“It's impossible. We have made a mistake.” I muttered in confusion as I was studying the new report we received from the particle collider. Without fail, it had yielded such absurd and exceptional results that I could not believe my own eyes. My hands trembled before me, distracting me from the pulsating heartbeat that I could feel in my ears. My colleague and I had been working meticulously in our laboratory at CERN. For the third time, we had repeated the experiment with increasing precision and thoroughness. Yet despite our diligent efforts, the hadron accelerator still exhibited the same astounding results.
“There are no other possibilities. These results are correct!” insisted Simon van der Meer, my colleague and long-time friend, bringing me back to reality. My eyes deviated away from the graphs in my hand, briefly glancing over at Simon as he continued, “You don't know the impossible! The only rule in science is that the final arbiter is observation - that you just have to look at the world and report what you see!”
Simon was correct, of course: our beliefs don’t affect reality. The causal arrow goes the other way. Our results pointed in a direction that was clear and unambiguous. The new particles that we had just discovered did not behave like traditional subatomic particles, nor like anything we had ever seen before.
At first glance, the experimental results would have seemed trivial to anyone who is not a particle physicist. Most puzzling were the characteristics of these new particles, the W and Z bosons, which defied the laws of modern physics. The first and second laws of thermodynamics, which assert that the energy is conserved and that the entropy of an isolated system can only increase or remain constant, was not universal after all. We had just shattered the laws of the universe. More specifically, the particles we had just discovered were violating what we thought were absolute laws, but evidently were not.
Alone in the laboratory and in crushing silence, Simon van der Meer and I pondered the repercussions of this discovery.
“We’ll be able to produce more,” I said. As both experts in our field of research, we understood that once perfected, the technology that would emerge from this discovery would create renewable energy and thus permanently solve planetary energy problems. “Such a discovery is worth the Nobel Prize, and it will change the world forever. Reversing entropy won't be the last question after all!”
“Change the world, clearly, but...” he replied. He turned to me, frowning, “For good or bad, that is the question?”. He looked me straight in the eyes, continuing hesitantly, “I don't think we should publicly reveal our discovery.”
I was stunned. My ingenious colleague, who had already pushed science further than ever before, had clearly gone insane. “To not publish the discovery would be a crime against science. Imagine the amount of lives we could improve!” I cried.
He crossed his arms, took a deep breath, then added, raising his voice, “Haven't you learned anything from the nuclear ordeal? It is clear some countries have enough power to destroy the whole planet if they so wished! What will happen if we help develop a technology with the capacity to wipe out the entire universe? If someone can create a chain reaction that produces these particles, the reaction will never stop, and it will cause a domino effect of chaos! The explosion will continue to expand, endlessly, until the universe becomes a pure explosion of energy! A place of very low entropy, of course, but where life is not possible.” He looked heavy now, as if he hadn't slept in ages. For a usually reserved man, his emotional outburst was surprising.
After finishing his tirade, he asked, now in a calmer tone, "Do you think the benefits outweigh the risks? That it is worth worldwide recognition and making life better for millions of people? Wouldn't this put nearly five billion people as well as any extraterrestrial civilizations at risk of extinction?"
Despite feeling the vibrations against my chest, my mind was becoming clearer. I was silent for a few seconds, considering what he was saying. Yet, I reminded myself, the benefits and risks aren't all that matters; the difficulty of putting certain solutions in place should also influence our decisions. My gaze returned to him, “So, your solution is to establish a global science conspiracy? It is one of the main values of science that everyone should have access to information. Not to mention that even if we were to decide to silence our discovery, it would take a few years for another laboratory elsewhere in the world to repeat our experiments with even more precise tools to discover the same particles. Your solution only works in the short term.”
We were both silent for over a minute, contemplating years of research that lay before us.
I wanted to scream, or cry, or be cradled in my mother's arms and ask her what was the right thing to do, or scream what I knew from the rooftops and take the consequences, or ask God, or I don't know what else. Nobody should have to make such complex decisions with so many uncertainties and catastrophic consequences, and to give up their deepest beliefs in the uncertain hope of saving the universe.
Simon turned to me smiling, and spoke softly, “I trust you to make the right decision. The choice is yours, Carlos.”
References found in this story
[T]he only rule in science is that the final arbiter is observation - that you just have to look at the world and report what you see.
– Eliezer Yudkowsky
Nice one!
The ending paragraph seems strange though: Simon just argued that the universe is at stake and that the MC is wrong, and then hands over the decision?
I suppose that you want to put the reader in the shoes of the MC, but I don't think that this is a good way to do that.