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 1934–1938 by Pavel Cerenkov (1904–1990). 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-
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 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
