"So you see that we must proceed with the utmost delicacy on this matter," said Jacques.
Sam nodded and tried to setup her computer to attach to the large video screen on the conference room wall.
She continued for a few minutes in silence until Mathiason and several others joined them in the conference room.
"Hello, Samantha," said Mathiason. "I trust your flight went well?"
"It went very well," she answered. "I didn't know you were coming to this meeting or we could have flown together and gone over the presentation notes before meeting with everyone."
Mathiason shook his head. "Not to worry. I know you are doing great work. The results will speak for themselves I'm sure. I was at a conference in Cairo and just stopped here on my way back to the states. I am really here as an observer. Don't mind me. Continue with the meeting as if I'm not here."
"Just give me a few minutes to get this hooked up," she said.
Jacques was holding onto three adapters, trying to figure out which one went where.
"Does anyone know how to turn this on?" Samantha asked the room.
Three people got up and started milling around the front of the conference table.
"It will just be a moment," Sam said. "Do we need to get anyone on the phone?"
"They're all here at the moment," Jacuqes said. He held a long complicated chain of adapters and cables. He examined both ends and looked around the table perplexed.
One of the people near the front of the desk said something in German and walked out of the conference room to get another adapter.
"While we're waiting, let's go around the room and introduce ourselves. I'm Samantha Griffen at theoretical physics laboratory at Micron University. I've been assembling test results based on the measurements you sent me and the description of the problems at the collider." Sam pointed at the next person. Sam turned and busied herself setting up the computer. The attendees of the meeting introduced themselves as of physicists, engineers, managers, and project managers.
Mathiason introduced himself last. "I'm Theiroux Mathiason, president and CEO of the solid state products group at Thorne Enterprises. We've gathered out best and brightest here to solve the problems with the collider setup so that we can start tests again at the new 14 tera electron volt energies on time. I'll start with Ms. Griffen who has some interesting results."
"Just one more moment," she said. "Does anyone have the remote for the wall-mounted display?"
The German-speaking man who left arrived with a cable and two adapters. Another man left to get the remote.
"I apologise for the inconvenience," Sam said.
Everyone waited. Finally, Jacques was able to connect Sam's computer to the display. Sam tapped her screen and poked, looked up at the display but nothing showed up. The man who left earlier brought back a remote and pressed a red button on it. The display turned on and showed a red circle with a line through an image of a computer. Next to the red circle with a line through it were the words "No, _non_, _nein_".
"Just a few more seconds," said Samantha.
Mathiason checked his watch. "We're a little late starting."
Sam was flustered. Jacques said, "Why don't you join the web desktop sharing conference and I'll display on the screen."
Sam nodded and started swiping and poking at her screen.
Jacques connected his computer to the cables and adapaters and punched some keys. A picture of his desktop appeared. He tapped some more keys and a presentation screen appeared. One more click with a mouse and the presentation filled the screen completely.
"Ok, here we are," said Sam. "I apologise for the delay. As I understand the problem set that was described to me and the data provided, we are having an issue with the systems auto-dumping during test bunches." Several heads nodded around the table. Sam advanced to the next slide which showed some bullet points. She continued, "The issues seem to point to a two to three centimetre misalignment of the ring. No one has yet found where the mismatch is. Further, the dumps occur relatively late in the acceleration cycle, which might point to a misalignment coming after the tubes are running." Sam advanced to the next slide. "Here are some tenantative problem guesses that have been identified: a loss of geometry in one or more magnets, or a sequence of magnets, a loss of vacuum seal under load, a faulty electrical system, or a faulty sensor, or series of sensors in the automatic shutdown systems."
More heads nodded around the table. Sam advanced to the next slide. She said, "I've been running experiments on the clocks and the measurement sensors provided to me, included the list on this slide and the next slide. She tapped again to advance. Then she tapped again to advance so that several green checkmarks appeared next to the list of equipment descriptions. "Fortunately, Thorne industries provides a lot of equiment for my own labs so that these tests were easy to prepare and validate." Mathiason nodded. Sam tapped to show the next slide. Some red checkmarks appeared and the attendees who had been sitting back in their seats sat forward in interest.
"I've measured some discrepancies in the equipment marked in red here," Sam said. "These sensors that measure the proton bunches as they pass seem to be off of their rated frequency of approximately 34 megahertz by about four percent. This is highly unusual because they use a solid state oscilator crytal. In fact, many of these devices have been used in our labs without issue and have been recalibrated recently. They have spontaneously started to drift."
Sam tapped her screen to advance to the next slide. Two overlapping wavy lines where shown in a sequence from top to bottom. "But that's not enough to cause a problem of the magnitude we are experiencing. The frequencies I measured were easy to adjust with an injection waveform. This is standard offset calibration. Nothing to see here." Sam tapped on her screen again.
"Here I list some of the timing measurements I ran with a coil of fibre optic cable against some of the cessium atomic clocks that had a problem earlier. I measured some routine anomalies, but I was easily able to add a calibration offset through the usual procedures to bring them into line with the speed of light and get very accurate results."
Someone in the back raised their hand. Sam nodded. The man said in heavily accented English, "These are the same clocks that Herr Dieter found problems with." Sam nodded. "These clocks can be calibrated, but why would they drift so much if they are manufactured to very high specifications?"
Samantha answered, "The cessium-133 samples in every clock are always different even though they are very pure. There are a lot of variables in the local geode density. There is no real way to have an authoritative clock reference with only one clock. Only by synching several clocks together over an average from several sources can you get a very good and reliable measure of time."
The man who raised his hand said, "Herr Dieter has sent out several dissertations showing how much adjustment the clocks require and he says that he is constantly increasing the offset. Perhaps there is more to the design or implementation of the clock than the manufacturer is willing to admit."
At this, Mathiason spoke up. "With all due respect to Herr Dieter, we have found a lot of errors in his methodology. He's sent us data that we confirmed many times wasn't correct. The OPERA project rushed to publish results from Herr Dieter that were shown to be categorically false. Now, we admit that one of the clocks in the tests wasn't calibrated correctly. As Ms. Griffen described, you must use serveral clocks from several sources before you make any judgements. Especially on an internationally visible scale like this."
The man objected, "With all due respect, Monsieur Mathiason, Herr Dieter was upset about his published results. But he was certain that the equipment was calibrated correctly until much, much later when another manufacturer's clocks were used to verify the results. Herr Dieter was extremely emotional about the subject and felt badly to be sure. But we believe the clock problems were the result of your manufacturing process, not the OPERA teams processes."
Mathiason folded his hands and said, "I was on the conference call when Dieter was upset and explaining his results. We told the OPERA team not to publish their results. He was crying. I could hear him crying on the phone. But we had told them not to make fools of themselves."
The man said, "He was crying because your company witheld vital information and were not forthcoming until after the results were published."
Mathiason said, "That's not true. Maybe he was crying because his vagina was leaking estrogen. I don't know. We have always stood by the manufacturing excellence of our products."
The man said, "I don't think that's an appropriate statement about Herr Dieter. Especially in front of several women present." He pointed around the room.
Sam said, "Gentlemen, let's get back to my presentation. I don't know the status of Herr Dieter's vagina. I think we can leave genitalia and hormones out of this discussion. The clocks require calibration like any piece of equipment. We still have not found the issue with the equipment. Now," she said, tapping her screen to show the next slide, "here is a graph that shows the approximation of c over time from the lunar measurements from NASA." Everyone squinted. Sam said, "The most recent results I've run show that there is a slight increase in c since just before 2011 and it continues in minute increments to today."
There was a large noise and commotion from everyone in the room. Sam held up her hands to quiet the room. "Calm down. Calm down," she said. "Everyone calm down."
"What is the meaning of this," said someone.
"These numbers are obviously wrong," she said. "The speed of light cannot increase. It cannot suddenly increase. That would be disasterous to the fundamental rules of the universe. It is imposible."
There was still a lot of commotion from people in the room.
"Quiet please." Sam tapped her screen to advance to the next slide. "As I show, there are several results of this which I explain can't happen. So we know that these data are lying. First, we might say that space shrinking. That might increase c. The metre is defined in SI units by c, so maybe the metre is shrinking. Thus, light might move slightly more than one metre in the SI definition. Quiet!" she yelled. "We know the universe is expanding, I know that."
Sam continued, "Second, time might be slowing down. That might increase c. These two are a contradiction, by the way. You cannot have both." She kept raising her voice over the objections of people in the room. "Assuming that the universe is expanding, it's possible the local expansion is increasing even faster. Thus, perhaps relativistic effects on space dilation are slowing time down. It seems like a strange contradiction. But it is the opposite of the first theory.
"Third," Sam raised her voice again over the noise, "Third! There could be discontinuities in space. Perhaps a quantum gap. Perhaps Planck's constant is increasing. Perhaps an experimental observation has altered the outcome of some quantum processes that were previously unknown. Now that we have observed some interaction, we have collapsed a waveform in one particular way. Previously this interaction would have averaged itself out.
The hubub in the room grew louder. One man stood up and took the floor. "This is impossible. The speed of light must be constant because it has been derived from certain dimentionless measurements: the raitio of mass of electrons and protons, for example. Chemistry would be affected, the interactions of particles in atoms would be disrupted. Nuclear reactors would change the way they operate. This is silliness."
"Fukushima," said someone around the table.
Sam spoke up above the noise as the man sat down. "Yes, I agree. It is silly. We know it is a mistake. Where is the mistake? What causes the mistake? When did it start? This is the mystery.
"What is so special about 2011?" Sam continued. "We must get a task force to look for anomalies in manufacturing. We must look for changes in solid state nanotechnology. We must review our results from lab interactions in science from that time."
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