“‘The world watches as a two-party government stalemate holds international science hostage. The People’s Republic of China offers the scientists currently abandoned at the American research base in Antarctica full logistic and scientific support for its threatened experiments, many of which have global importance.’”
As everyone exited Comms, murmuring excitedly, Dwight pulled Cooper aside. “An e-mail came in for you,” he said. Dwight’s regular corpse-like pallor had gone ghostlier, and Cooper’s stomach lurched.
“Is somebody dead?”
“No,” Dwight replied. “But someone’s charade might be.” He handed her a folded printout.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Attn: Cooper Gosling
Dear Cooper,
I’ve clung to the root for too long. I refuse to drown. I’ve ceased my activity on behalf of Bayless and Calhoun. I know it’s too late, but I hope it helps.
Sincerely,
Frank Pavano
De Pere Post Gazette
March 24, 2004
De Pere Students’ Correspondence with South Pole Scientist Comes to Abrupt End
Did you know that Antarctica is the largest desert in the world? Did you know that in winter, no planes can fly in or out of South Pole? Do you know how to build a snow trench?
Every year, the fourth grade students at Marshall Elementary School study Antarctica during their unit on the earth’s polar regions. But this year, their studies had been enhanced with personal correspondence with a scientist living and working at the South Pole.
Dr. Sal Brennan, a thirty-six-year-old astrophysicist from Princeton, had been communicating with the students via e-mail since September. He sent pictures and answered questions about his life on the cold, desolate continent. However, the students found their Polar unit merging into their U.S. Government and Civics unit when Dr. Brennan told them that, as a federally funded scientist, his experiment would be shut down as a result of the current standoff between Congress and the National Science Foundation.
“The students were thrilled by Dr. Brennan’s e-mails,” noted their teacher, Carlotta Beardsley. “They were constantly thinking up questions for him, and they’d enjoyed sending him e-mails about what they’ve been learning.”
When the students learned of the decision made by several scientists, including Dr. Brennan, to remain at South Pole Station in violation of the government’s evacuation order, and federal law, a lively debate ensued in the classroom, Beardsley said. “We are all heartbroken that politics have affected his ability to conduct research, but at the same time, it’s a teachable moment for the students. We debated whether Dr. Brennan had done the right thing by staying and about what would be lost to the global scientific community if he’d left.”
According to student Griffin Wakefield, Dr. Brennan was putting himself and others in danger. “I just thought, you have to do what the government says. What if he runs out of fuel or food?” Fellow student Diani Soltau, however, thought Dr. Brennan was doing the right thing: “You can’t just restart an experiment. I think I would do the same thing if I’d spent so many years working on something.”
the riemann hypothesis
Sal hadn’t been sleeping much. It was Sri, back in Madison, tussling with lawyers and subpoenas. It was Lisa and her team, who’d reluctantly left the joint experiment in his hands. It was his stake in the experiment—cyclic universe or bust—now in its final year, the third. Three. Pythagoras’ “noblest” number—the only number to equal the sum of all the terms below it.
Both experiments rushed forward now, in their waning stages, like binary stars mid-collapse. The e-mails poured into Sal’s in-box, an engorged river of inquiries. From Kavli at Stanford, from Lebedev in Moscow, from Princeton—even from CERN. From the journalist-geeks, from the bloggers, from New Scientist and Scientific American. And then the e-mails from the Russians at Vostok volunteering to provide telescope techs, even to travel overland to do it. Or the Chinese, who offered to send their own team of physicists from Zhongshan via sleds. Sal assumed the U.S. government would see these particular offers as posturing, but he knew better. This went beyond secretariats and embassies and politics—this was science. Everyone who mattered knew what was at stake.
Now Alek was sitting on a folding chair, his hands between his knees, tears trickling down his face. Sal looked around the lab. The fluorescents sounded like cicadas; one bulb flickered, trying to die. The hard drives hummed ceaselessly. And above him, the telescope clicked as it rotated on its plate on the roof, searching the sky, looking for the curls in the polarized cosmic background radiation that the inflationary theorists had been so desperate to find, and which he had, it seemed, found for them.
Sal and Alek had been up for forty-two hours straight. They had not eaten anything besides stale Chex Mix and Mountain Dew, and had ignored all faxes and e-mails, except one. Sal had just hung up after a four-hour phone call with Peter Sokoloff, his boss and mentor at Princeton, going over data Lisa and her team hadn’t yet seen, because they were back in Palo Alto, waiting to hear from Sal. He knew the rumors had been flying for months already—particle physicists, cosmologists, and astronomers all over the world seemed to sense something big was going to happen at the Dark Sector. That the research station was officially shut down—in “caretaking mode” while simultaneously being “occupied”—only made the anticipation more intense.
Dwight had set up the call to Sokoloff, and had kept the satellite clear for the four hours it had taken for Sal to painstakingly read out the data, line by line, to his mentor. When he was done, there had been an excruciatingly long pause.
“It’s five-sigma, Peter.”
There was another long pause. “Does Lisa know yet?”
“No.”
Sokoloff sighed. Sal imagined the sigh leaving Sokoloff’s lips, then bouncing off the pockmarked MARISAT-F2 satellite two hundred miles above the Earth’s atmosphere, before diving into the GOES satellite’s terminal just outside the Dark Sector. “This could just be synchrotron radiation or light scattering from galactic dust,” Sokoloff had finally said. “It’s too early to hand out Nobels.”
But Sal had heard the change in Sokoloff’s voice. Uncertainty. Not of the scientific variety—hell, that was their native language. No, this was uncertainty of the personal kind. Before they got off the phone, Sokoloff had added, “Tell your father before anyone else. Let him be the first to know.”
“You know he won’t understand,” Sal replied.
“No, Sal,” came Sokoloff’s voice from the satellite. “That is the one thing he will understand. I’ll call Lisa and hold her off until this sequester business is resolved. Do this in person.”
*