Warp Speed (7 page)

They had made me a guitar that was about one micron long for Christmas the previous year. The darn thing actually played, but you had to have a microwave receiver to "hear" it. Of course, we could never figure out how to chord the thing. It was one of the neatest Christmas presents I had gotten since Sadie Jo Livingston kissed me at the fifth grade Christmas party at Priceville Elementary.

Jim and 'Becca went off to the nanotech lab to work on the energy collector. I went to my office to catch up on some emails. My colleague Matt had sent me a note wanting to know why I hadn't called him since Goddard. I wrote a quick response back telling him that I was overwhelmed with work and that I would get with him in a week or so. After finishing up about a million emails, I decide to catch up with Mom. After all, I owed her a call or two.

Nothing new had happened. Dad had caught a nine-pound bass down by "the pump house" and my twelve-year-old nephew who was with him netted the thing. It was the highlight of their summer. They put up a picture at the local country store of my nephew holding the fish. Grandma was still claiming to be deathly ill. Oh and by the way her eighty-second birthday was coming up. My brother was probably going to be reactivated and sent back to the Middle East. He was in the Air Force Reserve. My first cousin's twin girls turn five next week. Don't forget to call them. And when am I going to come visit them again?

Anybody who has parents has had that conversation, as Carl Sagan might have said, "billions upon billions" of times. I guess I had rather have the conversations than not have the parents. Small price to pay, don't you think?

I hung the phone up finally after, "Yeah, uh huh, no I have to get back. No. Yep, uh, I don't know. Okay then, I will see you soon. Yeah. No. Maybe, soon. All right. We will see y'all later. Naw. I don't know. Yes. Okay then. All right then. Nope. Okay I gotta go. Yep. Uh, maybe. Uh huh. All right, we'll talk to you later. Okay I gotta go. Bye. Unh huh, love y'all too. Okay bye now."

"Now back to work," I muttered to myself. I got my notes out and started looking over the tensors for the metric we were using in the current configuration. There are just too many equations so I ran the tensor math package on my computer. There were nearly too many for that thing, even at six hundred gigahertz. I tweaked a few equations here and there and set the calculations in motion. It would be an hour or so before they were through, so I decided to see how the kids were doing.

I put my paper tux on and headed for the airlock. Jim was running some mechanical arms from the computer and 'Becca was looking through the eyepiece of a microscope giving Jim orders. This was funny because Jim could see everything she could from the computer monitor.

"Damnit!" he said. "Do you want to drive?"

"If you can't drive any better, I might need to."

"Children, children, please be calm." I said. "Don't make me separate you two."

"Boss," Rebecca began, "do you remember that thing you told me about too many chefs making the soup taste like crap?"

"Point taken, 'Becca. I will just set over here and watch like a good televangelist." I sat down next to Jim and kept my mouth shut. Well, except when I was sniggering my ass off at the show.

"Okay, 'Becca say when." What they were doing was loading various materials that would be vaporized and then deposited on a dielectric substrate. Jim could indeed see the objects as the materials began to deposit and adhere to the substrate but the contrast wasn't as good as through the phase contrast microscope 'Becca was using. He was waiting for her to tell him when the center portion of the wafer they were looking at had enough silicon--or germanium or gold or whatever they were depositing at the time--on it. Of course, 'Becca could probably eyeball it and get it right since she had done this so many times. But she also had a nanogram balance readout right in front of her to tell her when. The computer would do most of the etching and depositing once the design was drawn in the special CAD system they were using.

"That's good Jim. When already!" She raised her voice to make the point.

I sniggered again. Realizing the sensitive part was over; I figured that I could speak now.

"Have you guys already drawn up the blueprints?"

"Nah, we just thought we would load up the machine and get that out of the way. Here is what we have so far." Jim punched a few keys and a drawing not unlike the one on the whiteboard in the conference room popped up.

Rebecca finished for him, "We still have to put in all the materials, thicknesses, and so forth, and so on, and so on."

"And scooby dooby dooby," I sang. They just looked at me funny. I'm getting old. But I am still everyday people, by God!

"Anybody ever told you just how weird you really are, Doc?" Rebecca asked.

"My mom told me about thirty minutes ago." Of course I was lying. Mom may think it but she would never say it.

"We're going to have to start having some sort of comic relief around here. Maybe like 'Punday' in those Spider Robinson stories. You guys are getting a little stiff," I said.

"Stiff as that little super tool gadget," 'Becca said as she picked up a
spider wrench
sitting on the table. It was a cross-shaped tool like a miniature tire tool with a different size socket on each end of the cross. I'm sure she asked for it on purpose. She wielded it like a real cross. "Be gone, evil demon!" she said to me.

Jim followed suit by singing just in time, "Here's to you, Mr. Robinson Anson thinks he's cool but he don't know. Woah, woah, woah."

"Huh," I grunted.

We were quiet for a few minutes as Jim spun up the centrifuge for a test. Then 'Becca asked, "Hey did you guys see the news last night? There was the strangest thing on about this murder."

"No. I missed it. What about it," I asked.

"Well, apparently some local materials engineer guy was working on this new fiberglasslike alloy that would be used for aircraft and spacecraft. He was working on it in his basement lab. The material was supposed to be like Kevlar but more modern, stronger and lighter. So anyway, this guy was mixing some of this stuff up in a big tub in his basement when he was attacked. There must have been a scuffle and the police said that at one point it looked like the engineer pushed his attacker's head into the tub of the not-yet-dry resin and fiber material. Unfortunately for the engineer, the attacker did get free of his hold and shot him. His wife came home from work and found him dead in the basement floor." She paused for a breath.

Jim chimed in on cue, "Did they have any leads?"

'Becca continued, "Well, the sketch artist and the forensic specialists examined the material in the tub once it hardened."

"Hey, that is pretty cool and lucky." I was awed by our local police.

"Yeah." 'Becca laughed. "They were able to make a really good
composite
drawing!"

Jim added, "Yeah, he had made quite an
impression
!" She and Jim guffawed.

"Okay, okay." I shook my head. "You got me. And I'm sure they will find out that the attacker was an out-of-work impressionist, and that forensics got all the evidence they needed from
fibers
found at the crime scene. And the analysis from the material stuck to the dead guy's hands led the coroner to believe that he had 'resin' from the dead." They simultaneously rolled their eyes and groaned in pain.

"I'll let you guys get back to work." I laughed smugly. I left before they could top me. As I closed the airlock I thought about how proud I was for finding those two.

My computer had finished its calculation by the time I had gotten back to my office. Three of the equations in the stress-energy tensor didn't converge to a solution.

"Dangnabit! @$$%%&?!" Oh, well. I changed a few other things here and there and started it up again. It was about four-thirty in the afternoon--Tabitha would be here soon. I checked on the vacuum chamber and it was ready to go. I brought the warp experiment online and so I was ready whenever she was.

She arrived at the lab about an hour later. By that time Jim and 'Becca were about finished with the new energy collector. They left the computer running the manufacture of the prototype and joined us in the warp experiment lab.

"Nice of you two to join us. How is the collector coming?" I asked.

"It should be done in an hour or so," Rebecca guessed.

"Good. Let's get to work here shall we? I already brought the system up. The electron gun is ready to go. All of the detectors are ready and the cameras are online," I assured everyone.

Jim sat down at a computer and started firing up the warp field generators. In other words, he started increasing the current in the toroids and he turned the function generators on that are connected to the field coils.

"Everything is ready. The fields are on," he said.

"Rebecca, fire the electron beam."

We all watched the detector monitors and the camera monitors with anticipation. A very bright blue light flashed on all of the camera monitors and nothing happened on the electron detectors.

"What the heck was that?" Jim exclaimed.

"Blue photons," 'Becca said smartly.

"Why were there blue photons?" I rubbed my chin and thought out loud. "There's nothing in there for the electrons to react with. If they ablated some of the toroids away, the particle detectors would've measured that. What the heck is going on?" I scratched my head.

Tabitha looked concerned.

"It couldn't be Cerenkov radiation could it?" she asked.

My brain did a double backflip.
Of course!
Cerenkov radiation!

"'Becca hit the e-beam again!" I almost shouted. She flipped a couple of interlock switches and pressed the fire button. Again the blue flash! "Oh my God!" I grabbed Tabitha and kissed her right on the mouth. I turned and ran to the whiteboard and never looked back.

It was so obvious! How could I not have thought of it before? Jim, Rebecca, and a slightly red astronaut filtered into the room. I hoped she was just blushing and not mad.

"What gives, Anson?" Rebecca asked.

Jim followed with, "You gonna let us in on the secret?"

"Shhh! Give me a second--us old people think slower than you youngsters," I scolded. They sat patiently while I worked out tensors in my head, on the board, on pieces of notes on the table, and back on the board. It was like an avalanche. It took one tiny snowflake to trigger a flow of ideas that were so powerful I couldn't control the rate they came or where they were going. I just had to follow along for the ride. When the smoke and dust settled I had a group of equations on the board circled and a diagram drawn.

"Jim, get the digital camera and record this now!" I looked over and noticed that he had already been doing so. Good kid.

"So, what gives?" Rebecca posed with her hands on her hips.

"Okay, here it is. We just broke the speed of light barrier in a vacuum!" I let that sink in for a second. "Tabitha was absolutely right. The blue light was Cerenkov radiation." I paused and turned to Rebecca, "Let's hear it, Rebecca." She frowned at me and flipped her laptop open. After typing in a few things a website came up. She began to read.

"Cerenkov radiation was discovered in 1926 by Mallet. Mallet observed that the light had a continuous spectrum instead of having 'dark lines' which are characteristic of emission spectrum. The unusual electromagnetic phenomenon was extensively studied between the years of 1934D1938 by Pavel Cerenkov (1904D1990). Cerenkov discovered fluorescence wasn't the cause of this effect and he measured speeds of particles over 230,000,000 meters per second. In other words, the particles traveled faster than light in that medium. However, Cerenkov never demonstrated faster than light motion with any particle in the vacuum." She looked around the room, "So what are you saying Doc?"

"First, you should have known that without having to look it up. Get the math down on that before your defense," I scolded her a little. "I know you'll remember it now. Just in case . . ." I winked at her to ease the tension so as not to embarrass her too much in front of company and to let her know that it damn well would be a question on her oral defense.

I turned back to the board. "Here's what happened," I started. "The electron beam hits the outer edge of the Alcubierre warped spacetime here where space is expanded and so the speed of light in this region is maybe thirty times ten to the eight meters per second--ten times the vacuum speed of light. We don't know how to measure that accurately yet. Then it passes through a region just beyond the expanded spacetime to the center between the two toroids. Here spacetime should be flat, so the speed of light is smaller, roughly three times ten to the eight meters per second--or normal vacuum speed. But the electrons didn't slow down and they are now traveling faster than light speed in normal flat space. Boom! Cerenkov radiation and they decelerate. Then they pass through the bubble edge near the second torus and were decelerated again because space is contracted in there and the speed of light is less than in flat space. Maybe three times ten to the seven meters per second. Boom, more Cerenkov radiation as they decelerated." I paused for air. "If we had fast photo-detectors instead of cameras, I'll bet you we would see two quick flashes overlapping each other. I'm guessing about one to ten nanoseconds pulsewidth each. Oh, one more thing, the Cerenkov radiation had to occur at the edge of each spacetime region in order to prevent any violations of causality. In other words, the electrons were never traveling faster-than-light for that region for more than the smallest possible time increment as they passed from one region to the next. Otherwise, there would have been time travel things goin' on and Gawd I'm glad that didn't happen."

"That doesn't explain why we couldn't detect the electrons though," Jim pointed out.

"That's right," Tabitha added, no longer blushing.

"Give me a second and I'll get there. Sheesh!" I overdramatized and kept talking.

"Remember that in order to keep the Alcubierre type field stable we had to use the Van Den Broeck idea of placing a second bubble around the main Alcubierre bubble once we got the matter inside. Ha!" I laughed at the pun. Nobody else got it. So, I continued to press onward, "And in order for us to control that bubble it is electrically charged on the outside. I went back through my notes here on the table. Once decelerated the electrons aren't fast enough to penetrate the negative charge on the outside of the Van Den Broeck bubble. So, they just get bounced around inside until they decelerate to a point where they aren't energetic enough to trigger the detectors once we turn off the field. They just scatter off at low energies. Remember the Alcubierre field only lasts like a nanosecond so the electrons don't get re-accelerated." I looked around the room. My heart was pounding a million beats per second.