Null Infinity - Chapter 1

Chapter 1

This wasn't the first time Harry 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 these 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 shorter and heavier than Harry.

Their dorm room at Georgia Polytechnical, 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, but I don't make the rules,” said Billy.

Harry knew that, but it didn't change the fact that society branded him.

It may have to do with procreation of the species but that ain't working out so great, is it?

Indeed, it was obvious now to anyone, even the non-nerd types 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, a game that hardly existed anymore.

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. Regionalization was happening, global trade was down, prices were up. Economic regions didn't quite have the economies of scale to match a global economy. But they 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 to a local pharmacy or grocery.

People saw it with their own eyes, the government was having a harder and harder time sweeping the 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 that world to one side during 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 school work 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 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 that have no interests in these subjects but I think that by now, in this society, people would be happy that there are people 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 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 their 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 encounters,” 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 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 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 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 spent most of his afternoons in the lab equipped with state of the art electronics. Harry also spent a good deal of time learning to operate that equipment. He spent the evenings in the old room he use to share with Billy thinking about spacetime bubbles and how they would affect their surroundings.

Harry 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. The small size would make detecting any bubble harder.

The only hint that Zee had given Harry was that the bubble should leave a “wake” of displaced spacetime spreading out around it as it moved. 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 can contribute to the energy associated with the cosmological constant. Meaning that the compactified or rolled-up spatial dimensions could affect the expansion rate of the 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 reduced 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 one of the dimensions.

The lack of a deep understanding of the Dr. Zee's math was a problem for Harry, but he found a solution in an unlikely place. First, because Zee expected the strongest gravity waves from the acceleration or deceleration of the bubble in spacetime, 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, Harry 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 to detect this change and generate an electrical signal.

Some of these 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 four 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 relativity 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 Harry worked through the calculations he realized the excellent sensitivity could only be obtained around the narrow band of 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 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 the presentation at the monthly physics colloquium that the department held. Harry was nervous but agreed.