Twenty Unusual Short Stories. Dr. Donald D. Hook

can’t give you a full demonstration at this time,” said Professor Lamont. “We still have some adjustments to make before the real run on the 16^th; however, I could rev things up just a bit below full speed to give you an idea of the collider’s power and the sound of its functioning, which is usually little more than a loud hum. Its working is most obvious here at one of the intersections. We tried it out yesterday, and everything checked out. What do you say? Would you like that?”

      “Oh, yes, by all means,” enthused Williams. “Let’s have a go at it.”

      “Just a moment while I notify the control room,” said Lamont, as he spoke into a handheld device much like a cell phone.

      The first sounds to become audible were a clicking mixed with the hum mentioned earlier. Suddenly, the hum became ever so much louder until the control operator, who must have been aware of it in his booth, shut everything down and came out to where Doctors Lamont and Williams had been standing and talking. I say “had been” because they weren’t there any more. Instead of the men there were only two grease spots on the floor and next to them a pair of glasses and a handful of hair.

      The investigation that followed satisfied all concerned that no strangelet had been involved, yet there was a question of a possible leak at the intersection that produced a tiny black hole. Further research seemed to bear out this possibility because it is believed that the smallest mass a black hole could have is of the order of the Planck mass, which is about 2 x 10^-8 kg or 1.1 x 10¹⁹ GeV/c². At this scale the black hole thermodynamic formulae predict the mini black hole would have an entropy of only 4 nats; a Hawking temperature of T_p/8, requiring thermal energy quanta comparable in energy to almost the mass of the entire mini black hole; and a Compton wavelength equal to the black hole’s Schwarzschild radius (this distance being equal to the Planck length). This is the point where a classical gravitational description of the object stops being retrievable with merely small quantum corrections, but in effect completely breaks down.

      The article that came out in the Times two weeks later, written by a young reporter by the name of Sarah Goldberg, said only that famed physicist Dr. William Williams had mysteriously disappeared in Geneva with the director of CERN.

      (From Reflections, Images, and Forecasts: Short Stories and Psychograms, by Donald D. Hook, Wildwechsel Books, 2009.)