“Now, what if we take that experiment one step further? What if we could do it with particles? In one sense, that is what light is, a particle we call a photon.”
“You’d have a particle existing at two places at once.”
“And what if in the process of shooting the particle, the original you started with gets destroyed?”
“You’d end up with a duplicate particle on the other side of your super-cold gas chamber.” The realization hit like a body blow. “You’re talking about some kind of science fiction transporter system.”
She gave him a pained grimace. “That isn’t how it is. There’s no ‘Beam me up, Scotty’. The media keeps hyping the possibility, but in truth transporting a human being, while possible in the abstract, will never be practical.”
“But is that what you wanted to do with the submarine? Transport it to Area 51?”
Her expression turned even more sour. “No, but we were afraid it might happen. You see, our aim was to make it invisible. We call it optoelectric camouflage. It’s designed for surface ships and perhaps aircraft if we can scale down the necessary equipment and reduce the power consumption. We used a sub because there was a theoretical chance something like this could happen.”
Ira interrupted. “It got away from them.”
“It didn’t get away from us,” she said curtly. “The navy was told about this possibility. We built in the fail-safes.”
“Tell me what happened.”
“The system my team and I developed uses a bubble of intense magnetism to bend visible light into a toroid, a kind of doughnut shape. We observe an object because light is reflected off its surface. Some wavelengths get absorbed and the ones that bounce back give the object its color. Now, something that is black will absorb all the wavelengths, so we can’t see it, yet we perceive its presence against a colored background. My theory was that if we could trap the light in a toroid so it couldn’t escape, and then bend it around the object, the observer wouldn’t see anything. It would be like how water bends light so a pencil looks disjointed if half of it sticks above the surface.
“And?” Mercer prompted, because while what she was saying sounded far-fetched, it wasn’t an explanation for what he’d seen in the mine.
“We ran into the quantum world,” she said as if that clarified everything.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning there was a consequence we had considered, took precautions against, but rejected as a real concern. The magnetic field bent visible light until it became a self-sustaining loop, a point in space in which light itself couldn’t escape.”
“Hold it, that sounds like a black hole.”
“No. Black holes are the collapse of matter due to gravity. We were using magnetism.”
“What’s the difference?”
“The difference is that gravity hasn’t been reconciled with the quantum world. It was what Einstein was working on when he died, a grand theory of everything — nuclear forces, magnetism and gravity.”
“So you stumbled onto something new.”
“Yet the consequences are the same.”
“What consequences?”
“For lack of a better way of putting it, we stopped time. The magnetic pressure, like gravity at a black hole, created a bubble around the test submarine. As the light within that bubble became trapped, the Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle took over.”
“So your experiment no longer had an observer?”
“And in the quantum world when there is no observer, nothing happens. That tree in the forest is still standing until someone goes out to look at it.”
“What did that do to your sub?”
“In essence, for the submarine time stopped and the rest of the universe vanished. A couple of scientists on our team thought this could have happened. That’s why we took precautions. We installed a trigger device using quantum entwining that would cut the power to the magnetic sphere around the submarine and return the normal flow of time. In theory it would reappear in our world.”
“Only you missed and it came back in Nevada. Why?”
“ ‘Tide and time wait for no man,’ ” she quoted. “We didn’t miss at all. The earth rotates at more than a thousand miles an hour and travels around the sun even faster. Factor in our solar system’s rotation in the Milky Way and you can see we didn’t do half bad just returning the sub back to our own planet. It could have just as easily refocused in orbit or on the far side of the moon. We couldn’t bring it back in the ocean because we couldn’t guarantee that the sub could come back above its crush depth, so it was decided to trigger its return at a remote secure facility on land. Area 51 was the perfect location.”
“DS-Two?”
“Destination Site Two,” Ira said. “The primary return coordinates were the area the sub first vanished off Jacksonville, Florida, the hope being that if it did fade out it would only be for an instant.”
Ira’s use of the word “fade” was what triggered the memory. It was one of the favorite stories told by UFO enthusiasts, conspiracy nuts and believers in the absurd.
“You’re describing the Philadelphia Experiment,” Mercer said.
“That story was what piqued my interest in physics,” Dr. Marie admitted.
Though debunked by the very man who started the myth, the Philadelphia Experiment remained a popular topic in fringe Internet chat rooms. The legend centered around a navy vessel, the USS Eldridge. As the story goes, during World War Two a secret program, Project Rainbow, was initiated by Einstein and the famed inventor Nicola Tesla. They wanted to create a light-bending camouflage using enormous magnetic pressures to hide Allied ships from Nazi U-boats. A newly commissioned destroyer was outfitted with all sorts of scientific gear including massive electric generators. During the first experiments, everything seemed to go as planned. A green-blue fog grew around the vessel when the equipment was turned on and moments later the ship faded from view. It reappeared when the power was cut.
The experiment was repeated several times until August 1943. Some adjustments were made to the ship and when the system was activated again it faded into a fog, only this time it reappeared an instant later in Norfolk, Virginia. A few moments later it returned to Philadelphia and emerged from the unnatural mist. If this tale wasn’t fantastic enough, a witness aboard a nearby cargo ship, the SS Andrew Furuseth, named Carlos Allende, reported seeing some members of her crew walking around in a daze, while others continued to fade in and out, as if they were ghosts. He claimed that still others were fused to the ship’s deck, grotesque mannequins caught in poses of unimaginable agony.
“But that was bullshit!” Mercer exclaimed. “I remember reading that years later Allende himself admitted to making up the whole story. Besides which, it was proved the Eldridge was never in Philly and Einstein was busy working on the Manhattan Project.”
Briana Marie smiled for the first time since Mercer had burst into the rec room. “Do you think the fact that it never really happened matters? Science is the melding of experimentation and inspiration. Where the ideas come from is irrelevant. There are countless examples of inventions being inspired by legends, myths, and science fiction. Dick Tracy’s wrist radio was just a fantasy in the 1930s, but you don’t question the cell phone. Jules Verne described an atomic-powered submarine almost a century before Admiral Rickover built the USS Nautilus, which he named after Verne’s creation. Science fiction preceded the laser, radar, sonar, space travel, cloning, and hundreds of other technologies. Don’t you think we scientists are influenced by what we read as children, thinking that someday we could make real what those authors only dreamed about?” She became heated.