“Now, Mike,” he started, “I’m going to take this step by step. To make it clear I’m going to show you some things that you’ve probably seen demonstrated at school but I want you to be patient, because it illustrates the very kernel of what I’m trying to do here. Okay?”
“Sure, okay.”
He held one of the bobs and gave the other one a little tap to set it going.
“A simple pendulum,” he said. “It oscillates at its own natural frequency.”
He looked at me and I nodded. So far I wasn’t finding this a massive intellectual challenge.
“Now, we can increase the amplitude of the oscillation by putting in a tiny bit of energy on each swing.”
He tapped the bob very lightly at the end of the swing and kept doing it, so gradually the arc got bigger and bigger.
“But the timing has to be right. We can put in our tap on every other swing, that’s to say at half the natural frequency, or at a quarter or an eighth and so on. But if we try to do it at, say, a third of the natural frequency we hit the bob in the wrong part of the swing, and instead of adding to its energy we dissipate it. What I’m introducing here is the idea of a resonant interaction, where a tiny amount of energy at the right frequency will interact with an object—the pendulum in this case—and make it vibrate or oscillate more and more.”
“Like the opera singer who breaks a glass by hitting the right note,” I put in helpfully.
“Exactly. Now let’s add the other pendulum.”
He lowered the other bob and steadied it with his fingers so that it was hanging motionless in the neutral position, drew the other pendulum to one side and let it go.
I knew what would happen, because I’d done the coupled pendulum experiment at school years ago, but it is an amazing thing if you’ve never seen it before. The pendulum that starts off stationary starts to swing, all by itself. As it swings more and more the movement of the other pendulum gets smaller, until it’s completely stationary. Then the whole thing repeats in reverse until the second pendulum is stationary again and the first one is swinging. It goes back and forth like that for ages.
We watched the pendulums doing this for a bit. I was trying to think what point he was making.
“Now, Mike,” he said. “How is the energy passing from one pendulum to the other?”
“Well, obviously they’re coupled by the rope. If you didn’t have that rope connecting the two they’d be isolated and it wouldn’t happen. So it’s mechanical vibration passing along the rope that carries the energy from one to the other.”
I was comfortable with this stuff. Like he said, it was physics we’d done at school.
“Good. All right, now let’s go back to the single pendulum. Suppose, instead of this string, I put in an elastic band and pull the bob down instead of pushing it to one side. It vibrates up and down now, with a different natural frequency, but the principle is exactly the same.”
“Okay.”
“And if I replace the elastic band by a thick rubber rod, it still behaves in the same way, although obviously it vibrates more quickly and over a shorter range.”
“Yes.”
“Now I can’t demonstrate this, but suppose we take that rubber rod, and instead of hanging it on a frame we add a weight to the other end. So you have a rubber rod with a weight on each end. If we pull the weights apart and let them go, they vibrate in and out, a bit like before except that now it’s happening at both ends.”
He was using his hands to demonstrate the motion, his two fists as the weights, moving quickly towards and away from each other. He went on:
“What we’re describing is a model of a simple molecule, consisting of two atoms—the weights—and a chemical bond between them—the rubber rod. Of course the vibrations are millions of times faster but if you want to set this molecule vibrating you still have to excite it at its resonant frequency. With the pendulum you could just tap it every few seconds. Here you have to inject energy at a much higher frequency, the frequency, in fact, of infra-red light.”
I looked round at the apparatus on the cage, all the lasers and photodiodes, and back at Rodge. He was nodding.
“Yes, you’re beginning to see the connection. Of course most substances are much more complicated than the simple molecule. They’re three-dimensional lattices made of millions of atoms connected to each other by chemical bonds—like the rubber rods—and they can vibrate in different ways. But the principle is the same. When we feed in infra-red light at the resonant frequency we set certain atoms vibrating—like your opera singer with the glass. Each vibration has a different resonant frequency, so each needs a different wavelength of infra-red to excite it. In fact if a chemist wants to know something about the chemical bonds in a substance that’s exactly how he does it: he shines a beam of infra-red light through it. He sweeps through different wavelengths, and each time he hits a resonant frequency the substance absorbs energy from the beam, so less gets through. That gives him a sort of signature for the substance.”
“You’re talking about infra-red spectroscopy, aren’t you?”
“That’s right. Now if you feed in enough energy you can excite a condition I call mass resonance. To explain that we’ll have to talk in terms of matter waves.”
I think a sort of shock went through me when he said “matter waves”. I thought immediately of his argument with Malcom Goodrich and the way he’d been just after it. My nerves had started to tingle. He hadn’t noticed my reaction though. He was warming to his subject.
“You see, at any one time, there is a certain probability that an atom will be in a given place. In mass resonance you spread that probability out so that there is a greater likelihood of it being somewhere else.” He put his palms together and then drew them apart as he said it. Then his hands fluttered in one of those throwaway gestures. “In itself that’s not particularly interesting.”
“Oh. Why not?”
“Because in any practical situation the atom is not on its own; it’s just one of a whole assemblage of atoms making up the material, whether it’s a crystal or a piece of metal or a plastic beaker or whatever. All of the neighbouring atoms will be exerting their own pull on that molecule. So although you’ve increased the likelihood of it being somewhere else, in practice it can never take up residence there because it’s always going to be attracted back into place by its neighbours. It’s not an interesting situation.”
“So what is?”
He leaned closer to me, and his eyes had a new intensity.
“What’s interesting is if you excite them all at once, put all of them into mass resonance.”
I thought about that for a moment.
“So that’s why you’ve got all those lasers and photodiodes and stuff.”
“Yes. And most of them cover frequency bands, not just one frequency, and I’m coupling and modulating and sweeping them. It gives you less power at any one frequency but I’m starting with a lot anyway, and you don’t need huge amounts.”
“Ok…ay,” I said slowly, “so you get all the atoms resonating. What then?”
“Then you put in a nice big dollop of energy and it moves into a coupled mass resonance.”
“Come again?”
“It’s difficult to explain in words, because it drops out of the maths, but I’ll try. I know, let’s use another analogy. Let’s think about a billiard table. Suppose you hit a billiard ball hard. It’s running around, bouncing off the cushions all over the table. Sooner or later it’s going to drop into a pocket. Once it’s in there it’s stable, it doesn’t move. Now we can put in a dollop of energy: we bring our hand up under the pocket and whack the ball. It comes out of the net, onto the table and rolls into another pocket. It’s stable again, but in a different place. Get the idea?”
“Not really. I don’t understand where this mass resonance comes in.”
“Ah. You see that’s where the analogy is less helpful, because thinking about billiard balls makes you think in very solid t
erms. You think to yourself, ‘Here is a ball, it can only exist in one place.’ But theoretically it could exist anywhere. It’s not actually confined to one place; it’s just most likely to be found there. See the difference? And setting up the mass resonance spreads out the probability of finding it somewhere else.”
“So what was all that about coupled resonance?”
“When you put in the dollop of energy the ball finds another pocket, but it doesn’t actually move, it just spends more time in the new position. Think about the two coupled pendulums. Each one exists in its own place, but something is travelling backwards and forwards between them. Like you said, that something is mechanical vibration. It takes several seconds for the energy to pass from one pendulum to the other. In the case of the ball in mass resonance what is passing back and forth is a matter wave, and it’s happening maybe a hundred thousand times a second. So you have the illusion of the ball being in two places at once. But it is an illusion; it’s simply sharing its mass very rapidly between two stable states.”
“You’re saying that it’s possible to transfer a ball from one place to another just by beaming a special kind of broadband electromagnetic energy at it and then giving it an extra jolt?”
“In essence, yes.”
“But that’s like a mass transporter—you know, ‘Beam me up, Scottie’ kind of thing!”
“No, it’s not quite the same. I’m not saying that couldn’t be done, but it’s far more ambitious. As I understand it, the idea there is to take apart a person or an object to its elemental particles, send it somewhere and then reassemble it perfectly at the other end. That’s heady stuff. All I’m talking about is each atom alternating its mass between two places. If every atom is doing it then the whole object is doing it. The constituent particles never lose their relationship to one another, not at any stage.”
“But doesn’t it take massive amounts of energy to do something like that?”
“Not as much as you might think. Remember we’re not moving anything really, just encouraging it to exist in two places. Look at the two pendulums. How much energy did that need? You just tap one of them lightly at the right repetition rate and it swings more and more. If the other one is there it couples to it and the energy flows backwards and forwards, for a long time. If you stop tapping it will all come to rest eventually because of air resistance and friction in the suspension. Those things don’t affect matter waves. I’m not sure if anything does, actually. You need a fairly big dollop of energy to get the other state started, but after that it seems very stable.”
I thought about all this for a moment. I’d been expecting something pretty mind-bending and I wasn’t disappointed. I remembered reading somewhere in a magazine about quantum coupling. This sounded similar in principle. Maybe quantum coupling was the equivalent of what he was saying, put in terms of particles. I didn’t like to ask; I knew how Rodge felt about particles.
Then I shook my head as if to clear it. Come on, I thought to myself, let’s get real!
“I tell you what, Rodge,” I said. “It’s a fantastically original idea, and I’m sure it looks just great on paper. But I’m sorry, chap, it can’t be done.”
His face went very serious. He dropped his voice, speaking so quietly I could barely hear him:
“It can be done, Mike. I’ve done it.”
7
My brain was in a whirl. I wasn’t even sure I’d understood him completely. These ideas, these theories Rodge had been talking about, they belonged in the obscure world of the atom. Surely he couldn’t have brought them into our world, the world we experience with our naked senses? I was pretty sure he could show me all the calculations, and I was equally sure I wouldn’t understand them, so that wouldn’t prove anything to me. I’m a practical sort of chap: I needed to be convinced by a demonstration. I think Rodge appreciated that, because without another word he took me over to the business part of the lab.
It was a pretty awesome set-up but as he went over it with me it quickly started to make sense. As I said before, the major feature was this big copper-mesh cage. It was rectangular. The shorter walls at each end carried most of the equipment: the power supplies, frequency generators, and amplifiers. From these a whole army of metal-clad cables crawled up over onto the roof of the cage, where they were connected to the various antennae and lasers. These larger items were mounted on a framework made of slotted racking, and all of them pointed downwards towards the table in the middle. Some of the cables passed through bulkhead connectors in the mesh to devices inside the roof of the cage. Other devices were above the roof but cut into the mesh. I looked again at the way he’d clamped the metal housings between flanges to make sure there were no gaps in the radiation shield. I’m a pretty fair hand technically, but I had to admire the job he’d done.
The control cables ran around the outside of the cage to the long wall, the one furthest from the entrance to the lab. Here they disappeared into a series of panels, with switches and dials and stuff like that. He’d identified most of these with little embossed plastic labels. I suppose if it had been NASA he’d have been sitting in a rotating armchair with all the controls arranged in a circular bank around him. His set-up wasn’t as swish as that. He’d simply moved a long wooden bench up against the outside of the cage, and the various panels were mounted on that. You couldn’t sit down to this one—you’d never be able to reach all the controls or read the dials. But there was an advantage in that. If you were standing up you could look over the panels into the cage, and if you got reasonably close to the mesh you could see what was going on inside.
The other long wall, the one you could see from the door to the lab, didn’t have any equipment or cables on it at all—just the door you used to enter the cage.
He started taking me through the instrument panels and switch banks. Although it looked a bit complicated to start with, the controls were laid out in a pretty logical way.
“This left-hand half,” he said, “is entirely concerned with the power supplies.”
“The power supplies to all those microwave generators and lasers and photodiodes over there?”
“Yes. The lever switches here just knock each device, or group of devices, on or off. The knobs control the actual supply voltages, and there’s a dial above each one to show what the setting is.”
The knobs must have come from some pretty ancient equipment. They were big black plastic ones, really hand-sized. I like gear like that. It’s got a real feel to it.
“All right,” he said, “we’ve got a power supply to each device and we’ve adjusted its setting. That’s all so far. At this stage none of the devices is actually doing anything.”
“Yeah, I can see that. It’s like switching on your stereo with the volume control right down.”
“Exactly. What we need now is a way of controlling the output power that will actually radiate into the cage—the equivalent of your volume control. That’s what this set of sliders is for.”
What he was referring to looked like a sound recordist’s deck in a studio. I could see why he’d done it that way. If you got all your fingers behind the sliders you could bring up the radiated power from all of the devices together.
“All right? Let’s get this part set up.”
We took up positions at the panel and he supervised me as I flipped the left-hand lever switches in turn and brought the volts up on each supply.
“Normally I’d do this at the beginning of an experimental session. We have to give it at least fifteen minutes to stabilize.”
While things were settling down he took me over the right-hand half of the controls.
“Now this part,” he said, “is concerned with what I referred to before as the ‘dollop of energy’. As you can see, it’s much simpler.”
It was a lot simpler: just a row of lever switches with a red and a green indicator light above each one, and a large red push button. He explained it to me.
“It works on the same principle as a photog
raphic flash gun. What we’re doing here is charging a bank of capacitors. The red light shows charging is in progress. When it’s fully charged the green one comes on as well. The capacitors are under there.”
He pointed under the wooden bench, and I bent over to take a look. I could see a row of metal boxes, about fifteen of them, each one the size of an old television set.
“Oil-filled capacitors,” he explained. “Weigh a ton. Nice, eh? You know where they come from?”
I straightened up and shook my head.
“Remember I told you this was a metallurgy lab? Well, they held undergraduate practical classes in here, and some of them must have involved spot-welding. These were the power supplies for the spot-welders. They’re really well put together—they have to be, they handle a lot of power. They were still here, all in perfect working condition, even after a few years of student use. I just took off the electrodes and linked them all up to my apparatus. They take about fifteen seconds to charge and then you discharge all of them at once into a separate set of generators. You deliver a huge whack of energy, but it’s stored energy so you don’t bring the National Grid to a stop.”
“How do you discharge them?”
“Just one button—the red button. It triggers a circuit breaker.”
“Not a solid state switch?”
A circuit breaker seemed to me a bit, well, last year. I didn’t mean to sound condescending, but if I did it completely passed him by.
“No, a circuit breaker. It’s over there.”
The Man in Two Bodies (British crime novel): A Dark Science Crime Caper Page 4