Universe in a Shell

This post is a long time coming.  One of the first things I did after I started working on Quantum Diaries was to get my hands on as much of the RHIC-as-doomsday machine literature as I could find.  OK, it's not an extensive library by any measure, consisting of several "factual" books about avoiding major catastrophes to the human race (ones that utilize RHIC as a paradigmatic example of science as potentially dangerous and irresonsibly unchecked) and...a science fiction novel.  Of course, the more serious "scholar" type (which I at least aspire to be) went right for the "serious" books by Rees and Posner.  I read Rees a long time ago, and am still working on my sustained counterargument (which is developing over time), and I've made it through enough of the Posner to feel somewhat used (on behalf of my entire community) for his aim to make a compelling book (and one that requires most of us to be a little more of an economist than I still think is necessary to make these arguments...). 

So of course I put off the science fiction book, mainly because I expected so little from it, but partially because I also expected to feel used in this case as well.  I expected to see things that are deeply important to me deployed purely in the interests of maintaining an interesting storyline.  And Gregory Benford's Cosm certainly provides a great deal of grist for my frustration mill.  Benford is an astrophysicist from UC Irvine, and is clearly a well-known and well-respected author, both of fact and fiction (although I have not read any of his other works, basing this assessment on the sheer number of his published works, as well as the large number of usually-positive reviews one can find online.)  More importantly, he's well-known as a purveyor of "Hard SF", where some thought and attention to science fact is applied to the generation of fiction, giving readers a sense that the story could "really" happen.  In that context, my main reaction to the first section of Cosm was a combination of amusement and irritation, when I found that he was doing what looked to me more like journalism, or maybe anthropology.  I found characters and activities and attitudes that I recognized, but so much so that it felt like a transcription of certain parts of my daily life.  RHIC, its basic physics, its experiments, and even some of its people (e.g. my colleague Tom Ludlam) are rendered with reasonable (and sometimes excessive) accuracy, almost as if it were out of a missing chapter of Sharon Traweek's anthropological work on High Energy Physics, "Beamtimes and Lifetimes". 

The endnotes make this less surprising in retrospect, since the background of the novel was based on visits to BNL and RHIC in the early 90's.  And that offered yet another angle, since most of the physics discussed in the book was state-of-the-art in 1990, and thus feels a little...well...old by now.  And yet, I will probably never forget the jolt of finishing one of the early chapters, turning the page, and being faced with a bold-faced "MAY 2005" at the start of the next.  Same jolt one gets at a reunion with old acquaintances after 20 years, as you attempt to reconcile your expectations of the future with that selfsame future as it has actually played-out.

And yet, Benford was creepily prescient in his most important plot device, that RHIC would do something to stress-test the known laws of nature in a tiny volume in such a way that a small region of space-time would be created with different laws.  Fortunately, he didn't go straight to the scary stuff, making some sort of runaway chain reaction that engulfed the known universe at the speed of light.  That would obviously have led to a very short book.  Nor did he take the RHIC language of the "little bang" seriously, and have us (or "them", in the sci-fi world?) create a new universe out of our primordial strongly-interacting liquid.  Instead, he postulated a scientific hail-mary where the densities were so high that the matter led to the opening up of a wormhole, offering a window onto a completely different universe, but one somehow sealed off from our own in a basketball-sized "shell".  While his conceit is a little extreme, he clearly captured the longstanding fascination of heavy ion of physics, where things would get so hot, so dense, and complex that essentially anything could happen.   Vestiges of this attitude persist in the field, but I'll discuss that some other time (feel free to bug me...)

Of course, once this sphere (eventually nicknamed "Cosm") is created, the rest of the plot follows inexorably, driven by the tension between the thesis and antithesis of the scientific enterprise: the lone-wolf physicist (here embodied by Alicia Butterworth, a physicist teaching at UC Irvine -- allowing some exploration of east vs. west coast styles of physics), obsessed with understanding her unexpected creation, and the enormous scientific and academic bureaucracy that, while designed to protect and foster scientific research, inevitably feels pressure to place limits on it on all sides, in the name of safety and accountability.  Benford makes some effort to show that both are necessary aspects of the science-research ecosystem, but it's clear where he bets  his money: with the renegade who reluctantly, but compulsively, bends the bureaucratic rules in the pursuit of pure knowledge.  Somewhat cliched to be sure (as were most of the characterizations, my overarching problem with the book as a piece of literature), but ultimately ringing true, and enjoyable in the way that it offered situations that are familiar to anyone who's ever had to muddle through the up and downs of a research project where you don't even know what you're studying, much less how to study it.