Einstein's Bridge

by Cramer, John

“It’s in the little closet over here that I’ve instrumented with a vibration-isolated double torsion balance,” said Garcia, leading Roger to the other side of the room. He pointed to the computer screen. “The sensors read out the deflections, convert them to a force vector, and display them here. There’s a feedback loop to keep the force maximized. Notice the force direction it’s measuring. It’s pointing at galactic latitude 48 degrees and galactic longitude 264 degrees. Does that sound familiar?”

  “Hmm,” said Roger. “Isn’t that approximately the direction of the dipole asymmetry of the cosmic microwave background radiation?”

  “Indeed it is,” said Garcia. “That’s the direction my axions are coming in from.”

  Roger stared at the display and shook his head. “An unbalaced force that points in the microwave dipole direction. That violates several of my favorite symmetry principles, Hernando. I think you’d better start at the beginning.”

  Garcia took a breath, then smiled. “Well, to be brief, with the help of funding from the Iris Foundation, I’ve suceeded in detecting axions and demonstrating that they are at least a major component of dark matter.”

  Roger whistled. “Axions, is it? I must confess that I never took them very seriously as the explanation for the extra hidden mass of the universe. I’ve always leaned toward massive neutrinos as the dark matter candidate of choice.”

  Garcia shrugged. “What can I say? I looked, and there they are. When I read the papers about the Reynald toroid last year, it gave me the idea for the detector. Do you remember that back in 1983 Paul Sikivie at the University of Florida suggested that if axions existed, they could be converted to photons by a big magnetic field?”

  “Yes, I remember looking into that,” said Roger, “but I thought there was an experiment by groups at Rochester and Brookhaven, and they didn’t see anything.”

  “Sure,” said Garcia. “They were only using a field of about a Tesla, and they were looking in the wrong place.”

  “I see,” said Roger. “With a Reynald toroid you can get a field that’s a thousand times larger.”

  “Yes,” said Garcia, “and the axion conversion probability scales with energy density, not field, so my detector is a million times more sensitive than theirs. Even at that, I tried their technique first, and it didn’t work”

  “Why not?” Roger asked.

  “The Rochester/Brookhaven experiment attempted to convert axions to microwave photons and detect the photons by varying the tuning of a microwave cavity, hoping to hit the right photon wavelength. I tried the same thing, but it didn’t work. It’s now clear it failed because the conversion isn’t going into photons.”

  “No photons?” said Roger.

  “No,” said Garcia. “The axions are converted to something else that moves at the speed of light. I don’t know what that might be. Neutrinos? Gravitons? Supersymmetric particles?”

  “Wait a moment,” said Roger, “if you’re not detecting photons, what are you detecting?”

  Garcia smiled. “I decided to try tuning the axion wavelength instead. I mounted two Reynald toroids with opposite fields on an optical bench pointed along the direction of the dipole asymmetry and varied their separation. When I hit a center-to-center separation of about 5 centimeters, strange things began to happen in my instruments. After a lot of testing, I discovered that, among other things, on resonance there is a net force pushing on my apparatus.”

  “How do you explain that?” Roger asked pushing on his beard.

  “As I told you on the telephone yesterday, it’s a ramjet. The axions, which are more or less at rest in the cosmic background reference frame, are moving through my apparatus at about 1/800 of the speed of light. If and when they’re converted to massless particles like photons, they move away at the speed of light. The speed increases by a factor of 800 and brings with it a change in momentum. So although we can’t directly detect either the axions or the particles they’re converted into, whatever those are, we can detect the momentum change of the conversion process. The momentum is absorbed by the Reynald toroids. We see a maximum force vector that points toward the incoming axions.”

  “I see,” said Roger. “But how can you be sure the momentum kick is coming from axions?”

  “Well,” said Garcia, “the old Sikivie paper can be used to predict the response of the detector under various conditions of field strength and orientation. Pseudo-scalar particles have certain unique symmetry properties. All of the predictions agree very well with our measurements.”

  “How big is the force?”

  “I can get up to a few hundred dynes of thrust from my small prototype, and there are ways of getting more. It’s not enough for levitation, but it should be sufficient to drive a small fuel-less space probe anywhere you want.”

  “But it only produces thrust in only in the direction of the dipole asymmetry,” said Roger. “That doesn’t sound too useful.”

  “No,” said Garcia. “The maximum is in the direction of the incoming axions, but the thrust is perpendicular to the plane of the magnetic field lines. You can point that anywhere in a hemisphere, and as the velocity builds, the incoming direction becomes the direction you’re moving in. With a curved trajectory, you could launch a probe in any direction you wanted.”

  “A few hundred dynes isn’t much thrust, though,” said Roger.

  “But the faster it goes through the axion medium,” said Garcia, “the more axions per second enter the field and the more thrust you get. That’s why I call it an axion ramjet.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Roger. “The thing accelerates forever? With more and more thrust? That’s not possible, Hernando. It would soak up all the mass in the universe.”

  “Remember,” said Garcia, “ramjets are always limited by the difference between inlet and exhaust velocity. In this case, the exhaust velocity is lightspeed, but the input velocity depends on how fast the object is moving through the axion medium. As the device approaches lightspeed, you lose the momentum kick because velocity change between in and out goes to zero. The device has its limits. It doesn’t work well near the speed of light. But it’s going to be useful, I think.”

  “Useful ...” Roger repeated. “You’re being far too modest, Hernando. You’ve invented a space drive that produces thrust without using any fuel. We can send probes to the stars. And maybe go there ourselves.”

  Garcia smiled.

  As he walked back to his car through the swirling snow, Roger’s mind was racing. This effect of Garcia’s was definitely not mentioned in the Maker download. Could the Makers be concealing it, for some reason? Or had they never discovered it?

  Roger weighed the alternatives, thinking of Iris. It was simply not the Makers’ style to conceal information. They didn’t know about the effect. Perhaps in the Makers’ universe in the vicinity of their solar system the axion density was too low to show Garcia’s effect. He had discovered a new phenomenon that the Makers did not know about.

  Roger smiled. Mankind had reached the frontier.

  CHAPTER 8.11

  Iris Campus

  THE NEW campus of the Iris Institute stood on a rocky bluff along the broad southern edge of Lopez Island, one of the San Juan group that clustered in North Puget Sound just south of the jagged international border separating Washington State and British Columbia . The several buildings recently constructed on the site formed a crescent facing southward toward the spectacular view of the blue waters of Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains behind them.

  George Griffin met his three visitors at the rooftop helicopter pad, and walked immediately to the young man who was about his height. “Hello, Charles,” he said. “I like your new face.”

  Charles Lewis, the new president of PetroGen, who had once been George Preston, who had once been George Griffin, smiled. “Roger’s right,” he said. “Ev
eryone should change his name and face once in a while. It’s like cleaning house. It gets rid of a lot of excess baggage and keeps you on your toes. At PetroGen, though, I have to be careful not to be to much like the old president. I wouldn’t want to confuse our staff.”

  Griffin conducted them downstairs and into the new conference room atop the central building. “I haven’t yet had the opportunity to kiss the bride,” he said. He kissed Alice on the cheek.

  “We had a private ceremony with Roger as best man,” Charles said “We would certainly have invited you and Grace if we’d decided on a larger wedding.”

  “No problem,” said Griffin. “I’ve been away from here too much as it is.”

  “How does Grace like the San Juans?” Alice inquired.

  “This change has been very good for her,” said Griffin. “She’s a lot more relaxed and happy now. And also, she’s pregnant ...” He looked at his hand, then at Charles. “I don’t know what that is going to make you. An uncle? A godfather?”

  “Uncle Charles will do fine,” said Lewis. “I haven seen you since the November elections, George. What do you think of the big turnover in Congress?”

  Griffin stroked his beard. “Your friends, the SSC-Killers certainly lost their seats in droves. Here in Washington State, every member of the House who voted to terminate the SSC was thrown out of office. Was all of that your doing?”

  Charles smiled and shrugged. “One only does what one can. The problem is that these flinty-eyed Republicans who replaced the Clinton-wave Democrats may not be a change for the better. I don’t think they understand in complete detail how they got elected. It will be interesting to see how Newt and his Newtonian Congress carries the ball for the next two years. I’m glad that we have no large political agenda to deal with in the immediate future.”

  “How is the recruiting for the Institute going, George?” Roger asked.

  “Very well, actually,” said Griffin. “We’ve persuaded some of our university groups to relocate here. They form the nucleus of the effort. With the cancellation of the SSC, we’ve also been very successful in our recruiting in computing, accelerator design, and particle physics, both theory and experiment. Biotechnology has been a bit harder, but there’s been a minor shakeout in the industry lately which has helped us.” He looked out the window. “Also, the site helps. There are lots of scientists and technicians with a deep-seated desire to escape the East Coast or the LA Area or Silicon Valley for a more tranquil environment with lower housing prices and plenty of waterfront property.” He looked at Roger. “How’s the recruiting going at Iris Institute Europe?”

  “Very well,” Roger said. “With the depressed state of science in the UK, the recruiting has been fairly easy. The Cornwall coast is an appealing location, with many of the attractions of this one. Tern’s group and others came from Cambridge, and we were able to pinch a number of Brits from CERN who were glad to return to the UK at a decent salary. Also, the meltdown of the USSR allowed us to recruit many scientists from the former East Block countries. They’re much more understanding of the Iris secrecy restrictions than are many of my own countrymen.” He sighed.

  “Have you considered recruiting your younger self?” Griffin asked, winking at Charles.

  “Young Roger is only twenty-one now and has another year at Oxford,” said Roger. “I remember that year very well. He needs it to grow and mature and learn. After that, I plan to recruit him. I’d hate to have him waste several years getting a Ph.D. at Cambridge learning obsolete physics and mathematics, when I could teach him so much more.”

  Charles nodded. “I’m having an easier time with that in our new commercial enterprises. Applications of the Reynald spin battery are already making us lots of money, and also generating considerable interest among scientists in our new industrial laboratories in Galveston. Industrial scientists understand trade secrets, and they don’t feel such a compulsion to publish their results immediately. But I’ll still be very glad when this phase of our operation is over.” He looked across the table at his alter ego. “How is the medical end of the project shaping up?”

  “That’s going to take some time,” said Griffin. “Actually, it’s quite frustrating. We have in our hands a broad spectrum of cures for all human ills: AIDS, cancer, flu and the common cold, all genetic diseases, excess fertility, even acne, hair loss, and dandruff. But we can’t release them yet. We must first discover how to produce the appropriate proteins and retroviruses without Writing them. After that, we must get the approval of the Food and Drug Administration or its equivalent in other countries. That will take years or even decades. And we will need to give the existing biotech industry a piece of the action, so we don’t destroy it. It’s going to be very tricky for a while. We’ve been using Roger’s new projection techniques to evaluate the impact of various scenarios for releasing new drugs. Sometimes the second-order social effects are amazing.”

  Roger grimaced. “That’s too bad,” he said. “It seems to be easier to invent a space drive than a cure for athlete’s foot.”

  “That reminds me,” said Charles. “We have a new industrial component. PetroGen has just spawned an offshoot company, SpaceGen. We bought out one of the ailing California aerospace outfits that had been sliding toward bankruptcy since the Cold War ended. We renamed it and moved the corporate headquarters to New Mexico. We’re setting up an organically-grown laser launch facility there, near the old White Sands Proving Ground. Soon we’ll start boosting small payloads into low Earth orbit. We have some nano designs that will eat the space junk that’s been accumulating in LEO and make it into useful stuff. Then we stare intensive probing of the moon and the asteroid belt, where more raw material is available. We’ve assembled a team that’s doing a preliminary design for a permanent manned moonbase. And with the Garcia drive showing promise, we may be launching a series of unmanned interstellar probes before long. It’s amazing how everything opens up when the launch cost goes down and the drive efficiency goes up. It’s the dawn of a new space age.”

  Roger nodded. “We’re going to need that technology. Tern’s team at Iris Europe has been making real progress in understanding the Makers’ maths. It’s now clear that the mathematics used by the Makers is a variant of Clifford algebra. It’s like finding the Rosetta Stone. We have the code key to their formalism. There’s a realistic possibility of doing Planck-scale physics, once we master the formalism and gain more insight into the techniques.

  “But the catch seems to be that Planck-scale experimental work will have to be done in space. Preferably well removed from the Sun’s gravity well, which means outside the solar system. Otherwise the gravitational curvature is too disruptive. We’re going to need infrastructure to support a base out in the Oort cloud.”

  “Iris Institute Oort,” said Alice. “That has a nice ring to it. I’m pleased there’s a legitimate need for physics research in space. I spent to many hours in Washington listening to comparisons of research at the SSC and on the space station. Most of the NASA science presentations were embarrassing.”

  “NASA is a problem,” said Charles, “but one, I think, that can be dealt with.” He smiled in anticipation.

  CHAPTER 8.12

  Epilogue

  THE SKY-FILLING disk of the dim yellow-orange sun was just rising on the east coast of the northern continent when the new universe was discovered. The Hive Mind’s latest breed of extra-dimensional Lookers signaled the find, triggering rapid transmissions that rose to a screaming pitch on all frequency bands as communications from separated components stitched across the planet. The Hive Mind gave orders. Resources must be refined, machines must be constructed, energy banks must be recharged, a new strategy of conquest must be put into place. Workers all over the planet scurried to fulfill their tasks, refining materials, producing parts, assembling machines, simulating alternate courses of action, making ready for the next great att
empt at Hive colonization.

  The End

  Afterword

  October 28, 1994

  “We have had to focus a lot of our time on helping [the physicists] let go of the idea that they can stay in high energy physics and getting them to focus on transferable skills ... It’s really a shock to the system.”

  — Marie Snidow, SSC Outplacement Councilor

  “The loss of a job is a traumatic experience for anybody. The loss of a career is devastating. I spent 15 years doing physics ... my investment and my career went out the window.”

  — Kate Morgan, Former SSC Physicist

  now employed by Citicorp, Dallas

  February 1, 1995

  “Once upon a time, science did have a voice in determining [national science] policy, but that was long ago. ... what science needs more than anything else are vibrant spokespersons who can communicate with the public and with the policymakers. Otherwise I dread the coming debacle that seems to be brewing in our nation’s capital.”

  — Prof. Leon Lederman, Illinois Institute of Technology,

  Former Director of Fermilab, Nobel Laureate

  Science & Politics

  THIS novel is a work of “hard” science fiction, that sub-species of the science fiction genre in which the protagonists are often working scientists, careful attention is paid to the scientific accuracy of technical details, and scientific problem solving is an important plot element. Hard SF inherently has special problems because the reader may be easily mislead into believing that fictional “rubber” science needed as extrapolation for the plot structure is real and factual, or that real scientific facts used to give the work verisimilitude are fictional.

  The present novel also has another problem, because it uses a fictional plot woven with as much plausibility as possible through the recent real but unlikely history of the initiation and cancellation of the Superconducting Super Collider project by the United States Congress. In this Afterword I want try to sort out the factual from the fictional science and politics of the work, because I think this may be of considerable interest to the readers of this book. However, the novel stands as a work of fiction without any follow-up explanations.