Warp Speed

by Travis S. Taylor

  "What gives, Anson?" Rebecca asked.

  Jim followed with, "You gonna let us in on the secret?"

  "Shhh! Give me a second--us old people think slower than you youngsters," I scolded. They sat patiently while I worked out tensors in my head, on the board, on pieces of notes on the table, and back on the board. It was like an avalanche. It took one tiny snowflake to trigger a flow of ideas that were so powerful I couldn't control the rate they came or where they were going. I just had to follow along for the ride. When the smoke and dust settled I had a group of equations on the board circled and a diagram drawn.

  "Jim, get the digital camera and record this now!" I looked over and noticed that he had already been doing so. Good kid.

  "So, what gives?" Rebecca posed with her hands on her hips.

  "Okay, here it is. We just broke the speed of light barrier in a vacuum!" I let that sink in for a second. "Tabitha was absolutely right. The blue light was Cerenkov radiation." I paused and turned to Rebecca, "Let's hear it, Rebecca." She frowned at me and flipped her laptop open. After typing in a few things a website came up. She began to read.

  "Cerenkov radiation was discovered in 1926 by Mallet. Mallet observed that the light had a continuous spectrum instead of having 'dark lines' which are characteristic of emission spectrum. The unusual electromagnetic phenomenon was extensively studied between the years of 1934D1938 by Pavel Cerenkov (1904D1990). Cerenkov discovered fluorescence wasn't the cause of this effect and he measured speeds of particles over 230,000,000 meters per second. In other words, the particles traveled faster than light in that medium. However, Cerenkov never demonstrated faster than light motion with any particle in the vacuum." She looked around the room, "So what are you saying Doc?"

  "First, you should have known that without having to look it up. Get the math down on that before your defense," I scolded her a little. "I know you'll remember it now. Just in case . . ." I winked at her to ease the tension so as not to embarrass her too much in front of company and to let her know that it damn well would be a question on her oral defense.

  I turned back to the board. "Here's what happened," I started. "The electron beam hits the outer edge of the Alcubierre warped spacetime here where space is expanded and so the speed of light in this region is maybe thirty times ten to the eight meters per second--ten times the vacuum speed of light. We don't know how to measure that accurately yet. Then it passes through a region just beyond the expanded spacetime to the center between the two toroids. Here spacetime should be flat, so the speed of light is smaller, roughly three times ten to the eight meters per second--or normal vacuum speed. But the electrons didn't slow down and they are now traveling faster than light speed in normal flat space. Boom! Cerenkov radiation and they decelerate. Then they pass through the bubble edge near the second torus and were decelerated again because space is contracted in there and the speed of light is less than in flat space. Maybe three times ten to the seven meters per second. Boom, more Cerenkov radiation as they decelerated." I paused for air. "If we had fast photo-detectors instead of cameras, I'll bet you we would see two quick flashes overlapping each other. I'm guessing about one to ten nanoseconds pulsewidth each. Oh, one more thing, the Cerenkov radiation had to occur at the edge of each spacetime region in order to prevent any violations of causality. In other words, the electrons were never traveling faster-than-light for that region for more than the smallest possible time increment as they passed from one region to the next. Otherwise, there would have been time travel things goin' on and Gawd I'm glad that didn't happen."

  "That doesn't explain why we couldn't detect the electrons though," Jim pointed out.

  "That's right," Tabitha added, no longer blushing.

  "Give me a second and I'll get there. Sheesh!" I overdramatized and kept talking.

  "Remember that in order to keep the Alcubierre type field stable we had to use the Van Den Broeck idea of placing a second bubble around the main Alcubierre bubble once we got the matter inside. Ha!" I laughed at the pun. Nobody else got it. So, I continued to press onward, "And in order for us to control that bubble it is electrically charged on the outside. I went back through my notes here on the table. Once decelerated the electrons aren't fast enough to penetrate the negative charge on the outside of the Van Den Broeck bubble. So, they just get bounced around inside until they decelerate to a point where they aren't energetic enough to trigger the detectors once we turn off the field. They just scatter off at low energies. Remember the Alcubierre field only lasts like a nanosecond so the electrons don't get re-accelerated." I looked around the room. My heart was pounding a million beats per second.

  "Do you realize what this means, Anson?" Tabitha asked.

  "You're damn right I do. We just built the first warp drive and accelerated the first matter to warp speed! YES! And the crowd goes wild." I shouted. "Goal!"

  I ran to my office with both arms still in the air and shouting, "Goal!" I stopped the calculation, and reentered the new data. We might have been warping for weeks and didn't know it! Kind of like Yeager and the sound barrier--he said in his book that he believes they broke the sound barrier a few days earlier than they realized. History repeats itself I guess.

  CHAPTER 5

  Looking back on the experiment, I realize that we were lucky the motive force caused by the warp bubble wasn't stronger than the Coulomb forces which we used to hold the bubble in place between the toroids. Also, if the warp field forces had been strong enough to overcome the mechanical strength of the mounts holding the toroids in place . . . whew-wee that could have been messy!"

  I explained to Jim and 'Becca how we might have punched a hole through the lab wall and most of the buildings in its path half way across the state. Hopefully, hypersonic pressures would've disintegrated the thing before it went too far. But, who knows how strong a Van Den Broeck warp bubble is?

  "Messy to say the least. Why didn't we think of that before?" Rebecca scolded me. I smiled at her charisma.

  "I don't know. Hey give me a break will you. We just invented the warp drive!" I said.

  "Yeah, yeah. That was thirty minutes ago. What have you done for me lately?" Tabitha said, laughing.

  "There are some possible military applications here." I rubbed my head in contemplation. "Maybe we can squeeze some cash out of DARPA. What do you think Tabitha?" I asked.

  "I'll ask," she said.

  Jim looked around the room. "Nobody move. I'll be right back!" He was gone for about seven minutes. We had just about given up on him when he finally came back in with a bottle of cheap champagne and some plastic cups.

  "This is all they had across the street at the gas station but it'll have to do." He began pouring and distributing. "I don't know about you guys," he began, "but this deserves a drink!"

  'Becca flipped through her notebook and found a passage. She held up her glass and said, "I found this in your library a few months back and I thought it would be cool for this occasion. It comes from your Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual in the section on Warp Field Theory and Application." She started reading from her notes about how the fictional Zephram Cochrane had gone through this crusade of developing new complex math and procedures required to invent the warp drive. It was interesting how the writers of that book closely paralleled the work that we'd done in Breakthrough Physics.

  "Cheers!" she exclaimed as she finished reading the passage.

  Like I said, I'm proud of myself for finding these two. "Cheers," I said as I raised my cup. I had to cover the tears of joy so the others didn't see them.

  "Cheers!" cried Tabitha.

  "I know we have to verify all of this better and do some optimization. But, seriously, what next?" Jim shrugged his shoulders.

  I started to respond. To my surprise, Tabitha jumped in before I could get the first word out.

  "First thing we have to do is get you guys more funds! And I'm going to see about getting moved down here, if that's okay. You'll need some help if we're g
onna do a flight experiment."

  "Whoa there, Tex!" I interrupted her. "First things first. The chocolate starfish is my man Fred Durst!"

  "Limp Bizkit?" Tabitha asked.

  "Yeah, good." I nodded at her approvingly. Then I realized how old I was. Who would've ever thought I would be listening to Limp Bizkit on classic rock radio?

  "Anyway," I got back to my original thought, "we go about our job and you go about yours. We would love to have you here, of course. But before you do that, somebody is going to do some lobbying and maybe even make a visit to the White House. However, let's keep this completely under wraps until we're damned sure we got it right. Okay?" If my calculations turned out to be wrong and we didn't warp space, this could be a much bigger fiasco than cold fusion ever was.

  We had gone through several months of rigorous experimentation and simulation. Everything turned out to be repeatable. We even found a way to quantify the strength, stresses, and projected speed of the warp bubble, provided we turned off the electric field holding it in place and let go of it. Jim and Rebecca finished the design on the Casimir type energy collection system and they were in the process of building a tenth scale of that required to power a manned-size, warp-capable spacecraft. The largest problem proved to be funding.

  On top of all that, Jim was able to complete his dissertation and graduated. I guess that is Dr. Jim Daniels now. I think I'll still call him Jim. 'Becca wasn't quite so lucky. She had trouble getting her dissertation finished before the deadline and although she finished, it wasn't in time to walk in this year's ceremony. She is supposed to pick up her diploma sometime in August at the records office. She can walk next year if she wants, but by then the new will be worn off of her diploma--it just won't be the same. What if she took a job out of town? Would it be worth it to fly back in town just for the ceremony? Graduation ought to be every semester even if there are only two students walking. I've complained about this problem at the local university for more than a decade. It always falls on deaf ears. Bureaucrats never understand human needs. I started introducing her to people as Dr. Rebecca Jean Townes.

  Tabitha finally came through for us in early June. She found about a million dollars in DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) money, a few hundred thousand from DOE (Department of Energy), and we squeezed NASA BPP for the following half-funded year now. NASA In Space Transportation Program threw in about a million and a half and NASA Office of Space Science claimed if we could prove the energy collection system they'd throw in ten million dollars for a prototype. I found a few private investors locally and it looked like we had just enough to put together a warp drive flight demonstrator experiment. Provided that the Casimir energy collector scaled prototype worked, we would then be in the business of building a faster-than-light spacecraft.

  We hired two cooperative education students, one graduate and one undergraduate. The plan was that the two students would work full-time one semester while attending classes part-time and vice versa the next semester. They were set up on opposite semesters so one of them would always be there full time. Al Rayburn was working on a Ph.D. in Aerospace engineering and was on part-time for the summer. Sara Tibbs was an undergraduate in physics with hopes of continuing on to a Ph.D. in cosmology or astrophysics.

  As you can tell, the activity around the lab really picked up. I was e-signing time cards now for the pay period including July the fourth. We needed to have the scaled prototype done by mid July to meet schedules we sold to our benefactors and we hadn't even successfully tested the new design yet.

  We also hired a clerical slash secretary slash everything else person. Johnny Cache (I'm serious--that's his name) came in and offered to do some maintenance on the front door after a thunderstorm blew a tree limb through it. The weird part is that there aren't any trees around the lab. Thunderstorms in the southeast are screwy that way.

  Johnny never left--and he has proven to be priceless. Apparently he worked as a general contractor for the last eight or nine years and was laid off a few months ago. He went around the area doing odd jobs to pay the bills while he was looking for something more permanent. Once I found out that he was fluent in Spanish, Linux, HTML II, C+++, could type about eighty words a minute, and was a licensed subcontractor and a travel agent I grabbed him up.

  It is hard to find a resume like that. He explained it easily though. His mom was first generation American. His grandmother brought her here from Mexico. I didn't ask if she was legal or not. Johnny said that he grew up on the Internet and computers were a hobby. His dad was a carpenter until he retired. Johnny learned the contractor profession from him. He and his wife became travel agents to earn extra money on the side. It all sounded logical enough to me.

  Johnny was putting the finishing touches on the drywall of two new office areas that was previously useless storage space when Tabitha finally joined us. One of these offices was to be hers. She had convinced NASA that she needed to be here until it was time for mission training. We weren't quite sure anyway how we were going to get the spacecraft to orbit. Cart before the horse.

  "Colonel, give me one more day and I'll be through painting your office," he assured Tabitha. It turns out that Johnny also spent four years in the Air Force. From the time they met Tabitha was never able to break him from using her rank.

  "That'll be fine." She didn't have a lot of stuff to unpack anyway. Most of her things were still in boxes in her apartment living room floor.

  Tabitha stuck her head in my office. "How are you?"

  "Hey, when did you get here?" I was pleasantly surprised.

  "I just got in. The new guy, Johnny? He said that my office won't be ready until tomorrow." She smiled and sat down on my couch. Offices really need a couch. I've spent many all-nighters working and catching catnaps every now and then on it. I've caught Jim and 'Becca on it a time or two also. Uh, I mean I caught them one at a time--not together--although I have recently noticed some chemistry going on there.

  "How did it go in D.C.?" I asked.

  "Not sure. But let's keep on plugging and figure out how to do the experiment. We'll get it flown somehow."

  All of a sudden a crash--no, more like an explosion--came from the clean room. Then I heard Jim.

  "Call 911!" he was screaming.

  Tabitha and I bolted to the airlock door where we found Jim walking Rebecca to the kitchen. Her left arm from the elbow down was covered in blood and her hand was mangled severely and coated with glass fragments. She was shaking but not making a sound. When the cold water hit her hand she collapsed to the floor.

  Johnny came around the corner, "What the hell was tha--" He fainted when he saw Rebecca's hand. Obviously, medic isn't one of the things on his resume. Tabitha put a cushion from one of the chairs under 'Becca's head. I immediately propped her feet up and held her arm over her head as well.

  "We gotta stop this bleeding now!" Jim screamed.

  "Calm down Jim!" Tabitha barked. "Get the first-aid kit!"

  "Doc, we never replaced it after we lost it in Tsali when we went mountain biking up there, remember!" Jim looked frantic.

  "Then get me a couple of towels. Fast!"

  Johnny came to. "What can I do to help?"

  "Go get the car and pull it around front." I told him. Looking back at 'Becca's hand once the blood flow had slowed some, I realized that her ring finger was missing and there were hundreds of shards of glass sticking out of her arm. The missing finger wasn't bleeding that badly, but the ugly gouges that the glass had made were bleeding profusely. I looked at Tabitha. She saw and only nodded back at me. Jim returned with the towels.

  "Jim hold her arm up like this! I'll be right back." I grabbed a sandwich bag out of the cabinet and headed for the clean room.

  There was nothing left of the vacuum chamber and there were glass fragments all around where it used to be.

  "What the hell happened in here?!" After a minute or so I found her finger inside the remains of the vacuum chamber glove. It had bee
n severed cleanly, most likely by a large piece of glass. I held the bottom of the sandwich bag and turned it inside out so my hand was on the inside (or outside rather) of the bag. I picked up the finger and turned the bag right side out and zipped it.

  By the time I returned Tabitha had 'Becca's arm wrapped in the towels and 'Becca had regained consciousness. She was calm, everthing considered--she was probably in shock. Jim on the other hand, was nuts. They were getting her upright and on her way to the car.

  "We're close enough to the hospital that we can have her there in ten minutes or less," I told them. Johnny was apparently out in the car waiting. I found the twelve-pack cooler under the sink and ran to the refrigerator. Once I was sure there was enough ice in the cooler I placed the sandwich bag in it and closed it up. I also grabbed my laptop on the way out.

  "Johnny get us to the hospital safely. You understand me?"

  "No problem, I just don't want to see the blood," Johnny replied.

  I sat in the front and Tabitha, Jim, and 'Becca were in the back seat. We made 'Becca lie down with her head in Tabitha's lap and her feet in Jim's. Jim continued to hold her arm up. 'Becca was fairly catatonic.

  I popped open my laptop, pulled up my duckbill antenna, and logged onto the Internet. I punched in the Huntsville Emergency Room online service. I adjusted the camera lens of my laptop to see me. A person wearing scrubs appeared on the other end and asked how they could help. After explaining the situation and putting 'Becca in the camera's field of view they took us a little more seriously. I told him our ETA was about fifteen minutes tops.

  "What is her heart-rate?"

  Tabitha was way ahead of me. "It is about sixty-nine beats per minute."

  "How much blood loss has there been?" He seemed concerned. I realized part of the problem.

  "I forgot to mention that she is very athletic and her resting heart-rate is probably much lower than that." I often get double-takes in the doctor's office when they take my pulse. Why are Americans so out of shape that when somebody isn't it's a surprise? The doctor/nurse whatever he is on the other end seemed to relax slightly.