He nodded.
“The actual distance measured is microscopic.”
“Colloquially.”
“Yes. It’s much smaller than anything we can see with a microscope lens. And the measurement itself is ten to the power of minus eighteen meters.”
Another nod. He knew this, too.
“It’s the same distance that an electron hops between atoms in Dr. Tuinstra’s black hole model.”
“What?”
He’d started to offer her a danish. Now, the pastry tumbled back into its box as his eyes widened, interest gleaming among the flecks of silver, his eyebrows lifting, his mouth tightening around an inhale.
His excitement and his almost-smile were for her.
“Show me?”
She dragged her laptop across the table, her screen split between the holometer data and the University of Amsterdam’s paper. She leaned in to highlight the relevant footnote. Ethan bent forward with her—and then into a two-hour technical discussion that hardly left her with time to refresh STEMinist Online’s exposé post on a hotspot for responses.
“If we can establish a definitive connection between the holometer and the electrons’ measurements, or at least replicate the distance of Dr. Tuinstra’s hops during our experiments—”
Two hours became three.
“—and if the data confirms that space-time is definitively discrete, with the electrons hopping over exactly one quantum unit between atoms, then string theory will be proven false, won’t it?”
Five hours of data and a debate about what credit she’d receive on his first-author paper, while the pastries grew steadily staler.
Another refresh of the forum post.
Nothing.
Fortunately, the potential for the holometer’s readings to dismantle string theory held her attention on their project, instead of on the burgeoning stubble shadowing Ethan’s jaw, or the edge of his tongue poking over his lower lip with the depth of his interest and enthusiasm… or the continuing radio silence from STEMinist Online. They even finalized the layout of their cable network in the MEC hutch, and she focused on the electromagnetic placement of ultracold atoms, on the manipulable hop distances of electrons, on Hawking radiation, and on laser angles.
Mostly.
Seven o’clock, one last refresh of Kramer’s thread, standing to stretch out the kinks in her spine.
Post Deleted
“What?” She scrolled down the page. “No, no…”
“What’s wrong?”
“No, no, no, no—” Her clicking at warp speed through irrelevant comments on other postings returned nothing. “Damn. The original author who wrote about Dr. Kramer appropriating her research removed her post. It’s gone, along with all the comments. One of our best data sources just got deleted!”
She had a new private message from DataDominatrix, though.
No.
Attached was an image of a redacted non-disclosure agreement.
“Fuck—”
But then:ping, from her SVLAC email.
“Wait, maybe…”
