Alice's Universe

By Terry Montlick

Professor Alice Sutton, a self-taught physicist, grew up in the Appalachian Mountains of southern Ohio. While still in her teens, she stunned the scientific world with her discovery of a fifth force of nature, with profound implications for cosmology.
She became a full professor at MIT in her early twenties. But her hillbilly ways and beliefs stayed with her, guiding her through mind-bending adventures in scientific discovery. This hard science fiction novel pulls no punches in describing the physics behind Dr. Alice's work.
Meanwhile, rumors circulate that she's built a time travel machine, and that it's locked up in her research lab. World powers send out their cloak-and-dagger operatives to steal it, as well as to kidnap Alice and members of her eccentric research group. Bob, Alice's hapless grad student, didn't realize what he signed up for.
But the bad guys have met a powerful enemy in Dr. Alice. In addition to her backwoods wiles and her brainpower, she has some unusual abilities which keep her two steps ahead of them, while Bob, our narrator, hangs on for dear life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Terry Montlick
• Release date: May 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9781737855903

Terry Montlick

Terry Montlick has degrees in biology and neurobiology. He has worked as a software engineer, semiconductor designer, cooking teacher, restaurant critic, and acoustical engineer.

Book preview

Prologue

Around seventy million years ago, a giant asteroid, now called Vesta, may or may not have been struck by a much smaller, denser asteroid coming from outside the solar system. This collision would create a slight wobble in Vespa’s orbit. The ricochet of the smaller, denser asteroid may or may not have put that asteroid on a course which, 40 years later, would cause it to collide with Earth and make a crater in what is now Central Africa. It would create the 25-mile-diameter crater called the Wembo-Nyama Ring Structure.

Vesta’s wobbling orbit would, 70 million years later, cause it to collide with Ceres, twice the size of Vesta, and the only dwarf planet in the asteroid belt. As a result of this collision, Vesta’s new trajectory would make it strike the Earth, head on, five months later.

Seventy million years before, in the region where the small asteroid may or may not have hit Earth, there lived a population of primates with prehensile tails similar to those of tarsiers. This particular primate would have been an ancestor of Homo sapiens. The small asteroid’s crash to Earth would have killed a breeding group of about a thousand of them.

1.  Hard Science

What I’m about to tell you is hard science. But don’t let that scare you.

By hard science, I mean hard science fiction if it wasn’t fiction at all, but really true. There are no fairies or wizards or dragons here. And it’s not hard in the sense of being difficult.

Okay, well, maybe it is difficult. I study physics, which can be rather hard. It’s particularly hard for me because I have trouble remembering formulas. That’s not a terrible thing in itself. Physics isn’t a memorization subject. The formulas do you absolutely no good unless you know what they mean and how to apply them.

But by the time I’ve looked them up, a brain hiccup leaves me lost when I try to return to what I was thinking. I have to turn back a page or two to recover the thread of my thoughts. Happens when I read fiction books, too: Which character is saying this? Is that the same person who did that other thing at the beginning of the story? Is she married to that other guy? Some kind of an attention-deficit thing, I guess.

Anyway, my life as a genuine budding scientist began when Dr. Alice slapped me upside the head in a seminar I attended. Lightly, but she still slapped me! Had I reported this, she could have been in serious trouble with the school. Corporal punishment is frowned upon these days in institutions of higher learning.

I’d never used the phrase ‘upside the head’ before. But Alice does. Dr. Alice Sutton, the eccentric physics genius who took the world scientific community by storm. My cheek stinging a little, I looked at her in shock. Here was a woman who appeared to be about my age, maybe five-foot-four, wearing faded, frayed-at-the-bottom jeans and a dirty maroon V-neck MIT sweatshirt, with mousey hair that hadn’t seen scissors in a while and a take-no-prisoners expression.

Who the hell let you into MIT? she spat. You’re a second-year grad student, and you don’t know how to do a simple 4-dimensional surface integral?

She was right. I did not belong at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I was way out of my league. Sure, I could talk physics shop pretty well. But when it came to actually working through anything, I froze. How was I going to perform any original research? I should transfer the hell out to some mediocre state school where they give you a PhD just for hanging in for enough years and producing a seriously run-of-the-mill thesis which superficially resembles good scholarship. At best, I could hope to teach at some community college.

She almost slapped me again, but I jumped out of the way. Jesus, you need help! she shouted. I’m gonna teach you something if it kills you.

Now I was a little scared. Maybe she would. I’d heard things about Dr. Alice that I couldn’t quite believe. There were stories. More like legends.

One claimed that she stepped out of a Louisiana bayou one day and knocked on the door of Louisiana State. She asked for the physics department and talked to them for five minutes. Two days later, she got a letter of acceptance with a full scholarship. Another story made the claim that she’d been a feral child in Mississippi and had independently derived knowledge of four centuries of physics without reading a single textbook. There were, as yet, no rumors that she had been raised by wolves. But the real story is, in some ways, much stranger. I’ll get to that later.

Some of these tales showed the markings of Tech student hacks, with dubious links to some ‘mit.edu’—fake, but official-looking—web pages. But one thing was for sure. She was a prodigy of the kind the world seldom sees. There she was, not even 24, skinny, with unkempt hair and dirty, worn sneakers, a once-in-a-generation phenomenon. I heard she would read an important new paper on black holes by Rovelli or Susskind or some other physics titan, take out a red Bic pen, and start correcting it.

Her own work in quantum cosmology was revolutionizing a major chunk of physics. She discovered the lambda field, which permeates all space. It was a brand-new force, a true fifth force of Nature. The fourth was discovered, when? An entire century ago?

The known forces of the Universe had been four: the weak nuclear force, the strong nuclear force, electromagnetism, and gravity. That was it.  They were enough to build our entire Universe. Or so it was thought. Some kind of extra force had been strongly suspected for decades, but nobody could pin it down. Except Dr. Alice.

Her equations solved many of the outstanding problems in physics, from the largest domains of the Universe all the way down to the smallest. Cosmology to quantum mechanics. Oh, and in passing, nearly all of quantum gravity. That missing link had been sought after for a century.  It was on par with Einstein’s theories of relativity.

A Nobel Prize for Dr. Sutton is a pretty sure thing. She’s a superstar.

I’ve got this feeling about you, said Dr. Sutton. And when I get a feeling ... She looked off into the air, then sharply down at me. You’re going to start working in my group. Next week, alongside the postdocs. I’ll talk to your current advisor, Dr. Greene. You’ll fit this in along with your regular coursework. There's a project there that I think you’ll find amuuu-sing.

I didn’t like the way she said this. She drew out the last word like some evil sorceress. Then added: We’ll make a physicist out of you yet!

With a half-smile, half-smirk, she turned around and left the room, clutching her notebooks.

My unasked-for relationship with Dr. Alice Sutton hadn’t started well. What was she up to? Did she just want to humiliate me? Or was there actually a spark of something semi-active in my brain that only she could perceive? How could I work at her direction alongside some of the smartest postdocs in the world?

I went to the 24-hour Student Center Library, plugged in my tablet and earbuds, and watched early ’80s Love Boat episodes all night.

Lauren Tewes as Cruise Director Julie is the best.

2.  Preparing for Alice

Ileft the library around 5:30 a.m. On the other side of Mass Ave., the Little Dome of Building 7 glowed in the rays of the Cambridge morning sun.

I stumbled back to my apartment stumbled back to my apartment in Central Square. Climbing the dingy staircase, I heard Hans bustling about. My roommate, Hans, was a visiting artist at the MIT List Visual Arts Center. It was ironic and yet typical of the school that this center, known for its merging of art with high tech, artists with engineers, had invited the only practitioner of the lowest-tech moving-picture art in the world, one that went extinct in the mid-20th century. This was Lumia, the art of projecting abstract moving light shapes on a screen. Most visual artists have never even heard of it. Unlike film, Lumia uses color filters and lenses and tilting mirrors to control each projected element. Hans had a giant mechanical console for controlling each bit of light. There were no motors; only his hands-on giant sliders, resembling oversized volume controls on a studio sound-mixing board.

The Center gave him a large space where he built a Lumia theater that held 40 seats. He composed long pieces of live art, usually with classical music playing with the light motions synchronized to the music. Each spot of light required its own specific lamp, mirror and set of classical music playing with the light motions synchronized to the music. Each spot of light console slider. He was the puppeteer pulling the strings. It would take him months to create a new Lumia composition, every one requiring an installation of new light controls and rope riggings to the console. It was amazing to see how different each composition could be. One with sharp, jolting angles. Another with soft, fuzzy balls merging and coming apart. He once used a dancer, close behind the screen. Sometimes she appeared black, with a sharp outline. Another time, moving a little turned her outline into rainbow colors. They separated to form several overlapping outlines of herself.

So, where have you been all night? Hans liked order and predictability and a regular schedule. I was usually disorganized and winging it. Though you might assume the opposite, it’s not so unusual for an artist and a scientist to play these respective roles.

I had a sort of encounter with Dr. Alice Sutton yesterday. I told you about our department wunderkind, right? The young genius who shook up the world of physics? She kind of shook me up, so I went to the Stratton Center library and watched old TV shows. Hans was not pleased. I thought he was going to give me a scolding, quite possibly entirely in Dutch. But instead, he turned his back on me disapprovingly.

So, what did this Dr. Sutton do that upset you? asked Hans. Not much, Hans. Just invited me to join her research group.

And for this you are upset? You said Dr. Alice was a world-famous scientist. Isn’t this an honor? A great opportunity for you?

Well, here’s the thing. I made a fool of myself at her seminar yesterday. I asked her a question when it was over. She asked me one back, I floundered around, and then I was stuck. And struck, in fact. Physically.

Wait. How did she know I was a second-year grad student? She’d never seen me before. At least I don’t think so. And how did she know that my adviser was Dr. Greene? Then she told me to be there next week. Maybe she’s on some kind of crusade. Some strange Henry Higgins–Eliza Doolittle thing. Take the worst student she’s ever met and turn him into a star. Or maybe it was something even weirder.

I spent the rest of the morning digging into research papers on the internet. I collected some papers by Dr. Alice and co-authors. But even the abstracts were intimidating. When they weren’t about odd features of galaxy clusters, they talked about aspects of the new cosmological model that followed from Dr. Alice’s lambda field. I already knew about lambda (the capital Greek letter Λ) as the cosmological constant, also called Einstein’s cosmological constant. At least, it was thought to be a constant, which means it would have the same value over all time and over the entire Universe.

Lambda was invented by Albert Einstein when he was developing his general theory of relativity. He found that his initial set of general relativity equations predicted that the Universe would contract under the force of gravity, rather than stay static. The generally accepted view at the time was that the universe was static. So Einstein added a new term to his equations which he called lambda. The value of lambda made general relativity compatible with a static universe.

Lambda remains an important number in modern cosmology. If lambda is positive, the Universe grows at a faster and faster rate, forever thinning out. If it is negative the Universe ultimately shrinks down to as small as it can possibly get. This scenario for our Universe is called the Big Crunch. It’s the opposite of the Big Bang, which is thought by most physicists to be the birth our universe.

Dr. Alice showed that lambda isn't just a single number, fixed over all time and space. It was a field, which could take on different values and directions over all space, as well as change with time. The force of gravity is an example of a field, and it certainly isn’t the same all over the Universe. If we were in a spaceship approaching Earth, we'd feel a stronger and stronger gravitational field.

Alice discovered that her lambda field wouldn’t permit a Big Crunch. It would instead cause the universe to bounce instead of crunch. Physicists call this scenario the Big Bounce. Different theories have been proposed for a big bounce, but all of them suffered one fatal flaw or another, and were abandoned. Under this theory, the Universe would expand until it reached some limit. It would then contract, growing smaller and smaller. It would eventually bounce and rapidly expand again. This cycle would continue on forever.

The new lambda field explained some puzzling astronomical observations—like Dark Matter and Dark Energy. Physicists knew something about these but couldn’t explain exactly why they existed. But now we know what they are, and that they’re necessary consequences of the lambda field.

Cosmology was one thing, but the impact of Dr. Alice’s discovery was at least as important to particle physics. Quantum mechanics requires that a field must always have a corresponding fundamental particle that creates the field in the first place. Kind of strange, huh? It was to me when I first learned about it. For example, the electromagnetic field’s corresponding particle is the photon, which transmits light. Now, particle physicists had a brand-new particle to investigate: the lambda particle. It fit neatly into one of the three remaining empty slots in the Standard Model, the table of all the known subatomic particles, along with their basic properties.

In fact, the lambda particle created the foundation for a grand unification of cosmology and particle physics. It provided a clean and consistent model of the Universe.

This particle had yet to be observed, though. But now that its properties were predicted by Dr. Alice, scientists knew where and how to look for it. They could search their old particle collider data for traces of it, or create new experiments that might reveal it.

How did Dr. Alice discover and prove her lambda field? I knew what it did, more or less, but how did it actually work?

There were lots of papers written about its consequences. A couple of short journal letters challenged its conclusions. But Dr. Alice had thought about these questions long ago, in the early stages of her work. She had all the answers ready and gave immediate and convincing written responses.

But I couldn’t find anything beyond the level of a finger puppet show (a la Scientific American) to actually describe the physical process by which it worked. It was time to bite the bullet and read her original Bouncing Universe paper, the one that gained her instant international recognition and acclaim.

Dr. Alice’s theory was pretty simple. Or so they said. All the stages of the universe’s evolution were neatly and tidily explained. Or so they said.

I opened up the paper. Yikes! Well, at least it was a short paper. All of nine pages, not including references. But it was nine pages solidly packed with equations.

I sort of understood the first equation. It had to do with what’s known as the Hamiltonian. The Hamiltonian approach to physics is very powerful. It was discovered in the early 1800s by William Hamilton, not Alexander Hamilton, with his famous Broadway musical.

The next equation, though, created a single Hamiltonian for the entire Universe. This was a little too much for me to understand.

And following this, the equations were pretty much unintelligible. The terms describing them were downright scary. Foliated spacelike submanifolds. Diffeomorphism symmetry. Canonical quantum gravity.

Holy shit. Get me out of here! I was in the deep water of mathematics, in well over my head and drowning.

As a mathematician, I was hopeless. I needed to practice more of it, badly. Well, not badly. That, I could already do! I didn’t have the patience or confidence to stop judging myself at every point, considering whether I was making progress or still roaming around in the same old bog.

In undergrad school, I’d had a roommate who was a math major, and I majored in physics. We started out taking the same core freshman classes in mathematics and physics.

I understood physics, at least at this lower level, and he understood mathematics. But neither of us could fully fathom the other’s subjects. We tried to teach each other. But eventually we would come to a point where we both got lost—in different directions. Why do you care if these two things are the same? How could anyone possibly think of applying that formula here? You use a variable here, but what does it actually mean? And so on. It was like we were from different planets, trying to work out a common language. We both failed to learn much of anything from the other.

Perhaps it came down to intuition. He had mathematics intuition but no physics intuition, and I had the reverse. It was like musical talent. Some of us are born to play Shostakovich on the violin. Others are born to play Pop Goes the Weasel on the kazoo.

It’s not fair! But since when did the world play fair? The problem was that I had all this scientific curiosity, a need to know how the world worked, yet I lacked the skill to accomplish this. All I could do was play the kazoo.

3.  Alice’s Lab

Monday, and time to meet my doom. Alice’s group had some offices in Building 36. To get there, you took a left at the end of the Infinite Corridor. Yes, that’s what it’s called. And yes, all the buildings at MIT have numbers

To enter the suite of rooms, you walked to the end of another corridor, a short one. A door stopped you from going any further. To the right of it was a keycard slot and a doorbell button. I pressed the button, and a comforting, old fashioned ding-dong sounded.

Yes? It’s Robert Goldstein, for Dr. A—

Okay, she said you’d be here, said a female voice. I’ll buzz you in.

I entered. Beyond the door was an array of rooms. A big pile of cardboard boxes mixed with papers lay to the left of the door as I walked in. Straight ahead was a T crossing in the entry corridor. In the middle of this corridor was a shiny metal door set flush with the wall. Other than that detail, everything looked like typically drab, old, early 20th century MIT offices.

The same voice called out to me. Over here! A waving hand poked out from the corridor to the right of the metal door.

A smiling young woman came out and greeted me. I’m Liz. Liz Chen.

I recognized her name from a paper I’d recently looked at, with Dr. Alice as first author. We shook hands. Liz was very cute. No more than five feet tall, she radiated energy. Liz would make working here a whole lot better. What a change from Alice! I think I’m going to like it here.

I’m really a mathematician, said Liz, but I play a physicist around here. I’m doing some work on making the Schrödinger equation nonlinear under an intense gravitational field. Like that of a black hole. Or, of course, a big bounce. There’s a nonlinear term that disappears under normal conditions. Did I say normal? Nothing is normal about the research around here. She let out a chuckle.

I wasn’t sure what she meant by ‘normal.’ Theoretical cosmology is far from normal, and neither are theoretical cosmologists, as far as I’ve seen.  

Do all the postdocs work on Dr. Alice’s research? I asked.

More or less, she said. But it extends in various directions, like an octopus. The Big Bounce model itself, quantum gravity, causal set theory, vacuum energy, Horndeski theory, and so forth.

I had no idea what Horndeski theory was. But I was sure I’d be learning something about it. Or at least who the hell Horndeski was.

Did Dr. Sutton say what I’d be working on? I asked.

No. But I’m sure she’s got something interesting in mind. She’s not here right now. She’s out at Haystack. And just call her ‘Alice.’ She won’t take offense. In fact, you’d start off on the right foot with her. She wishes everyone would refer to her that way. She’s still trying to adjust to the title of ‘Doctor’ or ‘Professor’ without cringing.

Haystack was Haystack Observatory, a large MIT radio telescope facility located in Westford, Massachusetts, about half an hour away. I wasn’t sure what Alice did out there. Again, there were crazy campus rumors. Something about closed timelike curves and time travel? Insane. So, what’s your thesis about? asked Liz.

I was afraid someone would ask me that.

I don’t have a thesis topic yet. I’m still doing coursework. And so, I admitted to being in kindergarten.

Don’t worry, she said reassuringly. After a week or two here, you’ll be overloaded with ideas. I can at least get you oriented and introduce you to whoever’s around. Oh, and give you a key card.

Liz walked to the last door on the left corridor branch of the T. This is the conference room.

In the center was a modest round table with a hole in the center and a bunch of ethernet cables running through it. Didn’t they use Wi-Fi? There were comfy-looking swivel chairs around the table. Whiteboards covering one wall.

Whiteboards are important for