Nagoya also knew that the Russians were greatly interested in the gates for some very specific reasons. First, there was the natural tendency for paranoia on the part of every Russian. Numerous invasions over the years and betrayals had engendered a certain mindset in that country. Second, the Soviet Government had supported Kolkov with tremendous amounts of resources once it was determined that a gate opening in the vicinity of Chernobyl had caused the disaster at that nuclear power plant. There was also considerable speculation that the massive explosion in 1908 at Tunguska had somehow been associated with the gates.
Like Foreman and the CIA, Kolkov had worked in the dark hallways of the KGB for decades searching for answers when no one was even sure what the questions were.
Nagoya, with less resources but more technical expertise at his beck and call, had focused on scientific answers to the gate anomalies. The Japanese over the centuries had lost ships and more recently planes in the Devil’s gate and there were many legends about the area.
Nagoya wanted to step forward and look over Ahana’s shoulder to see how the data was progressing but he knew to do so would cause her some loss of respect among her peers, so he forced himself to continue waiting, standing over the tank, looking down at totally smooth black surface.
The Super-Kamiokande- the Can- had been developed because Foreman had discovered something rather strange about the gates. Using research money that poured down from the United States government to various university for projects, some of which even the American public considered quite arcane and bizarre, Foreman had had the Bermuda Triangle gate checked with just about every type of scanner science had ever invented in the desperate hope of uncovering any information that might yield data on what exactly the gates were and what was on the other side. Up until a year ago the gates had been simply a black hole to all imaging and sensing devices, recording nothing.
But last year one of those research projects discovered that the gates discharged muons which was strange information indeed. As a physicist, Nagoya knew the history of the muon.
In the 1930s, physicists had been very confident that the building blocks of matter were the proton, electron and neutron. There were three other basic particles that scientists were aware of but knew little about- the photon, neutrino and positron.
But there was a problem with the physics of the time- scientists also knew that the protons in the proximity of the nucleus, holding equal charges, should strongly repel each other, yet they remained there. Nagoya was very proud that it was a Japanese scientist, Hideki Yukawa, who came up with the answer and was awarded the Nobel Prize for his brilliance.
To explain why the protons were held in place, he proposed a new force in the nucleus formed by a new particle, which he called the meson. He also determined that the ratio of the force of this new particle was inversely proportional to its mass which made the meson 200 times more massive than the electron.
Other scientists around the world searched for mesons, mostly by studying cosmic radiation from the sun, the strongest electro-magnetic field they could find, infinitely more powerful than anything man could produce. The researchers discovered that it wasn’t quite as Yukawa had predicted- there was more than just a meson, there were two particles under that heading. One held the strong charge with little mass- now named the pion- and the other held a lot of mass with little charge- now called the muon. Both the pion and muon were very unstable and decayed rapidly when separated. The muon decayed into an electron, a neutrino and an anti-neutrino.
These discoveries were the beginning of particle physics which opened the doorway to quantum mechanics as well as a new perspective on special relativity and Einstein’s energy-mass relation.
The fact that the gates emitted muons which did not decay as rapidly as established equations for physics predicted they would was troubling to Nagoya and the other scientists who were investigating the gates. Fundamentally it meant that the physical rules on the other side of the gates were different than that on the Earth side- or, and this was even more troubling- it meant that whoever or whatever was on the other side was manipulating particles at the very basic level in order to make the gates work. Nagoya thought it was likely both. He also felt that the gates were tears in the very fabric of the Earth’s physical nature and, deliberately done by some force at another place, probably another dimension.
It was a staggering concept and one that Nagoya was determined to resolve. He had to admit that the Russians had suspected as much before anyone else, seeing a link between the gates. In the 1960's, three Russian scientists had published an article in the journal of the Soviet Academy of Sciences titled: Is The Earth A Large Crystal?
It was not taken seriously by scientists in the west, being lumped with articles in the same journal on psychic power and other matters 'real’ scientists considered the work of the lunatic fringe. Only in the last several years were the ‘real’ scientists beginning to realize the error of their ways and opening their minds to possibilities they had never considered before. And that awakening was not due to acceptance of the Russian theories, but rather new discoveries in physics that demolished old accepted beliefs.
The three Russian scientists who wrote the article had backgrounds in history, electronics and engineering and they threw aside their differences and preconceived notions to explore the world around them. They started with an earlier, widely debunked theory that a matrix of cosmic energy was built into the planet at the time of its formation and that the effects of this matrix were occasionally evident in modern times in areas that were now known as gates.
The Russians scientists divided the world into twelve pentagonal slabs. On top of those slabs they delineated twenty equilateral triangles. Using this overlay, they postulated that these triangles had a great influence on the world in many ways: fault lines for earthquakes lay along them; magnetic anomalies were often recorded; and ancient civilizations tended to be clustered along the lines.
They called junctions of these triangles Vile Vortices. It just so happened that these Vile Vortices were in many of the same places as the gates that Foreman was investigating. Thus, while the rest of the scientific community ignored the Russian paper, Foreman was very interested and passed it along to Nagoya in the mid-1960s.
The Russians had even postulated a mathematical harmony to the crystalline structure that formed these Vortices to explain the rhythmic nature of the disturbances associated with them.
Nagoya, upon receiving the paper from Foreman and being a scientist, had had two reactions. One was that the Russians were onto something by connecting the Vortices. The other was that the crystalline theory was grasping for an explanation that current science couldn’t give. Nagoya knew that the lithosphere, the outer surface of the planet, which is where these Vortices were located, had been moving for millions of years. He even knew of Einstein’s theory of crustal displacement which was not commonly accepted. Regardless, he knew that any crystal formation would be so disfigured by this movement as to make the fixed nature of the patterns the Russians postulated impossible over any period of time. Also, Nagoya knew there was no evidence of the planet having any sort of massive crystalline structure.
But during the recent expansion of the gates, there had been no doubt they were connected as they linked along the lines delineated by the Russians with electro-magnetic and radioactive propagation and were only stopped at the last minute by Dane from completely covering the planet.
The recent information from Foreman about the lines of propagation from the gates that flowed along the intersection of the world’s tectonic plates gave more validity to the Russian theory. The movement of the plates, continental drift in laymen’s terms, was the most powerful force on the surface of the planet. It could bring forth devastating earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, create the tallest mountain range on the surface in the Himalayas, and crack open the deepest depths of the oceans in the Marianas Trench.