COSM by Gregory Benford

Author:Gregory Benford [Benford, Gregory]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

COSM TIME = 64,800 YEARS [EXP(OUR TIME/2 WEEKS) – 1]

He had a figure printed out and hand-labeled, as was his habit. A smooth exponential curve rose.

He had crosses for data points in the third and fourth week of LAB TIME, with BRAD marked. At the top were questions, GALAXIES? STARS? The vertical axis was Cosm time in years, most multiplied by 106, a million.

He stood there beaming at her while realization dawned. “So… in the first two weeks the Cosm aged by… good grief, over a hundred thousand years.”

“Right! So by now it’s really taking off, maturing. The clocks in the Cosm run faster all the time. They exponentiate every two of our weeks.”

“If they form. How do we know this universe is like ours?”

“We don’t,” he said cheerfully. “But we’ll be able to find out.”

“How?”

“Look for enhanced visible light while this UV we’ve recorded goes away.”

“That visible light would come from stars, if they form,” she guessed.

“Right!”

“Um.” She stalled. Seldom was it a good idea to agree with a theorist; best to cultivate a skeptical reserve, bordering on disdain. “This exponential scaling you found, it comes out of the theory? I want to see the calculation.”

He started to show her and very quickly she saw it was the kind of argument she did not like. He started from some symmetry principles in a twenty-three-dimensional space, which then caused all but five dimensions to collapse into regions of space-time so small they could never be measured. She asked him how that could happen physically and he showed her some more scaling relations which she could not see any physics in at all. It went downhill from there.

“So how can you put much trust in that?” she asked abruptly.

“It’s one plausible model.”

“How many other models are possible?”

“Let’s confine it to plausible; the possibilities seem unbounded, provided that space-time is unbounded as well.”

“I don’t understand that, either.”

He went on but she began thinking of a story about Paul Dirac, the English field theorist who had in the early 1930s formulated a theory of elegance, describing the electron beautifully. From it he deduced a solution with the same mass as the electron but of opposite electrical charge; all other quantum numbers they had were identical. He knew of no such particle but speculated that perhaps it was the proton, though the mass was conspicuously wrong, off by a factor of 1,836. Thus his failure of trust had led him to miss predicting the positron, which was discovered shortly afterward. But she respected a theory like that, a mathematical mind trying to forge its airy truths into concrete terms. Maybe, she realized as Max kept speaking, this could be like the Dirac case. Hold to the vision, hope to be vindicated. Maybe he should simply run with it.

“Okay, okay,” she said. “What can you predict with this exponential curve of yours?”

“That inside that other universe, visible through the little window of this Cosm, galaxies should start clumping together within a short while.”

“How long?”

He ran his finger along the straight line of expansion and squinted at the time axis.

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