Most of the untold millions tuning in already knew of her discovery, of course, at least the punch line, but this was the first formal announcement. Panicked speculation and rumors had gone viral almost as quickly as had the discovery.
Eugene Tobias stood at the microphone until the audience chatter gradually ceased. When the room was silent, he began. “As many of you are now aware, at 10:23 Pacific Standard Time last night, a graduate student at the University of Arizona named Madison Russo made a discovery that has shaken the foundation of science, cosmology, and religion. Indisputable evidence of not just extraterrestrial life, but of intelligent extraterrestrial life. This discovery has now been repeatedly confirmed.” A thirty foot image of Tobias also appeared on a screen behind him, so those in the back could detect his every facial expression.
“I will now ask Miss Russo to make a brief, prepared statement. She will be followed by Dr. Timothy Benari, an expert in something called zero point energy. He will make a prepared statement as well. Then we will introduce our full panel and open up the floor for questions.” He gestured to Madison. “The microphone is all yours.”
Madison approached the lectern in flats and a dark suit, consisting of a pencil skirt and matching jacket. She hated formal wear and found the outfit restricting and uncomfortable. But if there was ever a time to dress formally, headlining a press conference in front of most of America was probably it. She adjusted the microphone and cleared her throat.
“Hello,” she croaked, and to her own ears her voice sounded tiny and meek. “As Dr. Tobias said,” she continued, managing to increase her volume despite the trouble she was having taking in oxygen, “my name is Madison Russo. Before I describe my findings, I thought it was important to give a quick—and I hope painless—review of Einstein’s theory of relativity.”
She half expected to hear a unanimous groan from the crowd of reporters. She hadn’t slept in thirty-six hours, so didn’t entirely trust her judgment, but while everyone had heard of relativity, she guessed that few non-scientists fully understood its implications. Or how profoundly it had turned mankind’s intuitive sense of how the universe worked upside down.
She smiled nervously. “Naturally, this will be a huge oversimplification. But relativity is critical to understanding the discovery that Dr. Tobias spoke of.
“So here is a three minute course. Suppose I threw a ball twenty miles per hour at a boy racing away from me on a bike, also going twenty miles per hour. How fast would the ball gain on him? The answer is, it wouldn’t. Relative to the boy, the ball would be going at zero miles per hour. If he was racing toward me at twenty miles per hour, the ball I threw would be closing the gap at forty miles per hour.”
Madison looked out over the audience to see how the reporters were reacting, but they might as well have been made of stone. “So relative velocities are just a matter of addition and subtraction,” she continued. “Pretty simple, and true for every object ever measured.” She paused. “But then light came along. It travels at an incomprehensible speed of 670 million miles an hour. And as impossible as it seems, it doesn’t obey this simple rule. The speed of light measured by an observer is exactly the same, no matter how fast he or she is moving toward it or away from it. If you were traveling at ninety-nine percent the speed of light, and chasing a beam of light, it would still be moving away from you at the full speed of light.”
She turned a page of notes and continued. “This would be like being in car going fifty-nine, chasing a car going sixty, and the car you’re chasing is still gaining on you at sixty miles an hour. Just as fast as it would if you were standing still. Seems impossible, and defies common sense. Newtonian physics couldn’t explain it. Fortunately, Albert Einstein developed a physics that could.”
Madison paused for just a moment and looked out at the sea of reporters. They still could have been made of wood for all the interest they were showing. Oh my God, she thought. I’m boring an entire nation to death. Her throat tightened, and breathing became even more difficult. But there was no turning back now.
“Einstein devised a theory and set of mathematics to account for light’s strange behavior,” she continued, forcing the words out. “According to him, speed changes everything. As objects get faster, to an unmoving observer, they shrink in length and increase in mass. At just a hair away from light speed, an object’s length would be very near zero. And its mass would approach infinity. And time would slow down for it as well. If you traveled very near the speed of light for just a few minutes—at least for you—a million years could have passed for your sister on Earth.”
Madison could tell from the body language of the room that interest in the subject matter was growing.
“Pretty mind-blowing stuff. And it seems totally crazy. But Einstein’s predictions have now been proven over and over again. Particles that decay at one rate when they’re slow, take far longer to decay when traveling near the speed of light. Precisely as the equations of relativity predict. Even GPS satellites are corrected for relativistic effects using Einstein’s equations. The reason these effects seem so ridiculous to our intuition is that they only take place at insane speeds, far faster than anything on earth can travel.
“Einstein also provided a new take on gravity. He realized spacetime is like a trampoline, which is dented by any object with mass. Put a bowling ball in the center of a trampoline and it causes an indentation, so that anything else you put on it wants to roll downhill toward the ball. This is gravity. When a mass indents spacetime it sends out gravitational waves at the speed of light. Until very recently, these were all but impossible to detect. But a new theory has arisen which has allowed for super sensitive detection of these waves.
“My research gives me access to such a detector. I designed software to sift through billions of pages of gravitational wave data from endless masses, big and small. From asteroids to planets to suns. My software crunches this data and alerts me if it detects anything unusual.” She paused for effect. “And last night it did. It detected a mass the size of our moon in interstellar space, in the plane of the ecliptic, hurtling towards us from the direction of galactic center. Dr. Tobias has provided the exact coordinates in your information package.”
She paused and took a sip of water from a glass on the lectern. “Now a moon sized mass by itself isn’t all that interesting. But the mass of this object was falling precipitously as it went. First it was the mass of the moon. Then this moving object was only half as massive. Then only a fifth. Then a tenth. And so on.
“This made no sense at first. But then I remembered relativity. Remember that an object’s mass increases as it gets closer and closer to the speed of light. If an object were traveling very near the speed of light, and then began to decelerate, one would observe exactly what I had observed.
“But objects in interstellar space don’t travel anywhere near the speed of light. So I was sure I was mistaken. But when I drove this data through Einstein’s equations, it fit perfectly. Crosschecking its apparent mass at different time points and at different locations gives a precisely consistent picture mathematically. I’ll spare you the math, but the picture that emerged from the equations is as follows: a spherical object that, when not moving, would be roughly the size and weight of a small car, was traveling at greater than 99.99999 % of light speed. It then began braking smoothly. At its initial speed its apparent mass was huge, but as its speed fell its mass decreased dramatically.