Charmed Particles (17 page)

“It's much, much bigger than the accelerator we have now,” Abhijat explained. “Much bigger than the property we have. The current advances in tunneling, though, mean the Lab wouldn't have to acquire the land.” These points had been noted by the Lab director the day before in his announcement. Here, Abhijat's voice took on a hopeful tone. “No one would have to give up their farms or homes as when the Lab campus was built. Now we can just tunnel under these things, and people can retain their homes.”

Sarala looked at him dubiously.

“Oh, but you must understand,” he continued. “This is not a machine to be feared. It is something we should be in awe of, honored to have built here. Think of the answers it will reveal to us. Think of what it might mean for our family.”

Sarala was thinking of that. “But under our town? Under our homes?” she asked.

“Yes, but there is no danger. What possible danger could there be?”

But Sarala did not have an answer for this.

By the time Abhijat arrived at the Lab that morning, the staff had been summoned back to Anderson Hall where, just the day before, they had received what had seemed to them to be happy news. Again, the Lab director at the podium. Again the restless chattering among the staff in the audience. Again the director's hand held up to quell this, and then his voice.

“Many of you have likely seen the covers of today's papers. This is not how we planned the information to be disseminated to the public, but here it is and we must make the best of it.”

The day the cover story about the collider appeared in the paper, Rose, at the tiny desk in the corner of the kitchen from which she ran her political career, had begun to imagine greater things. With an issue like this, sure to galvanize the voters, she thought, she might—if she played her cards just right—have a chance next year at the mayor's office.

CHAPTER 12

Conditions at the Creation of the Universe

Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things. He is the God of order and not of confusion
.

—S
IR
I
SAAC
N
EWTON,
QUOTED IN
T
O
THE
H
EART OF
M
ATTER:
T
HE
S
UPERCONDUCTING
S
UPER
C
OLLIDER,
1987

I
N THE
WEEKS
SINCE
THE
ANNOUNCEMENT
ABOUT
THE
NEW
accelerator, Sarala noted that the front page of the
Herald-Gleaner
featured a steady march of articles on the history of the Lab, its safety record, and its scientific accomplishments. There were articles on land acquisition and the power of eminent domain, on the various methods that might be employed for tunneling beneath the homes and farmland of Nicolet. On the necessity for the Lab to secure the support of elected officials at the local, state, and national level if the project were to move forward. On subatomic particles like quarks and gluons. On the paradox of needing so large an instrument to study something so small. Abhijat had been surprised, then alarmed, at the amount of coverage the collider plan was getting in the news, not all of it good.

The decision about whether or not the super collider would be constructed was to be made, the citizens of Nicolet learned, not by them, but by the Department of Energy, which would conduct and then circulate environmental impact studies, feasibility studies, and would endeavor to gauge the response of the community to the idea by hosting a public hearing on the matter.

Representatives from the Lab and the Department of Energy were quoted, insisting that the path that had been outlined on the front page—in which the tunnel traveled west from the Lab's campus, running under homes in Eagle's Crest, under Heritage Village, and out into the surrounding farmland before arcing back around and making its way back to the Lab, passing under still more farmland, more homes, the elementary school, the junior high, and the high school—was only one of several possibilities still under consideration.

These same officials cited the Super Proton Synchrotron at CERN on the French-Swiss border, which had been constructed under French farmland, as a model, and as proof that there was no reason to fear living on top of such a facility.

Not long after the articles began to appear, Sarala noticed that the Editorials and Letters to the Editor sections of the
Herald-Gleaner
had begun, slowly, to be taken over entirely by the issue of the collider. Gone were scraps over increases in property taxes, rogue candidates for school board, and complaints over the noise produced by the cannons set off each summer during Heritage Village's annual Revolutionary War Days event.

The editor of the
Herald-Gleaner
would later come to remember the day of the super collider cover story as the last day the editorial pages featured content unrelated to the collider. From that day forward, letters about the collider began to arrive, at first in a slowish trickle, but that had been deceptive and unrepresentative of what was to come.

Throughout Nicolet, suspicion grew among the citizens as to just what the Lab was up to out there, whether they'd been planning this further takeover of the town's land all along. In place of the usual sorts of letters to the editor were diatribes questioning whether all of the public activities at the Lab—the cultural events, the butterfly gardens, the hiking trails—had only been naked attempts at improving the Lab's public image, luring in the wary public, who now eyed the Research Tower from their bedroom windows and imagined the superconductor snaking beneath their rec rooms, God-only-knows-what whizzing around below them as they slept. And then, once they collided, once they “succeeded,” what then? The end of the world? Dark matter? A black hole that would swallow Nicolet whole, leaving a gaping crater of nothingness in the prairie?

Since the announcement of the collider issue, Lily's letters to Randolph had begun to focus almost exclusively on the subject, providing him with updates and articles clipped from the
Herald-Gleaner
. The local unions, she explained, argued that building the collider would bring thousands of construction jobs to the area, and were thus in favor of it. Local realtors worried that the location of the collider tunnel under homes would decrease property values in the area, so they had come out against it. Most teachers, Lily wrote, supported the project, as did many of the citizens who worked for computer or high-tech companies. These people, she explained in her letters, surely understood the research possibilities the collider would bring. But farmers, Lily noted, were split on the issue. There were those who were grateful for the Lab campus, for the way its land, returned to prairie grass, was the only land for miles that had not been swallowed up by suburban sprawl. But other farmers, remembering the land that had, years ago, been taken to build the Lab campus, were wary of the assurances that they'd still be able to own and farm the land under which the tunnels would be constructed. And on it went, the town divided.

To Lily, it seemed obvious that the collider was not only a good idea, but in fact an essential one. She found herself perplexed by the response of community members who did not support it, and had begun to feel as though she were living among foreigners whose strange customs she'd only ever half comprehended. Sitting in the wing chair in her father's study, she wondered if that was how her father felt during his explorations. But, she realized, looking around the room at his photos and collections, he seemed to find these differences exciting rather than worrisome.

Randolph read Lily's letters with a mixture of amusement at this strange, curious daughter he and Rose had produced and concern that she seemed so entirely uninterested in the things one might expect from a girl of her age.

He wrote to Rose:
How do you suppose we might interest Lily in some of the more conventional preoccupations of young women her age?

But Rose, having never been particularly conventional herself, had been able to offer no fruitful suggestions. She remembered her own parents' letters about the construction of the Lab years ago, the newspaper clippings her mother had sent in the letters she'd posted to wherever Rose and Randolph were due to arrive next. For Rose, out in the world, in the midst of her adventures with Randolph, the whole thing had seemed like a story that was happening to someone else.

CHAPTER 13

Expeditions through Unmapped Territory

As the quantum physicist Finkelstein said: “As well as a Yes and a No, the universe also contains a Perhaps.”

—P
AOLO
N
OVARESIO,
T
HE
E
XPLORERS

A
LL
WINTER
LONG,
COMING
HOME
FROM
C
AROL
'
S
OR
CATCHING
A glimpse of her own home through Carol's big bay window as they shared coffee in the morning, Sarala had begun to think that her house did, in fact, look stern and imposing. She felt embarrassed that it had taken her so long to notice how spare and utilitarian the yard was—driveway, grass, sidewalk, porch. By the end of the long grey winter, her eyes craved color, and she began to make plans for changes come spring: bright flowerbeds to line their front walkway, a flowering tree for their front yard. She sketched it out on a piece of paper, borrowing ideas from the glossy magazines she kept in a pile on the living room coffee table.