Null Infinity - Chapter 2

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 Harry's 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 Harry 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. Harry was crushed.

Harry hurried from the lecture hall as soon as possible and went straight to his room. He lay in bed watching the light of the 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 professor?”

“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 gravity 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, and it was made from niobium because of the metals 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 expected 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 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 a correspondence with the same gravity waves as the operating 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 creating gravity waves and then shed its energy as 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, still it was 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 to publish.

Even in preprint the paper caused a storm of publicity with too many headlines shouting that faster than light travel was now possible. 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 gravitational waves. He should then be able to detect the bubble all along its path instead of just at the endpoints.

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. This test would take more room than the current building provided because 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 humpf of the power supply even though he was across the field in one corner of the field while the laser was in the other corner. The path of the bubble would be diagonally across the field to maximize the path 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 and brilliant light flashed. The goalposts at that end of the field were bathed in the light and when it finally dimmed enough to look through their protective goggles, the goalposts bent over like flowers needing watering 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 thousand 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. 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 Army 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 the first person.

“We will have to sign an understanding with them, yes. 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.

“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. 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 on way, which was to graduate school. Harry lost touch with Zee's group, he never saw another publication from them.