it. Nobody had to fight to survive anymore. With plentiful cheap energy, desalination became affordable and so drought was banished and so was famine. There were still territorial disputes but people quickly lost interest in these because they could simply move to previously uninhabitable areas of the planet and there were enough of those on the surface of the globe.

With warmth, food and security sorted out the press had little to report on and so when professor Sander appeared to have found a chink in the previously impenetrable celestial speed limit they jumped on the story and went wild with it. It wasn’t long before the reporting began to get hysterical. Some of the things that were proposed by the pundits that they dredged up from the darkest recesses of cod-pseudoscience were quite fantastical and I guess that that was where the antis got their inspiration ... but that came much later.

No, with the spirit of the moment being adventurousness, the media clamour to explore this new frontier became a roar that couldn’t be silenced and professor Sander became its figurehead. At a meeting with the UN he was asked to draw-up plans for what the particle accelerator that could achieve trans-luminal velocities would be like. He had already said that it would need to be the size of the planet to limit losses from synchrotron radiation but the accelerator that he proposed would actually have to have a bigger diameter than that of our planet. His calculations showed that in order to break cee we would require an accelerator with a diameter three times that of Earth. The accelerator ring would need to be in orbit. This didn’t phase the scientists at all. They had been waiting for a project that genuinely needed a Clark Lift and this was to be it.

On to Chapter Two - The Globac.

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