Smarter (an Ell Donsaii story #2) (11 page)

Then more weeks passed trying to detect evidence of the first condensate’s “bumping” at the second condensate. Those attempts were all without success.

Ell had not really experienced a major failure at something she had focused on in the past. Well, except for physical tasks requiring endurance. She and Emma had started running together for exercise. This was at Emma’s suggestion and Ell suspected that Emma was trying to work Ell’s butt down to a smaller size. She liked getting exercise but, as usual, her limited endurance made it agonizing trying to keep up with Emma on their morning runs. Hauling the “fat pants” made it even worse. The running and the frustration she experienced with failure after failure of her bumping setup resulted in weight loss. She slept even less than her usual three to four hours per night. Her hair became brittle, perhaps made worse by Ell’s need to constantly apply the dark mousse in order to cover her reddish blond hair. At least the mousse covered the broken ends.

She felt a hand on her shoulder and lifted her head from her desk. She looked around blearily and found Roger standing at her shoulder, “Hey.”

Roger looked concerned and said. “Ell, are you OK?”

“Yeah, sure, what’s up?”

“Our three PM meeting is in a couple of minutes. I’ve been worried about you though. You don’t look good.”

“Yeah, this experiment is crushing me. Nothing seems to work and I’ve started having dreams about it.”

Roger’s brows knotted as he looked at her with concern. He’d really started to like the odd looking young woman quite a lot over the past couple months. He found her ability to handle the math in Donsaii’s paper astonishing and her equanimity so far in handling the incredible frustrations of her experiment inspiring. He felt sad seeing the project getting the best of her.

Ell got up and they went down the hall to the lab meeting. When they got there Dr. Johnson was in a terrible mood, ripping each of the grad students as they reported what was happening with their particular projects. But when he got to Ell’s project it got even worse. “Do you mean to tell me that you are
still
working on that ‘spin bumping’ crap?
How
many times do I need to tell you to move on to the double slit aspects of Donsaii’s paper? I want you to disassemble your spin bumping setup tomorrow! Stop! Wasting! TIME!”

Roger was aghast. Ellen had looked so down before they came to the meeting, he was afraid this tongue lashing would be the straw that broke the camel’s back. Her eyes dropped down to the table a moment, and then she looked up with a drawn face. “If I promised to only work on spin bumping on my own time, say evenings and weekends, could I leave it set up?”

Johnson’s eyebrows shot up, “You’d be thinking about it all the time, nothing would get done during regular hours!”

Ell’s expression remained dull and flat as she said, “I’m sorry, spin bumping is what I want to work on. If I can’t work on that here, I’ll find a different graduate program to work in.”

Roger was astonished to hear Ellen giving Johnson an ultimatum in his current mood, but even more astonished when Johnson suddenly leaned back in his chair. He looked up at the ceiling a moment then sighed. “OK, I’m sure that you guys are all aware that physicists under thirty make most of the really big discoveries because they try
stupid
stuff that older physicists
know
won’t work.
But
… you need to consider that thousands of foolish attempts at crap that older physicists know won’t work,
don’t
actually work. Though I’m ‘old’ I am
not
an idiot. But, I will not stifle you Symonds. If you want to work nights and weekends on something that is a complete waste of time, go ahead. However, don’t expect
any
help from me while you ‘tilt at your windmill.’ That project is now yours and yours alone, to fail with or even against all reasonable possibility, to succeed.”

The grad students all looked at each other with raised eyebrows, stunned to hear Johnson the tyrant speaking as if they had choices? Then he leaned forward in his chair, “Now, tell me, what are your plans to look into the double slit phenomenon?”

Still in a flat and listless voice Ellen said, “OK, we can’t try to detect which slit the photon passes with polarization or the like because such methods will break the fifth dimensional connection, so I’ve been looking for other means to register the passage of a photon. But there are two issues. First, that a method for detecting passage of a photon without stopping or deflecting the photon, and without breaking a fifth dimensional connection does not exist. Second, if Donsaii is correct, a single photon would, in fact, be detected at both slits, but I’m not sure how we would prove that two photons had not been emitted?”

To his surprise Roger heard his own voice saying, “What if you used very high energy photons and detected them with flux sens…”

Ellen’s eyebrows shot up and with an excited exclamation of “Yes!” she proceeded to detail a possible method, using the new “flux sensors,” much more fully fleshed out than the fuzzy idea Roger had just had. Roger could hardly believe that she had just heard his suggestion a moment ago. Johnson, leaned back a moment with his lips pursed, then without saying anything appeared to be mollified. He nodded and turned to his next target.

Weeks passed with Ell working weekdays on the double slit experiment, then evenings and weekends on her entangled particles. She’d given up on the condensates and moved on to other particles and was back to carbon macromolecules. This Friday evening she had entangled some long carbon nanotubes and was stimulating the near one with various means, not just spin bumping. She was heating the nanotube with a laser while varying a magnetic field around it when the laser developed an intermittent fault. Ell swore and slammed her fist on the counter, then unplugged the laser; she’d couldn’t replace it now, the supply room was closed. She started shutting down her equipment. It was as she reached for the switch on the detector module that she noted the spikes on its screen. Ice flooded her veins as she slowly reached out and began turning the apparatus back on. It took another hour to reestablish the magnetic field at the strength it had been before. Then more minutes to reset the laser at the correct frequency. With a sensation of her hair standing on end, she realized that the laser emission wavelength was a multiple of the length of the nanotube. Spikes then again showed up on the detector, replicating the intermittent faults of the laser though they were much larger than spin bumping should produce. They continued to appear after she picked up the detector and moved it into the other room. When she broke the circuit to the laser it caused the same spikes on the detector. Slowly she turned everything off and wandered dazedly out of the lab. She walked to West 87, pondering what she had just witnessed and contemplating how it fit into her theory? She knew serendipity had played huge roles in some of the most important scientific breakthroughs in the world, had she just witnessed a massively serendipitous event?

As she entered the bar, it suddenly came together for her. The laser wasn’t causing the “spin bumping” she’d been working on, rather the resonance between the nanotube and the laser was activating the secondary “photon-gluon resonance” phenomenon also predicted by her math!

When it came to her Ell’d stopped where she was and closed her eyes trying to visualize it in her mind. A bouncer grasped her elbow and gently moved her out of the flow of traffic. After a bit she opened her eyes and, looking up at her AI’s displays, she started having Allan run simulations of what she thought was happening.

Dr. Johnson had chosen this evening to go to West 87 with the grads as he did occasionally. Over at their regular booth, he turned irritably to Roger and asked, “What’s gotten into Symonds now?”

Roger noticed Ellen for the first time when Johnson nodded her way. He watched her standing immobile, apparently watching her AI monitors for a minute. He said, “I don’t know, I’ll go check on her.”

When Roger got there Ell didn’t notice him until he tapped her shoulder, “Ell?”

“Huh? Oh, hi Roger. I’ll be over in a minute.”

In fact it was more like fifteen minutes before she shook herself and walked over and sat down, still with a dazed appearance as her mind continued to jump from implication to implication of what had happened and to consider experiments to be done when she could check out more equipment.

Johnson said, “What’s with you Symonds?”

“Uh, I just got a weird result out of the spin bumping apparatus that has me rethinking the whole…”

Johnson interrupted, “Oh damn! Not more of that crap! You still haven’t given that up?”

Startled by the vehemence of his reaction Ell said, “Uhhh…”

Johnson interrupted again, “No, no, don’t tell me, I can see you’re going to keep wasting time on ‘spin bumping’ until Hell won’t have it. As long as you’re making progress on the double slit experiment, I’ll pretend I don’t care.” His tone abruptly shifted to pleasant, “Anybody up for a game of pool?”

Ell leaned back in her chair but James and Roger signaled assent. As they got up, James said, “Ellen, we need a fourth. Be my partner?”

Ell had been glaring at Johnson’s back and shook her head “no.” She didn’t want to hang out with the professor.

James leaned back to her and said, “Oh come on. It’ll give you a chance to put the old man in his place. Don’t you want a chance to get even for all those drubbings he gives you at the lab meetings?”

Ell tilted her head and looked at James speculatively. She narrowed her eyes, “OK.”

Roger had almost finished racking the balls and Johnson was chalking his cue when James and Ell arrived. Johnson looked up at them, “So Symonds, you going to watch some ‘physics in action?’”

James said, “Oh no, she’s going to play as my partner and we’re going to win some beers from you two.”

Roger looked surprised. Johnson said, “James, I’ll admit you’re pretty good, but you aren’t good enough to hold up a novice.”

James said, “Ellen’s played a few times. Or are you guys too chicken to play for beers?”

Roger looked at them speculatively but Johnson snorted, “I generally don’t like taking grad students’ money but, I don’t mind taking “smart assed” grad students’ money. Lag for the break?”

James won the lag and broke but didn’t get anything in. Johnson promptly put three balls in. Ell put in three to match him during her turn. Then missing on purpose she left Roger with a stymied “leave.” When she stepped back James whispered, “Why didn’t you run the table?”

Ell turned to him and quietly said, “I told you that was luck the other night. You might have to buy some beer tonight.”

James vehemently whispered back, “That was
not
luck!”

Ell shrugged and pointed to the pool table where Roger had missed his attempt at a bank shot, “Your turn.”

James shook his head and went to look the table over. He put two balls in before giving himself a bad leave. Johnson stepped back up to the table, “I sure am getting thirsty, you two might want to call a waitress over.” He chalked his cue and promptly put in three more balls. For a few minutes Ell thought he was going to run out the table but he missed a long cross table shot.

Ell took a deep breath and pondered just going ahead and missing her shot. She thought to herself that she shouldn’t have gotten involved in this game with a man she didn’t like and who held power over her career. Then Johnson turned to James and quietly said, “Women can be very good at math but, unlike men, they don’t have the intuitive grasp of mechanics that you need for a game like this. You can see by the look on her face that she has no idea which shot to take.”

Ell gritted her teeth, and then against her better judgment, she put their remaining two balls in and turned to the eight ball. As the eight ball dropped she regretted her action and said with false brightness, “Jeez that was a lucky run!”

James had chills, every one of Ellen’s balls had rolled smoothly into the very
center
of the pocket with a precision like he’d never seen before. Each leave was
perfect
for the next shot. With absolute certainty he knew there was no luck involved. Nonetheless he turned brightly to Roger and the Professor, “Hey, I guess you guys owe us a beer!”

Johnson scowled and turned to Roger, “I’ll buy if you’ll fetch.” Roger headed to the bar and Johnson turned back to Ellen intending to challenge another game but she was on her way out the exit. He turned to James, “What got into her?”

James grinned, “We sandbagged you guys. She’s actually really good at pool. But she said she needed to get home.” He shrugged, “Women?”

Johnson’s eyes narrowed as he looked after Ell, “She just got lucky. No way was that skill. I want a rematch next time we’re down here.”

Ell spent the weekend thinking and running simulations. Saturday night she went into the lab to test a couple of predictions that could be run despite the faulty laser.

Monday morning it was back to double slit experiments and that afternoon at their three o’clock meeting she reported that her new apparatus demonstrated wavelike interference and documented field perturbations at both slits when a “single” high energy photon passed, apparently through
both
slits. To her this astonishing double slit result was a minor substantiation of her theory, far less important than what she was finding with her other apparatus. The other grad students looked at one another with wide eyes. It sounded like a result that could really shake up the world of physics!

Johnson though, rolled his eyes and said, “OK, there’s something wrong with your setup. I’ll come and look at it after this meeting.”

Ell said tentatively, “Uh, Dr. Johnson, I think you should let me tell you about some surprising results I got with my other setup.”

“NO! Damn it! I am not interested in any weird results you are getting out of that crap. I won’t have you waste
my
time on it!” He sighed in dramatic exasperation, “It’s bad enough that I have to spend time trying to figure out how you’ve screwed up the double slit apparatus.” He moved on to crucifying James on his experiment.