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GREGORY BENFORD ·
found. Certainly having momentarily drained the energies of the brightest of
their generation, in pursuit of some solid knowledge, was an attainment.
Graffiti of the Hispanic regional cause marred a wall in the physics quad: a
poorly drawn map of the Western United States sectioned off and united with
Mexico to form a free territory for the flow of dollars and pesos and people.
She stared at it and the ideas seemed light-years away.
See the scenic photons fall, she thought and realized that she was woozy with
fatigue. But she biked up to the observatory to check on
Zak. He was his usual quietly earnest self, never happier than when he could
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slug away at a tough experimental measurement. "What've you found?" she asked.
"Not much," he said. "The flux is dying fast."
She studied the curves of light intensity, descending by the hour.
The trickle of light that fought its way out of the Cosm had shifted steadily
down from the UV into the visible frequencies. They had caught images with the
weak photons that came through, but got only a dim, uniform haze, no
structure. Now the emission frequencies were sliding into the infrared and she
and Zak had been forced to go scavenge more gear from Walter Bron to stay on
the trail of the pale fading glow.
She wished Max had given them more guidance about what to look for. She knew
the famous Enrico Fermi quotation: "Experimental confirmation of a prediction
is merely a measurement. An experiment disproving a prediction is a
discovery." But even such matters were minor, compared with what was at stake
here. They were sailing utterly unknown waters.
"Nothing in the visible?"
Zak had shrouded the sphere carefully and mounted a whole new battery of
optical sensors around it. "Still nothing. Peak's definitely in the IR now."
She fretted. It was easy to let your experimental acumen blind you. In the
1930s experimenters who bombarded elements with neutrons thoughtfully designed
their experiment so that their Geiger
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COSM
counters switched off when the neutron beam did, to minimize sources of error.
They missed the striking aftereffect; some elements gave off radiation as they
then decayed, rendered unstable by the neutrons. This artificial radioactivity
soon earned a Nobel for a less-fastidious experimenter.
"Let's look at this on-screen," she said. It was a simple matter to take some
elementary cosmology, which she had been learning at breakneck pace lately,
and apply it to Zak's measurements of the waning
UV flux.
"Here." She used a simple plotting routine to take his data and turn it into a
graph. "I translated the temperature of your UV counts into Costa time."
"Time seen inside, you mean?" Zak was still having trouble following all this,
not because he was not bright but because it was so bizarre. "How do you get
time from temperature?"
"Using standard Big Bang cosmology. It says that temperature drops with
time--in fact, inversely with the two-thirds power. I just transform that into
our time, an--no surprise--we should see the temperature decline
exponentially."
Zak nodded. "Because the two-thirds root of an exponential is still an
exponential, just a slower one."
"Check. See?" His temperature data dropped exponentially. "The idea that the
Cosm's time runs exponentially faster than ours still works."
"Y'know, the temperature we're getting now is about 300 K."
"Room temperature?"
The thought made her shiver. Inside the opaque sphere Creation's strange
engines were speeding ever-faster toward a shadowy destination.
The rate of time difference itself between the two increased exponentially, a
cosmic roller coaster plunging for the bottom. Already the light that had
fried Brad was no warmer than this observatory.
"Yeah, I'm getting counts only in the infrared. Even that's getting hard."
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