“How dare you?” she said. “Ashley told me all about how you were making moves on her. I never want to speak with you again!” Jennifer stormed off.
Great.
I really needed to get a copy of Matlab on my secure laptop for work like this, but all I had installed was an old DoD release of Microsoft Office. I just used an Excel spreadsheet, instead. I opened my microwave circuits book and worked through the equations to plot a Smith Chart in the x-y coordinates Excel could display. It took over an hour before the Smith Chart canvas was ready on my laptop’s screen. Then, I took the equations Schelkunoff provided for the impedance of the fields around a dipole – an elemental source of electromagnetic radiation. I’d heard people talking about the beauty of mathematics before, but I’d never really felt it until that night. Here are the equations Schelkunoff provided for the impedance of an electric and a magnetic dipole, respectively.
Plotting them was not straightforward. I had to split each into real and imaginary components. Then, I had to translate them into x-y coordinates to superimpose on the Smith Chart. I got a kind of distorted curve on a 50 ohm Smith Chart, so I recalculated, normalizing the Smith Chart to the Zs = 377 ohm impedance of free space. There it was: MacGuffin’s yin-yang diagram glowed on the screen. When the wave number times the distance, “kr,” was small, the curves started at opposite end of the real axis. They spiraled into the center as kr got big, hitting the 377 ohm bullseye as kr reached about 5. All that mystic mumbo jumbo about yin and yang and how the yin-yang symbol, the “taijitu,” symbolized harmonic balance in some vague manner – it wasn’t mystic at all. It was a description of the impedance, the balance of electric to magnetic field intensity in the creation of an electromagnetic wave, starting from either pure electric field or pure magnetic field. I opened up my scan of MacGuffin’s manuscript and took a closer, second look at his “mysticism.”
Non-polarity and yet Supreme Polarity! The Supreme Polarity in activity generates yang; yet at the limit of activity it is still. In stillness it generates yin; yet at the limit of stillness it is also active.
“Polarity…” a dipole? “In activity” it “generates yang…” an electric field? “At the limit of activity it is still.” OK. “In stillness, it generates yin.” As the dipole reaches maximum excitation it generates a magnetic field… yin? “At the limit of stillness, it is also active.”
Activity and stillness alternate; each is the basis of the other.
MacGuffin’s mysticism described an oscillation creating activity and stillness… magnetic and electric potential? Yin and yang… magnetic and electric fields? Each transforming back and forth, one into the other.
When the Supreme Polarity is Non-Polar, there is a balance of yin and yang. Each contains its own beginning and its own ending and together they flow harmoniously.
In radiation, the electric and magnetic fields form closed loops – in that sense, each contains its own beginning. That’s just Gauss’ Law for electricity and the corresponding law for magnetism – two of the four fundamental Maxwell’s equations that describe how electromagnetics works. They oscillate together in harmony with the precise ratio of 377 ohms between the electric and magnetic field intensities.
In imbalance, yin exceeds yang or yang exceeds yin. Yin no longer begins at the end when there is stillness without activity.
In static fields, the impedance is no longer 377 ohms. There is an imbalance. And, although the static magnetic field still forms closed loops around currents, the electric field no longer forms closed loops, no longer “begins at the end” because it now begins and ends on charges: Gauss’ Law for electricity.
There it was: right under my nose all this time. It wasn’t mysticism. I was reading a primer in electromagnetics, dating back hundreds of years before Maxwell was thought to have been the first to discover it. The concepts were tricky, slippery, not exactly the way I was taught in class. It was challenging to interpret the flowery mystical language into precise mathematical terms. MacGuffin was no scientist, and his translations connected analogous English words to the original Chinese without regard to the precise, underlying mathematical relationships. “Stillness” seemed a metaphor for electric potential, “activity” for magnetic potential. “Yin” meant an electric field, and “yang” meant a magnetic field.
I split the screen on my laptop – the scan of the MacGuffin manuscript on one side and a Word document on the other. I kept translating MacGuffin’s mysticism into modern terms. “Twistings?” Somehow that seemed to correspond to what we called “curl” in vector calculus. The next section I quickly realized was describing the other half of Maxwell’s laws – the Faraday and Ampere relations. I was reading the Tao of Maxwell, written hundreds of years before Maxwell himself had discovered, or rather, re-discovered it. I’d managed to translate less than a page of MacGuffin’s prose into modern physics. What mysteries lay hidden in the rest?
Amit finally showed up. “I got three more numbers, today,” he bragged.
“Well, I’m down one.” I told him about Jennifer.
“Sorry, dude, but that’s why you’ve got to get over your oneitis,” was his attempt at consolation. “You should have done Ashley, anyway.”
I decided not to waste my time pointing out the alternate scenario in which my roommate hadn’t pissed off my girlfriend’s roommate. I shared my result with him.
He grasped the significance immediately. “No wonder the Circle’s so paranoid about MacGuffin. That’s why they shut down the Maxwellians – Maxwell, Hertz, and Fitzgerald were killed before they could figure out the implications. There’s over a hundred pages there, and you haven’t finished translating page one. The Circle knew where it was going, and they acted to stop anyone from finding out.”
I also showed Amit some of my latest research from over the break. It was amazing to me how – long before the development of quantum mechanics in the 1920s and 1930s was supposed to have “forced” physicists to abandon classical causality – key figures were already actively pushing in that direction. For instance, in 1921, noted physicist Walter Schottky argued that elementary acts of emission and absorption of radiation were indeterminate, “without direct cause and without direct effect,” and that they were “outside the relation of cause and effect.”
I was particularly fascinated by the 1924 collaboration of a young American physicist, J. C. Slater, with the famous physicist Niels Bohr at Bohr’s Institute in Copenhagen. Slater brought to Copenhagen an interesting idea. It was already well-established that electromagnetic radiation could sometimes be thought of as particles. Slater’s idea was that these corpuscles of radiation or “photons” were guided and directed according to the familiar laws of electromagnetism. He viewed them as real entities obeying causal laws.
Bohr and his other collaborator, Kramers, insisted that Slater recast his theory in non-causal form. They argued in favor of modifying Slater’s theory so that energy was not conserved in the individual acts of emission and absorption of radiation. These individual processes were viewed by Bohr and Kramer as random and not subject to the law of cause and effect. Under Bohr’s and Kramers’ modification, the law of energy conservation was only satisfied on average.
“So that’s like a theory of gasoline consumption that might correctly predict a certain car consumes on average a gallon of gas in travelling 30 miles,” Amit asked, “but also predicts that once in a while the car would end up the trip with more gasoline than the amount with which it started?”
“Right.”
Slater’s idea, as modified by Bohr and Kramers, came to be known as the “BKS” theory (after the authors’ initials). The notion that energy and momentum were not conserved in individual atomic processes, but only in the aggregate, statistically averaging over many individual processes was soon proven false. To colleagues in later years, Slater recounted being led on a “dubious adventure” by Bohr and Kramers.
“You think Bohr and Kramers sidetracked Slater?” Amit asked. “T
hey were in on the conspiracy?”
“It sure looks like it,” I concluded. “Bohr, at least. You see exactly how Alinsky uses Bohr’s concept of complementarity to justify any number of political and philosophic contradictions, that all good requires evil, and that’s OK ‘because quantum mechanics.’”
“I still don’t get this whole observer-dependence thing,” Amit shook his head ruefully. “It’s confusing. An entity isn’t real until it’s detected and measured. It’s like the tree doesn’t make any sound when it falls if no one’s there to hear it?”
“Exactly,” I agreed. “Bohr’s followers claim he’s such a deep thinker despite his notorious obscurity. They’ve never actually observed this profound wisdom, yet they’re confident it’s there. They forget his dictum that no phenomenon is actually real until it is observed!”
Amit chuckled. “This Majorana, he worked with Bohr?”
“Majorana was working with either Heisenberg in Leipzig or Bohr in Copenhagen when he rediscovered or came across the Heaviside theory,” I explained. “I can’t be precisely sure of the timing. Apparently Schrödinger visited Bohr in Copenhagen, too. Schrödinger fell sick due to stress and overwork. So there he was, lying in his sick bed, and Bohr came in and kept badgering and harassing him until he got Schrödinger to renounce causality and accept the Copenhagen interpretation.”
“Man, that’s hard core. I remember when you first suggested someone was trying to guide the course of scientific discovery by diverting, distracting, even killing scientists,” Amit recalled.
I nodded, “Dad pointed out the logical problem – the people responsible would have to be much further along. They’d have to know what the answers were going to be in order to try to hide them.”
“They really did know the answers,” Amit pointed out. “That’s what you’ve found in the MacGuffin manuscript.” He looked thoughtful. “That still begs the question – how did they know? Profoundly deep thinkers who sat in a monastery somewhere and came up with all these clever ideas without any experiments?”
That made no sense. “I don’t see it. Maxwell’s discoveries were the result of a synergy between theory and application. Faraday based his ideas on lots of direct experimentation. Maxwell built his theory on the foundation provided by Faraday and his contemporaries. Heaviside did a lot of the most critical work, for goodness sake, and he was a telegrapher, interested for professional reasons in how transmission lines behave. I just don’t see how they could come up with the right theory if they weren’t using it or applying it.”
“Ancient high tech civilization?” Amit speculated. “Atlantis, all the traces of which were lost beneath the sea?”
“Hard to hide all that,” I pointed out. “You’d think there’d be more evidence lying around, even with the Circle doing their best to hide it.” Each step forward only led to more questions.
Amit set up a secure connection, and I sent my findings to Uncle Rob. We also sent another note from George P. Burdell to Professor Muldoon warning him a second time about the audit and explaining how we thought Gomulka was planning to discredit him.
Amit recounted his day. He’d sounded out the Japanese graduate student who was TA for his data structure class. “Satoshi is amazing – really knows his stuff. He gave this lecture on open source software. You need to read this book, The Cathedral and the Bazar, he recommended. It’s all about the difference between centralized control and a more robust, more distributed approach. I think it’s relevant to how the Friends of George should operate. We need to act as independent cells, each improvising and adapting to meet the same end goals.” Amit thought his TA seemed a promising target. “George P. needs to reach out to him. The FOG thickens, once again!” he proclaimed as he customized our encrypted email tutorial and call for action we’d been distributing as we came across likely candidates.
Gomulka was right about most students being too focused on their daily lives to get involved in activism. The Friends of George had the same problem, without the carrot of offering a full-ride scholarship. Even students whose opinions appeared to align with ours rarely troubled themselves to sign up and contact us. I’d had only a few successes among my engineering and physics acquaintances out of a couple dozen invitations sent.
Before we turned in that night, George already had his answer from Professor Muldoon, “I heard you the first time. Keep me posted if you have any actual updates. Thanks.” Arrogant bastard.
While homework, note taking, studying, and tests had become routine by my second semester, one aspect was new – job interviews. Neither Amit nor I had ever done an actual job interview before. We looked up long lists of interview questions online and spent several hours one weekend taking turns playing interviewer and interviewee. We’d learned from long experience in high school debate that the best impromptu answers are the ones carefully prepared in advance!
The first surprise was how little help the career center offered. Both Amit and I spent a good bit of time getting entered in the system and submitting resumes. Many of the top employers, however, including Omnitia, Tolliver, and even the Civic Circle, interviewed outside the formal career center bureaucracy. Omnitia and Tolliver both advertised in the Technique. I signed up through their websites and each held off-campus interviews. One afternoon in February, I found myself walking over the Interstate to a conference room in the Renaissance Atlanta Midtown for my first interview.
I swear the interviewer for Tolliver Applied Government Solutions must have used the exact same list of questions I’d practiced with Amit. “Can you tell me about yourself?” “How did you hear about us?” “What do you know about Tolliver?” “Why do you want to work for us?” “What is your greatest achievement?” “Where do you see yourself in five years?” “What’s your dream job?” “Who else is interviewing you?”
My practice with Amit paid off, and I had a smooth, well-thought-out answer to every question. I’d studied their website, and could speak with genuine enthusiasm about their work. TAGS worked for NASA supporting the International Space Station, they did classified work on missile defense, and they did contract research for any number of government clients. It sounded interesting. I played up my IT expertise and networking experience aiming to get into whatever group was responsible for networking the Civic Circle meeting and the G-8 Summit. Uncle Larry had instructed me not to mention my connection to the family, so I didn’t. I suspected he’d be pulling the strings for me anyway, but I left the interview feeling I was likely to get an offer even without his assistance.
I landed one of the highly sought after interview slots with Omnitia a couple of days after my experience with TAGS. That was the highpoint of the experience, however. I walked over to the Crowne Plaza Midtown and showed up ten minutes early. Then, I had to wait twenty minutes for my interviewer to show up. She started the interview with a question about my high school background. I explained that my high school only offered an introductory course in programming and that I’d had to supplement it with online training. She was busy looking for something on her laptop and didn’t appear to be listening to me. She must have found what she was looking for, because she suddenly asked me some Java-related questions. They were pretty easy, and I think I answered them correctly. That was the last of the technical questions. Then, the interview transitioned to a series of logic puzzles.
“Suppose a couple has two children and I tell you that at least one of them is a boy,” she asked. “What’s the likelihood the other is a boy?”
That one’s a basic exercise in conditional probability. There are four possibilities: boy-boy, boy-girl, girl-boy, and girl-girl. The information that at least one offspring is a boy eliminates the girl-girl case, but leaves the other three. Since two of the three cases are a boy and a girl, and only one case is both boys, the answer is straightforward.
“One-third of the time the other child is a boy,” I explained.
“No,” she replied smugly. “It’s something called a “conditional p
robability” and the answer is two-thirds.”
Somehow, she’d gotten it backwards, I started to explain. She interrupted me. “These are very tricky problems, and we don’t have much time, so let’s move on to the next question. What is logically wrong with this statement – ‘In 1925, Madame Jolie told her friend that her husband died in the First World War.’”
“It was usually referred to as the Great War or perhaps just ‘The War’ until after the Second World War,” I replied. Then, I made the mistake of adding, “Although a prescient observer may well have called it the First World War if they were expecting another.”
That set her off. “No,” she lectured me. “It’s logically impossible to have called it the ‘First World War’ until there was a second.” She smiled triumphantly.
That’s when I knew I was wasting my time. I felt like standing up and asking, ‘Is this the first time someone has walked out of one of your interviews or merely the Great Walkout?’ Instead I decided to play it out for the sake of the experience. I put on my best friendly face and said, “That’s a fascinating perspective,” as if she’d enlightened me.
She grinned in pleasure at my recognition of her cleverness. Suddenly, I realized that the interview wasn’t about my suitability as a job candidate, but rather all about helping my interviewer demonstrate to me how clever she was.
The rest of her logic puzzles really weren’t that complicated. I gave her the superficial answers she wanted and took every opportunity to compliment her on her insightful questions as if she’d thought them all up herself, instead of finding them in a list somewhere. On the few that stumped me, I emphasized how tricky they were and implied how smart she must be to understand the answers.
The final phase of the interview included all the standard questions I’d prepared for with Amit. I nailed them.
Finally she asked me, “What do you see as your greatest weakness?”
A Rambling Wreck: Book 2 of The Hidden Truth Page 18