“Well,” Ahana began, “the Super-Kamiokande has nothing, no muonic transmissions anywhere near San Diego.”
The Super-Kamiokande was a device buried three miles below the planet’s s1hface, in northern Japan, in an abandoned mine that had opened into a natural cavern. There was a control room at the top of the cavern where Ahana’s cohorts worked, their computers. Desks, and chairs set on a steel grate that covered a highly polished stainless steel tank, sixty meters wide by sixty deep and filled with water. The walls of the tank were lined with twenty thousand photomultiplier tubes-PMTs. The tubes were very sensitive light sensors that could pick up a single photon as it traveled through the tank’s water. The Super-Kamiokande was essentially a ring-imaging water Cerenkov detector. Cerenkov light is produced when an electrically charged particle travels through water. The reason the Super-Kamiokande was so far underground Was to allow the miles of earth and rock above it to block out the photons emitted by human devices on the surface of the planet. While they knew little about the gates and the Shadow, they did know that activity by the Shadow produced muon emissions, which the Super-Karniokande could trace. During the last several battles with the Shadow, they had used the Super-Kamiokande to try to anticipate attacks. It could read muonic activity throughout the planet.
“It would make sense that the Ones Before are transmitting in a somewhat different mode than the Shadow,” Dane said. “You don’t want to transmit on the same frequency as your enemy.”
Ahana nodded. “I agree it would make sense. Muons are part of the second family of fundamental particles. Most of what we are used to here in our timeline is in the first family, consisting of electron, up quarks and down quarks. The second family consists of muons, charm quarks, and strange quarks. And all these things are not single points according to string theory but rather tiny one-dimensional loops that are vibrating, which gives them several characteristics that allow us to merge relativity and quantum mechanics.”
“So have you checked the charm and strange whatever you call them?” Earhart asked.
“Yes,” Ahana said. “Nothing so far. However, let us · take this to a deeper level.”
Dane exchanged a glance with Earhart. He’d listened to Ahana and her late-professor Nagoya discuss the cutting edge physics with which they were trying to understand what was going on with the gates and the Shadow and he’d had a hard time, especially considering the two scientists themselves didn’t completely understand what · they were dealing with and most of the time were just theorizing out loud.
“There are four base forces in nature,” Ahana said. “Gravity, electromagnetic, strong, and weak. Each has a force particle. For electromagnetic there is the photon. For gravity it’s postulated that there is a particle called the graviton but only because of effect, as we’ve never seen one. For strong the particle is the gluon. And for weak we have weak gauge bosons.
“Professor Nagoya believed the Shadow can manipulate the strong and weak forces,” Ahana said. “We can do so, but only in a rudimentary fashion. For example a nuclear weapon explodes when atoms are suddenly split and the strong forces are released in a very short amount of time. When uranium decays in a reactor, we are using weak forces, releasing the power in a slower mode. We are nowhere close to controlling these forces like we do electricity. But I think — and so did Professor Nagoya — that the Shadow can control those forces quite readily.”
“And the Ones Before?” Earhart asked.
“We’ve been searching,” Ahana said, ‘’but nothing so far.”
Dane frowned. “What about high frequency?”
“We’ve checked high frequency,” Ahana said. “Nothing there either.”
Dane knew a little about radio transmissions from his time in the military and doing rescue work. A radio transmission is just frequency modulation on an energy wave, correct?”
“Basically,’’ Ahana agreed.
Earhart picked up on that. “You haven’t said anything about gravity,” she noted. “The fourth power.” She pointed out the window at the wings. “Gravity is something every pilot is very concerned with.”
Ahana sat back in her chair and shifted her focus from the two computers, even though they were closed, to the two people. “As Professor Nagoya would advise if he were here, We must look at the basics first. Sir Isaac Newton proposed his law of gravitation in 1687. He said that every particle in the universe attracts every other particle with a force that depends on the product of the mass of each particle divided by the square of the distance between them. The exact formula is F equals G times mass one times mass two divided by the square of the distance between them. G is the universal constant of gravitation, which Newton had no clue as to the value of.
“According to this theory, gravity is a linear force, directly between the two centers of gravity between the two masses. As I said, the one thing Newton wasn’t able to figure out was the value of G. An apple falling from a tree is · fine, but not exactly scientific data. Over a century after Newton, the English physicist Henry Cavendish finally managed to measure G and it was a very, very small number.”
“So gravity isn’t very powerful in a way,” Dane said.
“It’s a strange force,” Ahana said. “You can look at it as the force between two objects, but you can also look at it as a field. As Ms. Earhart notes. The gravitational force around the earth produces a downward force on objects near the surface. Also. Objects can affect each other across distance. This is the essence of the how the solar system stays in balance around the sun. In fact, before anyone ever saw Neptune, scientists were able to postulate it existed by noting unexplainable variations in the motion of the planet Uranus due to Neptune’s gravitational field.”
Dane had closed his eyes as he listened to Ahana. They were in transit with nothing else to do and he had learned that golden nuggets of vital information were often mixed among the deluge brought forth by scientists. In his gut he knew they were on the right path and that what Ahana was saying was important in a way he would only understand after other pieces of this puzzle fell into place.
“A problem with Newton’s theory,” Ahana continued, “involved relativity. According to his theory, two observers making measurements of the speed of an object will end up with different numbers depending on their own motion relative to each other. For example, a person standing on a platform observing a stationery ball on a train passing by will measure the speed of the ball as the same as that of the train, while a person on the train will measure the ball’s speed as zero. Thus Newton would say there is no constant, fundamental speed in the physical world because all speed is relative. However, near the end of the nineteenth century this came under attack and the Scottish physicist Maxwell proposed a complete theory of electric and magnetic forces that contained just such a constant, which he called c. He estimated this to be one hundred and eighty thousand miles an hour. That was how fast electromagnetic waves, including light waves, traveled. This feature of Maxwell’s theory caused a crisis in physics because it indicated that speed was not always relative.
“The scientific community struggled with this until Einstein came up with his theory of relativity in 1905. An important aspect of Einstein’s theory was that no object could travel faster than c. This conflicted with Newton’s gravity theory, which implied gravity moved at infinite speed.”
“But no one’s been able to find this particle that is the essence of gravity,” Earhart noted. “So how can anyone know it moves at infinite speed?”
“A good point,” Ahana said. “We can measure light waves directly but not gravity — only the effect. Einstein did see the discrepancy, and in 1915 he formulated a new theory of gravity in which he said the force of gravity moves at speed c. Another important difference between Einstein and Newton was that Einstein described gravity as a curvature of space and time, not exactly a linear force.”