Influx Read online

  “An opportunity cost.” Grady gestured to the towering apparatus. “High energies are necessary to induce exotic states in baryonic matter. And exotic states are what we needed.”

  “I’m guessing your burn rate is the real reason we’re here.” Marrano gestured to the massive tower of equipment. “Is this your Hail Mary pass before you go under? And what the hell is baryonic matter?”

  “Physical stuff—for our purposes at subatomic scales.” He looked to Kulkarni. “Doctor Alcot and I have been studying the interaction of high-energy particles moving through doped graphene within superfluids like helium-4.”

  Kulkarni nodded uncertainly. “Okay. And how does that relate to chiral superconductors, Mr. Grady?”

  There was a pause.

  “It doesn’t.”

  There was a tense silence.

  “But I could get funding for chiral superconductors.”

  “That’s fraud.”

  “Fraud’s an ugly word. Anyone reading the business plan able to comprehend our mathematics would clearly understand what I was proposing.”

  “Like I said: fraud.”

  Grady looked unfazed. “Then it would make for the most boring lawsuit ever. Besides, someone in government was evidently intrigued by my math.”

  Kulkarni turned to Alcot. “Did you know about this, Bert?”

  Alcot grimaced. “I was unaware of it for a time, but eventually I came to accept it as necessary.”

  “Your professional reputation—”

  Grady interceded. “The fault is mine. Not Professor Alcot’s. But as you’ll see, none of that matters now.”

  Alcot held up a reassuring hand. “I’ll be fine, Sam.”

  “I’m concerned that Mr. Grady has been trading on your academic credentials.”

  “It’s not like that at all. Almost the opposite, in fact.”

  Kulkarni turned back to Grady. “So what is it you’re doing with these superfluids?”

  Johnson glanced between the physicists. “‘Superfluids.’ ‘Baryonic matter.’ It all sounds like bullshit to me.”

  Grady took a swig from a forty-ounce beer, then wiped his beard with his gloved hand. “Superfluids are very real, Mr. Johnson. A superfluid is a state in which matter behaves like a fluid with zero viscosity and zero entropy. Looks like a normal liquid, but at ultralow temperatures flows without friction. Point is: In certain extreme environments the standard model of physics breaks down. Look . . .”

  He approached a glass enclosure mounted to one side of the tower and slipped his arms through a pair of thick silvery gloves in its face. The others watched as inside the glovebox Grady unscrewed a smoking ceramic cylinder from the side of the monstrous assembly. He then grabbed a nearby glass beaker and carefully poured a clear, steaming liquid into it from the cylinder.

  “This is helium-4 at slightly below two-point-one-seven Kelvin.” He held the beaker up and to the side. Even though the beaker was made of thick glass, the liquid inside dripped through the bottom as if it were a window screen. It hit the floor of the glovebox and quickly evaporated.

  Johnson looked surprised. “Holy shit. It’s pouring through glass.”

  “Exactly. In a quantum state strange things happen. It’s paring matter down to its essence. Subatomic particles. Slipping between the cracks of standard physics.” He screwed the cylinder back in the monstrous assembly. “Each particle of helium-4 is a boson, by virtue of its zero spin. At the lambda point, its quantum effects become apparent on a macroscopic scale—meaning individual atoms are no longer relevant within the liquid. Superfluid vacuum theory is an approach in theoretical physics where space-time itself is viewed as a superfluid. The fluid of reality.”

  Kulkarni frowned. “Superfluid vacuum theory? Why . . . What are you trying to do here, Mr. Grady?”

  “We’re attempting to reflect gravitational waves, Doctor Kulkarni.”

  Kulkarni was momentarily speechless. He turned to Alcot. “Is he serious, Bert? And you agreed to this?”

  Alcot shrugged. “They say it’s important to stay active in retirement.”

  Kulkarni turned back to Grady. “What on earth made you think this was feasible?”

  “Because I can see it right here.” Grady pressed a finger against his head.

  Kulkarni just stared.

  Grady held up a hand. “All right, you’re skeptical. Fair enough.” He gestured to the tower. “A superfluid flows without friction. And superconductors allow electrons to flow without resistance. What we did was suspend a graphene coil within a superfluid.”

  “Why graphene?”

  “It’s a superconducting film. Replicates electrons moving through a near-perfect vacuum. Isolates particles from interference. Graphene also exhibits exotic effects under certain conditions.”

  “I’m still not seeing how this relates to your goal, Mr. Grady.”

  “Right. I needed a charged superconducting sheet. The quantum mechanical nonlocalizability of the negatively charged Cooper pairs, protected from the localizing effect of decoherence by an energy gap, causes the pairs to undergo nongeodesic motion in the presence of a gravitational wave.”

  Marrano threw up his hands. “I told you, Professor, this guy is just stringing words together at random.”

  Kulkarni held up a reassuring hand to Marrano and focused back on Grady. “Go on.”

  Grady shrugged. “The surrounding non-superconducting ionic lattice is localized and so executes geodesic motion, moving along with space-time, while the Cooper pairs execute non-geodesic motion—thereby accelerating relative to space-time. The different motions lead to a separation of charge. That charge separation causes the graphene to become electrically polarized, generating a restoring Coulomb force. The back action of the Coulomb force on the Cooper pairs magnifies the mass supercurrents generated by the wave—producing a reflection.”

  Kulkarni grimaced. “Mr. Grady, if this was so, why do Bose-Einstein condensates follow geodesics? I can drop them in a vacuum chamber, and they fall just like Galileo’s rock.”

  Grady grabbed a piece of paper from a table and started making intricate folds as he talked. “Yes, but the deBroglie wavelength of the BEC is on the order of a millimeter, whereas the gravity field wavelength is effectively infinite—which means gravity can move it around. If the de Broglie wavelength can be made longer than the gravity wavelength, we can in principle isolate the BEC from the gravity wave.”

  “Okay, but even so, it’s only true for time-varying fields—not static fields like this.”

  “Agreed, but I had an idea about that, too.” He held up what was now a paper sphere—handily crafted. He waved his hand around it. “Neutron stars have massive magnetic fields. And superconductors—like this graphene—exclude magnetic fields. But a neutron star like Cassiopeia A—which has a proton superconductor at its core—nonetheless has a massive magnetic field.”

  Kulkarni just stared.

  “How is that possible, I wondered? It’s because superfluids containing charged particles are also superconductors. The combination has some extraordinary effects. Add a superfluid to a superconductor, and the superconducting boundary shifts, changing the value of kappa and causing truly exotic behavior at the new superconducting boundary.” He slapped the side of the massive assembly. “I had a theory about the distortion of gravitational waves at that superconducting boundary.”

  Kulkarni sighed. “Mr. Grady, I don’t see how this could accomplish anything except waste money.”

  Grady gazed at the professor. “Right . . .” He turned to the chubbier of the two Asian men. “Raj, bring the power up, please.”

  “You got it.” Perkasa chuckled and moved toward the bank of capacitors on the edge of the room. He motioned to the visitors. “You guys may want to step back a bit. I’m about to pump fifty megawatts into this thing.”

  Kulk
arni snapped a look at Grady. “That could light a small city.”

  Grady nodded. “Yeah, I know.”

  Before anyone could object, Perkasa raised his hand over a glowing button. “Heads up! And three, and two, and one . . .” With a jab of his thick finger a deep hum settled over the lab. An eerie glow appeared in the sphere as motes of dust were ionized; then the glow faded.

  Grady raised his beer bottle to the opening of a long clear tube that snaked down into the heart of the monstrous assembly. “Just watch.” He poured.

  All eyes followed the beer as it coursed down the plastic tube and spilled out across the concave platform. . . .

  At which point the liquid fell straight up.

  Kulkarni removed his glasses and stared, mouth agape. “Good lord . . .”

  As the liquid “fell” upward, it passed some invisible point where natural gravity returned, and then it spilled back toward earth again, like a fountain—only to be caught once more in the altered field. Soon the liquid began bobbing up and down, oscillating between ever narrowing high and low points until it reached equilibrium. Before long it was bubbling around like a domed membrane on the edge of both gravity fields, a seething polar “beer cap” on an invisible globe.

  Kulkarni put his glasses back on. “My God . . . it’s a flux.”

  Grady nodded. “Exactly. Gravitational fields follow the same shape as electromagnetic fields. Just as the flowing electrons in a plasma jet generate a magnetic field, we’re thinking these quantum fields interact with gravitation somehow.”

  “Antigravity? You can’t be serious.”

  “No. Not antigravity. What I think we’ve created is a machine that’s ‘shiny’ to gravity—a gravity mirror. Or perhaps refraction is more accurate. I’m not sure yet.”

  Kulkarni pointed. “This is clearly some form of electromagnetism. Water is diamagnetic, and at these high-energy levels you could probably float a brick given just trace amounts of magnetic material. Surely you don’t claim you’re reflecting gravity?”

  “Superconductors exclude magnetic fields, Doctor.” Grady pointed. “And you must admit our test results look promising.”

  “But . . .” Kulkarni was speechless for a few moments as he watched the cheap malt liquor bubbling around in midair. “If you could bend gravity . . . it would mean . . .” His voice trailed off.

  Grady finished for him. “It would provide compelling support for the existence of gravitational waves. Not to mention gravitons. And a few other things besides.”

  Kulkarni groped for a chair, but all the nearby ones were in pieces. “My God . . .”

  “It is pretty damn cool.”

  Kulkarni started shaking his head again. “No. This must be electromagnetism. Even a nonferrous liquid—”

  “You’re quite right to be skeptical. Our lab is open to you.”

  “Because what you’re suggesting . . . well, the Standard Model of physics . . . this would create an entirely new form of astronomy. It would mean the Nobel Prize. And that’s just for starters.”

  Alcot, Grady, and the technicians exchanged looks.

  Grady laughed. “I hadn’t thought of that, Bert.”

  Alcot raised his eyebrows. “It was the first thing I thought of.”

  Marrano held up his hands. “Whoa! Guys. Hang on a second.”

  They all turned to Marrano.

  “Just an observation: You’re using enough energy to light a hundred thousand homes—to levitate a mouthful of malt liquor six feet off the ground. That’s about as cost-effective as using a Boeing 747 to clean a throw rug.”

  Doctor Kulkarni was starting to ponder what he was looking at as he waved Marrano off. “You’re not realizing the potential significance of this discovery, Mr. Marrano.”

  “Significance is great, but it’s not gonna make the economics work any better.”

  “If what we’re really looking at is antigravity—or a gravity mirror, as you say, Mr. Grady—and we haven’t yet determined that . . .” Kulkarni started examining the computer screen as he spoke to Marrano. “The potential impact would be enormous, it could reveal . . . well, the warp and weft in the fabric of the universe. It would help us understand the structure of space-time itself. So far, gravity is the only force that hasn’t conformed to the Standard Physics Model. No, this is potentially the most significant discovery of the century. Of perhaps any century. It could unlock untold scientific advances. Even a grand unified field theory.”

  The moneymen exchanged looks.

  “Okay, and the commercial potential for that is . . . ?”

  It was the scientists’ turn to look at one another.

  Grady handed the bottle of malt liquor to Kulkarni—who steadied himself by taking a swig. Meanwhile Grady answered Marrano’s question. “Probably not much initially; as you mentioned, it requires huge amounts of energy to induce these exotic particle states—even for just a tiny area. To commercialize it you’d need nearly unlimited energy—”

  Alcot added. “Unlimited cheap energy.”

  “Yes, unlimited cheap, portable energy. Assuming that, you could create reflective gravity devices. But as you mentioned, there are more practical ways to make things fly—”

  Johnson motioned to the bubbling liquid, still floating in the sphere. “So then you’ve created the world’s most expensive lava lamp. Don’t get me wrong—it’s impressive—but at fifty megawatts . . .”

  Kulkarni stepped between them. “You’re not appreciating how important this could be to science.”

  “We brought you here as the voice of reason, Doctor. You’re starting to sound like a nerdy kid at the museum.”

  Grady took the bottle back. “Yeah. I was that kid, too.”

  Kulkarni regained his serious bearing. Nodding, he turned again to Alcot. “Bert, prove to me this isn’t simply some form of electromagnetism. Does it work in a vacuum, for instance? Can we rule out ionic lift?”

  Alcot leaned on a cane. “We’ve produced the same results in a vacuum chamber and with nonmagnetic materials.” He turned to Grady. “Jon, show Sam the field manipulation experiments.”

  “Right.” Grady pointed at the floating membrane of malt liquor. “Look at the shape of the field. It’s one reason why I’ve always believed electromagnetism and gravity were linked—albeit in different dimensions.”

  Kulkarni was hesitant. “If it looks like an electromagnetic field, and acts like one . . .”

  “It’s not magnetism. Any baryonic matter with mass that you place in that field will experience the gravitational effects. Literally anything.”

  “Do you expect me to believe that with just fifty megawatts of power you’re exceeding the gravity well of the entire Earth? Without creating miniature black holes or—”

  “No, no. Again, We’re not creating gravity at all. Remember: We’re reflecting gravity. A gravity mirror. And that high-energy mirror can be manipulated to refract gravity in various directions.”

  “You mean like photons?”

  Grady considered this as he ran fingers through his mangy hair. “Perhaps. I’m not certain yet. But the reason I say it’s like a mirror or a prism is we can only reflect the gravitational field that’s already present. We can’t increase the strength of gravity no matter how much electrical energy we pump into the field. If there’s one Earth gravity present, then that’s the maximum we can reflect. But since gravity is also acceleration, we should also be able to mirror the increased g-forces experienced in acceleration—in effect canceling out higher g-forces. Which could be a very interesting application.”

  “Theoretically.”

  “Yes. Theoretically. Here . . .” Grady approached his computer monitor and pointed at a series of sensor readings. “We can diffuse the effect, too. We’re using the gravitational equivalent of Halbach spheres to create the gravitic field, which means we can manipulate
the gravity field much the same way you can manipulate an electromagnetic field with a Halbach array. We can modify its shape—exerting either an equal flow in all directions . . .” He adjusted the knobs.

  Suddenly the polar cap of beer poured downward and balled up into a glistening globule at the very center of the imaginary sphere—still hovering in midair but precisely spherical.

  Kulkarni muttered to himself. “My God. Zero gravity.”

  “Actually an equal flow of microgravity. The gravitational field is focused in toward a central point.”

  “An equilibrium then.”

  “Right. Or we can focus it in any single direction. Change the direction of descent—essentially change which way is ‘down’—to any vector in space . . .” He moved a joystick, and the beer suddenly hurtled out of the apparatus and “fell” across Marrano and Johnson, soaking them both.

  “Goddamnit, Grady!”

  “What the hell are you doing? This is a four-thousand-dollar suit!”

  “Sorry, guys.”

  Kulkarni was already looking around at all the debris on the floor. The dents and holes in the walls. “I’m beginning to understand why the lab’s a mess.”

  “Had to test it.”

  Kulkarni was cogitating, clearly trying hard to disprove it. “But if this is truly gravity you’re reflecting, then all baryonic matter should interact with the field. Not just diamagnetic materials but literally anything.”

  Grady nodded. “Yes. Exactly. Even in a vacuum. And it does.” He picked up a hardcover copy of Isaac Newton’s Principia and, after holding it up, nudged it into the gravity field, where it floated eerily.

  “What I don’t understand is why the altered gravity field doesn’t seem to propagate outside the sphere, as one would predict if gravity were flowing in a straight path.”

  Kulkarni considered this. “And gravity propagates over any distance . . .”

  “Right. If we were creating a gravity field as powerful as Earth’s, it should propagate outward. I think what’s happening is we’re causing a distortion, an eddy in the flow of gravitation.” He threw up his hands. “I’m just not sure yet.”