'Who sang that song?'
'Just how tall is the Empire State Building and what would happen if you dropped a penny off of it?' I actually make my freshman physics students work that one out every semester.
'Don't be silly,' I say to them. 'A raindrop weighs about the same as a penny and they fall from as much as forty thousand feet high during thunderstorms. You ever see a raindrop crack the sidewalk?' Terminal velocity is tough for some people to grasp.
And so the conversations continued. 'If you were driving along at the speed of light and you turned your headlights on, what would you see?'
'Could Jackie Chan whup Bruce Lee?'
'Which Heinlein book was the best?'
'Was Kirk, Picard, Sisco, Janeway, or Archer the coolest -captain?' I always voted for 'Q' myself, but didn't he always make himself an admiral?
'Who was the best guitarist of all times?' No contest there. Hendrix, period, exclamation point.
'Second best?' Stevie Ray Vaughn. Of course you can't discount Robert Johnson, George Thorogood, Jimmy Paige, Joe Perry, Slash, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, B.B. King, Ron Wood, Kirk Hammett, and that new kid, what's his name, and of course our local great, Microwave Dave. But there is an order of magnitude problem between second and third best that I'm sure the other guitarists would point out.
A pitcher later and Tabitha came through the door. Rebecca waved at her and she joined us.
'Did you call her or something?' I asked.
'None of your business,' she replied.
'Becca introduced her while I tried to figure out just how I was supposed to react. The group accepted her willingly and didn't quiz her too hard about being an astronaut. Alisa asked her a question that I never really thought about.
'Did you have to take some sort of self-defense stuff in the Air Force?'
'We had some training, yes. I'm sure it wasn't as involved as what I hear all of you do.'
I responded to that, 'Well, none of us have ever flown a Space Shuttle, either.' She seemed to like that remark. I seemed to recall having used it the first time I met her. Maybe I just thought I did. That day is still pretty fuzzy.
Our food finally got to the table. Well, mine almost did. Some crazy drunk guy in the middle of a story made a big hand gesture and knocked my plate right out of our waitress's hand. I laughed at first, until I realized it was my food. It all went downhill from there.
I slept in a little Monday morning and got to the lab about eleven. Tabitha was coming by after her Space Camp thing later that evening to see our experiments. I spent some time explaining it to her, but without seeing it, it's hard to explain. Rebecca and Jim were already in the warp bubble experiment lab setting it up. We had never figured out why the electrons had completely disappeared on us, although, the experiment is actually kind of simple. There's a one-and-a-half-meter-long glass tube with an electron gun attached at one end. The tube has huge electromagnets situated along it to steer, accelerate, and focus the electrons. The other end of the tube is a larger vacuum chamber in the shape of a cube about a half meter on a side. In the middle of the chamber is a misshapen toroidial superconductor with coils around the upper and lower half—the device looked kind of like a squished and twisted donut with thousands of wires wrapped around it in random looking fashion. A few centimeters away is a second misshapen toroidial superconductor with similar coils around it. A high current is set up moving counterclockwise in the first toroid and clockwise in the other and a rather complex alternating current function is set up in the coils. It's in the region between the two toroids that the spacetime metric should change to allow for the warp bubble—if the field strength is large enough, and if the theory is correct, that is. We based the field shapes on approximations to the Einstein equations and numerical solutions, but there still hasn't been any real closed solution discovered. If I could only have that dream again, maybe I'd figure it out.
All the apparatus is inside a clear plastic sphere that has electron detectors deposited on the inner surface of the sphere. This way electrons scattered at any angle could be detected. The problem is that you can't see the experiment because of the detectors—there are so many of them and they're all in the way from an outside viewer's standpoint. So, we modified the sphere by drilling a few holes here and there between the electron detectors and placed tiny CCD cameras in them. We sealed the holes around the camera connections with epoxy and vacuum sealant—that was an ordeal within itself. Now we could rerun the experiment and actually see what was happening inside the sphere. Some of the cameras are for ultraviolet, some for infrared, and some for visible wavelengths. We hoped that would shed some, ahem, light on the problem.
Jim and 'Becca had completed the modifications early and now had the chamber pulling down to a vacuum. That would take several hours. In the meantime we decided to have a bull session about the next step for the energy collectors.
'There has to be a way to make them more efficient or smaller.'
'Well, smaller is really out, Anson. We're at state-of-the-art and then some right now!' Rebecca said.
'Maybe there's a way to increase the surface area of the Casimir effect regions,' was Jim's input.
'That would increase the efficiency all right. Any ideas, 'Becca?' I asked.
'I dunno?' She shrugged. 'The most efficient use of surface area is a sphere, but how the heck can we use that?'
'That's it! Why didn't I think of that?' I went to the whiteboard and started drawing.
'What's
'Well, instead of plates for pistons we use hollow spheres. One inside the other. Like this.' I drew a large circle, which is a two-dimensional sphere, then a smaller circle inside it. Then I erased a portion of the larger circle and drew a rod from the smaller circle through the hole in the larger one and extended the rod a little. I drew the same thing on the other end of the rod.
'The question is, how do we support the rod and keep the inner spheres from touching the outer ones.' I tugged at my lip for second and realized that I was chewing on the end of the marker cap.
