by Wil McCarthy
For those wanting to learn more about this body of work, three of Haisch’s papers on the subject, coauthored with Drs. A. Rueda and H. E. Puthoff, include “Physics of the Zero-Point Field: Implications for Inertia, Gravitation and Mass” (Speculations in Science and Technology, 1996), “Inertia as a Zero-Point Lorentz Force” (Phys. Review A, Feb 1994), and the wonderfully for-dummies “Beyond E=mc2” (The Sciences, Nov/Dec 1994), which is available on-line at http://www.jse.com/haisch/sciences.html).
In discussions of charge-derived gravitation, the most common question is usually, “Why do neutrons have mass?” The answer is simply that neutrons are composed of quarks whose charges cancel out. The quarks themselves are charged, and therefore exhibit the zitterbewegung motions that give rise to gravity and inertia. The neutron’s “mass” is therefore a derived, rather than fundamental, property.
A more difficult question to answer is, “Why does gravity affect photons and neutrinos?” Current theory has a hard time explaining this, but I believe the short answer is probably “because charge warps spacetime.” For a detailed explanation of this concept, I’ll refer you to Steven C. Bell of Lockheed Martin Astronautics, whose “On Quantized Electronic Schwarzchild and Kerr Relativistic Models for the Spherical Orbitals of Hydrogen” can be found online at http://www.mindspring.com/~sb635/pap4.htm.
A formal unification of these theories has yet to be completed; while Bell makes a compelling case for charge as a general-relativistic influence on spacetime curvature, no one has yet approached it as the only such influence. Still, I think at least one road is clearly leading in that direction.
As for collapsium itself, the “Haisch effect” of Appendix A has never been tested in the laboratory. I doubt the necessary technology will exist for at least the next several decades. Nonetheless, assuming the effect is real, it should be possible to collapse a proton into a black hole by increasing its apparent mass. Collapse occurs when the Schwarzchild radius of the increased mass equals or exceeds the proton’s radius:
Rs 1.5E-15 m
Rs = 2µ/C2 = (2) (6.672E-11) (M) / (3.0E + 08)2
M = 8.768E11 kg
Hence the mass of one billion metric tons for the “neubles” that feed the process.
Gravitational effects of such a tiny hypermass are indicated by the following equations:
Gravity at 6 cm Range:
gR = µ/R2 = (66.72) (0.06)2 = 18533.3 m/sec2
(approximately 1900 times Earth surface gravity, ge)
Gravity Gradient:
δgR/δR = -2µ/R3 = (-2) (66.72)/(0.06)3 = –6.18E + 05 sec-2
or, δgR/δR = –6.3E + 04 ge/m
(changes by 630 Earth gravities in first centimeter)
Meanwhile, only four meters away …
Gravity at 4.06 m Range:
gR = µ/R2 = (66.72)/(0.06 + 4.0)2 = 4.23 m/sec2
(approximately 0.4 times Earth surface gravity, ge)
Gravity Gradient:
δgR/δR = –2µ/R3 = (–2) (66.72) / (0.06+4.0)3 = –1.99 sec-2
or, δr/δR = –0.203 ge/m
(changes by 0.2 Earth gravities in first meter)
So it’s certainly nothing you’d want to be standing very close to. For anyone who’s read my 1995 novel Flies from the Amber or who is otherwise familiar with the spacetime effects of a hypermass, the question of gravitational time dilation naturally occurs. Sorry, the math will disappoint you:
γ = 1–2µ / (RC2) = 1–(2) (66.72) / (0.06) (3.0E + 08)2
γ = 2.47E–14
In other words, even at the lethal 6 cm range, time passes only 0.0000000000025% more slowly than in the outside universe. So for human beings, collapsium does not constitute a forward-only time machine unless, like Marlon’s cage de fin, it’s moving at relativistic velocity. C’est la vie.
As for the obvious, “Why don’t the collapsium’s black holes fall into each other?” the answer lies in sympathetic vibrations. This is the same principle that lets “stealth” helicopters fly silently: the sounds produced by the engine and blades are measured, and a “negative” of the wave pattern—a set of equivalent sound waves 180 degrees out of phase—is produced to cancel it. If gravity is truly the result of vibration, an equivalent damping mechanism is quite plausible.
The terms “supervacuum” and “True Vacuum” are my own; however, information on the well-studied Casimir effect and its influence on vacuum energy can be found in Phillip Gibbs’ online physics FAQ at http://www.aal.co.nz/~duckett/casimir.html, or in Dr. Robert L. Forward’s Future Magic (Avon Books, 1988), or any of countless other sources.
Given the existence of neubles, building small planets around them is a natural—albeit hideously expensive—idea. Bruno’s world contains 1500 neubles, at the core of a soil-and-rock sphere 636 meters across, yielding a surface gravity of
g =µ/R2 = (6.672E–11) (1.5E16) / (636/2)2 = 9.9m/sec2
almost exactly one gee.
For information about the theory and practice of quantum wells, wires, and dots, the best reference I’ve found is Richard Turton’s The Quantum Dot (Oxford University Press, 1995), although for the past several years Science News magazine has run occasional short articles on the subject that have also been important in shaping my speculations. The term “wellstone” was supplied by Gary Snyder of Pioneer Astronautics.
There are, of course, innumerable technical details in this book, both major and minor, only a handful of which are directly (and sketchily) addressed in this appendix. However, readers with additional questions are encouraged to pursue them. The answers may well enrich us all.
appendix d
marlon
When Tamra was an eight-year-old princess and all but innumerate, her parents had sought an overqualified tutor, using the carrot of housing and stipend, plus full scholarship to any University in the solar system once the job was complete. Marlon, who’d been among the top mathematics students in North America’s preparatory schools, had answered the ad while summering in Tonga, and to his considerable surprise had been accepted for the job. His higher education plans had been indefinite anyway—many offers, none of them satisfactory—so it had been easy enough to put them on hold for two more years of sun and fun.
He hadn’t counted on the princess herself, though—her rages and giggles and thick-headed retrenchments, her merciless taunts, her utter lack of interest or respect or mathematical insight—and once his contract was up he’d been only too happy to light out for the Mexico City School of Physical Sciences to enjoy his eight-year free ride at the expense of Their Majesties Longo and Piatra Lutui.
He was as surprised as anyone when Piatra died, and Longo drank himself after her, and drowned, and Tamra was groomed to be not only queen of Tonga, but Queen of All Things. He was even more surprised to note, in her increasingly high-profile network appearances, that his shrill, malicious little girl had become a wry and arch and frightfully alluring young lady, unfazed by crowds and cameras, unhindered by any appearance of self-consciousness or doubt. So when her post-coronation dick hunt was announced, he’d answered that ad and, to his even greater surprise, had been accepted for that job as well.
It hadn’t lasted long: just six months of fighting, of constant maneuvering, of discovering she hadn’t changed so much after all. And yet, that time Marlon hadn’t been so eager to leave; he’d had to be thrown bodily from the palace by a pair of dainty robots before he’d realized he could not, in fact, smooth things over this time. And oh, how he wanted to smooth things over! In exchange for her virginity, she’d apparently taken something from him, some essential ability to be satisfied without her.
At first he’d tried to ignore it—his status as deposed First Philander of Sol made him popular enough with the ladies—but as time wore on … In her search for the next Philander, Tamra seemed much more selective, appearing in public on the arms of many gentlemen but taking—it was rumored—few or possibly even none of them to her bed. Marlon couldn’t help but take heart from this, to approve of his be
ing so difficult to replace. Where, after all, could a better man be found? So, cautiously and with utmost attention to his dignity and self-respect, he began once more to court her: to drop short messages into her queue, to send inexpensive but thoughtful gifts, to arrange to be “caught” by tabloid reporters in the company of this or that desirable creature at this or that noble gathering. Not so much to make her jealous as to provide the opportunity for her to reflect on his various merits.
It was working, too; Queen Tamra began replying to his messages, and over time there grew a wistful, vaguely flirtatious overtone in their conversations which he was careful to respond to only with rue and good-natured regret. If only it were that simple, my dear … Another year or two and he’d have been straddling her again, possessing the possessor of the human race, taking his pleasure from her as once he’d taken her girlhood. And filling, yes, that awful hole she’d left in his existence on the day the robots threw him out.
But then that bastard de Towaji had showed up, with his collapsides and his boyish, hat-in-hands charm and his rapidly mushrooming fortune. Also orphaned at the age of fifteen! He’d had more years to get over it, of course, and maybe that, finally, was what really drew Tamra to him. Either way, Marlon had found himself facedown once more on the greasy boardwalk of love. Bruno had moved in quickly, establishing his territorial claims with an ease that seemed calculated to infuriate. And he stayed, first six months and then twelve, and then twenty-four, forty-eight, then months without number, Tamra snuggling in the arms of her little pet genius. Declarant-Philander, well well.
It was hard to be sure just how big a role spite had played in Marlon’s discovery of superreflectance. Not zero, certainly, and he’d approached his Declarancy with grim smugness, a sense that vindication was at last on its way. But that bastard de Towaji had been right there for the ceremony, a step below and behind his lady love, and Tamra’s eyes had shown Marlon a sort of polite recognition and nothing more.
That was the day he knew he hated her, hated them both, hated everyone who’d ever lived. Marlon’s evils were many decades after that in coming, but it was that night, bitterly humping some socialite or other, that he’d officially crossed Humanity off his list of things to bother worrying about.
Like most of history’s monsters, Marlon Fineas Jimson Sykes leaves us all to wonder how things might have turned out, if this or that chance detail of his life had chanced the other way. But looking back on it, most in the Queendom would probably change nothing, even if they could. There is broad agreement: it has all ended well enough.
for Quentin and Casey,
because I said so
acknowledgments
I’d like to extend my heartfelt thanks to Chris Schluep, Shelly Shapiro, Scott Edelman, and Simon Spanton for understanding and believing in this project. Wouldn’t trade you guys for diamonds. Also, for their help in nailing down the basic ideas on which the novel rests, I’m indebted to Gary Snyder, Richard Powers, and especially Shawna McCarthy for being so difficult to please. The many people who helped with technical details are listed separately in Appendix C, but I’ll extend special thanks here to Bernhard Haisch for inspiration and for serving as a brilliant sounding board, and to Sid Gluckman for making a place where imagination matters.
For assistance on matters of Tongan language and culture, I’m grateful to Lonely Planet’s Errol H., and Vincenc Riullop and Periques des Palottes for information about Catalonia.
Also many thanks and apologies to those who faced the early drafts of this story, including Geoffrey A. Landis, Stanley Schmidt, Richard Powers, Maureen F. McHugh, and Cathy, my long-suffering copilot.
IF YOU LOVED THE COLLAPSIUM,
BE SURE NOT TO MISS
WIL MCCARTHY’S
THE
WELLSTONE
Set in the same richly innovative future,
this novel explores the ramifications of living in
a society of immortals.…
Available from Bantam Spectra in March of 2003
Here is a special preview:
One man in a sphere of brass.
One man alone in the vacuum of space.
One man hurtling toward solid rock at forty meters per second—fast enough to kill him, to end his mission here and now, to cap a damnfool end on a long and decidedly damnfool life. To leave his children defenseless.
In the porthole ahead is the planette Varna, his destination, swathed in white clouds and shining seas, in grasslands, in forests whose vertical dimension is already apparent against the dinner-bowl curve of horizon. Not planet: planette. It looks small because it is small, barely twelve hundred meters across. Condensed matter core, fifteen hundred neubles—very nice. The surface workmanship is exquisite; he sees continents, islands, majestic little mountain ranges jutting up above the trees. Telescopes, he realizes, don’t do justice to this remotest of Lune’s satellites.
The man’s name is Radmer, or Conrad Mursk if you’re old enough. Very few people are old enough. Radmer’s own age would be difficult to guess—his hair is still partly blond, his weathered skin not really all that wrinkled. He still has his teeth, although they’re worn down, and a few of them are cracked or broken. But even in zero gravity, as he kicks and kicks the potter’s wheel that winds the gyroscopes which keep the sphere from tumbling, there’s a kind of weight or weariness to his movements that might make you wonder. Older?
To be fair, the air inside the three-meter sphere isn’t very good. Cold and damp, it smells of carbon dioxide, wet brass, and the chloride tang of spent oxygen candles. Old breath and new—the only way to refresh the air is to dump it overboard, but after two and a half days he’s out of candles and out of time, and there’s a healthy fear stealing upon him as the moment of truth approaches. Opening the purge valve would be a highly risky stunt right now.
Giving the winding mechanism a final kick, he ratchets his chair back a few notches and unfolds the sextant. This takes several seconds—it’s a complicated instrument with a great many appendages. When it’s locked into the appropriate sockets on the arms of his chair, and then properly sighted in, he takes a series of readings spaced five clock-ticks apart, and adjusts a pair of dials until the little brass arrow stops moving. Then, sighing worriedly, he folds the thing up again, stows it carefully in its rack, and clicks the chair forward again to kick the potter’s wheel a few more times. Course correction needs a stable platform, you bet.
When he’s satisfied the gyros are fully wound, he takes up the course correction chains, winces in anticipation, and jerks out the sequence the sextant has indicated. Wham! Wham! The sphere is kicked—hard—by explosive charges on its hull. Caps, caps, fore, starboard, starboard … It’s quite a pummeling, like throwing himself under a team of horses, but before his head has even stopped ringing he’s setting the sextant up again and retaking those critical measurements.
The planette’s atmosphere is as miniature as the rest of it, and there’s the problem: from wispy stratosphere to stony lithosphere is less than half a second’s travel, if he comes straight in. That’s not long enough for the parachute to inflate, even if his timing is perfect. To survive the impact, he has to graze the planette’s edge, to cut through the atmosphere horizontally. Shooting an apple is easy; shooting its skin off cleanly is rather more difficult, especially when you’re the bullet.
Could he have sent a message in a bottle? A dozen messages in a dozen bottles, to shower every planette from here to murdered Earth? That would be an empty gesture, albeit an easier one. God knows he’s needed elsewhere, has been demanded in a dozen different elsewheres as the world of Lune comes slowly unraveled. But somehow this dubious errand has captured his imagination. No, more than that: his hope. Can a man live without hope? Can a world?
Alas, the sextant’s news is less than ideal: he’s overcorrected on two of three axes. Sighing again more heavily, he stows the thing and gets set up for the next course correction, gathering the chains up from their moorings. When he
jerks on the first one, though, no team of horses runs him over. Nothing happens at all.
With a stab of alarm, he realizes he’s been squandering correction charges, not thinking about it, not thinking to save a few kicks on each axis for terminal approach. Can he recover? By reorienting the ship, which he needs to do for landing anyway? Yes, certainly, unless he’s been really unlucky and run out of charges simultaneously on all six of the sphere’s ordinal faces.
Outside the forward porthole, there is nothing but Varna: individual trees beneath a swirl of cloud, growing visibly. There is, to put it mildly, little time to waste.
Attitude control is strictly manual; Radmer throws off his safety harness and hurls himself at a set of handles mounted on the hull’s interior. They’re cold, barely above freezing, and damp enough that his fingers will slip if he doesn’t grip with all his might, which, fortunately, he does.
There’s a metallic screech and groan, brass against brass, as the outer hull begins to roll against the bearings connecting it to the inner cage, where his feet are braced. The potter’s wheel and gyros hold a fixed orientation in space while the three-meter sphere, complete with chair and storage racks, is rotated around them. Sunlight flashes briefly through one porthole; through the other, the green-white face of Lune, from whence he came.
Like most men his age, Radmer is a good deal stronger than he looks. Still, the hull’s rotation is as difficult to stop as it is to start. It’s his own strength he’s fighting, the momentum he himself has imparted. Despite the cold, the effort makes him sweat inside his coat and leathers.
