Isaac Long had wasted his
entire life on one question that he now knew he could never answer—what did the
Big Bang look like?
Since graduating university
at the age of fourteen, he had spent sixty years seeking the answer. Isaac had
overseen countless launches of a variety of vehicles, each designed to be
faster and more advanced than the last, each equipped with the latest optics
and motive engines. No matter how swiftly he sent his sleek exploratory craft,
the invisible speed limit of the universe flummoxed him, as if each were running
along some cosmic treadmill, never able to get quite far enough away from
Earth.
While he knew his concepts
were sound, that the principles of what he was trying to do made sense, the
inflation of the universe after the Big Bang prevented Isaac from doing what he
had spent his entire life attempting to achieve. Each vehicle he sent had one
simple purpose—to get far enough out into the ether of the universe so that its
optics could look backward, to the center of all that was, and “see” the Big
Bang as it had occurred, however long ago. Some sort of quantum effect
prevented each craft from ever getting far enough away so as to be able to see
the big picture of the Big Bang. Each successive craft overtook the others as
Isaac and his assistants developed faster and faster propulsion, better and
better optics, and more and more efficient data transmission, but, as he had
feared early on and now all but knew, the universe did not allow his crafts to
ever reach the outer limits of its expansion.
Just as he was worrying that
his eyesight would fail him before he could succeed so that he would never
enjoy the fruits of his life’s labor and telling himself for the millionth time
that his idea should work and all his theory was sound, it struck him—sound! If
he could not see the beginnings of the universe, could he not at least hear it?
Like a mad sea captain
changing course in mid-journey, Isaac, with a renewed passion drove his
assistants towards a vastly different tack. He gathered all the information
regarding sound that existed and within a year found a glimmer of hope. If he
could sample the sound of the universe from a variety of different
perspectives, he believed he might be able to extrapolate the sound of the Big
Bang.
His hopes were dashed when
his assistants told him that they would need more years than he probably had
left to be able to send out probes that could sample enough of the ambient
sounds of the universe to give their quantum computer enough data to
approximate what might have been the first sounds of the universe. Again his
theory was good, and if he started the project, it would likely succeed, but he
would probably not be around to hear the results. In desperation, he opened his
lab to the world, to any scientist who might be interested in the data he had
thus far collected, and he commissioned anyone who would listen to devise a way
that the process might be expedited.
A week later he received an
anonymous message from someone who wanted no credit for the idea—why not use
the multitude of crafts he had already sent out to collect his data? He deleted
the message with a snort, disgusted by the message sender’s ignorance. Isaac
had equipped his vehicles with every type of optic he could, but naturally none
of them recorded audio of any kind.
He awoke the next morning and
realized he actually could do it.
Each vehicle recorded various
telemetry data, including vibrations in the hull and all manner of radiation,
and what was sound but vibration? The cliché that sound did not travel in a
vacuum was overstated. Every star and planet gave off energies, and all matter
was affected by vibration. While the human ear could not perceive the
background noise of the universe, the sensors aboard his failed explorers might
contain enough information.
Weeks upon weeks he spent
preparing his quantum computer, trying to devise a program that could collate,
interpret, and extrapolate all the vibrations and radio waves each craft had
recorded across the universe. The computer gave him its projected completion
time for the program to run. Naturally, he expected it might take weeks or even
months. Isaac broke down and cried when the computer reported it would take at
least a decade.
His eyesight began to fail,
despite repeated corrective surgeries. Doctors provided him with bionic ear
implants that enabled him to hear well enough. At last he tottered into the
room in which he had spent decades of his life and saw that the calculations,
extrapolation, and interpolation were complete.
Scarcely able to believe it
might be true, he instructed the computer to play its interpretation of the
sound of the Big Bang. Isaac had to play the audio three times before he
believed what he was hearing—it sounded organic, almost like a human voice. He
suspected his implanted hearing aids were playing tricks on him.
Isaac made the audio public
to see if any of his peers could shed light on it. Within minutes, he received
a message from a linguist. The sound was indeed a voice, speaking an ancient
language. The linguist believed that, although the sound was extremely
distorted, the voice was saying, “Let there be light.”
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