The Many Worlds of Albie Bright - Softcover

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CHRISTOPHER EDGE grew up in Manchester, England, where he spent most of his childhood in the local library dreaming up stories. He now lives in Gloucestershire, where he spends most of his time in the local library dreaming up stories. Before becoming a writer, he worked as an English teacher, an editor, and a publisher—any job that let him keep a book close at hand. He has written about encouraging children to read. When not writing, he also works as a freelance publisher and an education consultant.  Visit him at christopheredge.co.uk.

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1

It was my dad who gave me the idea of using quantum physics to find my mum.

She died two weeks ago. Her funeral was on Tuesday. It was at St. Thomas’s Church in the village. At first Dad said he wanted something called a humanist funeral without any“religious mumbo jumbo,”but Granddad Joe wasn’t having this.“She’s not a humanist,”he’d said, almost spitting out his tea when Dad tried to explain.“She’s my daughter.”

He said that Mum had been christened at St. Thomas’s Church when she was a baby, and he wanted her ashes buried there too, right next to Grandma Joyce, looking out toward the wind turbines and the mine at the edge of the moors.

That’s where Mum used to work--down in the pit. She wasn’t a coal miner; she was a scientist. You see, Clackthorpe Pit is one of the deepest mines in Great Britain, and when the coal ran out, it was scientists searching for the secrets of the universe who moved in there instead. Down at the bottom of the mine, they could use all their high-tech equipment without any cosmic rays interfering with their experiments.

Cosmic rays are radiation from outer space. Every second of the day, dozens of these cosmic rays zip through your body and you don’t even notice a thing. Don’t worry, they won’t turn you into a bug-eyed mutant, but they can seriously mess up the kind of experiments Mum and Dad do, so that’s why they’ve got to hide them away underground.

Mum and Dad used to joke that their first date was a thousand meters beneath the moors. They went down into the mine looking for dark matter--the invisible glue that sticks the universe together--and found each other instead. They got married, and (skipping the embarrassing biology bit) eight months later I showed up. Albert Stephen Bright. I was named after Mum and Dad’s favorite scientists, Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking, but everyone calls me Albie for short.

According to my mum, my early arrival was a bit like the big bang--a complete surprise, and pretty scary too--and I ended up staying in the hospital until I was nearly four months old. Then, when I finally got better, Mum and Dad took me with them when they went to work at CERN in Switzerland.

CERN is like Disneyland for scientists. It’s where the World Wide Web was invented, and now it’s the home of the Large Hadron Collider. In case you haven’t seen it on TV, the Large Hadron Collider is the biggest machine in the world. It’s sixteen and a half miles long and weighs a whopping 38,000 tons. That’s why it’s called the Large Hadron Collider. Scientists built the LHC to look inside the smallest things in the universe: atoms.

Everything in the universe is made out of atoms--you, me, this piece of paper, even the sun. And the thing about atoms is they’re small--very small. To give you an idea of how incredibly tiny I’m talking here, take a look at the period at the end of this sentence. Had a good look? Now, that period has eight trillion atoms inside it. That’s 8,000,000,000,000 atoms. Count those zeroes. There are more atoms in that period than there are people alive in the world today. That’s pretty amazing, don’t you think? And every atom is made up of even smaller particles called protons, neutrons, and electrons.

When I asked Mum why she needed such a big machine to look inside something so small, she told me that the Large Hadron Collider is like an underground racetrack for atoms, but the winner is the one who has the biggest crash. In the collider, these tiny particles race around and around in circles, getting faster and faster until they smash together at almost the speed of light. Mum said this creates a mini big bang--a bit like the one that made the universe--and by studying this, Mum and Dad hoped to find out exactly how everything began.

There was just one problem. In addition to those mini big bangs, it turned out that smashing atoms together at nearly the speed of light might make mini black holes too. A black hole is like an invisible vacuum cleaner in outer space, sucking up anything that gets too close. This book my dad wrote says that the gravity inside a black hole is so strong that not even light can escape. If you tried to fly a spaceship past for a closer look, you’d get sucked inside the black hole and turned into spaghetti.

Of course, the idea of the Large Hadron Collider creating a black hole here on Earth wasn’t that popular. Before you knew it, TV news crews from around the world were turning up at CERN to accuse Mum, Dad, and the rest of the scientists there of plotting to DESTROY THE WORLD! It ended up being my dad who was pushed in front of the TV cameras to explain how this was totally ridiculous and that any black holes that were created inside the collider would evaporate instantly without Earth being sucked inside out.

That’s when he got discovered by a talent scout. A TV company offered Dad the chance to make his own series, Ben Bright’s Guide to the Universe: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Space for People Who Hated Science at School. It turned out that quite a lot of people hated science at school, because eight million people ended up watching. One TV reviewer even nicknamed my dad The Man Who Can Explain Everything, but to be honest, he wasn’t much help with my homework. Most of the time he wasn’t even home, since he was flying around the world filming cool science stuff for his next TV show.

Whenever Dad did turn up to collect me from school, I usually ended up hanging around waiting while my teachers took a selfie with him. It was seriously embarrassing, but Mum didn’t seem to mind. She used to joke that all the time Dad spent being a TV star just gave her more time to get on with the real science, and that she’d win a Nobel Prize before him.

That was before Mum got the news that changed everything.

She’d gone for one of the health checks given to all the scientists at the LHC, and a shadow had shown up on one of the scans. Cancer. And with that one word, Mum and Dad packed up everything and we came back to Great Britain and the NHS.

We moved back into our old house in Clackthorpe, and I watched Dad ferry Mum to the hospital and back again, trying treatment after treatment until the doctors finally said there was no point in trying anything else. I watched Mum lose her hair, her smile, and finally all hope. There was just enough time for me to get angry, and then she was gone, leaving a supermassive black hole behind.

That’s how I ended up standing at the front of St. Thomas’s Church, staring at her coffin. The church was filled with Mum and Dad’s family and friends: Granddad Joe, Aunt Sophie and the twins, scientists from the Large Hadron Collider and from the mine at the edge of the village. There were people from TV and Mum’s old school friends. Everyone had come to say goodbye.

When the vicar started to speak, Dad grabbed hold of my hand and held on to it tightly. It was almost like he wanted to make sure I didn’t disappear on him too, but it just made me feel like a little kid. Granddad Joe was holding on to my other hand, and I had to sit there between them, just wishing I could stick my fingers in my ears. I didn’t want to hear any of it, but I can remember every word.

“Today we come together to remember Charlotte Elizabeth Bright, taken from this world at the age of thirty-nine,...