Null Infinity: Book 1 Sample

My story Null Infinity: Book 1 will be released on Amazon soon (December 20) in eBook form. It will be 99 cents until the end of the month. 

This is the beginning of a trilogy (maybe more) of works in my new universe Forgotten Earth. 

I consider this story to be hard science fiction plus. That is science and technology extrapolated from current theory that might or might not be proven true in the future. I also consider it to be space adventures, called space opera in the old days, with a touch of romance.

Here's a sample:

“What is space? An empty stage where the physical world of matter acts out its drama? An equal participant that both provides background and has a life of its own? Or the primary reality of which matter is a secondary manifestation? Views on this question have evolved, and

several times have changed radically, over the history of science. Today the third view is triumphant.”

Frank Wilczek

TO THE READER

This is Book 1 of the story Null Infinity. It will be followed by at least one more book, maybe more. Since I foresee this as being a long story, I have chosen to split it up, hopefully in such a way as to make sense and not be an irritant to the reader.

With that out of the way, let me say something about the science in the story. Some of the science is a continuation of the science found throughout my previous Future Chron Universe. Unlike in most of those stories, I am not going to explain the science in one (or more) paragraphs at the beginning of a chapter. I intend to integrate the necessary explanation into the text of the story. I'm told that this is not the way it's done in “modern” science fiction, indeed, it's a barely literate way of writing. However, since I love extrapolated science in stories, I intend to do it this way in mine. I've even included a section at the back of the book (oh horror) where more extensive explanations of the science (extrapolated or not) can be found.

Also, because the science is an integral part of my stories, and because I love speculation but not outright fantasy, I try to never just make up the science or technology without having a basis for it. Most of the ideas come from science articles (see the Acknowledgments section at the end) or books I have read and then used as if the author (usually a scientist) were describing an existing technology or a tested scientific theory.

To put it another way, I've been rereading some of Jules Verne's novels and am noticing his rather lengthy science/technology extrapolations in the text itself, which I enjoy very much.

Also, a short word about the date system used. In this story (and most of my stories), if I use a date, I know I am using the antiquated dating system, A.D. I blame this on the book Daybreak – 2250 A.D. by Andre Norton, which I read some time in elementary school (and of which I recently bought an old paperback copy). I was so imprinted early with that dating system that I think it sounds cooler than C.E. No social, political or any other kind of statement is meant.

Chapter 1

This wasn't the first time Harry Stimson had looked through the curriculum catalog. He had gone through it many times since his fifteenth birthday. But this would be the first time that he would be choosing to take some of the classes.

“I've had a copy of this catalog for two years. I've dreamed of signing up for all these classes over and over,” he said.

“You're a real nerd Harry,” said Billy Williams, who was taller and heavier than Harry.

Their dorm room at Georgia Polytechnic, besides the two beds, had built-in desks, a few shelves and a separate bathroom. A small fridge was in the corner.

“Isn't that funny Billy? If I was holding some kind of swimsuit models calendar, I'd be normal. But because learning is exciting to me, I'm weird.”

“Yeah, that's right, I don't make the rules,” said Billy.

Harry knew that, but it didn't change the fact that society judged him, and not kindly. He thought to himself:

The “rules” may have to do with fun or maybe even procreation of the species but that ain't working out so great, is it?

Indeed, it was obvious to Harry and anyone who cared to notice, that the population bomb was a dud. Societies all around the globe were losing populations, even those African countries that were late to the game of globalization and whose populations continued to reproduce after other societies had stopped, all were depopulating.

Harry knew what was happening, it made more sense to him than the news stories that proclaimed everything was fine, just what the current political party in power wanted them to say. Globalization was out, regionalization was in, global trade was down, and prices were up. Economic regions didn't quite have the economies of scale to match a global economy. But regions had one thing that people would pay for, security. No longer would a small band of terrorists' half-way around the world upset the supply chain of a local pharmacy or grocery.

People saw it with their own eyes, the government was having a harder and harder time sweeping reality under the rug. Harry didn't even know why they were trying; except they were scared about what came next in a shrinking economy. And that was, no one knew what came next, all economics was based on managing an expanding economy, new ideas were needed, and government wasn't a fount of new ideas.

Except for a few activists on campus, Harry could put world conditions to one side during the semester. And he intended to focus on nothing but his studies, there would be time for the other things afterward, but he wouldn't get the chance to learn again, it was a once in a lifetime opportunity.

Most of the others liked Harry, but no one, not even Billy, understood his determination to learn everything he could in the next four years. They wanted to do well, but they also wanted to have fun. That meant that sometimes short shrift to schoolwork might be necessary in order not to miss out on something, it didn't mean they were less interested in their studies than Harry, it just meant they had other interests that were important too. Harry didn't fit in, even at a school for nerds.

Harry was in his first day of classes. Unlike most freshmen he would start an advanced math class, calculus, along with his first physics, a class in Newtonian mechanics. He also was taking a first class in electrical engineering, Harry expected to get a dual degree. The rest of his classes didn't really interest him, being in English, history, and social studies. But Harry was as determined to do as well in them as he was in his math and physics classes.

After class he was talking to Billy in their room as they ate the pizza they had ordered. Harry was carrying on about the calculus and mechanics textbooks.

“Harry, I know you are crazy about these subjects but to me they are just requirements for my degree.”

“You know Billy, I understand people can have no interest in these subjects, but I think that by now, in this society, people would be happy that there are some like me that do. You can't run a high-tech society on magic.”

“I guess that many people don't care for a high-tech society Harry. They are more interested in other people than in calculus.”

“They might not care about high tech,” said Harry, “but if it disappears they will. This society would devolve rather quickly without the nerds that keep the technology going and make the scientific discoveries.”

“That's true Harry but who cares. Most people figure that someone will be interested in doing the job at some price.”

“And yet, they resent that person's success if they do, especially if it results in a windfall. It happens every time. Some guy works his tail off developing a technology, succeeds and is rewarded monetarily, and then is vilified for becoming rich.”

“Jealousy, Harry. It's as old as humanity.”

“May be Billy, but these primal traits aren't attuned to a modern society in which one man can bring wealth to many. As a matter of fact, a modern society is attuned to just such circumstance. Without these individuals, who in pursuing their own interests provide a bounty that others share, we would see many a terrible crash.”

“You think without these successful millionaires and billionaires, society as it is configured would cease?”

“It's like a rock tumbling down a mountainside,” said Harry, “it shakes loose more and more until a great momentum of, in this case, wealth is created. Without that landslide nothing's created.”

“Or that landslide could destroy anything it hits,” said Billy.

“Except that's not the way it works Billy; that's not the way it has ever worked. Just look at the billionaires who opened up space.”

“Well, yeah it's cool that people are on the Moon and that we've been to Mars but so far as I can tell it's not had much impact here on Earth,” said Billy.

“That's like saying the voyages to the New World had no effect on world history. There hasn't been enough time Billy, they're building the infrastructure and at some point, the effects will be more than apparent.”

“Well, when they're apparent, I guess people will be more supportive. Once it affects their day to day.”

Harry ended that year with a four-zero grade point average, Billy finished with a two-eight, but Billy did see all the home and away football games. Harry continued to pull ahead of Billy in classes completed until the first semester of their third year, Harry found himself with just three classes left for his degree, Billy faced another full two years. They no longer roomed together and rarely saw each other.

With just a few classes that semester, Harry had enough time to take on another project. He found a position in one of the physics labs. The head of the lab, Maxwell Zee was studying spacetime bubbles. Harry didn't understand exactly what that meant until he had an opportunity to read some of Dr. Zee's papers.

According to the papers, a bubble in spacetime was one of a number of topological entities allowed by general relativity. In this case it was like a void around which spacetime would swirl. In spacetime, the bubble's movement and time would slow down, speed up or stop according to the sign of the solution to the underlying metric, negative, positive or null, respectively.

If Zee's hypothesis was correct, then anything inside the bubble would be carried along with the bubble's motion, with the object experiencing the rate of time that the bubble experienced. It was an interesting conjecture and as far as Harry could tell, the math supported the conclusion, but the proof of spacetime bubbles would have to come experimentally. And that was going to be difficult.

After discussing the work with Dr. Zee, Harry found himself assigned the task of detecting the bubble and its motion. Dr. Zee would be responsible for causing the bubble to form and move. He offered Harry a few ideas on how to detect the bubble but the details of implementing those ideas would be left up to Harry. Harry was a bit daunted, he had little support, no help, and not enough training, but he also had nothing to lose, so he would try.

Harry spent most of his afternoons that semester in the lab which was equipped with state-of-the-art electronics. He spent a good deal of time learning to operate that equipment. He spent the evenings in the old room he used to share with Billy thinking about spacetime bubbles and how they would affect their surroundings.

He knew that Dr. Zee expected these first bubbles to be extremely small. The size of the bubble scaled as the energy used to create it and Zee didn't want to use too much energy in a building on campus close to others. But the small size would make detecting the bubble harder.

The only hint that Zee had given him was that the bubble should leave a “wake” of displaced spacetime spreading out around it as it accelerated through curved spacetime, such as in Earth's gravitational field. Zee was a gifted theorist and experimentalist, but his explanations were somewhat lacking. He expected the math to do his talking.

Although Dr. Zee had tried to explain his theory to Harry, mostly using math of course, Harry couldn't completely follow the professor's arguments since he hadn't had the math or physics necessary, that wouldn't come until graduate school. But Dr. Zee had explained that his method was to change the Hubble constant locally.

Harry knew that the Hubble constant was related to the expansion of space itself. And he had found that at its present global value, one meter of space would expand to two meters of space if someone were to wait sixty-five billion years, a very slow warp drive.

Zee had also explained that to locally expand space at the speed of light, the Hubble factor (he had almost stopped calling it a constant) would need to be increased by a factor of ten to the twenty-six, a huge number. Not only that, but Zee's idea of how to increase the Hubble factor was based on the as yet unproven theories of extra dimensions.

According to these theories the gravity fields (actually graviton fields in the theories) of the extra dimensions could contribute to the energy associated with the Hubble constant. Meaning that the compactified or rolled-up spatial dimensions could affect the expansion rate of noncompact space. Indeed, general relativity itself showed that by changing the radius of the rolled-up dimensions, expansion of normal space should follow. Further calculations done by Dr. Zee showed that the radius of the compactified dimension would need to be changed by a factor of ten to the thirteenth to cause space to expand at the speed of light.

Dr. Zee wouldn't try to have the tiny bubble he hoped to create reach anywhere near that speed during the early experiments. He would settle for subluminal speeds.

To affect the rolled-up dimension he would shine a laser on a black box target in an effort to focus enough energy in a small enough space to hopefully change the radius of one of the rolled-up dimensions. It didn't seem to matter which compacted dimension was affected, just that the energy provided by the laser could change the radius of that dimension.

The lack of a deep understanding of Zee's math was a problem for Harry, but he found a solution in an unlikely place. First, because Zee expected the gravity waves during the acceleration and deceleration phase of the bubble, Harry would focus on detecting those emissions. Second, because the usual detection of gravity waves was done by interferometric means and this meant a large and expensive detector, he had to come up with something else. He found a possibility in an old but discredited gravity wave detection scheme, a Weber bar antenna.

Weber, also an engineer and physicist, had used solid metal bars to try to detect gravity waves. Weber's original “bar” was a large aluminum cylinder two meters long and half a meter in diameter. A gravity wave traveling perpendicular to the cylinder's axis would produce tidal forces that stretched and contracted the cylinder's length. If the gravity wave frequency was close to the resonant frequency of the bar, the change in length would be detectable. Weber used piezoelectric crystals attached to the bar to detect this change and generate an electrical signal.

Some of the Weber bars were as unwieldy as a giant interferometer since they weighed up to five tons. And no Weber bar had conclusively found a gravitational wave, as had a lightwave interferometer. But Harry had an idea for increasing the sensitivity of such a detector while decreasing its size.

A chamber of superfluid helium-4 would respond at acoustic frequencies to the passage of gravity waves. To get the information out of the chamber Harry could couple the acoustic waves to a resonant microwave circuit. Even though the coupling between the motion of the helium and the microwave field would be relatively weak, Harry thought he could dig it out with some properly designed electronics and maybe some data processing.

Such a system could be small and still have a better sensitivity than existing interferometers or Weber bars. As he worked through the calculations, he realized the excellent sensitivity could only be obtained around the narrow band of the detector's acoustic resonance. In other words, the detector could only detect a narrow range of frequencies. But Harry could eventually tune the frequencies the detector was sensitive to by pressurizing and therefore modifying the speed of sound in the helium.

He worked up a presentation and gave it to Dr. Zee. Dr. Zee looked it over without comment and scheduled Harry to give his presentation at the monthly physics colloquium that the department held. Harry was nervous but agreed.

Chapter 2

The lecture would be in one of the larger classrooms. Like an amphitheater, the rows of desks rose from the front to the back. Harry had given talks before in several of his classes but not in such a large room where many of the listeners towered over him. The size itself felt overwhelming. The room was only about a quarter full but that didn't help his nervousness.

It didn't go well. Harry's nerves were almost too much but it was the question-and-answer period that followed the presentation that made him want to quit. The audience of physics professors and students was very skeptical that he could make his proposal work. Almost everyone felt that a Weber bar antenna, in whatever form it might be realized, would never work. The huge versions had never made the discoveries that light interferometers had made, and no one saw any reason why such a small version such as Harry proposed would be any different. He was crushed.

He hurried from the lecture hall as soon as possible and went straight to his room. He lay in bed watching the light of day disappear. He wondered if he would continue in the lab, he wondered if he would continue at school. Maybe he would transfer somewhere else to finish his degree, maybe he would just quit and get a job. It was almost midnight before he got up and ate something and went to bed, falling asleep only after more hours of worry.

It was the following day that Dr. Zee sought out Harry.

“Harry, I missed you yesterday after your talk. I thought it didn't go too bad,” said Dr. Zee.

“What do you mean professor? They practically booed me out of the room,” said Harry.

“Ah well, if you hadn't disappeared so fast you would have found that not everyone reacted in that way. Besides, you have to get use to that kind of criticism when you present such a bold new idea. People, including physicists, don't really appreciate their world models being overthrown,” said Dr. Zee.

“So, are you saying I should pursue my idea?”

“I think it is a long shot, but if you can get it to work it wouldn't only prove our experiment, it would be a real advancement in portable gravity wave detectors,” said Dr. Zee.

Harry couldn't think of anything to say, he eventually said, “Well then, I'll try.”

Harry called the cylinder a superconducting cavity resonator, a SCR. It was made from niobium because of the metal's mechanical properties at the super low temperatures, below fifty milli-Kelvins, required for helium to be a superfluid. The cylinder had a radius of eleven centimeters and a length of fifty centimeters. When filled with helium-4 the superfluid would acoustically resonate most strongly around six kilohertz. This was the center frequency of the gravity waves that Dr. Zee expected from the bubble when accelerating or decelerating.

Essentially, the superfluid would vibrate like a tuning fork as the gravity waves of the bubble passed. Microwaves would be coupled in and out of the SCR through loops recessed in the top of the cylinder. Acoustic waves in the superfluid would affect the resonance of the microwave circuit and that would be detected, recorded, processed, and displayed. Harry was expecting to see a ring up and ring down effect, that is, an oscillating but rising signal and then an oscillating but falling signal, from the acceleration and deceleration of the bubble.

The day of the experiment arrived. Harry hadn't been able to test his detector completely except in limited tests that did seem to detect some correspondence with the gravity waves that the gravity wave laboratories had detected that week. So, he was hopeful that it would work.

The “lab” was a large hangar like area on campus, usually used for indoor sports. The ceiling was high but it was the unobstructed distance from corner to corner that Dr. Zee found useful. The bubble once created would accelerate away causing gravity waves and then shed its energy as more gravity waves until it dissipated quickly. Zee calculated that it would all occur in one-hundred feet, there was more than enough room in the structure.

Zee powered the laser up, the sound was like a loud buzzing sound from lower to higher frequencies. The target was on a stand about twenty feet away. He expected the bubble to accelerate at right angles to the laser beam, but wasn't sure, so everyone was well out of a hundred-foot radius around the target, he was operating the laser remotely.

“Okay, here we go,” said Zee in a loud voice.

The laser light hit the target. Everyone had their protective goggles on as the light was in the visible range and very bright. In a few moments a rumble of sound was heard, Zee cut the laser. The rumble shifted to a higher frequency and then stopped. Zee took off his glasses and ran over to where Harry was monitoring his detector.

“Did you see it?” Zee asked.

Harry held his hand up as a way of saying, wait a minute. Then he looked up at Dr. Zee with a smile.

“We got something. It looks like a trail of gravity waves, and it has the ring up, ring down waveform we were expecting.” said Harry.

The taller Dr. Zee put his arm around the boy.

“Harry,” he said, “I think we just made history.”

They ran the experiment several more times looking for errors and misinterpretations, but after several runs with very similar results, Dr. Zee decided they had something, and he eventually published the results.

Even in preprint the paper caused a storm of publicity with too many headlines shouting that faster than light travel was now possible even though the bubble never traveled faster than the speed of light in the test. Harry's contribution was mostly overlooked except by a few other scientists. He got several inquiries about his experimental setup; some were interested in reproducing his design. Harry answered the inquiries as best he could.

He was also busy improving the performance of his detector. He followed up on his idea of pressurizing the helium so as to change the resonant acoustic frequency. This would make the detector tunable, thereby making it more sensitive to the center frequency of the expected gravitational waves. The detector would be very sensitive to the bubble now.

So far, all the experiments had been at subluminal speeds, but Dr. Zee felt he had enough experience with the bubble to push it to superluminal velocities. The next test would take more room than the current building provided because Dr. Zee expected it would take longer for the bubble to accelerate up to superluminal speeds and then decelerate, so he was taking the experiment outside. The university football stadium would work since it wasn't football season, and the necessary power and network hookup were available.

Dr. Zee got a use permit and with the help of several graduate students soon had the equipment set up. Harry set up his detector without help. The day was clear and sunny and was getting warm by the time they were ready to start. As usual Dr. Zee brought up the laser, which was more powerful than the one he had used before.

Harry could hear the whumpf of the power supply even though he was across the field in one corner while the laser was in the other corner. The path of the bubble should cut diagonally across the field to maximize the length.

The laser light hit the black box target. In a moment, Harry saw a huge spike on the screen, he moved as quickly as he could to attenuate the sensitivity of the SCR. But it was too late, the liquid helium boiled, Harry ducked, and the niobium encasement ruptured with a loud bang. Almost simultaneously, at the far end of the field, a louder noise was heard and a brilliant light flashed. The goalposts at that end of the field were bathed in the light and when it finally dimmed enough to look, they were bent over like flowers needing water and a roiling cloud was rising above the stadium.

Luckily, no one was hurt.

Later inspection revealed that the whole end zone was scorched, and the nine-foot-high reinforced concrete wall was brittle, as if baked at temperatures exceeding a thousand degrees. The damage would cost tens of thousands of dollars to repair. The issuer of Dr. Zee's use permit was soon unemployed. Dr. Zee himself was told that no more experiments would be allowed anywhere near the campus.

Zee began to investigate what could have happened. Eventually, it became clear. He discussed his findings with the group and what they would do next.

“Okay, I realize now that a superluminal bubble catches up to forward traveling light rays in its path. As it does the light is captured asymptotically at the bubble's front horizon and highly blue-shifted. As you probably know, this greatly increases the energy of the light rays. There is also a rear horizon for the bubble and these horizons only exist for superluminal velocities. When the bubble velocity falls into the subluminal regime, all the forward traveling light that was captured by the front horizon is released at once.

“The effects of that released highly blue-shifted, high-energy light is what caused the damage in the stadium. So, we are going to have to find a place that is deserted enough so that when the bubble comes out of superluminal, we don't repeat the damage.”

“How much room will it take?” someone asked.

“We will need something like a desert situation,” said Zee.

“The university doesn't have anything like that, do they?” asked another.

“No, the university can't help us, but the military can. They have several places that are wide open enough to do such research,” said Zee.

Some in the group murmured.

“But then they will get the science of what we're doing. Would they apply it for military purposes?” asked a person.

“We will have to sign an understanding with them, yes,” said Dr. Zee. “And they will be providing some of the logistics of the experiment in return for a look at the science. But I see nothing wrong in allowing them an early look. After all, we will be publishing the results openly. Anyone, including the military, will be able to take those results and do whatever they wish. I don't see a problem in accepting their support.”

Even though it was true that the results would not be a secret, a couple in the group quit when the Army was brought in, Harry was one of them.

“I didn't quit because it's military,” said Harry. “I quit because you will never be allowed to freely publish Dr. Zee, once the military is involved, and I want to continue publishing freely.”

“Come on Harry,” said Zee, “this is the twenty-first century, not nineteen-forty-five.”

It was almost their last conversation before Zee left for the military base. Harry didn't refuse Zee's request to use his detector, he even helped another in the group to become proficient at using it, but he did go his own way, which was to graduate school. Harry lost touch with Zee's group, he only knew they were going to some air force base in New Mexico, but he never saw another publication from them.