the war channels and keep any sequences where my unit appeared. “So I was pretty sure you were having a safe, boring time.”
“So shall we find something exciting to do?”
“You go find something.” She picked up the plates and carried them to the sink. “I have to go back to the lab for half a day.”
“Something I could help you with?”
“Wouldn’t speed it up. It’s just some data formatting for a Jupiter Project update.” She sorted the plates into the dishwasher. “Why don’t you catch up on your sleep and we’ll do something tonight.”
That sounded good to me. I switched the phone over, in case somebody wanted to bother me on Sunday morning, and returned to her rumpled bed.
* * *
the jupiter project was the largest particle accelerator ever built, by several orders of magnitude.
Particle accelerators cost money—the faster the particle, the more it costs—and the history of particle physics is at least partly a history of how important really fast particles have been to various sponsoring governments.
Of course, the whole idea of money had changed with the nanoforges. And that changed the pursuit of “Big Science.”
The Jupiter Project was the result of several years’ arguing and wheedling, which resulted in the Alliance sponsoring a flight to Jupiter. The Jupiter probe dropped a programmed nanoforge into its dense atmosphere, and deposited another one on the surface of Io. The two machines worked in concert, the Jupiter one sucking up deuterium for warm fusion and beaming the power to the one on Io, which manufactured elements for a particle accelerator that would ring the planet in Io’s orbit and concentrate power from Jupiter’s gargantuan magnetic field.
Prior to the Jupiter Project, the biggest “supercollider” had been the Johnson Ring that circled several hundred miles beneath Texas wasteland. This one would be ten thousand times as long and a hundred thousand times as powerful.
The nanoforge actually built other nanoforges, but ones that could only be used for the purpose of making the elements of the orbiting particle accelerator. So the thing did grow at an exponential rate, the busy machines chewing up the blasted surface of Io and spitting it out into space, forming a ring of uniform elements.
What used to cost money now cost time. The researchers on Earth waited while ten, a hundred, a thousand elements were chucked into orbit. After six years there were five thousand of them, enough to start firing up the huge machine.
Time was involved in another way, a theoretical measure. It had to do with the beginning of the universe—the beginning of time. One instant after the Diaspora (once called the Big Bang), the universe was a small cloud of highly energetic particles swarming outward at close to the speed of light. An instant later, they were a different swarm, and so on out to a whole second, ten seconds, and so on. The more energy you pumped into a particle accelerator, the closer you could come to duplicating the conditions that obtained soon after the Diaspora, the beginning of time.
For more than a century there had been a back-and-forth dialogue between the particle physicists and the cosmologists. The cosmologists would scribble their equations, trying to figure out which particles were flitting around at what time in the universe’s development, and their results would suggest an experiment. So the physicists would fire up their accelerators and either verify the cosmologists’ equations or send them back to the blackboard.
The reverse process also happens. One thing most of us agree on is that the universe exists (people who deny that usually follow some trade other than science), so if some theoretical particle interaction would lead ultimately to the nonexistence of the universe, then you can save a lot of electricity by not trying to demonstrate it.
Thus it went, back and forth, up to the time of the Jupiter Project. The Johnson Ring had been able to take us back to conditions that were obtained when the universe was one tenth of a second old. By that time, it was about four times the size the Earth is now, having expanded from a dimensionless point at a great rate of speed.
The Jupiter Project, if it worked, would take us back to a time when the universe was smaller than a pea, and filled with exotic particles that no longer exist. But it would be the biggest machine ever built, by several orders of magnitude, and it was being built by automatic robots with no direct supervision. When the Jupiter