The Planck Factor

“Gosh, no, Swede. Who’s he?”

Swede’s mouth turned up on one side, but the half-smile quickly vanished. “You probably know that under Einstein’s theory of relativity, the speed of light is constant.”

“Yes, I know. I took basic physics, remember? Even thought about majoring in it, but philosophy was a better match for me.”

Swede nodded. “That’s right. Remind me. Why did you change your mind?”

“Couldn’t hack the math. Calculus was my downfall.”

Swede nodded. “There’s a lot of that.”

“Don’t change the subject. You were talking about Einstein and the speed of light.”

Swede paused, as if gathering his thoughts. “Have you ever heard of João Magueijo?”

“No. What the hell is that?”

“It’s a who, not a what.” Swede explained that João Magueijo was the name of a Portuguese cosmologist. “He was trying to figure out certain inconsistencies between what we know about the universe and the Big Bang theory.”

“Magueijo came up with this notion that maybe Einstein had it wrong. Maybe the speed of light wasn’t a constant. To boil it down, if light moved faster than it does now when the Big Bang occurred, it would explain a whole lot of things that hadn’t made sense up until then. Like the ‘horizon problem.’ Are you familiar with that?”

Alexis shook her head.

“Essentially, the background radiation in our universe is too evenly disbursed, too homogeneous. The universe is so huge, this shouldn’t be the case. The edges of the universe are 28 billion light years apart, but the universe is only 14 billion years old. If nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, heat radiation simply couldn’t have travelled between the two horizons fast enough to even out all the hot and cold spots and create thermal equilibrium throughout the universe.” He paused. “I get the feeling I’m losing you.”

“I think I get the gist. Just don’t start talking in differential equations.”

Swede smiled. A real smile this time. “That part doesn’t really matter, anyhow. That’s just the background. Suffice it to say, it’s a controversial theory. He’s been heavily criticized for positing it as a better theory than the ones that square with Einstein’s views.”

“Okay. And all this is dangerous why?”

Swede hunched his shoulders and leaned into the chair. “Magueijo wrote a book called Faster Than the Speed of Light. In it, he mentions that the research he was doing might end up being used to create a more powerful weapon than the H-bomb but dismissed this concern in a footnote. Under his theory of VSL--that’s variable speed of light--an accelerator used to produce Planck mass particles would create a bomb with half the power of an H-bomb. However . . . .”

Alexis waited. Her life felt worse than a Hitchcock movie.

“Magueijo had a footnote to this in his book. It said that this outcome was based on a certain factor in his equations being positive. But if he was wrong and that factor was negative . . . it would actually create a bomb twice as powerful. At least, in theory.”

Alexis drew in a breath. “So you’ve proved this theory? The one that could lead to . . . oh, my God.”

Swede’s head drooped. “Not conclusively, but our research led us to believe Magueijo’s worst-case scenario could be true.” He looked up at Alexis. “And I don’t think Daniel’s death was an accident.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

Alexis

“Wait a minute, wait.” Alexis held up one hand like a crossing guard. “Why would they, whoever they are, want to kill Daniel?”

Swede heaved a sigh and rubbed his forehead. He resumed his watch out the window.

“I’m assuming you meant he was murdered,” Alexis said. “Crashing your own car down a steep slope seems like an odd way to commit suicide.”

Swede squeezed his eyes shut and his brow furrowed as if conjuring a response took great effort. “We were approached.”

“Approached?”

“Three people who claimed to be with the government. They said they’d gotten wind of our research and wanted to know our findings. Daniel and I were suspicious right away, since we’d told no one exactly what we were working on. We asked them where they got their information, but they refused to tell us.”

“Could they have checked your records at Stanford and figured it out?”