Nodal Convergence (Cretaceous Station Book 1)

by Terrence Zavecz

  Einstein’s general theory made a base assumption that the propagation speed of gravity was constant and equal to light speed. A little more than a hundred years before Einstein, Laplace’s experiments suggested that gravitational interaction speed was about ten million (106) times faster than light.

  Poliakov’s key observations are derived from experiments replicating Einstein’s famous theory of the distortion of light by massive terrestrial gravity wells. He cites a 1975 experiment that demonstrated the distortion, using a rapidly rotating ferromagnetic, to be from two effects; an intense drift of magnetic ions changing the index of refraction and an otherwise weak gravitational distortion that turned out to be about 1010 more than Einsteinian predicted gravitational predictions. The logical conclusion was that gravitational sources are not mass-dependant but rather magnetic and that gravitational forces from a field in flux are much more strongly influenced than from a stable field.

  The theory is supported by an experiment. In 2000, a group of experimenters in Krunichev, Russia used mercury as a rotating fluid to create an engine. Controlling the speed of rotation and the size of the fluid ball the engine became a gravitation wave source. The engine weighed 39 kilograms and by care control of spin-speed and by optimizing the magnetic field changes they were able to reduce the weight by one kilogram or 3%.

  Chapter 2: Tipler Travel

  “For that we need generators and receivers of gravitational radiation. It means that the financial support is necessary. And engineers are sure to be ready to pay the highest price for the chance to give to the Mankind spaceships, systems of instantaneous communication with them and real perspectives for the very long history”

  S. Poliakov, O. Poliakov,”Gravitonics is Electronics of the XXI Century”, New Energy Technology, Issue #4 (2002) Russian Science

  The planet before them was a cold killer.

  Twelve times the size of the earth. Jupiter spins fully about its axis in less than half of an earth-day.

  The giant planet is a deadly, natural synchrotron with a magnetic field fourteen times stronger than that of earth. A field that rips electrons to near the speed of light to form a planet-encircling shroud of screaming particles encircling father Jupiter that beams out bursts of synchrotron radiation emissions to the stars.

  The winds below Jupiter's cloud tops do not die off as they would if driven by solar heating but persevere at more than 350 miles per hour. Aeolian currents that scream and form into massive bands, gusts and eddy pools that are near impossible to traverse.

  More probes have been lost to Jupiter than any other planet. No man has been foolish enough to approach closer than its moon Europa. Today the thin metallic skin of a ship with 322 people now plunges toward the maelstrom. A pioneer’s expedition of scientists, engineers and their families committed to unlocking secrets that, with the smile of fate, would someday carry humankind to the starts.

  ‘We won’t have to worry about the heavy surface winds. You can’t see it because of our approach angle but the Red Spot rises above the surrounding cloud cover by several thousand miles. Once inside we will cruise near the center of the Spot for all but the last leg of the passage.’ Matthew Zoeller commented to Paul Wenford as they walked to the Star Lounge.

  Matthew Zoeller, a broad shouldered stocky fellow, is the chief engineer. He has a doctorate in Electrical Engineering from Lehigh University and Paul noticed that he also had a solid background in the physics involved. They had decided to take a break from their lab work to get a cup of coffee. Matt firmly believed that a cup of coffee, a napkin and a pen have solved more engineering problems than all the computer simulations.

  With his flair for the dramatic, Mark Nolen had named the ship the Argos. They were after all on a long journey in pursuit of the Golden Fleece, Knowledge. The Star Lounge was located up near the top-center of the ship. The Lounge serves double duty as the dining hall and meeting room. You enter it by way of a high encircling walkway that leads to a central staircase. At the bottom of the staircase you could select to move to a cafeteria-style service or over to more formal meeting areas.

  Coffee in hand, they moved over to a table by the walldisplay. Paul had been here with a group only one other time. Then the walls were filled with calculations, interactive notes and simulations. The group had worked to anticipate the problems the ship would encounter when they exited the Red Spot formed Tipler Cylinder emerging hopefully into the Cretaceous. An exit they were now calling the Cretaceous Portal.

  The current seamless panorama covered all the walls and ceiling of the room with a real-time hemispheric of the heavens with Jupiter and its Red Spot filling most of the view. The image of the father overpowered all else with a disk-filled violent tapestry of blues, greens and orange whirlpools bounded by contrasting currents. Immobile in the very heart of the maelstrom was the great Red Spot. A cyclonic engine fixed amid the turmoil creating a bow wake against the clouds that violently pushed aside the streams before it to rebound and then swirl, eddy and churn in the wake. The diminished aurora-glowing disk of Europa lay serenely behind them. Details of the moon quickly fading into the distance to be slowly replaced by a strengthening sister display of ionized gases radiantly visible above the southern pole of the gibbous father Jupiter.

  Matt commented. ‘This is my favorite spot. I always feel like we are perched up here, exposed like a bump on a log. Here we sit, alone in the void with the ship beneath us. Right now we must have the best view in our solar system.’

  The Lounge is actually located down inside the ship. No bulges or bumps protruded from its smooth skin. The Argos design is aerodynamic and optimized for both atmospheric entry and near-lightspeed travel. Argos designers were not concerned with a reduction in friction during atmospheric entry but rather an easy ship’s curve that simplifies the gravitonic field tuning.

  Travelling at near-light speeds, the field accelerated the small but deadly particles found in deep space from the path before the ship. When entering an atmosphere at a much lower velocity, the force field flings air molecules in the entry path to the sides leaving the Argos to fly in a partial vacuum envelope. There is no bow-wave compression of the gas before the ship so flight is more efficient, frictionless and without sonic booms.

  Matt took a sip of coffee, smiled and turned to Paul. ‘Well, we finally have a few minutes to sit and talk. I am glad you came along; you removed a load from my shoulders. You weren’t here for the full mission planning but you have time to catch up. The real challenge for you doesn’t begin until after we land.’

  ‘The ride for the next few days should be smooth unless we encounter something the probe didn’t see. Our path is much too confined for travel anywhere near light speed but we will not need to travel far into the Tipler Cylinder that is forming the Red Spot. The real questions will arise when we find and then exit at the Cretaceous Portal since we never sent the probe actually into it.’

  Paul had taken the time to review some of the background material involving the Cylinder. ‘I know that John Tipler had described it rather simply.’

  "First take a piece of material 10 times the mass of the Sun, squeeze it together and roll it into a long, thin, super-dense cylinder - a bit like a black hole that passed through a spaghetti factory. Then spin the cylinder up to a few billion revolutions per minute and see what happens."

  ‘This description certainly doesn’t fit into what we see at the center of Jupiter. A Tipler Cylinder has an entrance and an exit and it is infinitely long. How could it have multiple exit points?’

  ‘Our studies show that a black hole exists at the center of Jupiter.’ Matt took another sip of coffee. ‘It’s a small one but with a sustainable lifetime that is at least the age of the Earth. The immediate question would arise, was it captured by the Sun? Thinking that the Sun could capture it would be like you trying to capture a freight train. It may in fact have been a binary of the Sun that collapsed to form a black hole.’

  ‘Well then, did Jupiter capture t
he Sun?’ he continued. ‘If so, then the black hole’s orbit about the Sun or vice-versa would simply be a matter of the frame of reference of the observer. This scenario however does not explain the orbits of the remaining planets centered on the Sun. We simply don’t know these answers yet.’

  ‘We do know that the Black Hole at the center of Jupiter is not the Tipler Cylinder. Theory supposes that the clouds above the event horizon of the black hole are maintained by its emission of Hawking Radiation and rapid rotation along with new matter that is scooped in from the solar wind and debris from the asteroid belt.’

  ‘The real oddity here is that great fixed feature in front of us, the Red Spot. We’ve discovered that a Cosmic String is anchored into the black hole at the center of the planet to form the Red Spot. A black hole contains a one-dimensional singularity – an infinitely small point in the space-time continuum. A cosmic string is a two-dimensional line that is about the thickness of a proton. Even though a cosmic string is extremely thin it has immense density and so would represent a significant source of gravitational waves. A cosmic string about a kilometer in length may be more massive than the Earth. We feel the cosmic string forming the Red Spot is a closed and tangled string where the exit portals corresponding to near-overlapping segments or kinks. We don’t know the string’s actual length since we can’t measure something that bends both time and space. However the tortured combination of the two forms our natural Tippler Cylinder, our time machine.’

  ‘I don’t know if we are lucky or cursed having a time machine of this magnitude in our back yard but we are taking advantage of it. It represents a chance to leap ahead in our knowledge of the physics of the universe. We will be tracking the gravitonic flux throughout the trip. Local time and space should be very calm until we get to the point where we have to move from the center of the cylinder to the anomaly caused by the exit portal.’

  ‘The trip should be interesting. The Cylinder transports you by distorting both time and space. When we exit, we won’t be in our present time frame. We also will not be at the same point in space. We think we will still be right by Jupiter but we’ll have travelled many light-years in relation to our current position as well as many years in time. Movement of the solar system, our star group and the galaxy you know.’

  The human race has a penchant for not fully appreciating significant events until after the fact. A cup of coffee shared between two friends spotlights the consciousness of daily life. As they talked, the Argos passed through the first light clouds of hydrogen to enter the Red Spot. About the ship, space and time began to bend and warp with no apparent influence on the consciousness of the engineers. Two engineers talking shop as they each walk back to their lab with a coffee cup in their hand.

  As the hours went by visibility in the Red Spot improved until a relatively clear central tube could be seen extending off into a red lined tunnel. The initial green, orange and blue wisps of clouds formed by trace elements had given way to a uniform red-shifted hydrogen haze. External lighting eventually faded to a cave-dark blackness until a faint glow once again began to permeate the surrounding.

  Two thousand years before, the Roman Republic changed into an Empire and ended the long reign of the Pharaohs in a far off land called Egypt. Egypt’s civilization first raised a pyramid ten thousand years ago while Mammoths still walked the earth of the far North. Humankind created art and worshiped gods drawn on rocks more the forty thousand years ago. In a blink of the eye, the history of man passed unseen to the crew of the Argos as they traveled back in time.

  The autopilot of the ship read directly from the fluctuations monitored by the GraviDynamics drive. It sensed the approach of a singularity in the gravitonic lines of flux ahead caused by a near crossing of two Cosmic String segments. The Argos had encountered the first anomaly in the string at a point that occurred 14.5 million years ago, called the Middle Miocene Disruption. An extinction caused by strong cooling of Antarctic deep waters forming a major growth of the East Antarctic ice sheet. Sudden climate cooling resulted in a mild extinction of 30% of the mammalian genera.

  Stronger lines of force now lay ahead. They needed to avoid a direct encounter with the singularity because of the conflicting forces but they followed its field-lines away and out from the central axis of the Red Spot. The portal pulled the Argos to draw it to a point 65.5 million years before their entry into the Red Spot. Strong forces now direct them to a point in time marked by a major extinction known as the Cretaceous–Tertiary. Sometimes called the K-T extinction, it ended the age of dinosaurs except for a small segment of the Theropod branch that today we call birds. The extinction was major for more than just the dinosaurs. The event killed off half of the species on the planet. The Argos fought the current of time and space to cross over the easiest exit-path to a time a thousand years earlier and safer. A maneuver designed to avoid the unknown dangers surrounding the easy path toward the extinction point.

  The Argos emerged into a star-studded sky dominated by a large planet very much like the Jupiter they knew. As they passed out from the planet, the Red-Spot now formed an elongated, almost hot-dog shaped artifact with no apparent difference in its familiar deep red colors. The father was even greater in measurable size than the Jupiter they knew. Sensors turned and noticed that the frozen surface of Europa was now gone, replaced by one large, liquid ocean.

  Constellations in the sky appear different. Many seem vaguely familiar, others are gone. Even this long jump is only a moment in the long history of our Solar System. Some changes are evident to the human eye; the handle of the big dipper had a stronger bend to it but other changes are more subtle. Argos took the trip from Jupiter down the gravity well of the Sun towards the Earth slowly over the next few days and carefully placed robotic monitors along the route. Travel was strangely quiet without the chatter storm of communications normally present.

  Matt Zoeller looked to his HiveTab to check the status of the Gravitonic Drive parameters. Three of the engineers were already reviewing tuning and performance levels. All appeared normal. The objective of this expedition was to look for signs that universal constants in this universe might not be constants at all. He did not really expect to see any changes this early in the voyage because they had no fixed frame of reference while they were within the drive field itself. Discoveries would have to wait until they could set up the more sophisticated test beds. Well, he thought, a little sightseeing wouldn’t hurt right now.

  ‘Well that caps it off!’ said Adrian, the first pilot of the Argos. ‘It’s just plain weird not having Tycho base down by the lunar water mines.’ Adrian Lee turned his quick smile on for the others in the command cabin. Even in this era of almost-human hive-computers, quick reactions with a sharp mind characterized the best pilots. Coal black short hair framed a pair of oriental brown eyes that charmed many a young girl. ‘Just look at the field around it. The splash rays from the crater are a lot brighter than I remember.’

  Matt took a slow sip from his cup and mentioned, ‘Well, Tycho is one of the younger large craters on the moon. Only about 100 million years old from our time so we’ve travelled back a little more than half its life. It has a fresher print than I would have expected though. Personally I think the Earth is much more interesting, you obviously haven’t looked at the globe.’

  ‘This is the moment we worked for.’ Matt whispered to Adrian. All non-critical personnel on the Argos are already linked-in through either their Hive Tab or using the walldisplays to view the moon and, even more impressively, the Earth.

  ‘There we are ladies and gentlemen. That beautiful blue ball below us is the Earth from before our ancestors. For those of you who haven’t met her the young lady standing next to me is Doctor Sara Wenford and she is our official Paleontologist. I’ll let her explain the changes we see below.’

  The HiveTab link is easy enough to use and easy to forget as it sits on the bone behind your ear. Most of the time you don’t even have to command it, the function or informatio
n is just there when you need it. It’s a little harder learning to cope with the abundance of both data and visual information. Right now Sara could see, before her on the walldisplay, the Earth-Moon panorama outside the ship. She could also simultaneously access a magnified image of the Earth and a display of the measured sensor data directed toward the planet. Multiple images in her mind that somehow were instantly interpreted and that she could react to independently.

  A part of Sara’s mind thought about linking the ship-wide channel that Matt’s HiveTab highlighted for her. Sara suddenly sensed the presence of the rest of the explorers. A powerful, alien and yet comfortable feeling of community like no other she had ever experienced. In her current presentation mode, Sara found that she could control the video, audio and even highlight segments of the images seen by the others. A truly intimate, powerful and yet easily controlled presentation from her consciousness into those crewmates who selected to participate.

  ‘Good Morning everyone, I’ve just received this new HiveTab so bear with me and please take it easy if you have questions. If you can, take your eyes from the view for just a second and notice the gas mix down there. This is important and will influence the way we operate after we land.’

  ‘Our Earth's atmosphere contains about 77% nitrogen, 21% oxygen. Here our sensors are measuring a 31.2% oxygen level at ground level. This level of oxygen falls in line with trapped air pockets we have measured from prehistoric amber samples, so the higher level of oxygen is no surprise. The oxygen content is not high enough to hurt us even for extended periods. We’ll still need to monitor our performance during physical workouts. You should actually feel better with a noticeable improvement in verbal cognitive performance. Take care with open flames; things will burn a little easier.’