—E.M.
Next, he moved into a shared view of his nemesis and new collaborator’s calendar. Meetings and deep work blocks populated beside his own schedule, an overlapping clutter of dates and times that realistically should’ve safeguarded him from ever colliding with Erin by the coffee machine. That hadn’t worked out.
They were both free in the midafternoon on Wednesdays and Thursdays, however. It was tempting to set a regular meeting from seven to nine o’clock on Saturday nights. He’d never run the risk of seeing her in the Wine Room again, or at Salt & Straw… although if Erin couldn’t be at the bar or the creamery, neither could he. In making her life miserable, he’d also shoot himself in the foot. Still, he considered it. But eventually he scheduled a preliminary project period on Wednesday afternoons.
Meeting (Recurring):Quantum Gravity Work Block
Day/Time:Wednesdays, 1:00 p.m.–3:45 p.m.
Location:Sidewinder Conference Room
Required Attendees:Dr. Ethan Meyer, Dr. Erin Monaghan
Almost immediately, a message from SVLAC’s internal communications channel zipped onto his monitor.
Dr. Erin Monaghan
I was scheduling a block.
Dr. Ethan Meyer
It’s already done. Time management isn’t your strength.
Her response was to decline his invitation and send a new one.
Meeting (Recurring):Quantum Gravity Work Block
Day/Time:Wednesdays, 1:05 p.m.–3:50 p.m.
Location:Sidewinder Conference Room
Required Attendees:Dr. Erin Monaghan, Dr. Ethan Meyer
That’s how she wanted to play this?
Fine.
14
His week was… difficult.
Ethan had copied and pasted a paper—with its hundreds of theoretical and numerical footnotes—on lab-generated black hole models into a shared virtual document to assess its research potential for their project, and every time he opened it to make comments on the temperatures and methods required to cool atoms for use as quantum simulators, every time he drafted equations to calculate the necessary strength of an electromagnet to manipulate those experimental particles, Erin Monaghan’s cursor was inline beside his.
It wasaggravating.
But he couldn’t deny that it was Erin who’d learned of the paper’s existence prior to its publication inPhysical Review Research. She’d leveraged her network of astrophysicists to connect with an astronomy associate at Sonnenborgh Observatory, who knew a researcher from the University of Amsterdam whose work was relevant to their own strain of proposed inquiry into the quantum gravity paradox. This was Dr. Liesbeth Tuinstra, whose studies centered on tuning the ease with which electrons hopped along one-dimensional chains of atoms, which caused certain physical properties to vanish and effectively created lab-generated models of a black hole’s event horizon—including Stephen Hawking’s theorized thermal radiation—by interfering with the wave-like nature of the electrons.
So, yes, he acknowledged her contributions to their work. She was always in his—their—document, however. Watching him think. Not that she wasn’t analyzing how they might replicate aspects of Tuinstra’s research by using ultracold atoms to facilitate greater experimental control over the black hole model and its matter, too.
But still.
He skipped his cursor down a line. Hers followed. As did his desk.
“Stopdoingthat.”
He stepped back from his screen and rubbed a hand over his neck while his desk locked in its height.Blink,blinkwent Erin’s cursor. He had to admit that she’d made impressive use of the resources at her disposal, galvanizing her network to identify crucial work on their topic before it was publicly available—but it was his own expertise with atomic manipulation that would put their ideas into practice.
Req. temperature of atoms: 0 degrees, he noted now in the document’s margin.
