Interversal

1

Alex Whitmore stood in front of the camera and cleared her throat, very aware that this was probably the most important day of her professional life. In a few minutes it would be her job to report on one of the biggest scientific advancements in human history, an experiment that could uncover the fundamental nature of physics.

Her producer, Amy Santorina, was attaching a small microphone to her shirt collar. When it was fixed up to her liking, the veteran newsmaker shifted focus to fix Alex's frizzing hair. The young distraught looking young women was her responsibility. She wasn't the typical Global News Today reporter, didn't fit the commercial look. Amy could tell she was not used to talking into a camera with the knowledge that on the other end, was the entire world. Or at least a good chunk of it, sitting on couches and at office desks, in airports and schoolrooms, expectantly waiting to be told what was happening.

"If Al Roker can do this, so can I," Alex mumbled quietly, not feeling the least bit self-assured.

"Al Roker is one of the best there is," said Jake, the cameraman, without a hint of sarcasm, his pudgy face feigning indignance. "Like to see anybody do the weather that long and not go at least a little crazy."

"He did five years at Today," Amy remarked to Alex, referring to Jake. "He's got a thing for Roker."

"Oh. Who doesn't..." Alex added unconvincingly.

Composed was not a word that could be used to describe Alex at that moment.

It looked a bit like she had, not knowing how to manage this new anxiety, taken it out on her hair. It wasn't totally unworkable, that wasn't the problem. Just, it didn't help the young-looking, nervous woman. In a little while it wouldn't matter, because the experiment began in just a few minutes. But it was bothering her, distracting her from what really mattered. She knew she should feel excited, like she has when she first got the opportunity.

Standing there, right before it was all set to begin, she began to wonder what the hell she got herself into.

Hundreds of members of the press, scientific and collegiate communities were descending on Geneva in anticipation of the day. Professors, students and physicists, engineers, technical and support staff had come from all parts, a widespread and capable set of individuals from across the globe. Many had done something to help with the experiment, most in very small ways, and a very small subset whose job it was to oversee the whole show.

Each was there to see whether her or his work, worked.

More than just them, there were the science fans, people for whom the experiment was an important moment to pay attention to, who'd been waiting for today with just as much excitement, and far less understanding of what was actually happening.

The seemingly fantastic, always mysterious news about particle physics had been a topic on front pages, evening news shows endless conversation on the internet.

Many were excited, engaged, and anticipating big news. In fact the story had taken on a life of its own, a kind of modern day space race that had galvanized its place in popular culture. There was hardly a person who wasn't at least aware the experiment was happening. Its outcome had big implications for everyone on the planet, so word had gotten around. Alex was partly responsible for that as a science reporter.

And because every action has an equal but opposite reaction, there were also people who thought the experiment was a bad idea. Not just bad, but something more along the lines of catastrophic, and a misstep in humankind's arrogant scientific adventure. At first they were a small if not vocal group, whose ideas slowly creeped into broader appeal through social media newsfeeds, shared by the kind of people who tended to get their news through social media. Which is to say, pretty much everyone. The notion had legs, and it covered more ground with each day that led to today.

Things had reached peak crazy online awhile ago. It was anybody's guess if the controversy sparked by the experiment would spill over into the real world.

Alex, and most anyone who considered themselves to be educated about experimental physics, knew there was no actual risk in particle collision experiments. Nevertheless the fear some people had, misplaced or not, was very real. And it was driven by a simple, single factor. Because it was so hard to understand even the basic principles of particle physics, it was even harder to articulate to the general public.

There were by now dozens of Films, TV shows, books and written material giving a layman's education on the subject. And even though they were earnest in heir attempts to convey how the world works, they tended to leave viewers with the sense that the universe is powered by magic.

Which it very much wasn't, at least in Alex's view. The universe was what it was, and humans were only smart enough to have a vague sense of that. Even the smartest couldn't accurately sum it up. It was the brain's inability to comprehend the universe that made it seem, to big swaths of humanity at least, like the work of a higher power.

Not helping things was the Higgs Boson, better known as 'The God Particle', among the most mysterious particles yet discovered in physics, the final missing piece in Newtonian, large scale physics.

The nickname was a bad one, an intentionally sarcastic moniker coined by an American physicist twenty years before, when the publisher of his forthcoming book on the theoretical particle told him to make up a title for it. The scientist flippantly typed "The God Particle" on the title page of his manuscript and sent it to the publisher, who loved it.

Despite protests from The writer himself, and flat out insistence that the name was just a joke, it stuck. By the time the Higgs Boson was discovered during a 2013 experiment, it was so ingrained in popular culture that few people knew what it even did. And while it wasn't in any way God-like, it was incredibly important.

The Higgs was what gave atomic materials their mass. With mass came pretty much everything else, from gravity and electromagnetism to E=MC². Like God, without mass, there is nothing.

To discover the God Particle, scientists had to take extreme measures. One of the most disconcerting for the average concerned watcher was the fact that the experiment would, as they understood it, recreate the Big Bang at a very small scale. This would let scientists look at what happened at the exact moment the universe came into being, and the moments after. The Big Bang, they were told, started as an incomprehensibly small tear in the fabric of space and time.

Today, at CERN, scientists were making the biggest little tear ever attempted.

This logic was, of course, not accurate. Nothing was being torn in any way, shape or form. The experiment contained nowhere near as much energy as the Big Bang. But the problem was there wasn't a very good way to explain that to average, non-scientific people except to say "just trust us, it's fine."

And that, in 2018, just wasn't going to happen. Distrust of the scientific community was at an all time high. Trust of gut instinct was far higher, and this felt to some like Book of Revelation type stuff. It was the sign of the times.

Protesters showed up at every previous particle experiment in growing numbers, carrying signs and, always peacefully, making their feelings known. This would, somehow, incur God's wrath.

This was the audience Alex was about to report for.