The Hidden Truth: A Science Fiction Techno-Thriller

by Hans G. Schantz

  My physics textbook made everything seem so simple, clean, and inevitable: Maxwell came up with his equations, Hertz discovered radio waves, and then on to atomic theory. Reality was much messier.

  While professional physicists skeptically toyed with Maxwell’s theories, an unemployed telegrapher put them to immediate practical use. Heaviside applied Maxwell’s ideas to telegraphy, deriving the equations that describe how signals propagate on transmission lines. He showed that you have to have a balance of electric and magnetic energy to send a signal without distortion. Most telegraph lines of the period didn’t have enough magnetic energy. Heaviside demonstrated that telephone lines needed more inductance – circuit elements to increase the magnetic energy in the right amount to carry signals without distortion. As Mr. Burleson pointed out, AT&T paid Michael Pupin a fortune for his “invention” of this solution, and Heaviside never saw a dime.

  Heaviside’s contributions aided theory as well as practice. He came up with the compact vector notation that transformed Maxwell’s ill-expressed concepts into the simpler and easier-to-use form that scientists and engineers still use today. What we call “Maxwell’s Equations” are actually Heaviside’s successful attempt to make sense of Maxwell’s ideas.

  While ivory tower thinkers debated, Heaviside continued demonstrating the worth of Maxwell’s ideas by putting them into practice. He joined forces with a professor, Oliver Lodge, to develop much of the theory behind alternating current and high frequency electronics. Establishment figures tried their best to crush them and their ideas. The chief engineer of the British Postal System, William Henry Preece, despised Heaviside and Lodge, mocking and belittling them. Heaviside returned the favor with some brilliant and vicious sarcasm. When Oliver Heaviside tried to publish a joint paper with his telegrapher brother, Arthur, Preece refused permission for them to publish their results and analysis. I was looking for clues to a conspiracy of some sort to cover up hidden truths in electromagnetics. Was Preece’s attempt to silence Heaviside and suppress his ideas a part of the same cover up?

  This epic feud was soon overshadowed by reports from Germany that a young and previously unknown physicist, Heinrich Hertz, had succeeded in generating and detecting electromagnetic waves. He demonstrated that electromagnetic waves behaved as Maxwell predicted – propagating at the speed of light and bending, reflecting, and behaving just like light, once allowances were made for the much longer wavelengths.

  By then, it appeared to be too late to suppress the truth.

  Hertz’s premature death in 1894 hardly slowed down the progress of electromagnetics at all. Marconi and others were quick to grasp the commercial implications of Hertz’s electric waves. Fundamental research continued. At the turn of the century, Heaviside, FitzGerald, and a Dutch physicist named Hendrik Lorentz were poised on the cusp of some great breakthroughs. Michaelson and Morley had demonstrated that the speed of light appeared constant no matter what the orientation of their experiment or time of day or time of the year. This negative result was strong evidence against the æther theory – the notion that electromagnetic waves were conveyed by undulations in some physical medium that pervades the universe.

  Heaviside, FitzGerald, and Lorentz had pieced together various aspects of how this all worked from a bottom-up, fundamental study of electromagnetics. For instance, they showed how apparent length contracts and how the mass of objects increase with velocity. FitzGerald died prematurely in 1901. Lorentz explicitly worked out how electromagnetics required transformations to adjust measured length and time depending on the velocity of an observer.

  Just as all these discoveries positioned electromagnetics to go to the next level, along came Albert Einstein: a 26-year-old who had not yet completed his doctorate and was working in a patent office. In 1905, he published five papers, each of which was a profound and fundamental breakthrough in physics. It was as if Einstein had all of a sudden figured out most every outstanding problem in the physics of his day, from atomic to quantum theory, including an explanation of electromagnetics he called “special relativity.” They called 1905 his “annus mirabilis,” his “miraculous year,” with good justification. It certainly looked like a miracle. It seemed too good to be true. Maybe it was.

  The bottom-up approach of Heaviside, FitzGerald, and Lorentz was swept away. In its place, Einstein offered a top-down approach starting from two axioms – first that the speed of light must be constant with respect to the observer, and second that physical laws do not depend upon the inertial frame within which one makes a measurement. To me, his axioms looked like conclusions disguised as starting points that begged the question of why these things held true. Lorentz’s æther theory agreed with Einstein’s special relativity, but the æther concept seemed superfluous, so special relativity came to rule the day. Lorentz continued in physics for a time, but soon he was sucked into administration. He even invested the last part of his life in planning flood control dams that were so critical to the safety of his Dutch homeland. By all accounts, it was great work, but it distracted him from further progress on his æther theory.

  Was it the electromagnetic villain at work? Did someone aid or influence Einstein? I found some suggestion that Einstein may have been helped by his wife, Mileva Maric, a fellow student from whom he was soon separated. The suggestions I found, though, were not well supported. Most historians concluded she did not make substantive contributions to his work. There didn’t seem to be anyone else close enough to Einstein to have influenced or contributed to his work.

  What better way to derail technical progress than to jump to the conclusion and skip over the details of how and why something works? Show someone the answer, but don’t explain how it works or where it comes from, and you guarantee they can only calculate and will be unable to make further progress. Hand a first-grader a calculator. Show them how to key in their arithmetic problems. Let them use it exclusively. How likely is it they will ever truly understand what they are doing? Einstein passed out the magic calculator that solved the problem, and the result was that everyone stopped trying to figure out how and why it worked and what it did. Heaviside, FitzGerald, Lorentz, and all their efforts to work out why electromagnetics led to special relativity were largely neglected and forgotten.

  I suggested this to Dad, and he pointed out the glaring error with my hypothesis. Suppose Einstein’s remarkable discoveries actually were too good to be true. Then, whoever was manipulating Einstein and feeding him results would have to be even further ahead. It simply wasn’t credible. He had a point. I put aside my electromagnetic conspiracy theories while I looked for more clues.

  Amit and I were both tiring of the search and the lack of results. A big part of the problem was that – contrary to our expectations – a good number of the books simply weren’t available online. Or if they were available, it was in an earlier or a later edition so no direct comparison with the Tolliver Library copy could be made. Absent a scan to compare against the book, we’d never be able to tell if there were any suspicious omissions or edits. The fundamental question that still stumped us was, “When were the edits and omissions made?” Were these recent changes implemented as the books were scanned into Omnitia or Project Gutenberg, like Dad thought? Or were these truthful and accurate scans of actual hardcopy books that had already been edited and modified a century ago, long before Omnitia and Project Gutenberg got to them? That was my suspicion. The solution was to seek out more copies of the books and find out.

  The University of Tennessee library in Knoxville did not have the editions we needed. Amit found an online listing: a copy of Fleming’s Principles of Wireless Telegraphy was available at Vanderbilt University. It looked like the right edition, too. I thought of asking Kira to check, but I decided to bide my time until I could check in person, rather than risk a phone call or email. I’d make a point of stopping by the library at Vanderbilt when we were in Nashville on our vacation.

  Amit also found a number of leads to used books online. But th
ey tended to be snapped up quickly. Our thought that we could drive to Cleveland or Chicago, let alone Portland or Providence, to buy a book anonymously was simply not workable. The books would be gone by the time we got there. Someone was snapping them up faster than Dad or Uncle Rob could arrange the logistics for a friend to buy them for us. And we could hardly ask one of bookstores to hold the books for cash payment and pick-up, because that would be announcing our presence to whoever was also buying the books. They might be waiting for us when we got there! I know Dad discounted my thinking, but I remained convinced that there was some century-old conspiracy at work. I didn’t buy into all of Dad and Amit’s paranoia about Omnitia. There was simply no way so many people could keep a secret.

  While I researched the history and personalities of electromagnetics, and planned how I was going to get hold of more books, Amit was busy on his software project. His presentation went so well that he’d been invited to install his network administration application at three additional branches of the Berkshire Inn, two in Knoxville and one in Oak Ridge. He’d been busy testing it out and training the managers there how to use it. He’d also convinced Berkshire management that he needed access to the company’s guest database, so he could assign the MAC address of the guest’s wireless devices to the guest and room number. The side effect of this was that he could impersonate any guest, sending his own Internet traffic and making it appear as though it came from any arbitrary guest. He hadn’t exploited the ability yet – explaining that four hotels didn’t make a big enough haystack within which to hide his spoofing. Besides, Amit didn’t want to tip his hand and jeopardize a large-scale deployment. He wanted to get his network administration utility adopted throughout the Berkshire Inn chain before beginning to exploit it to disguise our traffic.

  In whatever spare time we had, we continued researching alternative energy sources for debate. I was confident my case on Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generation was a winner. Amit and I also had a dozen negative rebuttals prepared for the various alternative energy schemes our affirmative opposition might throw at us.

  My physics class ended with my acing the final exam. With my reading of Maxwell’s Matter and Motion, not to mention Dad’s patient tutoring, I had a firm grasp of the basics.

  * * *

  At the end of July, Dad rented a sedan, and we were off on our family road trip. Our first stop was Vanderbilt University in Nashville to pick up Kira. “Damn pricey finishing school,” Dad muttered until Mom hushed him up.

  When we picked up Kira, I explained that I needed her assistance to examine a book at the library. Visiting a library on a vacation? She thought I was pulling a joke of some kind. Mom and Dad had to assure her that it was no joke. I truly did need to see the book, and it had to be secret. I went into the library with her, only to discover that the Fleming book wasn’t there – it was stored in the library annex. Kira was about to whip out her ID, when I preempted her, telling the librarian we forgot our IDs and didn’t need to check it out anyway, only check a couple of references in it. Kira noticed my cue and asked pretty please if the nice librarian couldn’t recall the book from the annex, so we could just take a look at it tomorrow? That cute and sweet act never worked on Mom and Dad, but the librarian clearly wasn’t made of such stern stuff. Or maybe Mom and Dad were immune through repeated exposure, like I was. In any event, the librarian told us we could check with her tomorrow morning and it would be there.

  We toured many of the nostalgic destinations we’d all visited when Kira and I were kids, like the Parthenon, the Grassmere Zoo, and the Cumberland Science Museum – although now they were calling it the Adventure Science Center. I persuaded the rest of the family to swing by some of the local bookstores, including McKay’s. None of them had any of the old technical books I wanted.

  We stayed at Kira’s apartment near campus. The next morning we all ate breakfast at the Pancake Pantry across the street from yet another used bookstore near the Vanderbilt campus – BookManBookWoman – a quaint place, but not much of a selection of old technical books. Then Kira and I swung by the library. The librarian handed Kira The Principles of Electric Wave Telegraphy. I restrained the urge to rip the book out of her hands and fling it open. Good thing. It was in bad shape. I could see why it was no longer shelved with the regular books. It wasn’t aging well. It had an off, musty smell and the binding was starting to separate the cover from the text.

  I gently opened the dark green book and looked at page 640. There was no mention of Heaviside, and the Lodge reference had large spaces in it and “p. 72” dropped to the following line. It matched the Omnitia scan exactly. I took a closer look at the paper. Page 640 seemed to be printed on the same paper as any other page. It had the same faint gray fog from a century of the opposing page’s ink being rubbed against the page. I made a photocopy of page 640 as well as the title page. Either I was holding a masterful forgery or the alterations to the text had been made in conjunction with the original printing. It looked as though Omnitia had scanned an actual book, not concocted a digital fake. That meant there were two kinds of old books in circulation: some with the Heaviside reference, and some without.

  Kira and I returned the book and walked back to her place. As we walked, my mind whirled with the implications. I had to be careful, since this was only one data point, but it looked like an old conspiracy to modify the books not long after they were printed. A more recent forgery? It could be. Even in the case Dad mentioned, though, the forged historic documents were a page or two of old letters or documents, not an entire book, and the forger was selling them for large sums of money, not leaving them to gather dust in a university book storage facility. The forgery theory didn’t make sense. Someone must have pressured the printer to withdraw the books probably as soon as the electromagnetic villains noted the disclosure of Heaviside’s bouncing waves concept. They must have leaned on the authors and publishers alike to be quiet. Threats? Bribes? Appeals to patriotism? Hard to say. Whatever they did was effective to have kept their secret for so long. Mostly. But, a few copies of the suppressed book escaped into the wild, and Tolliver Library just happened to get some of them.

  We continued on to Memphis for more family touring. We visited Mud Island and enjoyed barbeque and blues on Beale Street. Each stop in the tour, I spent at least a couple hours looking through the local booksellers. Finally, in Houston, at Half Price Books near the Rice University campus, I hit the motherlode.

  I was browsing the science section and coming up empty again, when I noticed a cute clerk walking by. Amit’s influence had been rubbing off on me, and I decided to try an approach. “Hi there.”

  “Hi,” she said, “May I help you find something?”

  “I was looking for Franklin’s Electric Waves,” I replied.

  “Oh!” She said excitedly. “I think we have that, but it’s a special order for another customer.” My heart rose and then sank between beats. I followed her to the service desk, where I spotted the plain, blueish book on the shelf behind the desk. Yes, that was definitely a copy of Franklin’s Electric Waves. So close, yet the prize was tantalizingly out of reach. My mind raced, trying to figure out how to handle this while she continued looking. Eventually she found the book I’d already spotted. By then, inspiration had struck.

  “May I take a look? I’ll be careful.”

  “I suppose so,” she said. I picked up Electric Waves. She continued, “Please be extra careful. This is a very special book because it has a particular printing flaw.”

  A what? Really? I struggled to maintain an even tone. “Oh, what kind of printing flaw? I don’t see anything wrong with it.” I leafed casually through the Franklin text, pausing just a moment to glance at page 115. There was the extra Heaviside text about the bouncing waves, just like the Tolliver Library copy! I casually kept on leafing as if I saw nothing special. There was a packing slip in the back of the book: Xueshu Quan with an address in Arlington, Virginia. I silently repeated the name and address repeatedly,
willing it into my memory.

  “I’m not sure exactly about the printing flaw,” the clerk said. “Our customer had us scan and fax one of the pages to him so he could look at it.”

  “Oh, which page?” I asked.

  “Page 115,” she said. Oh my. I casually opened the book to page 115.

  In his forthcoming third volume, Heaviside will elaborate on his remarkable theory of wave interference whereby electric waves bounce off each other. This ingenious discovery promises to unlock similar valuable insights.

  Yup. There was the ‘printing flaw,’ all right. “Gee, that’s funny,” I said. “There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with that page.”

  “I know,” she said, “It’s so crazy! Apparently that page makes this a $1000 dollar book!”

  “Wow!” I said in honest amazement. I stole another sneak peek at my new friend, Xueshu Quan from Arlington, Virginia. This time I worked on his cell phone number and e-mail address. “It must be so cool to work in a place where any day, you might uncover a secret treasure!”

  “I never thought of it that way,” she said with a bright smile, “but I guess you’re right. Only, this is the first time I found a book that’s so valuable.”