Free Doctor How and the Rings of Uranus by Mark Speed

Author’s note
    Doctor How asked me to write this series in British English. Original manuscripts in Gaelfreyan and Squill will be available when your civilisation reaches the necessary level. Similarly, the Imperial system of measurement is used, rather than the Metric: the French were wrong on a truly cosmic scale.

     
    “Great, that’s all I need,” said the Doctor.
    “What’s up, Doc?” asked Kevin, who was reading Particle Physics for Dummies on his Sliver™, translated into English by the Spectrel from the original Squill pan-universe classic edition. He was reclining, having told his seat in the Spectrel to transform into a steamer-style chair. He was recovering from a bone-shaking ride on a horse and carriage the previous day. The noise and discomfort of the experience had made him want to throttle the producers of any film which portrayed romantic scenes in such vehicles. A house-bot was massaging his feet.
    “All this buggering around in the seventeen-eighties has had ramifications.”
    “Uh-oh, I don’t like the sound of that. What’s happened?”
    “It’s what’s not happened that I’m bothered about.”
    “What’s not happened, then?”
    “Uranus’s gamma ring is missing.”
    “Huh?”
    “The gamma ring – the reddish one – is missing from Uranus. That’s the seventh planet of your solar system, in case you were wondering – not part of your anatomy.”
    “No big deal, surely?”
    “Believe me, it is a big deal, lad.”
    “Look, before you get onto that, is it really true that the Higgs Boson doesn’t exist?” He held up his wafer thin Sliver™ and flapped it in the Doctor’s direction.
    “Of course. Why on Earth would you think that it did exist?”
    “I remember it being on the news. The Large Hadron Collider. You know. Then they had that Higgs guy on the news and that former pop-star Astrophysicist all the women rave about. The guy with –”
    “Oh, him ,” sneered the Doctor. “Mr Smiley with the smooth voice.”
    “I think you’ll find he’ s actually a professor.”
    The Doctor snorted. “You know fine-well what I think of people on television . Particularly those who endeavour to popularise subjects like astrophysics by dumbing it down.”
    “Jeez, let it go, man. Don’t have a go at Brian Cox because of the sins your brother committed.”
    “Alright, alright. Anyway, please be assured that the Higgs Boson doesn’t exist.”
    “But didn’t some people get Nobel Prizes an’ stuff for it?”
    “Sure.”
    “But if it doesn’t exist…?”
    “There is a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences,” said the Doctor. “To my amazement, the oxymoronic term ‘economic sciences’ is not used in an ironic way. The whole area of study is complete and utter bunkum, which is why it’s only a Nobel Memorial Prize – having been set up by a bunch of bankers, rather than Nobel himself. So the fact that an honest Physicist might get a prize for something that was thought to be true and later turns out to be wrong isn’t such a bad thing, is it? An economist would probably call that wealth redistribution . Anyway, why are you so emotionally attached to the Higgs Boson?”
    “Well, it’s like… It was the big thing , you know? This big British contribution to nuclear physics. On a par with what Einstein did. You get me?”
    “Hmph. I think the very year of its theoretical existence should be warning enough for you. 1964.”
    “Oh. Right. The year after your brother spilled the beans with his supposedly fictional TV series about a time-travelling superhero scientist.”
    “Exactly.”
    “But I don’t understand how they could have been fooled into thinking it existed. I mean, they say they found all the evidence, didn’t they? And it fitted the Standard Model.”
    “ Your Ph.D. in Astrophysics is ever-elusive, isn’t it, lad? What can you tell me about the behaviour of photons? What happens when you fire a single photon at two slits?”
    “Erm… It goes