The notebook's last entry: "Day 251. The reactor spectrum is wrong. High frequencies drop off. Classical formulas break down here too. I have to rediscover quantum mechanics." I don't remember writing that. But the handwriting is mine.
G is different here. That's what the satellites proved. But G is just one thread. Pull it and the whole fabric unravels. If gravity is different, what about electromagnetism? What about Planck's constant? What about the speed of light?
The reactor. The reactor is still running. I can hear it from here — a low hum, but the pitch is wrong. Too high. The reactor was designed for solar-system physics. If the constants are different here, the reactor's behavior should be different too.
The reactor temperature is 5800K — same as the Sun's surface. But the power output doesn't match. Energy has to go somewhere. Where is it going? I need to measure the radiation spectrum.
Classical physics predicts: the higher the frequency, the stronger the radiation. Ultraviolet, X-rays — energy should approach infinity. This is the Rayleigh-Jeans law. It works at low frequencies. At high frequencies, it's a disaster.
In 1900, Planck faced the same problem. Classical physics said the blackbody spectrum should diverge at high frequencies. But measurements showed a peak, then a drop. The ultraviolet catastrophe. Planck's solution: energy is quantized. E = hν. A desperate mathematical trick.
I'm about to redo Planck's experiment. Not in a lab on Earth. In a reactor room on a drifting ship, in a local domain where physics itself is different. If h — Planck's constant — has a different value here, then quantum mechanics itself is different. Atoms are different. Chemistry is different. Reality is different.
- Measure the reactor temperature
- Measure the radiation spectrum
- Compare classical vs quantum predictions
- Discover Planck's constant in this domain
The same experiment that broke classical physics on Earth. Now I have to break it again, here, alone.
The classical prediction diverges at high frequencies — the ultraviolet catastrophe. Planck's formula matches the data only if energy is quantized: E = hν.