Part 11 (1/2)
The appearance of the CERN complex surprised Skarda, looking more like a campus of white concrete bunkers and warehouses than a world-famous scientific research inst.i.tute. Turning into the visitors' lot, April slotted the Vantage into a s.p.a.ce in front of a concrete-and-gla.s.s building marked ”33”, where a man in faded jeans and hiking boots was waiting for them. When they climbed out of the car he broke into a smile, waved, and trotted over. Skarda liked him immediately. He was in his mid-twenties and skinny to the point of emaciation, with a scruffy light brown beard and a T-s.h.i.+rt littered with advanced mathematical symbols.
He stuck out his hand. ”I'm Ezra Yadin. You're Park, April, and Flinders, right? Recognized you right away from h.o.r.n.y's description. Welcome to CERN!”
Skarda took his hand, looking puzzled. ”'h.o.r.n.y?'”
Ezra c.o.c.ked his head, scrutinizing him with a curious grin. ”Mike Hornblower. 'h.o.r.n.y'. We called him that because he was scared to death of girls. Never went near one without wanting to hurl.”
Skarda laughed. ”'h.o.r.n.y'? That's funny! To us he's 'Candy Man'.”
”That sure fits! I remember seeing him sitting at his desk with about twenty Hershey bars in front of him. Two hours later they were gone.” He bobbed his head in recollection. ”I tell you what-all of us at MIT were a bunch of Uber-nerds and pretty smart, I guess, but h.o.r.n.y blew us all out of the water. Did you know he dropped out after his junior year? The professors told him he should be teaching their cla.s.ses. He wasn't much on physics, but I've never seen anyone better with computers. He could hack into anything.” His voice lowered to a conspiratorial whisper. ”Word is, he hacked into the NSA supercomputer at Ft. Meade! Pretty awesome, huh?
”Anyway...” He lifted his hand and flourished it at the campus. ”This is it! Not much to see up here, except the Globe.” He pointed across the street at what looked like a hundred-foot-tall rusty golf ball jammed halfway into the ground. ”They show movies in there, have conferences-that sort of thing. It's sort of our trademark. Looks like it's made out of metal, doesn't it? It's really made out of wood.” He pointed at the ground. ”But the really cool stuff is down there. Come on. I'll show you!”
___.
Skarda's ears were popping by the time the service elevator doors valved open and Ezra ushered them into a lobby made of concrete blocks. ”Welcome to the LHC,” he said. ”The world's largest particle accelerator. You are now three hundred and fifty feet under Switzerland.”
He had issued them red hard hats and brought along a steel oxygen tank. ”Just in case anybody needs some down there,” he'd said with a grin.
Leading them down a short cement hallway, he held open a wooden gate, then ushered them into a gla.s.sed-in room crammed with computers, electronic gear, and monitors. Two men and a woman in hard hats sat at computer stations and didn't look up as they entered.
Through the gla.s.s Skarda could see the collider itself. It looked like a oversized, silver sewer pipe intersected by a series of cobalt blue rings and adorned with bolts, cables, and magnets.
”This tube is the particle accelerator,” Ezra explained. ”It has to be kept really, really cold-just a couple of degrees above absolute zero, which is just about minus four hundred and sixty degrees Fahrenheit.”
”So what exactly do you do here?” Skarda asked. His ears were popping again and claustrophobia was beginning to gnaw at him, intensified by a constant pounding noise in the background that sounded like someone beating on a thousand drums all at once.
”Well, to give you the basics, we break up a bunch of hydrogen atoms, harvest the protons, then accelerate bunches of these protons-called 'hadrons'-around the tube at about three meters per second slower than the speed of light-pretty fast! But we fire more than one beam of protons, one going clockwise, the other going counter-clockwise, and then let them smash into each other. The idea is to break these particles down into their own const.i.tuent smaller particles to see just what matter is ultimately made of. Once we do that, there are five detectors along the path of the ring-ATLAS is one of them, where I work-where there are powerful magnets that deflect the trajectory of the beams to spray the particles resulting from the collisions into the detectors where they can be trapped, photographed, measured, and studied.”
April adjusted her hard hat. Even she was looking curious. ”Is that when the black hole happens?”
Ezra threw his head back and laughed. ”One of the first things I'll say is that nothing's impossible, but that's pretty much of a myth that the media glommed onto. Look at it this way-in s.p.a.ce black holes are caused by the collapse of ma.s.sive stars, so in other words, you need a lot of ma.s.s to create a black hole, which is why they exert such an enormous gravitational pull on the objects around them and why they can suck in matter and light. But a micro-sized black hole, which is the only kind that could possibly be created here, would have almost no ma.s.s, and so would have an almost zero gravitational pull and so would not grow. As a matter of fact, even if we could generate one here, which is doubtful, all it would do would be to almost instantaneously evaporate.”
He glanced at April's expression. ”It looks like you're disappointed.”
”I am,” she said matter-of-factly.
”I still don't understand why you're colliding these hadrons,” Skarda said.
”We're trying to create in the laboratory the fundamental particles of matter that aren't stable and observable in the current universe-particles that were created just fractions of seconds after the Big Bang, the creation of the universe. There's just so much of the universe we have yet to discover-about ninety-five per cent of it is still a mystery.” He chuckled. ”Well, enough of that! I could go on all day about this stuff! So h.o.r.n.y said you're interested in supernovas? My specialty is theoretical particle physics, but I know my way around a star.”
Skarda nodded. ”Would it be possible for some kind of unknown element to be made in a supernova explosion that could come to Earth as a meteorite, and then be used as a power source?”
”What kind of power source?”
”I'm not sure. I'd say something pretty powerful, though.”
Ezra ran a hand over his scraggly beard. ”I think what you'd be looking at is what's called an 'isomer'. An isomer is an isotope, which is an atom of a certain element that has a different ma.s.s because while they have the same number of protons as the main element, they have different numbers of neutrons. So basically it's the same element with a different overall ma.s.s. An isomer of an element has much more internal energy than the normal state of the element. You can think of it as a highly charged-up version of the basic element.
”Isomers are usually produced in nuclear fusion reactions. Most of these are highly unstable and radiate away all their energy within a fraction of a second, but some of them are called 'metastable', meaning that they have much longer half-lives before they dissipate all their energy. The isomer of the heavy element Hafnium, for example, has a half-life of thirty-one years, and the half-life of the Tantalum isomer is something like a quadrillion years.
”What this means is that all the extra energy of the isomer is stored in the atom and ready to go off-boom!-if you can find a way to release it. So the explosive power of about a quarter teaspoon of the Hafnium isomer would be around seven hundred pounds of TNT, and this energy would be released almost instantaneously to the power of exawatts, which is measured in the quintrillions. You could heat a hundred tons of water to the boiling point in a split second and it would keep heating from there.”
He grinned, looking at each of them in turn. ”Cool, huh? And isomers, like all the heavy elements, can be formed in supernova explosions.”
Skarda's pulse quickened. ”But you said, 'if you can find a way to release it'.”
”Yeah, that's the problem, for sure. Somehow you have to pump energy into the isomer to get energy out. One way to do it is to bombard the isomer atoms with X-rays. Another way, probably better, is to use some kind of concentrated light beam, like a laser.”
”You mean, if you shot a laser beam at this stuff, it would explode?”
”Oh, yeah. Sure. Big time. Boom! And the cool thing is, the explosion shoots straight up, like a volcano-not like a conventional bomb where the energy spreads upward and outward from the epicenter.”
April frowned. ”So why doesn't the military make bombs out of it?”
”Because there's so little of it to be found naturally. And it's way too expensive to manufacture in the lab.”
Skarda turned the information over in his mind. ”So isomers can be made in supernova explosions?”
”Sure! A lot of spooky stuff happens when a star blows up. And a lot we don't know about yet.”
”Okay...so let's say a star blew up and created an isomer that doesn't occur naturally on this planet. Could it get here in a meteorite?”
”Sure, it's possible, I guess. But it would be very rare. But sure.”
Skarda turned to Flinders, giving her an ”okay” sign. From her pocket she pulled out a small metal case and opened it. Inside lay the chunk of the emerald pillar and its core of orichalc.u.m. She handed it to Ezra.
”Take a look at this,” Skarda said.
The scientist shook the piece into his hand and turned it over, poking at it with his index finger. ”Looks like beryl. Emerald, probably.” Then he angled the rock to catch the light, bringing it up closer to his face to study the red-tinted ore inside. He glanced up, his curiosity piqued. ”This is the metal you're talking about?”
Skarda nodded.
Ezra stroked his beard. ”Awesome! Okay, I'll tell you what. Let's sc.r.a.pe a little off and see what we can see.”
___.
Ezra led them down a series of narrow, windowless corridors to a whitewashed laboratory room crammed with equipment. From a metal bench he picked up what looked like a bright yellow hand-held radar gun. ”This is an XRF-an X-Ray Fluorescence a.n.a.lyzer. It's very awesome, like a tricorder from Star Trek. It will instantly give a readout about your sample.”
Flinders set the chunk of metal on the bench and the scientist aimed the XRF at it. ”Awesome!” Peering at the readout screen, he beat the air in a fist pump, then straightened and turned to the group. ”The outer casing is definitely gem-quality emerald. And the metal's an isomer, all right! Metastable. It's not Hafnium, but resembles it in structure. I think what we're looking at is an entirely new element! You've got to let me keep some of this-I want to do more tests on it!”
Skarda turned to Flinders. She nodded an okay.
”So this would explode if you hit it with a laser?” he asked.