 Cover to Einstein's Bridge | |
| Author | John G. Cramer |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | hard science fiction, Alternate history |
| Publisher | Avon Books |
Publication date | June 1997 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback), eBook |
Einstein's Bridge is a hard science fiction novel by physicist and science fiction writer John G. Cramer.
The novel was published in June 1997 by Avon Books. The hardback and trade paperback were followed by a mass-market paperback in 1998. The novel is out of print as of 2016 [update] . [1]
The plot revolves around three characters, George Griffin, Roger Coulton, and Alice Lang. Set between the years 1987 and 2004, the book details the efforts of physicists George and Roger as they work to bring the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) online in Waxahachie, Texas. Alice is a novelist who becomes involved with the pair while researching material for her new horror book at the SSC. She and George fall in love just as preliminary trial runs of the SSC produce an unexplained phenomenon: a Snark, to borrow an expression from Lewis Carroll, or an impossible event, in the form of a heavy particle which emerged from the planned head-on collision between two 20 TeV protons inside the SSC.
In addition to violating physical laws such as the conservation of mass, this particle emits pulses of radioactivity, spelling out the numerical prime number sequence of 2-3-5-7-11-13-17-19-23-29-31-37. Therein begins the unraveling of an even greater mystery than the particle: a powerful intelligence is behind this event, seeking to communicate with humankind, which has unwittingly announced itself to the universe through the powerful bursts of energy unleashed from the collisions of particles within the SSC. For a while, first contact is conducted by a benevolent species. A different species is also working to make contact—a less benevolent one, who may ultimately destroy the Earth and perhaps even the fabric of the universe.
The plot does not occur on our timeline but in an alternative history—one in which the Superconducting Super Collider was completed in Texas. In reality, the project was cancelled in 1993 and never implemented. In this alternate history, American forces invaded Baghdad and overthrew Saddam Hussein after liberating Kuwait during the Gulf War (1990-1991), leading to George H. W. Bush's re-election in 1992 over Bill Clinton. The sinister significance of all this, and the relation of the alternative history to us, become clear in the end.
In reviewing the novel, SF Site said, "Cramer weaves a compelling tale." [2] Kirkus Reviews noted "Cramer splendidly demonstrates just how fascinating and mind-boggling real science can be, and shows exactly how vulnerable basic research is to political whim." [3]
Leon Max Lederman was an American experimental physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1988, along with Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger, for research on neutrinos. He also received the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1982, along with Martin Lewis Perl, for research on quarks and leptons. Lederman was director emeritus of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois. He founded the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, in Aurora, Illinois in 1986, where he was resident scholar emeritus from 2012 until his death in 2018.
The Big Crunch is a hypothetical scenario for the ultimate fate of the universe, in which the expansion of the universe eventually reverses and the universe recollapses, ultimately causing the cosmic scale factor to reach zero, an event potentially followed by a reformation of the universe starting with another Big Bang. The vast majority of evidence indicates that this hypothesis is not correct. Instead, astronomical observations show that the expansion of the universe is accelerating rather than being slowed by gravity, suggesting that a Big Freeze is more likely. Nonetheless, some physicists have proposed that a "Big Crunch-style" event could result from a dark energy fluctuation.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle collider. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008 in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and hundreds of universities and laboratories across more than 100 countries. It lies in a tunnel 27 kilometres (17 mi) in circumference and as deep as 175 metres (574 ft) beneath the France–Switzerland border near Geneva.
The Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) was a particle accelerator complex under construction in the vicinity of Waxahachie, Texas, United States.
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Physics World is the membership magazine of the Institute of Physics, one of the largest physical societies in the world. It is an international monthly magazine covering all areas of physics, pure and applied, and is aimed at physicists in research, industry, physics outreach, and education worldwide.
John Gleason Cramer Jr. is a professor emeritus of physics at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington, known for his development of the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics. He has been an active participant with the STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and the particle accelerator at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.
Roy F. Schwitters was an American physicist, professor of physics at Harvard, Stanford, and finally the University of Texas at Austin. He was also director of the Superconducting Super Collider between 1989 and 1993.
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The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question? is a 1993 popular science book by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon M. Lederman and science writer Dick Teresi.
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The Higgs boson, sometimes called the Higgs particle, is an elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics produced by the quantum excitation of the Higgs field, one of the fields in particle physics theory. In the Standard Model, the Higgs particle is a massive scalar boson with zero spin, even (positive) parity, no electric charge, and no colour charge that couples to mass. It is also very unstable, decaying into other particles almost immediately upon generation.
Particle accelerators in popular culture appear in popular science books, fictional literature, feature films, TV series and other media which include particle accelerators as part of their content. Particle physics, fictional or scientific, is an inherent part of this topic.
Barry Clark Barish is an American experimental physicist and Nobel Laureate. He is a Linde Professor of Physics, emeritus at California Institute of Technology and a leading expert on gravitational waves.
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Twistor (1989) is a hard science fiction novel by physicist and science fiction writer John G. Cramer. The novel was first published in hardcover by William Morrow in 1989, then in mass market paperback by Avon Books in 1991. It was reprinted by Avon Books in 1997 with slight revisions.
George H. Trilling was a Polish-born American particle physicist. He was co-discoverer of the J/ψ meson which evinced the existence of the charm quark. Trilling joined the Physics Department faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1960, where he was Department Chair from 1968 through 1972. Trilling was on sabbatical leave to CERN in 1973–74, where he worked on the study of the properties of charm particles, their decay modes and excited states. He was also director of the Physics Division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory from 1984 until 1987. Trilling was a principal proponent of the Superconducting Super Collider project and spokesperson for the Solenoidal Detector Collaboration. After the SSC was cancelled in 1993, Trilling transitioned most of the SDC team to collaborate on the ATLAS experiment at the LHC, which led to the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012. Trilling was elected vice-president of the American Physical Society, beginning his term on 1 January 1999, and was president of the society in 2001.