by Alan Seeger
CHAPTER 5
Randall Orwell sat in his office at ChroNova, smiling broadly at London Griffin, a writer from American Science Magazine who was there to do the first national article on the breakthroughs that the company’s researchers had made in the company’s four year existence. Elizabeth had brought in a fresh pot of coffee and a tray of enormous muffins purchased from the coffee shop across the street, and left them in peace. The bright, Tuesday morning sun filtered in through the vertical blinds that covered the large expanse of windows behind Randall’s large cherrywood desk.
Randall was a gregarious man of sixty with thinning hair (“Too much brain up there for my hair to cover up,” he was fond of saying with a hearty laugh) and a silvery streaked beard. He walked around from behind the imposing desk and plopped down on a leather sofa opposite Griffin, looking relaxed in a polo shirt and khakis, and ready to field questions.
“So, Dr. Orwell —” Griffin began.
“Oh, come on, let’s not start off so formally,” Randall interrupted. “Call me Randall, like everybody else.”
Griffin relaxed visibly and smiled. “All right, then — Randall. Tell me how ChroNova’s work began.”
“Well, I was a graduate assistant at Princeton in the late seventies,” he began thoughtfully. “Under Dr. John Henry Simons. He was doing a study of the relationship between space and time.
“What he believed was that time is simply another dimension. As I’m sure you are familiar, one measures physical objects in three dimensions — length, height, width — but he said that ‘the fourth dimension manifests itself as a sustained existence over a non-physical distance or trajectory,’ which we call time.
“I attempted to build on the concepts that he taught me. Finished my master’s at Princeton, went on to do my doctorate work at Cambridge. I returned to Princeton and taught there until 1996. From then until May of 2010, I served on the faculties of UCONN, Caltech and Stanford, successively; then I began selecting the particular individuals that I felt would fit together as the best possible team to accomplish what I set out to do — Rick Harper, Terry Cambridge, Sarah Rhodes, and the others — and ChroNova officially came into existence on the first day of 2012.
“What we have learned since then is that the past and the future seem to be opposites of this same fourth dimension; they differ from each other in the same way that left and right do, or up and down, or forward and backward. The thing that makes them different from each other is the observer’s relative position — our relative position — in time; the when.”
Griffin nodded. So far he was keeping up adequately.
“Physicists speak of the ‘space-time continuum,’ but that is simply the three dimensions of space combined with the dimension of time, for a four-dimensional world. Of course, string theory says there may be as many as twenty-six dimensions, but that goes far beyond what ChroNova is dealing with.
“Time is, in my opinion, another physical dimension of space. We just perceive it differently than the other dimensions. You can’t see gravity — you can only see that it causes objects with mass to be attracted to one another. In the same way, we can’t see time, either — we can only see its effects on objects. Just like up and down in a gravity well, we can only move through it in one direction, without assistance.
“At least we think that time is different... we assume that we can only move through it in one direction, because, insofar as we know, no one has ever gone backward through time. Of course, this could be perceptual too. We don’t really know what we can do until we do it. No one thought it was possible to make a heavier-than-air flying machine, or land on the moon, for that matter,” he grinned.
“Yes, it's all very interesting, but until we have a way of traveling in time, or reversing it, we have no way to know for sure, so doesn’t that make the point kind of moot?” said Griffin. “Someone once said, ‘Time is an illusion caused by the passage of history.’ And the string theory thing is something else that I never really understood… twenty-six dimensions?”
“Well, according to string theory — and I promise you, in a couple of minutes you’ll understand why I didn’t really want to go there, it’s kind of mind boggling, even for a physicist — the critical dimensionality is not four as one might expect, again, talking about the three axes of space and one of time. Flat space string theories are 26-dimensional in the bosonic case, while superstring and M-theories turn out to involve ten or eleven dimensions for flat solutions. In bosonic string theories, the twenty-six dimensions come from the Polyakov equation.” Randall grinned as he saw Griffin’s eyes begin to glaze over. “I hate to say I told you do, but I told you so. No, I confess — I love to say I told you so,” he laughed.
“Now, as far as this discussion being moot, it would be a moot point if it were true that it’s impossible to know whether time can be manipulated. However, that’s kind of the reason you’re here today,” Randall continued.
Griffin nodded. “So you’re saying that time can be manipulated.”
“We’ve made some progress,” Randall smiled. “At this point it’s on the order of shortening a year by sixty seconds or so, for example, but yes, we’re making headway. It seems that, in a way, time is… malleable. You may have heard of the fact that one ounce of gold can be hammered into a sheet a hundred feet square, or drawn into a wire five miles long. It’s kind of along those lines. We are also working on speeding the flow of time, as opposed to slowing its pace.”
“Do you have any ideas about whether your research will someday allow time travel to take place?” Griffin asked.
“Well, now that you bring it up, that is obviously one of the practical applications of our research,” Randall replied. “Causing the flow of time to speed up and slow down only has a certain amount of usefulness — it’s not like we can create a 48-hour work day, after all, because if we figure out how to double the length of a day, the work that is done during that day is going to take twice as long as well. I don’t think that’s gonna happen, anyway,” he added. “We’ll never bend time much more than we are right now. There’s just no way that nature is going to allow it. My personal belief is that we’d seriously break something if we were to succeed. After all, a willow branch will only bend so far.” He smiled the smile of someone concealing a surprise.
“On the other hand, if we were able to find a way to allow someone — or even something, a sensor, a camera, or whatever — to travel through time, that would be incredibly useful. Phenomenal, in fact. Sending a tiny, unobtrusive video camera back to the Battle of Gettysburg, the Globe Theater, the crucifixion of Christ, the Mesozoic, the Jurassic… even the birth of the Solar System! The Big Bang itself! If we were somehow able to see the Big Bang occur… no longer just a theory, but a verified event! Imagine what that would do for historians and educators. But think about this: traveling back in time is one thing, but what about traveling forward?”
He was almost preaching now. “We already travel forward in time — 24 hours every day,” he smiled. “But what if we could accelerate that, like a Formula 1 car when its turbocharger kicks in? Of course, if you’re gonna do that, it’d be useful to have a way to get back.”
“So at this point, you aren’t saying that that’s possible?” asked Griffin.
“We think it may be, someday,” said Randall. “Think of it like this: we really can only move through the up and down dimension one way, without requiring assistance. If you step off the roof of a building, you’re gonna move down, very rapidly, in fact, and we call that falling, unless you happen to be wearing a jetpack. Time is like that; we can only move into the future without some kind of chronological jetpack. The thing is, what sort of energy does it take to move into the past, and how much?”
Griffin’s bewildered look led him to change his approach. “Remember the old Michael J. Fox movie, Back to the Future, with the DeLorean that traveled through time?”
Griffin nodded, smiling. “Yes, of course.”
Rand
all continued, “That thing was powered by plutonium and, according to the movie, generated 1.21 gigawatts of power, or as old Doc Brown pronounced it, ‘jigawatts.’ That’s the equivalent of 1.2 million 100 watt light bulbs. Well, according to our calculations, that’s only a fraction of the power it will — or would — actually take to power… oh, here I go, I’m gonna use the term you’ve been poking at — to run a time machine.”
Griffin smiled wider, scribbling notes furiously. Despite being a science writer, he was an old fashioned journalist; he preferred a pen and tablet, not a recording device or laptop.
“Let’s look at it still another way,” said Randall. “The Embalse nuclear plant in Argentina uses a CANDU Pressurized Heavy Water Reactor that employs nuclear fission to generate heat, which creates steam to drive a turbine, which generates 648 megawatts of electricity. That’s only enough to supply power to about five percent of the Argentine Interconnection System. That’s about half of what Doc Brown’s DeLorean needed, but our computer simulations seem to indicate that we’d need something on the order of six thousand times that to power a real time travel device, if we can ever figure out how to design one.”
Griffin sat in stunned silence for a moment. Randall gave a slight smile, letting it sink in. “So you’re saying that it’s basically impossible,” Griffin said.
“Well, I wouldn’t say it’s impossible. I’d say we just don’t know where to plug in the extension cord yet.” He grinned at Griffin’s bewildered expression and added, “It takes a very special sort of person to even understand the questions concerning all this… attempting to think through the answers even makes my head hurt.”
They talked for another twenty minutes, and by the end Griffin was both lost in a maze of theoretical physics and convinced that Randall Orwell was a genius as well as possibly the most visionary — and possibly insane — person he had ever interviewed. He still wasn’t convinced that time travel was possible, but he knew that if anyone could ever figure out a way to make it work, it’d be Randall Orwell and the ChroNova team.
CHAPTER 6
Weeks had passed since Rick’s close encounter with the elusive spark of a solution that day in the coffee shop, and the hours of pondering the problem that he had done that night. Now he lay awake once again, listening to Stefanie’s slow, steady breathing, staring alternately at the ceiling and the clock, which presently read 3:47 AM. He continued to poke at the embers of the idea that had been teasing him since that sleepless night, breathing life into it, hoping it would suddenly surprise him by bursting into flame.
He envisioned a set of encyclopedias, the old fashioned kind that had occupied the bookshelves in his grandmother’s den.
The entire set was divided into twenty-two leather-bound volumes, each cover being decorated in 22 karat gold leaf, and each hefty tome containing a portion of the entire library of alphabetized entries. Each volume was further subdivided into individual entries based on the topic. Set, subset, Rick thought.
Rick pondered the theories that said that reality was actually an infinite series of parallel universes. What if there was a way to access a sort of cross-referenced index that permitted access, not only to the wheres inherent in these parallel worlds, but the whens?
He realized that having the ability to access such an index would provide the information necessary to access any place and time in history; of course, that didn’t mean you’d be able to go there, because you’d still need the means to make the journey. Otherwise it’d be like having a Rand-McNally atlas which told you how to get from New York to L.A., but no car to make the three thousand mile trip.
On the other hand, if you had a vehicle and enough gasoline, even if you didn’t have a map, you could still drive around at random, explore the landscape, and find interesting things to see, and maybe even, eventually, wind up at your destination in Los Angeles.
He finally dozed off at 4:39 AM, more determined than ever to find the key.
CHAPTER 7
For four years, the researchers at ChroNova had been studying the theory that there was a type of sub-atomic particle, of a type that physicists called quantum particles, which governed the flow of time. The existence of these theoretical particles had first been proposed by Gerald Feinberg in 1967, who referred to them as tachyons or tachyonic particles. He theorized a particle that always moves faster than light, which most physicists think is impossible, as it defies the laws of physics.
Rick’s theory, on the other hand, visualized a quarklike object in which the spin of the object determined whether it moved into the future or the past. He referred to this theoretical particle as the chronos particle or chronon, and his fellows had followed suit, although they had never actually detected a chronon or even formulated a real hypothesis on how they might be detected.
It was late in the day, and Rick was in the large shielded room in which the ChroNova staff did the portion of their research which dealt with various types of radiation and particle physics.
He’d had a dream a couple of weeks before that he had been in this very room, experimenting with various combinations of radiation fields, when something had happened. He had combined a specific ratio of — how many was it? Five or six different sorts of radiation fields, and a sort of portal had opened in midair in the middle of the lab. It was a greenish swirl, through which Rick was able to see an idyllic pastoral scene like something out of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
In the dream, he stood staring, then realized that he should note the nature of the exact combination and ratios of energy that had produced the effect — but before he was able to document the data, the scene began to fade, a klaxon sounding in his ear…
And then he woke up. The klaxon was his alarm clock. He reached over and shut it off.
Even though he realized it had only been a dream, there was something about the foggy recollection of the experiment that seemed to have the substance of reality. He knew that he had to keep pressing for a breakthrough.
Rick began spending ninety percent of his time at work in the lab, creating various fields of particles and bringing them together in endless combinations, always wondering in the back of his mind whether he would accidentally discover the poor man’s method of producing antimatter and annihilate himself — and perhaps the entire office or even the planet — with the wrong combination of energies.
The company’s senior technician, Terry Cambridge, completed the construction of what he called the Multi-Phasic Field Generator, a device which combined the various tools that the ChroNova researchers used to generate the particle fields they experimented with. The MPFG allowed researchers to easily combine the fields in various combinations to see how they interacted with each other. Rick joked that it also meant that it made it far easier for them to blow the place up.
However, that didn’t keep him from sometimes spending his full work day in a radiation suit, manipulating the controls of the MPFG and observing what effect, if any, the various combinations produced.
Now, two and a half weeks after the vivid dream, Rick felt as if he was on the brink of a nervous breakdown. He had tried every combination of energies he could conceive of, and there were some interesting results, but nothing that seemed to have any effect on the timestream and nothing that even remotely resembled what he had seen in his dream.
He began to think that this was all a waste of time — no pun intended — and that his life would be better spent in some other field of endeavor.
It was just an hour and a half until time to close up shop for the day when he decided to try one last combination. He had activated five of the energy generators, and was about to power up the sixth.
Every experiment at Chronova was required to be completely documented, from what methods were used in the experiment to the time — to the billionth of a second — that each stage of the experiment took place.
In this particular instance, the data on Rick’s computer read as follows:
DATE TIME
&nb
sp; 2016/06/08 16:39:05.592693472
2016/06/08 16:39:05.593814396
2016/06/08 16:39:05.594741092
2016/06/08 16:39:05.596552138
2016/06/08 16:39:05.599270371
2016/06/08 16:39:05.602969379
2016/06/08 16:39:05.604837283
2016/06/08 16:39:05.606192837
2016/06/08 16:39:05.607583921
2016/06/08 16:39:05.609958727
Those readings covered a period of less than 1/50 of a second, but as Rick watched the clock in what he thought of as “normal space” — outside of the MPFG field — a full three ticks of the second hand went by. The field generated by their equipment appeared to have slowed the passage of time by 150 times its normal rate.
Then Rick activated the sixth energy field, and his entire world changed.
CHAPTER 8
Tonight, all thoughts of work would be set aside. There was a bottle of fine wine that would be opened, a beautiful pair of Chateaubriand steaks that would be grilled, and love that would be made.
He walked in the door and shouted, “Steffi! You are not gonna freaking believe what happened today!”
She was in the middle of cutting up vegetables for a salad, and looked up at him as he walked into the kitchen. “Hi, honey,” she smiled.
He walked over, took the paring knife from her hand and laid it on the counter. Sweeping her up in his arms, he kissed her long and hard.
“Whoa… it must have been something quite spectacular,” she said.
“It really was. It was the most incredible thing,” he replied. “We were experimenting with fields of different kinds of quantum particles…” he paused.
Stefanie focused on Rick’s face. There was something in his tone that she knew meant he had something very important to share.