A Length Of
String
By Jim
Stanfield
City Hall
was bedecked and speckled with colored lights for the grand opening of the time
capsule. As I waited in line to get into the auditorium, I reflected on the
number of times I had been here before for these events. Shuffling in, I gazed
around at the familiar faces of the other spectators.
I took my
usual seat along the railing of the first balcony. The tedium of waiting never
seemed to get any easier to bear. It was the custom of some to nap in their
seats. Others ate packed lunches and passed the time in small talk.
All the
heads of state and their cronies had arrived and were taking advantage of their
captive audience, making speeches to fill the three hours since the auditorium
had been sealed closed. Three hours was considered to be the minimum prudent
buffer to isolate any foreseeable length of time anomaly from the outside
world.
This time
had not been a total waste. I had been reading one of those bulky and wasteful
relics, a book printed out on paper. It was as large as my pocket monitor
which, when patched into ALBERT, could read out, page by page, every book in
the public domain. Despite its shortcomings I liked this old book. It seemed as
though the author was writing to me directly. I had read this book before.
Shortly
the call came down from the Chairman of the Floor, "Ladies and Gentlemen,
may I please have your attention." The crowd noise abated in response. The
Chairman then announced several distinguished scientists, all summa cum omni
with space master or time master certification, satori and all that. They would
preside over the opening.
The time
capsule set on a stainless steel table within a glass isolation chamber in the
middle of the stage. This would provide an initial buffer for its contents upon
opening and also to contain any possible contaminants within.
The time
capsule contained a single cosmic string.
Captured
in free space and brought back to earth by the Cosmic Explorer, the strings
released so far had ranged from less than a meter to over two hundred meters
long. As a coiled spring stores energy, so a coiled cosmic string stores time.
Simply
put, as the string is released from its confinement, it unfurls and releases
its stored up hoard of seconds. It would shed it, so to speak, in what they
call a Calabi-Yau bubble emanating outward along its length. Expanding
backwards, the bubble carries us upstream within a localized rift of time.
Minutes
would go by and then they would go by again. The sensation of deja vu was quite
pleasant. When released under these carefully controlled conditions, the
discontinuities are local and do not seem to have any effect outside the
electromagnetic confines of the auditorium (a hemispherical faraday cage). But
within, the participants are provided with an all pervading feeling of well
being and connectedness, and the very minor nuisance of having to set our
watches ahead to the correct outside time when we leave. We gained just over
forty-five minutes in the case of the two hundred meter specimen. Momentum
anomaly measurements on this particular capsule hinted that this specimen might
be even longer.
To state a
length for a cosmic string is quite a bit of an oversimplification, of course.
The length is theoretical and is figured backwards from the time gained, 13.7
seconds per meter. In its opaque abstraction, the math of it makes sense to
the mathematicians who study that arcane
branch known as topology but a full understanding of the effect eludes even the
best minds. Quantum mechanical effects are, in essence, inexplicable and this
is no exception. It was first described in the mathematical formalism of 10-D
Kaluza-Klein space, then more succinctly, in super-cubal Hawking
'sixteen-space' in which three of the four sets of four space-time dimensions
are curled around each other in a topological way so as to confound any common
sense understanding. Dimensions so tightly curled that their extent is as much
of a jump smaller than a quark as that same quark is smaller than the mind that
tries to understand it. Dimensions so small that they stand diminished from the
scale of man by thirty-three powers of ten.
It was
still a topic of scientific debate just how long a cosmic string could be.
Deja vu. I
seem to be able to remember the explanation each time I review it, and the nice
part is, I seem to be able to understand it just a little bit better each time
around.
They know
it isn't strictly the case, but as they explain it to the layman, the uncurling
of the primary dimension, length, causes a tightening of the curl of the other
fifteen, four of them being time dimensions. As curl is conserved, this causes
time to flow inwards, or as we perceive it, backwards.
Dr.
Opperman set the movement range at one-to-one on the mechanical hands and slid
his fingers into place. Within the chamber the mechanical fingers extended
toward the capsule. On the index finger of the right hand was a snipper, which
after three attempts, engaged and bit through the first of four retaining
wires. After the other three were dispatched the stainless steel bolts were
turned releasing the top. The top was still being held firmly against the
capsule by atmospheric pressure, so Dr. Opperman then opened the equalizer
valve. The top was spring loaded and would fly open releasing its cosmic
contents in much the same fashion as a child's jack-in-the-box.
A wave of
anticipation would always overtake the audience just before the magical event.
Simultaneously, we leaned forward in our seats.
City Hall
was bedecked and speckled with colored lights for the grand opening of the time
capsule.