essenmein said:
maybe that is the "fiction" part of scifi
"Yes, but how does it
work?" Paul asked the Professor.
The Prof adopted what Paul's friend John called his 'smug face' and started to explain. "As you would know if you'd been paying attention in my GR class, Paul, gravity propagates in waves. My anti-gravity plates take advantage of that, using destructive and constructive interference to manipulate the local field very precisely."
He waved over to the middle of the room, at what looked like cheap bathroom floor tiles to Paul. They seemed unlikely enough as artificial gravity devices, but the 'other thing' was just wrong.
The closest tile was a shiny white and had a tennis ball floating about six centimeters above it, circling lazily. The next one looked like it had not been cleaned in forever, and the slight green bulge in the center was familiar, but not enough to immediately place. The air above this one seemed to waver, like a heat shimmer, and Paul thought the bulge was a tennis ball sliced in two and placed there, but the shape was not quite right and that didn't make any sense anyway, so he figured it was just his brain taking the floating tennis ball and and associating the color similarity of the bulge to that.
Further away was the 'other thing', which was entirely strange. An oily toadstool about a meter tall rose from the floor, only when Paul concentrated on it, it was not exactly oily and if he squinted, he could occasionally make out what looked like other views of the lab, swirling in and out of focus and at strange angles, like the view through a poorly ground lens.
The Prof puffed up and launched into what Paul just knew was going to be a patronizing spiel.
"So, the first plate cancels Earth's gravity exactly, putting the tennis ball in free fall in a zone from immediately above the plate to sixty centimeters high. It stays there for hours, until air currents nudge it out to the edge of the zone, and then it falls down, of course."
Of course. As if Paul couldn't have worked that out by himself. He knew he wasn't a genius like the Prof, but he wasn't a dullard either. That the Prof treated all his students as dullards was not consolation, Paul was emotionally skewered by each incident of the Prof's intellectual bullying, and more so when it was not buffered by being part of a group under fire.
"Truly, canceling out the stochastic signal is the hardest part of this tile, as even minute random field effects will disturb the anti-gravity effect. I built a swarm of picolayer MOSFET processors with quantum dot interferometers that read even relic gravitational waves and produce what is essentially a real-time counter frequency to negate them. Those relic waves are so annoying, not small enough that I can ignore them, and not large enough that I can use them, but I've patented the processor and the NSA bought a bunch of them as encryption busters, so all's well that ends well."
Paul suppressed a groan. Besides intellectual bullying, the Prof was an habitual boaster. Actually, beyond a boaster. He thrived on one upping everyone and everything, even if, as Paul suspected in this instance, it meant throwing confidentially agreements out the window. The Prof did not seem to care about that, just as long as he could name drop his latest triumph. Paul often hoped that such behavior would get the Prof into trouble, but his prolific genius was such that his indiscretions were viewed with some kind humor, as if those being name dropped were secretly pleased that the renowned Professor Samuel Clements Silver had deigned to mention them. He mentally shook his thoughts away, as the Prof had recommenced his lecture.
"So, as I was saying, to cancel Earth's gravity locally, the processors instantaneously calculate the changing quadrupole moment to determine the gravitational radiation and then generate a locally destructive frequency. Big as Earth is, it's a tiny amount of energy, about two hundred joules per second, and once you've got the wave heights, that is very straightforward to overcome.
"The second tile is actually a gravity amplifier. Be very careful with that one, it's generating a forty gee field between the surface of the tile and six centimeters above it. Squashed that tennis ball flat, as you can see, and would do catastrophic damage to your body if you were stupid enough to go near it."
Paul sighed. That was so like the Prof. He didn't believe in safety warnings or cordons to protect people.
If they're stupid enough not to be paying attention, well it's their stupid fault if they hurt themselves he'd been heard to say often enough. The Uni's OHS Rep had tried to explain that each mishap in the Prof's class cost them dearly in payouts and insurance premiums, but then the Prof would just license some other new gadget which would more than cover the expense and the Dean would shrug as if to say, 'What can you do?'
"Gravity amplification is actually much harder to achieve than zero gravity, as the processors need to create and maintain a constructive cascade of wave forms that are self-referential, as a shaped field. My original picolayer architecture was not quite fast enough, so I had to extend it with a look ahead cache that applies a Monte Carlo to future events and builds a probability distribution seven nanoseconds out. As the eigenstates superposition collapses, the look ahead refines the Monte Carlo using an 'informed observer' algorithm and that is correct enough of the time to beat the odds and maintain the cascade."
The Prof looked off into the distance.
"You know, Paul, that informed observer algorithm was actually the hardest thing I've ever done." His face darkened. "I even had to ask that damned blowhard Phillips for help with the entanglement math. He's been crowing about it ever since, the idiot, talks as if he'd invented quanta momentum theory when he knows full well that I brought the concept to him pretty much fully completed. I mean, really, all he had to solve was a trivial calculation, tricky mind, but trivial. That's the last time I ask
him for help with anything, let me tell you."
Paul kept the smile from his face. He'd heard all this before, but the truth was that Phillips wasn't crowing about helping. He was actually still reeling from how the Prof had unified Quantum Mechanics with General Relativity, in his spare time, for an unrelated project, and
not even gotten why it was a big deal! Phillips knew that calculating a twelve dimensional, time-dependent, observer-less Hamilton space was a fantastic effort of its own, but in context, it was as if Einstein had asked him to tabulate his tax return. No, Phillips was not undermining the Prof at all, but the Prof was nothing if not self-absorbed. And perhaps just a little loopy.
"Anyway, let's not talk about that again. Old ground, Paul, and you know me. Forgive and forget."
Paul could not back a snort at that, and the Prof looked at him sharply. To deflect what was likely to be a severe dressing down, Paul pointed at the toadstool.
"And what's that one Professor Silver?"
It was clear that Silver was not fully buying the distraction, and Paul suspected he would be working off some demerit points very soon, but the Prof's nature for exposition overcame his nasty demeanor.
"That, Paul, is my crowing achievement. The
toadstool as you so loathsomely put it, is a curved space time manifesting as an outward facing spherical manifold. I'm thinking I'll have to call it an anti-black hole so the punters can somewhat understand it, plus that's going to get Miss Rogers over in the astrophysics department in a tizz because it's clearly not anything to do with a black hole and you know how pedantic she is."
The Prof giggled, a bully knowing a weakness in a victim. "You should see how she blows up when I call Pluto a planet. Makes me laugh every time. My God, you'd have thought she'd know I'm just doing it to wind her up by now, but the woman has zero self control."
Paul knew that last part to be true enough. Jenny Rogers had once fallen for the Prof, even though it was against the University fraternization policy, and Paul was honest enough to admit to himself that he could see why. The bully and shameless self promoter came in a package of movie star good looks, and was loaded to boot. Forbes had put him in the Top 10 list of wealthy individuals last year, based on a succession of patents and gadgets licensed off for ridiculous sums. Watching the floating tennis ball, Paul just knew that next year his name would be even higher on the list. Jeff Bezos was getting rich selling and shipping all the Prof's stuff to the masses, but the man himself was fast catching up with each passing day.
"So, the toadstool. It is a collection of plates configured to create a two dimensional gravity bubble that almost entirely encompasses the collective. I say almost because the prototype has power and control cables coming up through the bottom, hence the toadstool shape, but I am working on a self-contained unit. Bloody thing required yet
another new processor, because the field interactions are so complex. Rather than try to predict the future to create and maintain a cascade, I cheated a little and developed an heuristic that tags a place holder on each gravity wave as it passes, encoded in the polarization, and which the next in line processor uses to calculate the wave height they need to generate to exactly shape the gravity effect. That processor tags its gravitation wave, and so on, a closed loop system that uses a forward equivalent class model to keep the gravity field in check. That reduced the algorithm load enough that a custom germanium-on-sulfur chipset, overclocked and using inline DRAM, could just keep up. Actually, I can overclock them considerably because the processor takes the thermal energy and uses it to cycle-pump the incoming gravitational wave, which actually incrementally cools the processor down to a fraction of a Kelvin. It's like a troupe of Maxwell's demons are having a gravitational wave party and getting drunk on stolen heat."
Paul knew about Maxwell's famous demon of course, but he just couldn't picture how the Prof managed to violate the second law of thermodynamics. He thought it might just be a metaphor, until the Prof continued.
"My first batch of processors actually cooled themselves to death, got right down to absolute zero, which stopped them working as you'd likely imagine, and in that instant between one Planck time period and the next, ka-boom! Turns out that you
can harness zero point energy, though that first try was pretty frightening. I'd unwittingly created an entropy instability that instantiated the equivalent of three kilograms of TNT from the quantum foam. I have to admit, I was not expecting
that."
Paul knew that nobody had been. It was a miracle that the Prof's explosion hadn't killed anyone, but his habit of working odd hours was fortuitous in that he had started his experiment at four in the morning, then immediately gone to get a coffee from the vending machine down the hall, thinking the device would need a few minutes to 'warm up'. So nobody was around when the Prof had not only proven the existence of zero point energy, but harnessed it,
and then gone on to figure out that time had to be quantized. Until now, the Prof hadn't disclosed what it was that he was working on that could explode in such a manner, and the Uni's lawyers had forced him to sign even more stringent damage waivers on the basis that his silence put an undue risk on their insurance policy. Scuttlebutt was that the Prof had laughed all the way through that meeting, calling them a a "bunch of indolent Blacktone's". Apparently, they'd ignored that until one of them later thought to look up what the Prof might have meant, and realized he'd insulted them all and they'd been too ignorant to realize it.
But of course, the Prof had keep shtum and since nothing had exploded since, the excitement had passed. Paul focused back on the toadstool - no way was he going to call it an anti-black hole, he'd side with Rogers on that one - as the Prof continued his explanation.
"As you can see, it does marvelous things to photons, reflecting them in unpredictable ways, but generally creating curved paths 'front' to 'back' if you take that reference to mean the angle of the incident light hitting the gravity interface being perpendicular. The stochastic signal actually injects just enough uncertainty that the light rays can be jostled out of the field, and I call that the Hawking's Hair Effect, because while it's not at all like what he predicted, the opportunity to honor one of the great's was just too good to pass up."
They were both silent for a moment, a mutual recognition that invoking Hawking's name warranted recognition of his passing.
"So, Paul. To get back to your original question. It works because of gravitational waves, and as you'd no doubt know if you paid any attention last semester when we dissected the properties of self-propagating transverse oscillating waves of electric and magnetic fields, once you can detect a wave, it's only a matter of time before you can manipulate a wave. And once you can manipulate a wave, well, wondrous things can happen. In this case, more wondrous than radio and television, at least I think so. I've been thinking of a few things that my anti-gravity plates can do, which is why I asked you here, actually. I need a new lab assistant, and I think your combination of keenness and constrained intellect will be just the ticket."
The Prof slapped Paul on the back, as if they were sharing a joke rather than him engaging in blatant workplace abuse. For a second Paul was tempted to show the Prof that while he might have a 'constrained intellect', he had fast and furious fists honed by almost two decades of Karate. But looking about the lab, and realizing how revolutionary the Prof's latest invention would be, he sucked up all the resentment and anger, and focused creating on a good outcome for himself, Paul McKenzie. That outcome would be fame and wealth, necessarily scavenged from the reflected brilliance of the Prof and not earned entirely by his own efforts. But Paul knew he could live with that. A few years suffering as the Prof's dogsbody? What was that against decades to live whatever life he pleased?
"Prof, that's fantastic," Paul enthused. "Honestly, I could not think of anything that I would enjoy more!"
It was a lie of course, but Paul's mother had always said that God forgave a lie told to spare someone's feelings. The only problem was, as Paul told the lie, he just wasn't quite sure who's feelings he was sparing.
