All the apparatus is inside a clear plastic sphere that has electron detectors deposited on the inner surface of the sphere. This way electrons scattered at any angle could be detected. The problem is that you can't see the experiment because of the detectors—there are so many of them and they're all in the way from an outside viewer's standpoint. So, we modified the sphere by drilling a few holes here and there between the electron detectors and placed tiny CCD cameras in them. We sealed the holes around the camera connections with epoxy and vacuum sealant—that was an ordeal within itself. Now we could rerun the experiment and actually see what was happening inside the sphere. Some of the cameras are for ultraviolet, some for infrared, and some for visible wavelengths. We hoped that would shed some, ahem, light on the problem.
Jim and 'Becca had completed the modifications early and now had the chamber pulling down to a vacuum. That would take several hours. In the meantime we decided to have a bull session about the next step for the energy collectors.
"There has to be a way to make them more efficient or smaller."
"Well, smaller is really out, Anson. We're at state-of-the-art and then some right now!" Rebecca said.
"Maybe there's a way to increase the surface area of the Casimir effect regions," was Jim's input.
"That would increase the efficiency all right. Any ideas, 'Becca?" I asked.
"I dunno?" She shrugged. "The most efficient use of surface area is a sphere, but how the heck can we use that?"
"That's it! Why didn't I think of that?" I went to the whiteboard and started drawing.
"What's it?" Jim asked.
"Well, instead of plates for pistons we use hollow spheres. One inside the other. Like this." I drew a large circle, which is a two-dimensional sphere, then a smaller circle inside it. Then I erased a portion of the larger circle and drew a rod from the smaller circle through the hole in the larger one and extended the rod a little. I drew the same thing on the other end of the rod.
"The question is, how do we support the rod and keep the inner spheres from touching the outer ones." I tugged at my lip for second and realized that I was chewing on the end of the marker cap.
"Maybe we can do it this way." Rebecca took another marker and drew squiggly lines to represent springs from the rod. She drew two springs on top and two on bottom of the rod at equal distances from its center.
"But what about collecting the energy. How do we do that?" I asked.
This time Jim figured it out. "Easy. Just make the rod a magnet and we put a coil around the rod. Voila, we have a generator!"
"Could this work?" I thought aloud. I did some quick math on the board and showed that the surface area was an order of magnitude greater, hence making the energy collection that much greater. "The efficiency of this coil idea might even be better than the plates configuration. This might be win-win. Can you guys make it?" I looked at them hopefully.
"We'll figure it out! I don't think it's more complicated than that guitar we made you for Christmas," Rebecca said with excitement and confidence in her voice.
They had made me a guitar that was about one micron long for Christmas the previous year. The darn thing actually played, but you had to have a microwave receiver to "hear" it. Of course, we could never figure out how to chord the thing. It was one of the neatest Christmas presents I had gotten since Sadie Jo Livingston kissed me at the fifth grade Christmas party at Priceville Elementary.
Jim and 'Becca went off to the nanotech lab to work on the energy collector. I went to my office to catch up on some emails. My colleague Matt had sent me a note wanting to know why I hadn't called him since Goddard. I wrote a quick response back telling him that I was overwhelmed with work and that I would get with him in a week or so. After finishing up about a million emails, I decide to catch up with Mom. After all, I owed her a call or two.
Nothing new had happened. Dad had caught a nine-pound bass down by "the pump house" and my twelve-year-old nephew who was with him netted the thing. It was the highlight of their summer. They put up a picture at the local country store of my nephew holding the fish. Grandma was still claiming to be deathly ill. Oh and by the way her eighty-second birthday was coming up. My brother was probably going to be reactivated and sent back to Europe. He was in the Air Force Reserve. My first cousin's twin girls turn five next week. Don't forget to call them. And when am I going to come visit them again?
Anybody who has parents has had that conversation, as Carl Sagan might have said, "billions upon billions" of times. I guess I had rather have the conversations than not have the parents. Small price to pay, don't you think?
I hung the phone up finally after, "Yeah, uh huh, no I have to get back. No. Yep, uh, I don't know. Okay then, I will see you soon. Yeah. No. Maybe, soon. All right. We will see y'all later. Naw. I don't know. Yes. Okay then. All right then. Nope. Okay I gotta go. Yep. Uh, maybe. Uh huh. All right, we'll talk to you later. Okay I gotta go. Bye. Unh huh, love y'all too. Okay bye now."
"Now back to work," I muttered to myself. I got my notes out and started looking over the tensors for the metric we were using in the current configuration. There are just too many equations so I ran the tensor math package on my computer. There were nearly too many for that thing, even at six hundred gigahertz. I tweaked a few equations here and there and set the calculations in motion. It would be an hour or so before they were through, so I decided to see how the kids were doing.
I put my paper tux on and headed for the airlock. Jim was running some mechanical arms from the computer and 'Becca was looking through the eyepiece of a microscope giving Jim orders. This was funny because Jim could see everything she could from the computer monitor.
"Damnit!" he said. "Do you want to drive?"
"If you can't drive any better, I might need to."
"Children, children, please be calm." I said. "Don't make me separate you two."
"Boss," Rebecca began, "do you remember that thing you told me about too many chefs making the soup taste like crap?"
"Point taken, 'Becca. I will just set over here and watch like a good televangelist." I sat down next to Jim and kept my mouth shut. Well, except when I was sniggering my ass off at the show.
"Okay, 'Becca say when." What they were doing was loading various materials that would be vaporized and then deposited on a dielectric substrate. Jim could indeed see the objects as the materials began to deposit and adhere to the substrate but the contrast wasn't as good as through the phase contrast microscope 'Becca was using. He was waiting for her to tell him when the center portion of the wafer they were looking at had enough silicon—or germanium or gold or whatever they were depositing at the time—on it. Of course, 'Becca could probably eyeball it and get it right since she had done this so many times. But she also had a nanogram balance readout right in front of her to tell her when. The computer would do most of the etching and depositing once the design was drawn in the special CAD system they were using.