She didn’t watch Ethan’s door to see him leave for a salad or a sandwich at the cafeteria. Shedidn’t. She changed positions in her chair, tried to ease the prickle on her skin.
At least the call with Nadine occupied her through lunch: the requisite protests that her supervisor shouldn’t be attending meetings right now—especially this early in her leave!—followed by congratulations to her and her wife Qadira, updates on the department’s interns, budget check-ins, routine project status reports (she didn’t mention LIGO’s detection of Hawking radiation, knowing that the topic would launch their discussion into an hours-long thought experiment, and if she mentioned Kramer… but what was the point? Nadine had worked with him for years, so she knew what she knew), and an introduction to the newest member of the Jamil-Fong family, happily burping on Qadira’s shoulder.
“Everything’s running smoothly at the lab? No scheduling or personnel issues?”
“One of the interns is asking me to be her mentor.”
“I assume you’re going to take that on?” Nadine shifted to elevate her feet on her couch, pressing a hand over her still-swollen belly.
“Of course. We can discuss it later, though. You’ve only been gone for—”
“Yes, I know, but…ugh.” Then, calling to Qadira, “Darling, can you help me up to the bathroom? I thought I’d be able to get a little work done, now that the baby’s out, but no one tells you that your postnatal body is almost as hard to manage as the pregnancy.”
“We’ll talk once you’re back.” Waving and wincing in sympathy, Erin closed the call.
Her watch read six minutes before one o’clock.
As anticipated, no time for lunch.
Continuing to ignore her stomach, she gathered her federal resources—computer, blueprints, spreadsheets—and set up in the Sidewinder conference room, then refreshed STEMinist Online again. There was nothing new on Kramer’s post, so she returned to her earlier review of the quantum gravity project’s reference materials. A holometer export was the first spreadsheet to expand over her screen.
Ethan had found Hawking radiation in her data yesterday.
What if she could discover something advantageous in his?
He’d claimed earlier that the standard deviation in synchronization readings for the device’s split laser beams was low. She ran the numbers herself, now: calculate the mean of the data, find the square of each point’s distance to the mean, sum those values, and divide the sum by the data point total—millions of readings per second. As expected, the standard deviation for the results was minimal. She hadn’t doubted his accuracy. He’d stated that the holometer’s results were consistent. They were.
They were familiar, too.
She opened Liesbeth Tuinstra’s paper beside the holometer data, scrolling past its abstract, introduction, and methods sections to the results. Tuinstra had hopped electrons along a one-dimensional chain of atoms, tuning their ease of movement and creating an event horizon, which produced a rise in temperature equivalent to Hawking’s theorized black hole thermal radiation. That, she knew. Skipping the discussion portion, she hopped herself down to a list of references—and there it was: the measured distance of the electrons’ jumps between atoms on the chain. Relegated to one footnote among hundreds, it wasn’t of interest to the authors, and she’d overlooked its significance earlier in her focus on the paper’s experimental processes. But:
10–18m.
Preliminary readings from the holometer on the size of Ethan’s units of space were almost perfectly aligned with the distance of the electrons’ hops.
Oh my God.
Kramer was wrong about many things, not least his belief that he’d get credit for their quantum gravity project—but also his claim that his subordinate hadn’t yet contributed data to it. Ethan had provided as much data as she’d done!
He just hadn’t known it.
Pushing back her swivel chair, pulse spiking in her ears, too eager to wait for him to return from the cafeteria, she hurried to the door—
—where she almost collided with him. He was carrying his usual messenger bag and a…pastry box?
“I found—” he said.
“Ifound—” she said.
“Sorry,” together. Then, together again, “What did you find?”
“…pastries. The Condensed Matter group is celebrating getting a paper intoNature Nanotechnology. There were leftovers in the kitchenette.” He raised the lid: flaking cream cheese danishes, croissants, half a doughnut. “Everything’s picked over and going stale, but there were no vegetarian options left at the cafeteria, and I’m assuming that you didn’t eat after your call with Dr. Fong. What didyoufind?”
Yesterday, he’d made her coffee. Today, he’d brought her pastries. And tomorrow…
Focus.
“I was reviewing our reference materials again,” she said. “You’d located the Hawking radiation signal in my exports, so I took another look at your holometer data because I wanted—well, you’re right that the standard deviation around the recombined laser synchronization readings is low.”
