I turned back to the board. "Here's what happened," I started. "The electron beam hits the outer edge of the Alcubierre warped spacetime here where space is expanded and so the speed of light in this region is maybe thirty times ten to the eight meters per second—ten times the vacuum speed of light. We don't know how to measure that accurately yet. Then it passes through a region just beyond the expanded spacetime to the center between the two toroids. Here spacetime should be flat, so the speed of light is smaller, roughly three times ten to the eight meters per second—or normal vacuum speed. But the electrons didn't slow down and they are now traveling faster than light speed in normal flat space. Boom! Cerenkov radiation and they decelerate. Then they pass through the bubble edge near the second torus and were decelerated again because space is contracted in there and the speed of light is less than in flat space. Maybe three times ten to the seven meters per second. Boom more Cerenkov radiation as they decelerated." I paused for air. "If we had fast photo-detectors instead of cameras, I'll bet you we would see two quick flashes overlapping each other. I'm guessing about one to ten nanoseconds pulsewidth each. Oh, one more thing, the Cerenkov radiation had to occur at the edge of each spacetime region in order to prevent any violations of causality. In other words, the electrons were never traveling faster-than-light for that region for more than the smallest possible time increment as they passed from one region to the next. Otherwise, there would have been time travel things goin' on and Gawd I'm glad that didn't happen."
"That doesn't explain why we couldn't detect the electrons though," Jim pointed out.
"That's right," Tabitha added, no longer blushing.
"Give me a second and I'll get there. Sheesh!" I overdramatized and kept talking.
"Remember that in order to keep the Alcubierre type field stable we had to use the Van Den Broeck idea of placing a second bubble around the main Alcubierre bubble once we got the matter inside. Ha!" I laughed at the pun. Nobody else got it. So, I continued to press onward, "And in order for us to control that bubble it is electrically charged on the outside. I went back through my notes here on the table. Once decelerated the electrons aren't fast enough to penetrate the negative charge on the outside of the Van Den Broeck bubble. So, they just get bounced around inside until they decelerate to a point where they aren't energetic enough to trigger the detectors once we turn off the field. They just scatter off at low energies. Remember the Alcubierre field only lasts like a nanosecond so the electrons don't get re-accelerated." I looked around the room. My heart was pounding a million beats per second.
"Do you realize what this means, Anson?" Tabitha asked.
"You're damn right I do. We just built the first warp drive and accelerated the first matter to warp speed! YES! And the crowd goes wild." I shouted. "Goal!"
I ran to my office with both arms still in the air and shouting, "Goal!" I stopped the calculation, and reentered the new data. We might have been warping for weeks and didn't know it! Kind of like Yeager and the sound barrier—he said in his book that he believes they broke the sound barrier a few days earlier than they realized. History repeats itself I guess.
CHAPTER 5
Looking back on the experiment, I realize that we were lucky the motive force caused by the warp bubble wasn't stronger than the Coulomb forces which we used to hold the bubble in place between the toroids. Also, if the warp field forces had been strong enough to overcome the mechanical strength of the mounts holding the toroids in place . . . whew-wee that could have been messy!"
I explained to Jim and 'Becca how we might have punched a hole through the lab wall and most of the buildings in its path half way across the state. Hopefully, hypersonic pressures would've disintegrated the thing before it went too far. But, who knows how strong a Van Den Broeck warp bubble is?
"Messy to say the least. Why didn't we think of that before?" Rebecca scolded me. I smiled at her charisma.
"I don't know. Hey give me a break will you. We just invented the warp drive!" I said.
"Yeah, yeah. That was thirty minutes ago. What have you done for me lately?" Tabitha said, laughing.
"There are some possible military applications here." I rubbed my head in contemplation. "Maybe we can squeeze some cash out of DARPA. What do you think Tabitha?" I asked.
"I'll ask," she said.
Jim looked around the room. "Nobody move. I'll be right back!" He was gone for about seven minutes. We had just about given up on him when came back in with a bottle of cheap champagne and some plastic cups.
"This is all they had across the street at the gas station but it'll have to do." He began pouring and distributing. "I don't know about you guys," he began, "but this deserves a drink!"
'Becca flipped through her notebook and found a passage. She held up her glass and said, "I found this in your library a few months back and I thought it would be cool for this occasion. It comes from your Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual in the section on Warp Field Theory and Application." She started reading from her notes about how the fictional Zephram Cochrane had gone through this crusade of developing new complex math and procedures required to invent the warp drive. It was interesting how the writers of that book closely paralleled the work that we'd done in Breakthrough Physics.
"Cheers!" she exclaimed as she finished reading the passage.
Like I said, I'm proud of myself for finding these two. "Cheers," I said as I raised my cup. I had to cover the tears of joy so the others didn't see them.
"Cheers!" cried Tabitha.
"I know we have to verify all of this better and do some optimization. But, seriously, what next?" Jim shrugged his shoulders.
I started to respond. To my surprise, Tabitha jumped in before I could get the first word out.
"First thing we have to do is get you guys more funds! And I'm going to see about getting moved down here, if that's okay. You'll need some help if we're gonna do a flight experiment."
"Whoa there, Tex!" I interrupted her. "First things first. The chocolate starfish is my man Fred Durst!"
"Limp Bizkit?" Tabitha asked.
"Yeah good." I nodded at her approvingly. Then I realized how old I was. Who would've ever thought I would be listening to Limp Bizkit on classic rock radio?
"Anyway," I got back to my original thought, "we go about our job and you go about yours. We would love to have you here, of course. But before you do that, somebody is going to do some lobbying and maybe even make a visit to the White House. However, let's keep this completely under wraps until we're damned sure we got it right. Okay?" If my calculations turned out to be wrong and we didn't warp space, this could be a much bigger fiasco than cold fusion ever was.
We had gone through several months of rigorous experimentation and simulation. Everything turned out to be repeatable. We even found a way to quantify the strength, stresses, and projected speed of the warp bubble, provided we turned off the electric field holding it in place and let go of it. Jim and Rebecca finished the design on the Casimir type energy collection system and they were in the process of building a tenth scale of that required to power a manned-size, warp-capable spacecraft. The largest problem proved to be funding.
On top of all that, Jim was able to complete his dissertation and graduated. I guess that is Dr. Jim Daniels now. I think I'll still call him Jim. 'Becca wasn't quite so lucky. She had trouble getting her dissertation finished before the deadline and although she finished, it wasn't in time to walk in this year's ceremony. She is supposed to pick up her diploma sometime in August at the records office. She can walk next year if she wants, but by then the new will be worn off of her diploma—it just won't be the same. What if she took a job out of town? Would it be worth it to fly back in town just for the ceremony? Graduation ought to be every semester even if there are only two students walking. I've complained about this problem at the local university for more than a decade. It always falls on deaf ears. Bureaucrats never understand human needs. I started introducing her to people as Dr. Rebecca Jean Townes.