How It Started

The technology that enabled us to dream about leaving Earth to the distant galaxies started with a high profile Jewelry Exposition, the robbery of the best guarded diamond ever, a missing decimal point, and a couple of confused CERN scientists.

It is the Expo Prestige Montreal, and the world is watching the biggest jewelry exposition in decades. The rarest jewels are on display, one entrance ticket was on the thousands, and only a few were issued. Billionaires from all the world would be looking at the rarest diamonds of the world. And between those million dollar jewel, the Koh-I-Noor, one of the most expensive diamond ever.

As expected, the security of the exposition is impeccable. The premises have been checked on every angle to determine weak points, every single entrance secured with the most high-tech defenses available, the staff experienced on those kinds of high profile events, the bullet-proof stall securely bolted to the floor. If sensors detected a breakage on the external glass box, the intermediate box would be almost instantly flooded with a special sticky foam that would harden in less than a second, making the removal of the internal box a slow and difficult operation. Nobody would be expected to be able to take that diamonds away before the security agents stopped the attempt.

That night, across the world, on the outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland, another kind of highly trained staff are busy with another kind of billion dollar jewels, but another kind of jewel.

After years evolving equations, testing them, analyzing results and refining the measurements, CERN will start another high-energy experiment to discover another elusive particle, one predicted by physics but never detected.

Each experiment have lots of controls. Staff would enter data on control computers for weeks, and every data is at least triple-checked by different scientists. Every single number must be checked against the tables to make sure it was impossible to enter a value outside of the specifications. But when you say it's impossible to anything go wrong, you are challenging the Universe.

It's 3 in the morning at CERN. The army of scientists are all tired, from sleepless long hours to the excitement of being part of history. If everything goes as planned, the sunrise would bring news that finally something deemed impossible for centuries would finally be achieved. They must enter and check the last few hundred parameters, fire up the massive proton bean, and wait. But in that process, a humble decimal point was left off, on a critical parameter. The correct value would be something like 1.5, but the point was missed and entered as 15. A tiny speckle of dust at the right place in the monitor of the first scientist to check the value made him think there was really a dot there, and the third one was too sleepy to notice the missing dot, as he looked only at the digits.

There's a process in place to check if the values entered are the values expected. It's something called checksum. It does some calculations with every value and generates a final result. If only one parameter is changed by the smallest possible amount, the final result is completely different. But sometimes, two different sets of inputs will generate the same output - a collision. A collision is rare, but possible. A collision in a set when only one value is changed is way more difficult, theoretically possible but never seen in practice. Until that night.

The last parameter is entered, everyone looks at their monitors, the check routine starts. The launch button turns green: all checks passed, all values correctly entered, the mighty proton cannon can fire. Countdown starts, everyone leaves the radiation chambers, every monitor turned on, every mind and soul of CERN glued to the monitors when the director pushes the button. And every light went dark, an unexpected high pitched sound floods the tunnels for 5 seconds, and the particle accelerator turns off. "LOSS OF VACUUM". That message indicates a severe failure somewhere, and a kind of failure that would take months to detect and solve.

At the same time, at the exposition, the lights go off. Every single one of them. A high pitched sound floods the place for 5 seconds, followed by silence. Cameras went dark, all cellphones died, computers restarted by themselves, the entire block left in the dark. Armed with pistols and flashlights, security staff run to the main exhibition room, and one diamond is missing. Something deemed impossible just happened.

Someone managed to kill the power substation powering the building, launch a powerful electromagnetic pulse to kill the backup generator, all security cameras, sensors and alarms, cut the upper part of the stall with a kind of high power laser cutter, and get away with the upper box weighting about 100 kg. All in less than 3 minutes.

Two high trained, professional staff looking very sad that day. They were experienced people, trained to avoid any kind of mistake, prepared for and worked several times on the same kind of job. And now, the catastrophe hits them. In Montreal, the press surrounds the Security Manager, asking the expected questions and met with an unexpected answer: we don't know what happened, we are still investigating. At CERN, a totally different kind of press is strangely asking the exact same questions, and receiving the exact same answer: we don't know what happened, we are still investigating.

The morning is busy at CERN. Nobody left for home, they are overworked, tired, and confused. Systems got back up, diagnostics pointed for a small 20 m section with a foreign solid body inside the tunnels. How could something get inside? There's a myriad of wires, pipes, steel armature, concrete, and something got in? How? More puzzling was the preliminary reports indicating Kevlar and glass inside. Kevlar?

It didn't took longto the maintenance crew get to that small zone, open the multitude of maintenance hatches, disconnect wires, dismantle protective armor, and opening the tunnel. What was inside? Something that definitely did not belong there, belonged to Montreal.

A couple hours pass, a couple directory searches and phone calls later, and Friedrich Schmidt, CERN director, calls the cellphone of Gilles Janssens, EXPO security head. "I know you are busy, so I will be short: your diamond is safe with us at CERN. You can send someone here to get it back?".

Janssens first thought this call was a prank. But as soon as Schmidt read to him the serial numbers and markings of the box, he undestood it was for real. Or some very elaborated prank by the real thief intending for them to lose precious time following a stolen diamond half the globe away.

"I can understand you will not believe me", said Schmidt, "so let's start a video call. I will stand outside CERN headquarters, you may recognize it, and move inside and show you the box. I am sure you will believe."

And he believe after seeing the box. It was without any doubt his box. Nobody could tell how could that large, secure box with a diamond inside get from Canada to Switzerland in 12 hours.

And that week, CERN scientists forgot about a missing particle on the Standard Model. And another kind of experiments started to take place, the ones trying to understand and try to re-create the Einstein-Rosen Bridge that stole that diamond.

It took a decade.