“There is a good chance that this effect could justify venture capital financing to start up a new company,” said John. “Then I would not have to be pushed around by Miller anymore!”
“If we start a company then when it goes public we would all get rich – I would never have to worry about money again,” mused Judy.
“If I can analyze what is going on here then I’ll become famous and get a Nobel prize in physics,” said Tony. “I propose a toast – to freedom, riches and fame!” The three clinked glasses together and reflectively sipped their wine.
“If we did that then we would all have to give up our jobs – and it would be hard to get new jobs if things didn’t work out,” said John. “If you stop and think about it even for a moment, we might be able to make aircraft without wings, helicopters without rotors and even space ships using the fifth force. Maybe once we have gone a bit further it could be an easy decision to give up our jobs. But I am frightened at the thought of what effect this could have on the world as we know it. Everything from elevators to airplanes to satellites could change – this could be very disruptive to our civilization. I can’t think if things would be better or worse, but they would sure be different.”
“If you earned as little as a university teacher, then giving up your job would be an easier decision!” responded Tony. “I’ve given this phenomenon a heck of a lot of thought since last night, and I’ve come to a few conclusions. To go to the next step we need to at least make the drive current ac, so that we can control the thing easily. I think it needs to be driven by a constant current, and I’ll explain why in a minute.”
John interrupted: “We use ac constant current circuits for most of the electronic ballast circuits that I work with. It’s easy; you just use a big inductor or capacitor to limit the current and then vary the frequency to adjust the current. You can control the frequency with a microprocessor, so that you can make it respond in smart ways if you want to.”
“Sounds familiar to me.” said Judy, with a smile.
“Well,” Said Tony, “Left to itself, one of those coils will just tip over into a vertical position like we saw. So we have got to find a way to stabilize them in a horizontal plane. If we have four of them, placed at the corners of a square say, then if the thing starts to tip over then we can sense it and adjust the power to the corners to straighten it up again.”
“I’ve got an idea,” said John. “We could use two of those miniature gyroscopes like they have in cameras and binoculars, one sensing an X axis and one a Y axis, and simply feed back the signal so that the power was adjusted to keep the thing level. You can buy a complete gyroscope in a tiny integrated circuit package. Nowadays all these image stabilized cameras and binoculars are keeping the image steady in just that way.”
“That’s a classic control loop - I know how to program that!’ chipped in Judy.
“My biggest concern is with conservation of energy,” said Tony. “The power has got to come from somewhere and the only possible place is your power supply John. That’s why I want to run these things with a constant current. The power going into it relates to the voltage times the current so if we monitor the voltage across the coil then that gives us a reading on how much power it is taking. We can control the thing by turning the drive current up and down, which Judy can do by programming the frequency.
“ I predict that if we apply just the right current to one of these coils so that it hovers, then we increase the current so that it starts to move upwards, we will see the voltage across the coil increase. In other words it will be sucking energy out of the battery or whatever is running it. Conversely, if we push it downwards, we will see the voltage across the coil decrease in a proportionate way. In my theory, when it is going down rapidly you could even extract power out of it, rather like the regenerative braking in one of those hybrid cars. But I think that is a much more advanced game than we are in right now.”
“This has a lot of implications,” reflected John. “I had been thinking that these things could just float up like a helium balloon, but what you are saying is that it is going to take energy to move it up after all.”
“Right!” replied Tony. “You can’t get something for nothing! Suppose you have a vehicle which weighs say, 2000 pounds, comparable to a small car. I calculated this afternoon that if you had say, a 1 kilowatt power generator or inverter, that’s just over a horsepower, driving the coil, then the 2000 pound vehicle could move upwards at about 11 centimeters per second. That’s not exactly like a rocket; in fact it is much more like a helium balloon. On the other hand some cars have 300 horsepower so if you had a lot of engine in there you could move it around fairly swiftly. I’d been imagining that you could travel to outer space like this, and indeed I think you can, but you sure can’t use an internal combustion engine because there is no air out there to mix with the fuel.
“What we might be able to do would be to use a small fossil fuel engine to get up through the atmosphere. Then unfold a huge solar panel which would power it up from there. It would be smart to have some good sized batteries to tide you over in case you were moving into the shadow of the earth or something.”
“You guys are way ahead of yourselves!” joked Judy. She was trying to be light hearted and merry, but her powerful intuitive powers were ringing alarm bells with the message that the consequences of what they were discussing might be comparable to global warming. “Maybe this Merlot doing something to your brains. We can’t test any of these ideas until we drive coil with constant ac current, and see if voltage really change when it moves, like Tony supposes. How long will it take to build constant current inverter that we control?”
“I think I could just tear apart a self-oscillating electronic ballast and clip capacitors in and out to tweak the frequency,” responded John. We could do it in a primitive way tomorrow night at my place.”
“Just one thing,” worried Judy. “If what we are talking about is even half way true, then this thing worth fortune. The venture capitalists who invested in Lighting Enterprises would kill to get invention like this under their control. Can we all swear to secrecy, please? Nobody except us three know about this! If it really is this easy, then it is incredible, like unbelievable, that nobody has spotted this effect in last hundred years. I’ve still got worried feeling that we are kidding ourselves!”
“Yes, I think we should keep it secret. Secrecy and tomorrow night, my place, eight o’clock,” replied John.
“Secrecy and eight o’clock it is,” chimed in Tony.
As they made their way home that night, each of them wondered about the possibilities of what they had just seen. Maybe it was all just an illusion. Judy wondered if John could have been tricking them. It was good to keep it secret, because absolutely everybody would laugh at the thought that they had stumbled across the fifth force. Any technologist could easily lose credibility by embracing such way out ideas. She had never even heard of the fifth force before yesterday.
Chapter 7
The next evening Tony and Judy drove towards John’s place under the dull grey skies of the “marine layer,” - low clouds produced when the hot air from the California deserts comes in contact with the frigid Pacific Ocean. Locals called it “The June Gloom.” To Tony these dark fast shifting clouds symbolized mystery and uncertainty. The conflict between the hot air of the desert and the cold air of the ocean was in his mind a metaphor for the conflict he felt between the established expectations of the physics community and the theories that he was forming in his mind to explain John’s experiments. The resulting dark clouds symbolized trouble! When they got to John’s place, John had already dismembered an electronic ballast so that its high frequency output current could drive his special coil. Before they got started the three of them shared a Hawaiian pizza and Coke.
John told the others: “I had a terrible dream last night. Vehicles powered by the fifth force were fighting each other. Robbers were using them to drop down from the sky and steal people’
s property. It was an awful experience. Every time I woke up, then when I went back to sleep the dream came back.”
“I’ve not been sleeping well, either,” said Tony.
“Nor me’” chimed in Judy.
“Let’s get down to business and see if this thing will tick,” said Tony, trying to seem lighthearted, as he munched on a slice of pizza and washed it down with Coke. Even though he was trying to display the cool demeanor that he thought would be becoming for a physicist, he inwardly felt as excited as a child about to go for a carnival ride.
“The only ballast I could get my hands on was one for driving a regular office light,” remarked John. “I think it should work, I have juiced it up a bit but if I tailor something just for the purpose it might work a whole lot better. I’ve brought home my work scope so we can get a good look at the voltage across the coils and see what is going on.”
John methodically joined the parts together for the now familiar experiment. “We ought to think of a name for these coils,” he remarked.
“How about Warp Drive?” responded Judy instantly. ” I’m a Trekky and to me that’s obvious.”
“Well I disagree,” countered Tony with a smile. He enjoyed trying to make light of the moment even though his fingers were tingling with excitement. “The Star Trek warp drive was a matter-anti-matter reactor. It was supposed to have limitless power. This thing is about as potent as a helium balloon. How about just calling the power units anticoils? To me that symbolizes how they are the antithesis of any coil ever made.”
“OK, anticoils it is,” chimed in the other two, nodding supportively.
John had taken an upright kitchen roll dispenser, and placed the anti-coil over it so that it rested with the pole going through the coil so it was not possible for the coil to tip. Now, it could only move up and down. He connected up the dismembered electronic ballast to the power line through a variable transformer. This allowed him to smoothly adjust the power up and down. He had put in outsize current limiting capacitors so that much larger currents than normal could come out of the output. After joining up the wires, he hooked up his work oscilloscope across the terminals of the anti-coil. This allowed the waveform of the voltage across the coil to be seen as a wide green band going across the screen. With trembling hands he slowly turned up the voltage from the variable transformer. The three of them stared expectantly at the voltage waveform on the scope. A wider band meant more energy going into the coil, and a narrower band meant less energy going in. Eventually the power was sufficient that the anti-coil started to lift itself up the shaft of the kitchen roll dispenser. When it got half way up John grabbed it with his hand. “Now watch the scope!” he instructed the others. “I’m going to push it down now!” As he did so, the wide horizontal line on the scope became less wide for a moment, and then resumed how it was. “Now let’s see what happens when I let it go up,” said John. He let go of the coil and allowed it to start rising slowly up the shaft. As he did so, the green band on the scope became slightly wider.
“That’s just what I predicted!” Tony triumphantly exclaimed. “Your ballast is putting out a constant current, so the voltage across the coil is telling you how much power is going into it. When you are pushing it down the voltage decreases, meaning less power is going into the coil. When you let it rise, the voltage rises, meaning that the coil is sucking more power out of the inverter to provide the energy needed to levitate it.”
“I think I’m a believer!” said John.”How about you two?”
“Me too!” exclaimed Judy.
“And me!” affirmed Tony.
John said: “I’m ready to work towards giving up my job to start a company to make fifth force flying vehicles. Will you two join me?”
“Count me in!” replied Tony.
“And me!” affirmed Judy.
John raised his palm high in the air and high fived Judy and Tony.
“Let’s sit down and talk about this!” said Judy. “We need think about what comes next.”
John babbled out his thoughts in an excited uncontrollable stream: “The next step has to be to build a system that has four anti-coils, one at each corner. Then we’ll need a couple of miniature gyroscopes to sense the orientation, if the thing tips, then it automatically corrects itself. We need to have four inverters, one for each coil, and a microprocessor control system to sense the outputs of the gyroscopes. This will command the output from the inverters. It will need to have a big battery on board to power up the inverters. Let’s write software that will keep the thing horizontal, and control the inverters all together to move it up and down. We can use a model airplane RC system to do that.”
“Not so fast!” interrupted Tony. “For the same current from the inverters, the levitation force will be proportional to the area of the coil – in other words to the square of its diameter. The larger the area of gravitational field contained by the coil, the larger the force. This means that we want the coils to be as big as possible. How about having five coils – a big one going around the whole vehicle for lifting, and then four smaller ones which stop it from tipping over?”
“Now you’re talking,” chimed in John, slapping his left palm against his right fist.
“Do you realize what you describe?” exclaimed Judy. “When I was a child my grandmother had an old book around by a guy named George Adamski. He claimed to have photographed so called flying saucers. They were round vehicles. On the underside there was a ridge or rim right around the edge like the big outer coil you are describing. The underneath was flat except for four round bumps sticking out – the attitude control anti-coils! I remember that there were windows on the top for the pilots to look out of. What you describe will look just like Adamski’s flying saucer!”
“Oh lord!” sighed John. “If people notice that, then nobody will ever take us seriously. Let’s not mention that again, and discourage anybody who gets that idea in their head.”
“We must plan out what do,” said Judy. Money and value were never far from her mind. She continued: “We need to patent all these ideas. We need to raise money and form a company. With a dramatic idea like this we can be very, very rich. I know a guy in Silicon Valley who formed a company to make RFID tags like they use for security in stores. He is millionaire now.”
“How can we ever get the money to do that?” worried John. “I know it costs ten or twelve thousand dollars to get a patent written.”
“We could negotiate with a patent attorney and get him excited so he will work for share of company,” said Judy.
“But we can never get him excited if we don’t have something to show!” replied John.
Tony adopted his lecturing style as he was still trying to be formal and correct even though his body was over and over again getting the creepy feeling that came to him when he came to understand a profound physics theory: “We are using a huge amount of imagination. To us we are already building flying vehicles, but anybody else would see nothing but a coil bouncing up and down on a kitchen roll holder. If we are going to get anywhere we have to build something that would convince anybody.
“Especially a venture capitalist. If all you have is an idea, then they will not assign much value to that and they will own 95% of the company. But if you have something that works a bit already then the risk is taken away and you can end up owning even as much as half the company. So I think that we need to do just what John said – construct a model, just a couple of feet across, which has self contained batteries and inverters, has enough smarts in its software to stay flat, and can be controlled up and down with a model airplane radio control unit. Now that will be a demonstration that will convince a banker to give us money. Then we won’t need to convince a patent attorney because we can just pay him normally.”
“Let’s think about how much will cost,” said Judy.
“A circuit board for the inverters will set us back maybe four hundred dollars,” replied John. “Then all the Litz wire for a two foot diameter anti-c
oil and four small control anti-coils will probably be at least another two hundred. The parts for the microprocessor, memory, inverters maybe another hundred. Radio control gear about another two hundred. Maybe a hundred for the gyroscopes. By the time you consider a frame to mount it all on – let’s use balsa wood - and glue, fasteners etcetera to hold it altogether then we are talking about roughly a thousand dollars. And it will take a lot of evenings to design all that.”
“And a lot of evenings to write code to make it stay flat and go up and down!” chimed in Judy.
“Let’s have a toast,” said John.
Tony hastily dug out a bottle of Merlot from a cupboard and poured a small drink for each of them. “Here’s to freedom, riches and fame!” The three clinked their glasses together.
As Tony left John’s apartment that evening, he looked up at the moon faintly visible through the fast moving low clouds of the marine layer. He felt alternately excited and fearful, realizing that he was about to give up on his comforting, familiar surroundings and start an adventure into a future as unclear and shifting as the moon he saw through the fast moving low clouds.
Chapter 8
It was a fine fall morning as John, Tony and Judy were loading a big suitcase size box into the back of an SUV at the Hertz depot beside San Jose Airport, California. They had taken a morning flight up from LAX. John was carrying a briefcase containing a business plan. They had appointments to see five venture capital firms that day, all located along Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park. John had bought a book entitled “Business Plans for Dummies” which he had with him in the car, and had it on his lap as he sat in the front seat. He had created the name “Electrolev” for the company, symbolizing the association of electronics and levitation. He was planning to ask for $20M, and had worked out a business plan for how they could get to the stage of pilot production for a simple helicopter replacement vehicle. Mentally he had already almost given up on his regular day job. To make the next step towards fulfilling his dreams he had to persuade a venture capitalist to invest the money that would make Electrolev a reality. This could be the day when his dreams were made or broken.
A Disruptive Invention Page 3