Accidental Gods Read Free Page B

others in the room. She looked as if she had just come from a “Save the Rain Forests” rally. She had crazy blond hair and wore a dress that was not quite hippie but not quite mainstream either. It could best be described as upscale granola chic. She was, like Jules, also quite different from the rest of the core IACP team in more than just appearance. Her doctoral work in ethics at Brown already made her kind of an outcast in the group—not because of her focus on ethics, but because of her lack of a PhD in a “hard science.”
    “OK,” Ajay said. “I have an idea.”
    Jules started typing again.
    “Oh, really?” Stephen asked Ajay. He might have been too exhausted to be sarcastic anymore.
    Catherine turned in her chair and faced Ajay.
    “Yes,” Ajay said. “Hear me out before you start punching holes in it…or me.”
    “Proceed.”
    “People think of time as seconds, but seconds are a purely human construct. The universe doesn’t move in seconds. It moves in ticks.”
    He then drew four horizontal lines on the board, arranged vertically like ladder rungs without braces.
    “Think of each of these as a slice of the universe at any given time,” he said. “So as we grind out the evolution of the universe, what we are actually doing is ticking through small steps that represent steps through the laws—the individual motions of every particle in the universe—first one step, then the next, and the next, and so forth. This is all programmatic, so it really is stepping through each one.”
    Stephen nodded and ran his hands through his hair again.
    “So each of these ticks is probably equal to one unit of Planck time.”
    “Holy shit!” Stephen nodded more vigorously.
    “Yes. You see it now?”
    Larry frowned. “What the hell are you guys talking about?”
    Ajay said, “A single Planck time, as a unit, has two meanings, Larry. One is a unit of measurement, and the other is a point on the big bang time line. I’ll explain them separately, because they are both important—and interrelated. But I’m talking about the unit of time more than I’m talking about the big bang chronology.”
    “Look,” Larry said, “I don’t need to know all this.”
    “Yes,” Ajay said, “you do, because if I’m right, we’re going to have to design everything around this one principle.”
    “OK,” Larry said, bristling.
    He thought Ajay was a condescending prick, and Ajay’s proper British accent only irritated him even more. He spent half the time he was stuck in these meetings plotting ways to kill Ajay…and, less frequently, Stephen.
    “Planck time,” Ajay said, “is ten to the negative forty-third of a second—point zero, zero, zero…” He rolled his hand in the air in a whirling motion. “…zero one of a second. Specifically, forty-three zeroes. About one trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a half a trillionth of a second. So basically it’s a very, very small unit in time. In fact, the smallest unit of time we can measure.
    “In terms of the big bang, Planck time is the first era, which conveniently lasted only ten to the negative forty-third of a second—i.e., one unit of Planck time. Nothing about that first Planck unit is really understood. Basically, during this phase, things were tearing apart so fast that it represents a singularity—a singularity meaning we have some parameter approaching infinity as another goes to zero.”
    He wrote an equation on the board, studied it, and nodded.
    “This initial singularity from time zero through the first Planck unit of time is when the universe comes into being. During this period, the four fundamental forces—gravity, weak forces, strong forces, and electromagnetic—are unified as one universal force. At about one Planck unit, things start to blow apart. We don’t know what happened before that.”
    Larry, pretending to understand, simply said, “OK.”
    “Wait,” Catherine said. “Some would differ on singularities. I know you