Mach's Legacy

by D. W. Patterson

  “This is what it's like back on Earth. Miles of vistas and dense vegetation. To me it's incredible that this could be a built structure.”

  “You've been back on Earth?”

  “Yeah my family migrated from there.”

  “Really. Are you related to the Jackson that built the Star Way and flew the first light sail between Earth and the Centauri System?”

  “Ajax Starlifter Jackson, yeah he's one of the great-greats in my past somewhere.”

  “Wow, they were responsible for leading humanity to the stars. I think a Jackson was involved in all the early extra-solar space missions.”

  “No doubt, the family was quite extensive. They had a penchant for creating more Jackson's also,” he said with a smile.

  Emmy laughed.

  “No doubt” she said.

  They were both quiet for awhile.

  Finally Jack said, “So you will go back to your studies and research now in Centauri Two?”

  “I hope to.”

  “Well I'm not far away you know. Just an hour's shuttle ride. Maybe we could have dinner sometime?”

  “Sure,” said Emmy.

  Later while walking back down Emmy slipped and Jack grabbed her. He held held her for a bit longer than necessary.

  Chapter 19

  Wormhole Physics 101, 8th Edition, by Dr. Elias Mach

  Copyright 2640 C.E.- Chapter 4, Page 99

  Spacetime Disruption

  From Chapter 3 we know that spacetime is an emergent property of quantum entanglement. And when enough of these quantum entanglements are “broken” then spacetime can start to “unravel”, we call this unraveling disrupted spacetime. And the unraveling spreads at the speed of light. Fortunately the effects dissipate over distance.

  Disrupted spacetime cannot support the material world or human life. It is as if the system is between phases and will not settle into one or the other. Depending on the energies involved it may affect material objects on large scales such as planets and stars or on the small scale such as humans or in the most disastrous case on all scales.

  One way to cause this disruption of spacetime is to repeatedly create wormhole pairs without a reservoir of entangled particles. If this is done often enough spacetime will slowly unravel.

  A more spectacular way to cause this phenomena is to concentrate too much energy in too small a space. We will now calculate the amount of energy concentration required to disrupt spacetime . . .

  Averil Allen, an Earth astronomer, working with the Moon-based Langdon SR Telescope was the first to notice or perhaps it's more correct to say not notice. What Averil and his software had failed to notice on a sweep of the sky centered on the constellation Telescopium was the giant yellow star Omega Telescopii. Located about ninety light-years from Earth the star had been observed as recently as the year 2641 in an all sky sweep. At magnitude 5.5 it wasn't easy to see from Earth but should have been easy to find by telescope.

  But a specific follow up viewing session had still not found it. Averil was worried that something about his method was in error. So he sent out a message to others about his “non-discovery” for confirmation.

  Jack saw that message and thought it preposterous but intriguing. He would use the university's timeshare telescope located on Earth's Moon to do his own search. He couldn't find it either. Excited by his results he couldn't help but mention it to Emmy on their date that weekend.

  “So I didn't find it either and as far as I know no one else has reported finding it.”

  “No remnants, I mean like a supernova?”

  “No nothing at that position.”

  “Strange, I don't think I've read anything like it.”

  “No, there isn't anything in the literature, I searched.”

  “So what do we do next?”

  “Well I'm going to keep the university telescope trained on that patch of sky as much as possible. If anything's there I want to find it.”

  Kuiper Station was founded on a small ice asteroid in the Kuiper Belt of the Solar System. It had been a fueling station during the early days of Star Way construction where ships could fill their water tanks or reaction tanks with hydrogen and oxygen. The station made or grew everything it needed and only traded with the passing vessels for new or replacement technology.

  Almost two hundred people called the area home, usually living in small habitats near the station. Although it was rarely visited after the Star Way was finished the station still expected a ship occasionally. Pert Jackson was watching the skies through the station's telescope when it happened. Pert was searching for more of the glowing globes she'd seen orbiting the area for the past month. She was trying to figure out what they were. They looked like ball lighting but Pert couldn't figure out how ball lighting could get this far out in space. Then it happened.

  Pert said later it was like a blink. Then the sky was gone. Out this far from the Sun there wasn't much light anyway but there was star shine. And then there wasn't. Pert pivoted the scope as far as it would go but couldn't see anything except maybe some of the local habitats.

  Pert wasn't the only one who noticed. Soon the radio was filled with the voices of startled, incredulous people. Pert called for a radio check. That meant that each group would call in its number of people in an order determined previously. As the roll call continued a hundred ninety five people were accounted for. Those not accounted for were a group on a scouting mission for small comet like bodies which could be brought back to the area to be mined. They were aboard the Kuiper Star.

  “Kuiper Star to base, Kuiper Star to base,” called Captain Danworth over and over. “You're right Hap, either something's wrong with our radio or the base's. Okay I'm aborting the mission. This is a serious enough anomaly that we need to figure out what's going on. Heading back to Kuiper Station now.”

  They were nearly one AU from the station. The Kuiper Star was an older 3rd generation fusion ship and would take at least two days to reach the station. There wasn't much for the five man crew to do in that time but sporadically check the radio and try to contain their fears.

  Pert brought no new news to the meeting of the Kuiper Station Council. The small probe she had sent out had relayed negative discovery out to the limit of its radio transceiver and then had gone quiet. Pert couldn't explain what had happened to it. Upon reaching the limits of its transceiver's ability to signal base it was programmed to turn back but instead it was gone. And as far as where it had gone Pert could report nothing because nothing was there.

  “There's nothing there,” said the Captain of the Kuiper Star upon reaching the coordinates of the station and its surrounding ice asteroids.

  “It's all gone,” he said to no one.

  “Gentlemen,” he said into his mic, “we'll have to head to the next nearest outpost, Kuiper Four. We should be there in five days.”

  If it hasn't disappeared too.

  Pert was in the station's central atrium after the long and rather raucous meeting. She came under attack for not having a better answer for the phenomena they were seeing. But it wasn't her fault. There was nothing in the books like it.

  She stared at the wallscreen that used to be filled with stars. But now there was just nothing there but blackness.

  Just nothing.

  Emmy was glad to be researching long-distance wormhole generation again. She was reviewing her notes which likened the spatial phase along the length of a wormhole to the standing waves of a plucked guitar string. With one difference, the wavelength, or tone, of a plucked string changes with length, while the phase change of a wormhole does not.

  She would then liken this phase change to the impedance change in an alternating current electric circuit. Then she would use the complex math of AC circuit analysis to calculate the phase change of a wormhole.

  Emmy knew that in an AC circuit when the impedance of the source does not match that of the load a mismatch results and causes the voltage or current to add an imaginary part, usually called a
phase angle, to its value. This phase angle can go from zero to a maximum just like the wormhole phase.

  To remove the phase angle, and the imaginary impedance, in an electric circuit it is necessary to match the source impedance with the load. Similarly in the case of the wormhole to remove the phase change and therefore the phase maximum causing all the trouble, it would be necessary to match the wormhole entrance mouth to the wormhole exit mouth.

  At that point in her review she stopped and smiled when she thought about what her grandfather had called the procedure Emmy hoped to implement. He had called it “wormhole tuning”.

  But she could test nothing without feedback from a trip through a wormhole. And so far no one or no thing had ever been able to give such feedback. It was as if the wormhole hoarded all the information of the passage.

  There had been much effort to record such a passage but so far all had failed. So Emmy started by building a theory to account for this effect. Once she had the theory she could instruct Eric about how to build the electronics needed.

  Emmy knew that in all the trips through a wormhole they had been either subjectively described as instantaneous by people or objectively instantaneous by electronic equipment. However it was known that as wormhole mouths were cast farther and farther it really wasn't instantaneous but only extremely fast. Still for people it was as if the passage was too brief to be noticed.

  Emmy stopped. That would explain why people described the trip as instantaneous, “between thoughts” was the way one person described it. So how fast does a brain “think”? On average about two-hundred times a second, or a period of five milliseconds. If the trip through the wormhole was faster than that maybe the brain wouldn't notice?

  But what about machinery?

  Checking in with Eric they came up with an estimate of about a nanosecond, taking into account processor and algorithm speed. So, the passage time through the longest wormhole to date, around twelve light-years, would have to be faster than a nanosecond or the electronics would have logged at least one nanosecond. That set a lower bound on how fast the electronics would need to sample the phase change, faster than one nanosecond and as much faster as possible to get the most accurate readings on the phase change.

  And it couldn't be done, not with the electronics at their disposal. It was a show stopper.

  Emmy went into research mode. If current electronics couldn't do the job then physics would have to. Surrounding herself with datacubes and netscreens and old-fashioned paper books she buried herself in her research. Several Emmies were running to search through the onslaught of information and tag anything that might pertain to Emmy's problem.

  While going over research and speculations tagged by the Emmies she found a reference to black hole computation. It showed that if a kilogram of matter were compressed into a black hole it would last about a billionth of a nanosecond before evaporating, but in that time could do about a hundred-thousand quadrillion quadrillion quadrillion (1 followed by 15 zeros) operations. Add more matter get more computations. Of course, the trick would be to compress a circuit and still have it workable, let it do its computations and then capture the results, all of which the article offered no clue how to do. That in itself would be worth a PhD for her and maybe even Eric.

  It was a crazy solution but maybe the only one if she were to continue this line of research. One thing to her advantage, she had a natural black hole generator in the lab.

  Eric agreed immediately. Emmy smiled because of his enthusiasm for any challenge she could come up with. He would design a 3D computer in the form of a sphere. As the sphere was compressed it would continue to operate only faster and faster as the distance between logic gates shrank to the ultimate limit and it became a black hole computer.

  At the meeting to explain to other team members what they would be attempting Jack could only shake his head at the audacity of what Emmy and the kid were trying to do. But he was quite proud of both of them, especially Emmy. Dag and Sigmund offered all their help. The other engineers would be responsible for taking Eric's spherical design and turning it into an actual device. The project would proceed.

  The news from the Kuiper Star had traveled throughout occupied space at wormhole speed as it was packaged and sent physically through the network.

  In the weeks that followed as the team worked non-stop on the experiment, more investigation of the area around Kuiper Station found a strange anomaly. Something was there. Something that couldn't be seen but could be inferred from its gravitational interaction and the light it blocked when it was in front of a distant star. It had all the characteristics of a black hole except at its size it should be radiating Hawking radiation at a certain rate. It wasn't.

  Jack seized on the report immediately. He might have already been observing something similar but much larger. Could Omega Telescopii be a larger version of the Kuiper object?

  One way to find out was to look for the halo effect of gravitational lensing. Was the dark area that once was Omega Telescopii bending light from stars as it passed in front of them?

  Jack spent a week analyzing all the data he had collected. He found his answer early on a Saturday morning as he found the unmistakable halo of gravitational lensing around the remnants of Omega Telescopii. It was bending light rays like the Kuiper object.

  He quickly wrote up his results and put them up on the astrophysics server and sent a message to Emmy. Before long other astronomers were looking at Omega Telescopii and many were confirming his results. Something was up.

  It was a couple of weeks before Eric's design was ready. A sphere with an internal scaffolding design that connected its logic gates in such a way that the interconnections could be stretched or compressed. Compressed hopefully to the absolute limit of material compression and computational speed.

  It worked in simulation and showed a hopeful speedup as the simulation “compressed” the material. Now the other engineers would need to turn the design into a sphere of silicon weighing slightly more than two kilograms. They would essentially grow the sphere in a vat by imposing a schematic on the process.

  Emmy continued to work her theory into a testable form and returned to the lab in the Centauri Two habitat where her grandfather had been killed. No one including Emmy was sure whether her grandfather was deliberately targeted by the Beleni or it had been a case of collateral damage. Emmy herself felt the Beleni had deliberately targeted her grandfather but the expertise required to implement such an attack from that distance was beyond belief. Still the lab brought all those memories back when she first returned.

  Eric was there along with his newly crafted sphere as was Dag and Sigmund. Jack couldn't make it but sent Emmy supportive messages which she hadn't had time to answer. A few others from the engineering department at the university volunteered their time in return for the experience and institutional credit.

  To test her idea in such a confined area required her to make as much of a mouth to mouth mismatch as possible. One mouth would be as large as the room would allow while the other mouth would be very small.

  The experimental setup was similar to those before with a layered sphere in a water bath for cooling and radiation protection and buoyed and set spinning by a ring of superconducting magnets underneath. The sphere was positioned so that it could roll into the wormhole mouth at the right moment. With everyone ready in the control room Emmy turned on the power supplies and started the slow spin of the sphere which was needed to create the Mach effect.

  As the strain gauge sensors began to indicate that exotic or negative mass was being produced Emmy ramped up the voltage. The bright light around the sphere appeared and crystallized into something like glass in a sphere that reached almost from the floor to the ceiling. Before casting the far wormhole mouth Emmy released the ball into the near mouth.

  Then she did something that was dangerous but necessary she cut the generator and brought it up to the transition point. The wormhole reacted almost like a cartoon as it co
llapsed and bounced several times then squeezed the sphere into a tiny black hole. Emmy started ramping up the voltage again to create a wormhole mouth.

  The mouth overshot and crashed into the ceiling of the lab causing a cascade of debris. Some in the control room were turning as if to run. Emmy remained at her control station. She would dump the whole experiment if need be.

  But the wormhole collapsed and rebounded and oscillated for a brief second.

  Emmy didn't wait long she now cast the far wormhole mouth down the long hall attached to the main room of the lab. It seemed to be working. Then at the far mouth there was a huge display of energetic arcing and a popping sound that grew and then diminished.

  Eric nervously brought up the screen that would show whether he had captured the data release in a holographic datacube. He scrolled through but looked increasing worried. There was nothing but random numbers. Emmy was looking over his shoulder.

  “Okay it looks like we missed it. But still analyze it Eric and let me know if you find anything.”

  He didn't.

  It was in the messages that Jack had sent her that triggered Emmy's thought the day after the failed test. Hawking radiation was mentioned as a way of confirming the Kuiper anomaly.

  And Hawking radiation would happen with my black hole computer.

  She had not investigated the evaporation mechanism of a black hole carefully enough and what it meant for recovering the information the black hole computer would capture during its traverse of the wormhole but she was beginning to think that it was a problem.

  Emmy put her head in her hands.

  Grandfather I wish you were here.