Professor Alice Sutton, a self-taught physicist, grew up in the Appalachian Mountains of southern Ohio. While still in her teens, she stunned the scientific world with her discovery of a fifth force of nature, with profound implications for cosmology.
She became a full professor at MIT in her early twenties. But her hillbilly ways and beliefs stayed with her, guiding her through mind-bending adventures in scientific discovery. This hard science fiction novel pulls no punches in describing the physics behind Dr. Alice's work.
Meanwhile, rumors circulate that she's built a time travel machine, and that it's locked up in her research lab. World powers send out their cloak-and-dagger operatives to steal it, as well as to kidnap Alice and members of her eccentric research group. Bob, Alice's hapless grad student, didn't realize what he signed up for.
But the bad guys have met a powerful enemy in Dr. Alice. In addition to her backwoods wiles and her brainpower, she has some unusual abilities which keep her two steps ahead of them, while Bob, our narrator, hangs on for dear life.
Professor Alice Sutton, a self-taught physicist, grew up in the Appalachian Mountains of southern Ohio. While still in her teens, she stunned the scientific world with her discovery of a fifth force of nature, with profound implications for cosmology.
She became a full professor at MIT in her early twenties. But her hillbilly ways and beliefs stayed with her, guiding her through mind-bending adventures in scientific discovery. This hard science fiction novel pulls no punches in describing the physics behind Dr. Alice's work.
Meanwhile, rumors circulate that she's built a time travel machine, and that it's locked up in her research lab. World powers send out their cloak-and-dagger operatives to steal it, as well as to kidnap Alice and members of her eccentric research group. Bob, Alice's hapless grad student, didn't realize what he signed up for.
But the bad guys have met a powerful enemy in Dr. Alice. In addition to her backwoods wiles and her brainpower, she has some unusual abilities which keep her two steps ahead of them, while Bob, our narrator, hangs on for dear life.
What Iām about to tell you is hard science. Ā Ā But donāt let that scare you.
By hard science, I mean hard science fiction if it wasnāt fiction at all, but really true. There are no fairies or wizards or dragons here. And itās not hard in the sense of being difficult.
Okay, well, maybe it is difficult. I study physics, which can be rather hard. Itās particularly hard for me because I have trouble remembering formulas. Thatās not a terrible thing in itself. Physics isnāt a memorization subject. The formulas do you absolutely no good unless you know what they mean and how to apply them.
But by the time Iāve looked them up, a brain hiccup leaves me lost when I try to return to what I was thinking. I have to turn back a page or two to recover the thread of my thoughts. Happens when I read fiction books, too: Which character is saying this? Is that the same person who did that other thing at the beginning of the story? Is she married to that other guy? Some kind of an attention-deficit thing, I guess.
Anyway, my life as a genuine budding scientist began when Dr. Alice slapped me upside the head in a seminar I attended. Lightly, but she still slapped me! Had I reported this, she could have been in serious trouble with the school. Corporal punishment is frowned upon these days in institutions of higher learning.
Iād never used the phrase āupside the headā before. But Alice does. Dr. Alice Sutton, the eccentric physics genius who took the world scientific community by storm. My cheek stinging a little, I looked at her in shock. Here was a woman who appeared to be about my age, maybe five-foot-four, wearing faded, frayed-at-the-bottom jeans and a dirty maroon V-neck MIT sweatshirt, with mousey hair that hadnāt seen scissors in a while and a take-no-prisoners expression.
āWho the hell let you into MIT?ā she spat. āYouāre a second-year grad student, and you donāt know how to do a simple 4-dimensional surface integral?ā
She was right. I did not belong at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I was way out of my league. Sure, I could talk physics shop pretty well. But when it came to actually working through anything, I froze. How was I going to perform any original research? I should transfer the hell out to some mediocre state school where they give you a Ph.D. just for hanging in for enough years and producing a seriously run-of-the-mill thesis that superficially resembles good scholarship. At best, I could hope to teach at some community college.
She almost slapped me again, but I jumped out of the way. āJesus, you need help!ā she shouted. āIām gonna teach you something if it kills you.ā
Now I was a little scared. Maybe she would. Iād heard things about Dr. Alice that I couldnāt quite believe. There were stories. More like legends.
One claimed that she stepped out of a Louisiana bayou and knocked on the door of Louisiana State. She asked for the physics department and talked to them for five minutes. Two days later, she got a letter of acceptance with a full scholarship. Another story made the claim that sheād been a feral child in Mississippi and had independently derived knowledge of four centuries of physics without reading a single textbook. There were, as yet, no rumors that she had been raised by wolves. But the real story is, in some ways, much stranger. Iāll get to that later.
Some of these tales showed the markings of Tech student hacks, with dubious links to some āmit.eduāāfake, but official-lookingāweb pages. But one thing was for sure. She was a prodigy of the kind the world seldom sees. There she was, not even 24, skinny, with unkempt hair and dirty, worn sneakers, a once-in-a-generation phenomenon. I heard she would read an important new paper on black holes by Rovelli or Susskind or some other physics titan, take out a red Bic pen, and start correcting it.
Her own work in quantum cosmology was revolutionizing a major chunk of physics. She discovered the lambda field, which permeates all space. It was a brand-new force, a true fifth force of nature. The fourth was discovered, when? An entire century ago?
The known forces of the Universe had been four: the weak nuclear force, the strong nuclear force, electromagnetism, and gravity. That was it. They were enough to build our entire Universe. Or so it was thought. Some kind of extra force had been strongly suspected for decades, but nobody could pin it down. Except Dr. Alice.
Her equations solved many of the outstanding problems in physics, from the largest domains of the Universe all the way down to the smallest. Cosmology to quantum mechanics. Oh, and in passing, nearly all of quantum gravity. That missing link had been sought after for a century.Ā It was on par with Einsteinās theories of relativity.
A Nobel Prize for Dr. Sutton is a pretty sure thing. Sheās a superstar.
āIāve got this feeling about you,ā said Dr. Sutton. āAnd when I get a feeling ā¦ā She looked off into the air, then sharply down at me. āYouāre going to start working in my group. Next week, alongside the postdocs. Iāll talk to your current advisor, Dr. Greene. Youāll fit this in along with your regular coursework. There's a project there that I think youāll find amuuu-sing.ā
I didnāt like the way she said this. She drew out the last word like some evil sorceress. Then added: āWeāll make a physicist out of you yet!ā
With a half-smile, half-smirk, she turned around and left the room, clutching her notebooks.
My unasked-for relationship with Dr. Alice Sutton hadnāt started well. What was she up to? Did she just want to humiliate me? Or was there actually a spark of something semi-active in my brain that only she could perceive? How could I work at her direction alongside some of the smartest postdocs in the world?
I went to the 24-hour Student Center Library, plugged in my tablet and earbuds, and watched early ā80s Love Boat episodes all night.
Lauren Tewes as Cruise Director Julie is the best.
āAliceās Universeā by Terry Montlick
Ā
I enjoyed this story for many reasons. Unfortunately, itās a book that doesnāt quite know what it wants to be; it hovers between two different genres little interconnection between the two associated readerships. The author hasnāt made up his mind whether heās writing super-hard-science Sci-Fi or near-future Fantasy Action-Adventure. So, the beginning of the book is filled with enough cosmological philosophy and quantum mechanics to boggle Stephen Hawkings, with an unsophisticated plotline with good action and great characters.Ā
The main character, Alice, is a super-genius omni-scientist at MIT. The narrator is a grad student who doesnāt seem to know much about anything, but for some never-to-be-revealed reason she asks him to become part of her elite team. She is working on a super-secret project that will eventually have all sorts of spies, free-lancers, business magnates, and the whole kitchen sink of action-adventure novel secondary characters involved. Oh, yes and her mumbo-jumbo-woman mother, who brings an Ozark magic spin to the micro- and macro-physical elements of the plot.Ā
The author actually pulls that connection off cleanly; as far as most of us are concerned, the world of the muon and particle physics might as well be swamp magic.Ā
But in order to get to the real story, we must wade through a morass of all the decaying theories that have been posited about the beginning of the universe. Also, those that may have been proposed and tossed out, and Iām sure many that will be suggested, but only come into being when the author crosses the line between science and fantasy.Ā
The reader starts out trying to follow the scientific arguments. This is entertaining to those of us who have actually read Hawkingās work, but it soon palls when we become avalanched with Einsteinās cosmological constant, four-dimensional surface integrals, the Big Bang, the Big Crunch, and the Big Bounce (at which point I believe we have crossed the line mentioned in the last paragraph).
But the characters keep us going. There are enough kooks, weirdos, and genuinely different people to populate a tent camp for the homeless and the Philosophy department of an elite university. The main character, Alice ā part super-scientist, part juju woman ā is fascinating. She is only eclipsed by the narratorās handicapped sister, for whom āautismā is a far too simplistic diagnosis. These and other characters are jumbled together in a light-hearted, off-beat, and endearing mĆ©lange that actually fits together in their search for, among other things, a truly random number.Ā
Reading this book is like attending a physics lecture taught by a standup comic. If you can follow it, itās a whole lot of fun.
Ā
Ā