Section 3: It Really Was No Miracle
Torchwood Nova Scotia; Truro, Nova Scotia, Canada
Wednesday, February 27, 2020
Luc Sarkisian reviewed the results. A part of him expected the information to change. He'd seen the crazy and the incomprehensible. Time travel and temporal physics were things he'd previously attributed to bad science fiction. Working with Torchwood Three shook everything he thought he knew.
Reviewing the information on Torchwood Four forced him to consider the implications of manipulating time. What they knew was the building had a quantum entanglement energy source. Something disrupted it. What he couldn't decide was cause and effect. He couldn't shake the idea that a variable was unknown.
Spooky action at a distance, as Einstein once insulted, was a paradox. Anything involving time travel or temporal change should be impossible because of paradox. He wondered if the two were governed by the sample principals. Which gave him no more of an idea how it was possible than before, but it suggested a connection. He could only guess that there had to be some type of balance.
"Have you ever played Jenga?"
"The game with the wooden pieces?" Anwen asked.
"Yes. It starts with a solid rectangle comprised of blocks. Each player removes a block from the tower and places it in top. Changing the arrangement makes the tower unstable. One person can remove a difficult piece and not knock over the tower. Another person could try for an easy piece and knock it over."
"Okay."
"The problem appears to be Jenga at the quantum level. That's really really small physics. Quantum entanglement is particles connected at a distance for reasons that don't currently make sense. If the entanglement was a Jenga game, then the blocks are connected to other blocks in the tower in a way we can't see or measure. Moving a block from the upper left side could do nothing or it could cause one at the bottom right to disappear."
"The system wouldn't be stable," John said.
"Time travel is theoretically impossible. Quantum entanglement is screwed up, but it doesn't completely violate the Laws of Physics."
John groaned. "How do we fix it?"
"It was stable at one point. Which means it could be and probably should be." Luc reviewed the model on his computer. Kailen had been unable to program a scenerio that worked. He could only guess and he hated guessing. "Studying quantum entanglement is difficult because the act of studying it disrupts it. I think the power source was disrupted by another process that works the same way. As the result of the entanglement destabilizing was a time distortion, I'm thinking the two things are related."
"The CN, Rift Energy and chronon cocktail somehow interacted with Four, trapping us in its time distortion." John sounded tired. "Could the portal device have done it?"
"I don't think so. Several people have all use portal devices without a problem. There is evidence that other devices have been used." Luc hesitated. It was all very unscientific. "I think there is another device. Intentional or not, it came through the Rift and is affecting everything based on the same physics as Four's power source. Its probably passive."
"An observation device."
"Occam's Razor. Somewhat. Applying the least amount of assumptions to guess work."
"Then we have to block the observation. Pending the power source is stable, it would fix itself."
"Yeah."
Anwen swore. Luc had no idea what language. From talking to John, Anwen was drawing from his memories, and didn't know what language she was using. Which him wonder about Penrose's crazy theories about consciousness being another form of physics. The idea gave him a headache. "How do we block a device that operates on a part of reality we can't interact with?"
"We have to figure out what we're dealing with first. Scientists study dark matter by evaluating how it effects everything around it. It was discovered because of gravity. We understand gravity, or think we do, therefore, we use what we know to attempt to understand what we don't."
"Planetary physics vary by area of the universe, time…" John trailed off. "CN is energy contamination caused by creatures that travel through the Rift. Jack and I have chronons, or time energy, and have been affected by traveling through time and space. The first oddity was a result of me getting trapped in the Rift using a portal device that malfunctioned and Anwen rescuing me. That event connected us."
Luc rubbed his temples. "A disruption of the local Laws of Physics?"
"Do you have a better idea?"
"No." The conversation with an agreement that John would coordinate with Jack. It was difficult to solve a problem when he had trouble believing the problem was possible.
Eryn walked up behind him, and rested her hands on his shoulders. "Any luck?"
"No."
"I want to see this band tonight. Its a midweek promotional thing. Aman and Kailen have something planned." She sighed. "I'm being selfish. A kid is trapped and wants to get home."
Luc reached up and set one of his hands over hers. "I can't fix what I don't understand. Where's the band?"