A Disruptive Invention

by Peter Shackle

  Only days later she was looking uncharacteristically helpless as she stood with Tony in front of a gleaming piece of physics apparatus. “I don’t understand how to put the crystal in this X ray crystal goniometer thing,” she said.

  “Let me explain the whole apparatus to you,” started Tony, instinctively smiling as he eyed her bright smile and curvy figure.

  Judy artfully got Tony to guide her hands as she learned to operate the apparatus. Somehow her body was snuggled up against his.

  “Could I maybe have your phone number in case I have trouble with the write up?” she asked as he finished, dreaming of being able to touch that thick, fine blond hair and run her fingers through it.

  As she thumbed through the local paper that night, Judy spotted that there was a special exhibition of classical Chinese paintings on at the Long Beach Museum of Art. Her fingers flew to Tony’s number in her cell phone. “Hey Tony, this is Judy from your physics class. I have just noticed that there is an exhibition of famous Chinese paintings on at the Long Beach Museum of Art. I know about some of the artists. Would you like to share it with me?”

  At the other end of the line Tony seemed pretty responsive. “That’s a lovely idea Judy! Let me pick you up at 7p.m. on Saturday and we can go and check it out.”

  On Saturday evening Judy was fussing around as seven p.m. approached, brushing her long black hair over and over again. Owning only two sets of clothes, it was not a huge decision deciding what to wear, and she had put on her blue jeans with a red top. What little money she had for clothes came from her evening job as a waitress, which came naturally to her since her mother managed a restaurant. She gathered her hair into a pony tail and tied it with a rubber band at the back. Her room mate Xiaohong watched with a combination of amusement and envy.

  The bell rang from the front hall way where Tony had arrived to pick her up. Xiaohong walked uninvited with Judy to the hallway out of curiosity to see what Tony looked like. When she saw him, she said in Mandarin: “I like that beautiful blonde hair!” Judy shook her head dismissively and trotted proudly across to greet Tony. She was shocked when he greeted her with “Ni Hao,” the Mandarin greeting meaning “Hello.” She was embarrassed in case he had understood Xiahong’s remark. “I did not know that you can speak Mandarin,” she said in Chinese.

  “I’m sorry, I only know one word of Chinese, and that is “Ni Hao,” said Tony with a grin.

  Relieved, Judy accompanied Tony back to his car parked outside the dorm.

  While he drove to the art center, Judy chattered on about what they were about to see. “This exhibition all about the works of Qi Bai Shi, the famous Chinese artist. I first learned about him at Beijing tech and I have been taken with his work ever since. I think that his work is the very foundation of contemporary Chinese art. He died back in 1957. It must have cost fortune to rent all these paintings.”

  When they arrived, Judy was ecstatic at seeing the painting, “Autumn” showing some brightly colored red fall leaves. Adjacent, was a picture of a classical Chinese house placed spaciously in front of a mountain backdrop. Judy was transported almost into heaven to see it. If truth be known, having been away from her motherland for six months at this stage, she would have gone into ecstasies over almost anything Chinese. She was profoundly home sick, which really did not make her the best romantic company. Tony seemed to have an inkling of what was going on in Judy’s mind. Dutifully and courteously he escorted Judy around the exhibit, and when they came out after a couple of hours he ceremoniously drove her back to the dorm. “I really enjoyed being with you,” he said. “Maybe we can get together again some time?”

  “I’d like that,” replied Judy, and as she got out of the car outside the dorm she pecked him on the cheek, which is what she had gathered from American movies was the appropriate thing to do. I had really meant to see him again, but then Wentao Zhai became head chef at the restaurant. He was so cute. I thought we would share our lives together, until that new bitch came along last month.

  Chapter 5

  That evening Judy and Tony arrived at John’s place at the same moment. Tony’s eyes lit up at the sight of Judy, and they exchanged a brief hug on the street outside John’s apartment.

  As soon as they were inside Judy asked John: “What is curmudgeon?”

  Laughing, John replied: “That means a grumpy old fart who spoils all our fun!” He handed everyone a beer and spread out the dishes over his large coffee table in front of his easy chairs.

  Tony Shepard was delighted to see his favorite egg rolls. Panda express chicken egg rolls! Man am I hungry. About six feet tall with dramatic blue eyes, he was born in Minneapolis with an English father and a Norwegian mother. Why did I wait so long before seeing Judy again? She’s so smart and so beautiful. She makes every other girl I ever knew look silly by comparison. I can’t stand talking with people who aren’t like me. The trouble is most girls lose interest once they talk to me. I guess that’s why I don’t have a girl friend. She’s different – we can talk technical things together.

  “So what were you trying to do with these coils John, when you first noticed this effect?” he inquired.

  “I was starting to assemble coils for a magnetometer – I was going to build a little metal detector with some fancy features,” replied John. “I needed to wind one wide coil but I did not have a bobbin wide enough to hold all the turns of wire which were needed. So, instead I wound two coils on the narrow bobbins which I had available and then glued them together.” His face was momentarily pained. “By mistake, I joined up the two coils so that their magnetic fields exactly cancelled each other out, instead of helping each other. All it should have produced was heat. But when I connected it to a battery and put current through those coils, I was sure that I felt the assembly twitch momentarily. I’ll show you after we have finished eating.

  “Perhaps, the strangest thing of all is that when you put the assembly on a weighing machine and turn on the power, the weight goes down from 2.5oz to 2.3 oz. If you stand the coil on its side nothing happens, and you get the same result whichever way up the coil is.”

  “I’ll bet that the magnetism from those coils is just attracting the steel parts in the weighing machine and causing the dial to move.” proclaimed Tony confidently.

  “I don’t think so,” said John. “I checked with a flux meter which measures magnetic field and the coil assembly really was not producing any. In any case, the next thing I did was to reverse the connections so that the two coils aided each other and produced a magnetic field. When they were joined up like this there was absolutely no effect at all.”

  Tony was suddenly feeling cynical. The last time I saw John was in the practical physics lab where he had tangled up the cords in an Atwood machine for measuring gravity. I wonder what kind of screw up he has made now? “This is bullshit John!” he exclaimed. “You must have confused something. If there is no magnetic field then there can be no effect. OK, you have my attention, let’s see this experiment work!” This is embarrassing. How can I explain a mistake without hurting his feelings?

  The three of them gathered around a side table where John already had the apparatus set up. Tony stood with his arms folded, a figure of cynicism.

  With dexterous hands, that had now done this many times before, John put his special coil on the kitchen scales and turned on the power supply connected to the coil. “Look, when I turn on the power the reading on the scales goes down by a fraction of an ounce. Now if I put it on its edge, I can turn the power on and off and nothing happens. Now I put it down the other way up and when I turn on the power the reading on the scales goes down a bit, just like in the first place. If I reverse the electrical connection between the two coils, then nothing happens when I turn the power on and off.”

  Tony’s heart pounded. This is impossible. It can’t be happening. “Whoa!” he exclaimed. “That’s not supposed to happen. With two coils joined up to oppose each other all you should get is a bit of heat coming out of th
em.”

  He bent over with his hands on his knees and stared hard at the coils. The hairs on the back of his neck were giving him a creeping sensation. His mind reeled back to a meeting with his Cal State head of department Professor Jones about a year ago. I had made a name for myself with that paper in Physical Review Letters on electron–electron pairing mechanisms already when I was an undergraduate. Just my luck that the schmuck Jones insists on reviewing every paper from the department before it gets submitted. I had been studying electron force fields for five years at that point, and nobody else in physics would have dared cross me. It’s obvious from combining relativity with classical electrodynamics that the fifth force should happen, but that prick Jones blocked it.

  “I can’t let you submit this paper, Tony,” Professor Jones had announced somberly. “I agree that all your equations are impeccable, but your own references show clearly that nobody has ever found a trace of the fifth force that could be measured reproducibly. In the face of this experimental situation, you will have our department being laughed at if this paper is released.”

  “I think the experimentalists have all been doing something wrong,” argued Tony “The reasoning is infallible – it must exist.”

  “Tony –I am sorry but the answer is no! I cannot give you permission to publish this. Why don’t you go and do some more work on the robust electron-electron pairing mechanism? That is what made your reputation in the first place and there is plenty more work to be done in that field.”

  “I will think about it,” frowned Tony as he left his boss’s office. He never did publish that work, and he still felt the pain of injured pride as he thought about it now.

  “Have you ever heard of the fifth force?” he asked John and Judy.

  They looked blankly at him. Tony continued, thinking back to his controversial paper.

  “It’s an interaction that has been hypothesized to happen between moving electrons, in other words an electric current, and gravity. For about thirty years now theorists including me have been pointing out that to be consistent with the rest of physics this repulsion ought to exist. People have looked many times, but even though they saw small effects, whenever the experiments were refined, the effects vanished.

  “I am wondering whether what you are seeing here is a manifestation of the fifth force. I suspect that everybody else has been looking for it in the wrong way. What you have done here is completely the opposite of what every engineer or physicist has done for the last 150 years. What everybody else in the world has done is to wind coils so as to maximize the magnetic field produced. You have done the opposite- by mistake you have made a coil which produces no magnetic field at all. In conventional theory it should merely produce heat and nothing else.”

  Judy had been quiet through all of this, but now she was struck with enthusiasm.

  “It sounds to me you are saying that by completely cancelling out the magnetic field, John is allowing fifth force revealed,” she said out of sheer intuition.

  “Yes, that fits in, that’s it!” said Tony. “I have an insight. If all it takes is to cancel out the magnetic field, then if we do it more effectively the result of it will be enhanced. Do you have any Litz wire around?”

  “Sure, I was going to use some 12 strand wire for my magnetometer project.” said John.

  Tony furrowed his brow, looking intense. “If Judy’s intuition about the fifth force is true, then the more you cancel out the magnetic field the better it will work. You could make the current go back and forth inside a length of Litz wire – up one strand, then down the next, so that all the way along the magnetic fields are exactly cancelled out.

  “You could join together adjacent strands at each end so that electric current would go from one end to the other and then straight back so that all the magnetic fields were exactly cancelled out. With 12 strand Litz wire you could have six to and fro conductors. Then you wind a coil with this special wire so that when you pass current through the windings it goes round and round to the inside, and back, six times over, with all the magnetic fields being exactly cancelled out all the way through.”

  John’s face lit up. “Maybe you could have a drink and watch some TV for half an hour. I think I can put that together with the stuff I’ve got here.”

  “OK” said Judy, “I can handle that.” She stretched out on the couch and made herself comfortable in front of the TV. Tony settled into a lazy boy recliner. “How about the news?” she asked Tony.

  In the course of half an hour’s fiddling John assembled a coil the way Tony had imagined with every element of wire having an adjacent piece carrying the same electric current in the opposite direction. If Tony’s idea was right there should be no magnetic field regardless of how much electric current went through it.

  Finally John announced: “We’re ready to rock and roll!”

  The other two leapt from their seats and lined up beside the table.

  Just as before, John put the coil flat on the weighing machine, and set about joining the wires to the DC power supply which he was using instead of a battery. Turning to Tony and Judy, he said: “Ready?”

  “Go for it!” said Tony. John joined up the wires. Instantly the coil lifted up one side off the scale pan and set itself nearly on its edge, tilting just a few degrees to one side.

  Tony felt a chill run through his body. He looked as if he had seen a ghost. “Oh my God!” he exclaimed. This feels like a scene from a paranormal movie. John was trembling slightly, Judy looked dumfounded.

  Tony felt the hairs rising on the back of his neck. This must be what the fifth force looks like – no wonder that nobody has recognized it before.

  “Please tell me what going on,” pleaded Judy.

  Tony became very serious. His pulse was racing now, because he recognized that this could be a pivotal moment in human civilization. Now I am going to be able to show Professor Jones who really understands physics!

  “It’s like this,” blurted out Tony – his mind was churning furiously now as he thought out the ramifications of what he had just seen and the inevitable conclusions that followed. “The fifth force happens when an electric current is moving in a gravitational field. It is repulsion, and depending on the current it is supposed to be very strong. What Judy’s intuition is telling us is that when the electric currents are allowed to interact with each other to make what people call a magnetic field, then the repulsion of the fifth force is cancelled out. What we know as a magnetic field is the cancellation of the fifth force.

  “The more magnetic field the currents are allowed to produce, the more exactly the fifth force is cancelled out. Throughout all of technology history people have been winding coils so as to enhance the magnetic field as much as possible. John has just done the exact, perfect opposite of what everybody else has tried to do – by mistake he has made a coil which produces no magnetic field at all.

  “The fifth force repulsion that is produced depends on the orientation of the coil with respect to the gravitational field. When the coil is turned sideways, there is no gravitational field going through the coil and so there is no net force. So the sideways position which the coil is in right now represents a minimum energy configuration. It cannot get completely up onto its edge because as it approaches the vertical position the force fades away. Any physical system will naturally move to its lowest energy configuration. We already did the experiment in which we turned the coil upside down and the effect still happened. So that means that we can use alternating mains current instead of DC to power the coil and it will still work just the same.

  “Look, there is another crucial experiment which we have to do. Tie that coil down to the weighing machine with scotch tape so that it can’t rotate. That way we can get a calibration reading of how much anti-gravitational force it is producing.”

  John nodded, and without a word he turned off the power to the coil so that it flopped down and then placed it in the center of the pan of the weighing machine. He looked pe
nsive and preoccupied. Tony saw a momentary shudder run through John’s body. John went across the room and came back with a spool of scotch tape. He carefully taped under the pan and across the coil so that it was pinned firmly to the weighing machine.

  He turned the power back on to the coil, and the dial of the weighing machine slammed down from 2.5 ounces to BELOW the zero point. The three of them stood staring, stunned at what they had just seen.

  Tony spoke slowly, deliberately, almost like he was sleep talking: “That coil can stand a lot more power than you are putting into it for a few seconds, before it gets too hot and melts. Just for a few moments, turn the power right up.”

  John obediently twisted the knob on the power supply, and the entire weighing machine with the coil attached, lifted up off the table. He quickly backed off on the control knob and it fell down again with a thump.

  Tony stood there looking dazed. Either I’m going to become famous like Einstein or I’m going to be exiled from the scientific community like Pons and Fleischman, and I have no clue which. He felt that his career had just become like a space shuttle five seconds after ignition – it could either go into orbit or blow up, but nothing in between was possible.

  Judy exclaimed “Guys – this is cause for celebration. We can found a company to exploit this and become rich. I’ll zip down to Ralphs supermarket and get a bottle of bubbly to celebrate.”

  Chapter 6

  The next evening the three met at Tony’s apartment. Here the furnishings were neat and modernistic, in dramatic contrast with the jumble of stuff in John’s place. John, Judy and Tony sat around a low coffee table, each cradling a glass of red wine.