Warp Speed (6 page)

Each student had burned at least eleven hundred calories. That is how grueling the test is. Now we were asking them to fight ninety-second rounds. One one-on-one round for each belt earned every three months (up to brown, that's five rounds, then) and one two-on-one fight for each brown belt stripe (three stripes required for a black belt with a test each six months). To test for a black belt there is a three-on-one also. But this was brown belt tests; black belts test separately.

Now you might think that ninety-second rounds aren't that long. Try running twenty-meter sprints while forgetting to breathe and while people are hitting and kicking the living hell out of you for a minute and a half and then talk to me about it. No, wait a second. First do one hour of aerobics, thirty minutes or so of isometric-type exercises, then do another hour and half of aerobics. Then do six or seven minute and a half rounds as I just described with just one minute in between each.
Then we will talk about it!
Why do it you ask? Simple, it is fun as the dickens! (Not sure I know what "the dickens" are but to hear my grandma tell it they must have been real fun.)

Jim geared up and got in the mix. I wanted to get in and play so bad it hurt. But had I gotten in the mix, I'm sure it would have hurt. It was like when you were a kid and your mom wouldn't let you go in swimming for thirty minutes after you ate lunch. All the other kids were out there having a ball and you had to set there twiddling your thumbs. That is how it felt. So, I ref'ed and ran the clock. Bob wanted to fight, too.

"Bow to your partners, touch gloves, fight." This wasn't the sport karate point stuff. This was a continuous fight for ninety seconds. The only rules are no hitting below the belt and no grabbing. If somebody grabs you, you can throw them. While you are on the ground you are liable to be kicked in the head and if you don't get up you fail the test and have to wait six more months to be promoted to a higher belt.

Rebecca got set up against Jim and Alisa for her first one. She did pretty good. At one point she did a spinning backfist that caught Jim on side of the head. His mouthpiece flew halfway across the ring. We all laughed appropriately. Alisa didn't let her get away with it though. Although it looks good in the movies, spinning isn't really a good idea when you are fighting two people. It gave Alisa time to slip to her back side and bully up on her.

Rebecca finally "turtled up" and covered very well and let them hit her for a second or two. Once she got her breath she shoved, kicked, and punched Alisa into Jim, who was punching her in the headgear from behind and around Alisa with big slow looping hook punches. She ran to the other side of the room being chased and punched the whole way. This time she didn't stop running. She turned a long arc and threw a few kicks and punches and ran back the way she had come, fitness really becoming a factor now. The timer beeped.

"Stop!" I yelled.

She collapsed on the floor gasping for air.

Bob smiled as he looked around the room, "'Becca, die over there so we can start the next fight."

She crawled to the side of the colored-tape marked rings and sat with her back to the wall, gasping for air and sweating profusely.

"Don't sit still 'Becca! Keep breathing and keep moving. Get you a quick drink of water while you are at it," I told her.

Jim said something to her inaudible to me. She responded by kicking at his shin. Jim did a quick hopping two-step and decided he had better go get a drink of water and leave well enough alone.

A minute or so later it was Rebecca's time again. This time Bob and Keri (a one stripe brown belt that just wanted to fight another round) fought her. It looked pretty much the same except, Bob is much taller and can hold his ax kick up over his head and drop it at the most inopportune times. 'Becca found this out, the hard way. Defending Keri's attack of multiple kicks, she's kind of limber, 'Becca dropped her guard a little too much for Bob. He drove her to her knees with an ax kick on top of her head. Everyone gasped and paused for a split second to see if Rebecca was okay. She responded from her knees by reverse punching Bob just above the belt as hard as she could.

I think she was a bit mad. As she scrambled to her feet, Keri decided to give it to her with both barrels. Roundhouse kick to the midsection, hookkick to the head, another roundhouse to the head, she did all this balancing on her right leg and never sat her left foot down. Keri then followed up with a jab, cross, and a ridgehand. 'Becca took all this in stride and never stopped moving. With an amazing display of balance she bobbed and weaved into a spinning side kick and followed with an outer block to stop the ridgehand. By this time Bob had given her enough of a break and poured it on even harder. He raised his ax kick again. This time 'Becca was having none of it.

She ducked under his leg to avoid the kick and slipped to his back side and reverse punched Bob in the ribs following it with a left hook to the solar plexus and one to the side of the headgear. Of course, Bob wasn't there for the second punch and Keri had slipped to the side of Rebecca. Rebecca must have realized this and threw a real ugly half side kick half front kick. At the same time Bob was throwing a backfist to her headgear, Keri caught Rebecca's foot and pushed her backwards (our rules are that you are allowed to grab on blocks for one second or so). Rebecca was now falling backward with a backfist moving toward her head. Using the momentum of her fall she did a backwards handspring as Bob's backfist passed right through the air where her head had been a fraction of a second before. I'm sure she could see his fist go by her face. 'Becca rolled through the handspring and onto her feet into a traditional back stance with a knife hand outer block (I think by accident, but it looked amazingly cool). She side kicked Bob to hold him off as the timer beeped.

"Stop!" I yelled.

Every person present looked on in awe. I said, "Hell yes! That was awesome." Jim applauded and whistled. Rebecca fell to the floor gasping for air, her mouthpiece falling to the floor as she threw her headgear off.

"That was impressive! You rock!" Alisa cheered and clapped.

I had never seen anything like that outside of a movie. I seriously doubted that I ever would again. I guess that I should mention that Rebecca did her undergraduate schooling on a cheerleading and gymnastics scholarship at Auburn University. She still tumbles every now and then at the karate studio, just to show off I think. Keri helped drag a gasping 'Becca to the side of the rings and Bob organized another fight. After about three more rounds it was all over. Everyone had passed.

An hour later we were sitting around a table at one of our favorite sports bars just off of University Drive. We were on our second pitcher of beer, waiting for our food. Bob and I talked about when I would be back in class and if I thought I could compete next month. I wasn't quite sure about either, so I lied about both. Eventually the conversation turned to the various topics that are covered after three pitchers of beer.

"Who sang that song?"

"Just how tall is the Empire State Building and what would happen if you dropped a penny off of it?" I actually make my freshman physics students work that one out every semester.

"Don't be silly," I say to them. "A raindrop weighs about the same as a penny and they fall from as much as forty thousand feet high during thunderstorms. You ever see a raindrop crack the sidewalk?" Terminal velocity is tough for some people to grasp.

And so the conversations continued. "If you were driving along at the speed of light and you turned your headlights on, what would you see?"

"Could Jackie Chan whup Bruce Lee?"

"Which Heinlein book was the best?"

"Was Kirk, Picard, Sisco, Janeway, or Archer the coolest captain?" I always voted for "Q" myself, but didn't he always make himself an admiral?

"Who was the best guitarist of all times?" No contest there. Hendrix, period, exclamation point.

"Second best?" Stevie Ray Vaughn. Of course you can't discount Robert Johnson, George Thorogood, Jimmy Page, Joe Perry, Slash, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, B.B. King, Ron Wood, Kirk Hammett, and that new kid, what's his name, and of course our local great, Microwave Dave. But there is an order of magnitude problem between second and third best that I'm sure the other guitarists would point out.

A pitcher later and Tabitha came through the door. Rebecca waved at her and she joined us.

"Did you call her or something?" I asked.

"None of your business," she replied.

'Becca introduced her while I tried to figure out just how I was supposed to react. The group accepted her willingly and didn't quiz her too hard about being an astronaut. Alisa asked her a question that I never really thought about.

"Did you have to take some sort of self-defense stuff in the Air Force?"

"We had some training, yes. I'm sure it wasn't as involved as what I hear all of you do."

I responded to that, "Well, none of us have ever flown a Space Shuttle, either." She seemed to like that remark. I seemed to recall having used it the first time I met her. Maybe I just thought I did. That day is still pretty fuzzy.

Our food finally got to the table. Well, mine almost did. Some crazy drunk guy in the middle of a story made a big hand gesture and knocked my plate right out of our waitress's hand. I laughed at first, until I realized it was my food. It all went downhill from there.

I slept in a little Monday morning and got to the lab about eleven. Tabitha was coming by after her Space Camp thing later that evening to see our experiments. I spent some time explaining it to her, but without seeing it, it's hard to explain. Rebecca and Jim were already in the warp bubble experiment lab setting it up. We had never figured out why the electrons had completely disappeared on us, although, the experiment is actually kind of simple. There's a one-and-a-half-meter-long glass tube with an electron gun attached at one end. The tube has huge electromagnets situated along it to steer, accelerate, and focus the electrons. The other end of the tube is a larger vacuum chamber in the shape of a cube about a half meter on a side. In the middle of the chamber is a misshapen toroidial superconductor with coils around the upper and lower half--the device looked kind of like a squished and twisted donut with thousands of wires wrapped around it in random looking fashion. A few centimeters away is a second misshapen toroidial superconductor with similar coils around it. A high current is set up moving counterclockwise in the first toroid and clockwise in the other and a rather complex alternating current function is set up in the coils. It's in the region between the two toroids that the spacetime metric should change to allow for the warp bubble--if the field strength is large enough, and if the theory is correct, that is. We based the field shapes on approximations to the Einstein equations and numerical solutions, but there still hasn't been any real closed solution discovered. If I could only have that dream again, maybe I'd figure it out.

All the apparatus is inside a clear plastic sphere that has electron detectors deposited on the inner surface of the sphere. This way electrons scattered at any angle could be detected. The problem is that you can't see the experiment because of the detectors--there are so many of them and they're all in the way from an outside viewer's standpoint. So, we modified the sphere by drilling a few holes here and there between the electron detectors and placed tiny CCD cameras in them. We sealed the holes around the camera connections with epoxy and vacuum sealant--that was an ordeal within itself. Now we could rerun the experiment and actually see what was happening inside the sphere. Some of the cameras are for ultraviolet, some for infrared, and some for visible wavelengths. We hoped that would shed some, ahem, light on the problem.

Jim and 'Becca had completed the modifications early and now had the chamber pulling down to a vacuum. That would take several hours. In the meantime we decided to have a bull session about the next step for the energy collectors.

"There has to be a way to make them more efficient or smaller."

"Well, smaller is really out, Anson. We're at state-of-the-art and then some right now!" Rebecca said.

"Maybe there's a way to increase the surface area of the Casimir effect regions," was Jim's input.

"That would increase the efficiency all right. Any ideas, 'Becca?" I asked.

"I dunno?" She shrugged. "The most efficient use of surface area is a sphere, but how the heck can we use that?"

"That's it! Why didn't I think of that?" I went to the whiteboard and started drawing.

"What's
it
?" Jim asked.

"Well, instead of plates for pistons we use hollow spheres. One inside the other. Like this." I drew a large circle, which is a two-dimensional sphere, then a smaller circle inside it. Then I erased a portion of the larger circle and drew a rod from the smaller circle through the hole in the larger one and extended the rod a little. I drew the same thing on the other end of the rod.

"The question is, how do we support the rod and keep the inner spheres from touching the outer ones." I tugged at my lip for a second and realized that I was chewing on the end of the marker cap.

"Maybe we can do it this way." Rebecca took another marker and drew squiggly lines to represent springs from the rod. She drew two springs on top and two on bottom of the rod at equal distances from its center.

"But what about collecting the energy. How do we do that?" I asked.

This time Jim figured it out. "Easy. Just make the rod a magnet and we put a coil around the rod.
Voila,
we have a generator!"

"Could this work?" I thought aloud. I did some quick math on the board and showed that the surface area was an order of magnitude greater, hence making the energy collection that much greater. "The efficiency of this coil idea might even be better than the plates configuration. This might be win-win. Can you guys make it?" I looked at them hopefully.

"We'll figure it out! I don't think it's more complicated than that guitar we made you for Christmas," Rebecca said with excitement and confidence in her voice.