The Ship: The New Frontiers Series, Book One Read online

  “I doubt that electricity would be a problem. We’ll have to think about it, but right offhand, I can’t see any reason we couldn’t adapt a turboprop engine by using the gearing to drive a generator instead of a propeller. We need to talk about the science behind this too. You say Tesla understood it?”

  “I don’t know. But I now understand a lot more of it than he did, I think.”

  “Really? You understand what Einstein meant when he came up with general and special relativity?”

  “Well, yes and no. I understand some of it, but to be honest, I think Einstein was wrong in a couple of ways. Anyway, we can talk about that tomorrow. I’m sure you’re tired, and I’ve made up the bed in your old room. I’ve got some repairs to do before I can run that system again, so I’ll work on the impeller while you get some rest.”

  Chapter Four

  Morty found Chuck at the dining table, eating a breakfast of raisin bran. “Sleep OK, Chuck?”

  “I dropped off about 8:30 and didn’t wake up until 7:30 this morning. I put on coffee if you want some.”

  “No, it would just keep me up. I’m going to have breakfast and sleep for a while.”

  “You didn’t sleep last night?”

  “No, I stayed up and worked. I often work through the night. I sleep when I’m tired.”

  “This ends now, Morty. You get some sleep, and when you wake up, we’ll start getting you on a regular sleep schedule.”

  “It won’t work, Chuck. I lay there and toss and turn, and finally I just get up. I figure I might as well work if I have trouble falling asleep.”

  “Not good enough, Morty. I just found you again and I don’t want to lose you. Do you realize that we’re each other’s only close relative now, except for my uncle? And you never talk about him.”

  “I don’t think I ever thought of it like that, and there’s a reason I don’t talk about your uncle. I just don’t want to get into it. Nothing anyone can do, anyway.”

  Chuck decided to let the issue drop. “You get some sleep. I’m going to look around the property, and when you wake up, we’ll have dinner and you can tell me how the impeller works. Or, at least, how you think it works.”

  Morty nodded and fixed himself a bowl of cereal. Chuck drank another cup of coffee and watched his grandfather. Morty finished his cereal and went to bed. As soon as the old man started snoring, Chuck eased out of the house and headed for the workshop. He had a lot of thinking and planning to do, instruments he’d need, processors for each rotor axle to control RPM, a control system run by a computer, some sort of input device to tell the computer what to do. As soon as he got that working, he could decide what other software he’d need; the more he thought about it, getting the system under control was going to take a considerable amount of time and it was going to cost money. Where was that to come from?

  #

  Chuck was at the dining table, working at his laptop, when Morty woke up. A loose-leaf notebook lay on the table by the computer and a mechanical pencil lay on the notebook.

  “Afternoon, Chuck. I reckon I needed the sleep. Any coffee left?”

  “No, but I’ll make a new pot. I could use another cup too. I’ve been running some estimates of what we’ll need to automate the impellers. I’m thinking of using a simple processor with just enough ram to run a control program for the rotors. I think I can use a Raspberry Pi processor and mount the RPM sensors onto the same plywood base where you’re putting the transformer primary. I can probably use my laptop to control the main motor for now, the one that spins the primary axle, at least for this first test bed,. I’ll come up with an input system for steering as well as figuring out a way to control the output power. If we can dial the thrust up or down, that’ll allow us to steer by using the impellers the same way boat captains do with twin propellers. We can start out with a steering wheel for surface craft, but later on we’ll have to come up with something better.

  “I’m going to be writing a lot of code over the next few days, but I’ll take time to have meals with you, so plan on it. No more eating on the fly and sleeping when you fall down.”

  “OK, grandson. Reckon it won’t be so bad, long as I’ve got somebody to talk to.”

  Chuck busied himself at the coffeepot and poured Morty a strong cup as soon as enough water had run through the grounds.

  “You were going to tell me how the impellers work.”

  “Chuck, the important thing is that they do work, the strain gauge shows that. As soon as we get one we can run at full speed, we can calculate how efficient it is. I can do that by comparing the current draw and how much thrust output we get. That’s a starting point. As soon as we’ve got two usable impellers, we can have some fun. I’ve got a stack of 3/4 inch plywood sheets we can use to mount things on. I’m thinking of a boondock buggy. Bicycle wheels will work for the running gear, two in the back that just roll plus one in the front that’s steerable. How long has it been since you went chasing jackrabbits?”

  “You’re serious?”

  “Sure, why not? Lots of room out back, plenty of jackrabbits too. Plus something like this will give us a way to test the system before anybody else sees it. We’ll need a working prototype if we’re going to make people pay attention.”

  “You said you intend to make all the components yourself this time?”

  “Well, most of them. No need to make that main drive motor; it’s cheaper to just buy one.”

  “How much money do you have, Morty?”

  “Not all that much. Maybe seven or eight thousand dollars in the bank is all, but I finished a couple of consulting jobs that I haven’t been paid for. I figure they’ll pay me when they get around to it.”

  “I’ll need to look into that, then. Tell you what, machining the rotors and their dynamic balance adjustments, plus winding the coils, that’s your job. We’ll need four sets of those, and if you’re going to make the coils for the motors to spin the rotors, wind those too. What I want is two complete impellers that are as nearly matched as possible. When you start shopping, buy matching main power motors too. They should be single-phase. We’ll be using batteries mostly, and a two-phase inverter is likely to be larger than we need and maybe expensive. I’ll see about building a battery supply and hooking up an inverter to power the system. I’ll also be designing the sensors and the automatic controls to keep everything balanced. I’ll match those up with your rotors as soon as you get them built.

  “Meantime, I’ll also be contacting the people that owe you money. I’ll shake loose as much as I can; letting them decide when to pay you is no way to run a business. I’ll need to know what bank you’re using and your account number.”

  “I’ll get you a deposit slip, Chuck.”

  “You plan on putting in eight hours a day, Morty, no more than that, and if you feel tired at any point, you take a break. But eight hours is your limit, all right?”

  “If you say so, Chuck.”

  “Evenings are for you and me, grandpa. You’re going to explain how that impeller works, and I’ve got a few ideas to bounce off you.”

  #

  Chuck spent the next two weeks contacting the firms that owed Morty money. Occasionally he found it necessary to offer a small discount for immediate payment, but most had paid up as soon as he telephoned. Morty’s account doubled, then doubled again. Chuck finished working his way through the list, then printed out a balance sheet. Morty looked astonished at the numbers, then smiled. “I should have hired you a long time ago, grandson!”

  The components Chuck ordered began arriving, and he installed them as soon as Morty finished assembling the impellers. They finished late that afternoon, then wearily headed for the house. Chuck had put ingredients into a crock pot before starting work that morning. The two silently enjoyed bowls of green chile stew, then Chuck washed up while Morty went out to the patio and found a chair.

  The two were soon enjoying the cool West Texas evening. Chuck had slipped a dollop of brandy into Morty’s tea, hoping
it might help him sleep.

  “You know I never liked walking in other people’s footsteps, Chuck. That’s why I went into consulting. If somebody in a big shop comes up with an idea, most of the other people working there won’t disagree. Even if they think it’s dumb, they don’t want to be noticed so they don’t say anything. That’s not for me. I like to examine an idea from all sides, look at it and see how well the parts fit together. I did the same thing with physics. I don’t think anyone yet has matched Newton, and for that matter I don’t think Maxwell gets the respect he deserves. It’s all Einstein nowadays.”

  “Einstein’s reputation is well deserved, Morty. You can’t ignore that he predicted gravity’s effect on light waves, or for that matter his insight into the relationship between heat and particle motion.”

  “No question about it, Chuck, especially that part about heat. But I think he evaded the question when he claimed that gravity distorts space-time around a large mass. He did the same thing Newton did, he talked about what but didn’t explain how that happened. He just said it did. Anyway, I began looking at Einstein’s ideas, and some of them didn’t quite ring true to me. It’s like that part about the dual nature of light, that it’s a particle and a wave at the same time? It just didn’t make sense to me.”

  “I knew about that, Morty. But Einstein didn’t have anything to do with that model, and I don’t see...”

  “It’s like the people who came up with that idea never looked at Einstein’s equation, the one about mass-energy conversion. Did you ever try to work that one out?”

  “I can’t say I did. It came up in physics and the professor was damned near in ecstasy about it, but no one ever bothered to explain it. It was all about how beautiful it was, but I never could see that. It’s just an equation.”

  “Well, I worked my way through it, it’s not all that difficult. In one sense, I think Einstein cut a couple of corners. Think about C squared, for example. You’ve had basic math courses, and all you need is algebra to work that one out. You remember your algebra classes, don‘t you?”

  “I think so, Morty.”

  “One of the basic concepts is that if you square something, you square everything that’s part of the concept. For example, if you square two meters, you get four square meters, not just four meters. That’s important; it’s not just the numbers that get squared. It’s everything, including units. It’s also worth noticing that whenever you do that, you change dimensions, in this case from linear to area. You’re changing from simple concepts to complex ones, from first order units to second order ones.”

  “Okay, I can see that. But you’re referring to squaring the speed of light, aren’t you?”

  “That’s it. If you square the number, you must also square the units. Those are distance and time, usually kilometers and seconds. I can grasp what a square meter looks like, but what about a square second? Any idea of what that is?”

  “Uh, I don’t know. But it’s just a way of including both terms, isn’t it, going from first order to that second order you mentioned?”

  “It is, in one sense. Mathematically, such an operation is perfectly allowable according to our rules. But if you consider that as a dimension, the square of the speed of light, it doesn’t exist. Other than mathematically, of course. So Einstein included an imaginary unit in his formula, a dimension we don’t have a definition for. But if you think of the formula itself as a single entity, not as separate units to be solved, then conceptually I think it works. Everything in that formula other than numbers, units of energy, mass, and time, just cancels themselves.

  “Anyway, if you expand all those terms to their defined values and work the formula, you’ll find that all the units go away, leaving only a pure number. That’s the conversion factor for mass to energy and vice versa. And that’s what I think is wrong with the idea that light is a wave, which is to say energy, and simultaneously it’s also matter. The conversion factor works out to something like 900,000 to 1. I don’t remember exactly, it’s been a long time since I worked through the formula, but take it from me, it’s a big number. So given that, how can light be energy and matter? Electrons have some of that same duality also.”

  “So do you have an answer to this?”

  “Nope. I’m perfectly content to say I don’t know. But to say it has a ‘dual nature’, when the parts of that duality are not equal and more than that, unequal by 900,000 to one, it just doesn’t seem to fit. It’s a puzzle, and I don’t know that we can resolve it with our current state of knowledge. Anyway, back to Einstein and something I think I do have a better idea about.”

  “What’s that, grandpa?”

  “Back to grandpa, are we?”

  “It seemed right, somehow. It’s like when we used to talk about things during the summer when I visited.”

  “Okay, if it makes you feel better. Anyway, I thought about Einstein’s concept of distorting or warping space-time around a mass. I wondered about that. If you extend Einstein’s argument, then space-time, or at least space, has to have a structure. You can’t distort something that isn’t there.”

  Chuck thought about it. “Okay, I can see that. So what is the structure of space, Morty?”

  “That held me up for a while, but then I understood that there really is a structure, something that extends throughout the universe as we know it, something we’re aware of, and also something that can readily be distorted.”

  “So what is this mysterious something?”

  “Well, it’s not ether, not quite. That theory was tossed out about a century ago, maybe too soon. I figure the structure of space is made up of fields, gravitational and electro-magnetic for sure, and maybe even some we don’t know about. Does that dark energy stuff have fields, and are they different than the other fields we know about? Light is electro-magnetic, part of the electromagnetic spectrum, so it’s not surprising that it would interact with charged particles like electrons or protons. Einstein added gravity to the mix, and sure enough, observers saw light bend around a planet during an eclipse. Since then we’ve spotted gravitational lenses, so that’s even more proof. Conceptually, we know that somehow we should be able to use this information to unite everything in that grand unified theory that Einstein looked for, but now one has managed to do it so far.”

  “You’re serious, aren’t you? You think that space is full of fields that interact with each other?”

  “Sure do. I call it the matrix theory, not that I get a chance to call it anything very often. Most professional physicists are tied to Einstein’s concepts, and they’re not willing to listen to an alternative explanation.

  “Einstein said that light would be affected by a gravitational mass, but why only a large mass? Why wouldn’t the fields around any mass have an effect, even if the mass was very small and the effect difficult to detect? Is there some kind of threshold effect? Anyway, that concept of fields gave me another idea. Einstein pointed out that gravity affects light, but nobody extended that idea.”

  “Extended it how, Morty?”

  “You know about Newton, right? The laws of motion? The one about every action having an equal and opposite reaction?”

  “Sure, I learned about that in middle school. Eighth grade, I think.”

  “Right, so if the gravitational field effects light, doesn’t it also mean that light affects the gravitational field? We can think of light as a wave, so that the energy of the light waves would set up a kind of disturbance or wave effect in the gravitational field?”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone mention that, but it seems logical. It wouldn’t be a very large effect, though.”

  “It doesn’t need to be. Physics works with very large or very small numbers all the time. Now extend it again, Chuck. If I’m right, that the structure of space is fields interacting with each other, then the fields become the medium for transmitting waves. Like sound in water, you get compression and extension within the medium, so that the wave propagates through it. But ex
tend that idea too. That means that light is really a variable, based on the density of the fields, and Einstein’s value--he used an accepted value derived from Michelson-Morley, if I recall--is correct in theory, but not necessarily in practice. That, in turn, means that just maybe everything we know about the cosmos is more guesswork than science. Our entire body of knowledge about what’s out there depends on our interpretation of intercepted electromagnetic radiation, and if our knowledge of how radiation behaves is faulty, then so is every bit of knowledge we’ve derived from it.”

  “Morty, are you sure of this?”

  “Nope. I could be right, or the people who think that Einstein is all they need could be right. It doesn’t matter. It’s just a way of looking at the data, interpreting it. Some do it with mathematics, some with tea leaves, and I do it mostly with logic. The math is probably correct, but logic comes in when we start to interpret what the math implies. Anyway, it doesn’t matter what any of us think. Space is what it is. Someday, when we get out there, we’ll know for sure. But for now, I got to thinking that maybe the impeller secondary coils are creating a field to interact with the other fields that are in space and also here on Earth. They’re the secondary coils for a Tesla transformer, a high-voltage highly-magnetic transformer. Two secondary coils in each rotor, four in the pair, charging from one primary coil in the base. Every time a coil charges and discharge, it creates a large, if brief, magnetic field. And since the charging and discharging happens while the rotor pair is moving, that means the field is also moving. So what I think we’re doing is rotating a field in three dimensions, and that’s why the impeller pulls forward or pushes backward. But it doesn’t matter what I think as long as it works. Put electricity in, you get motion out. No exhaust. No fuel, other than what’s needed to generate the electricity. That means you can stack one impeller behind another or side by side if you want.”