She just nodded as if she understood. Then the plane rocked swiftly from turbulence and I grimaced in pain and held my side. She noticed.
"If you don't mind my asking, how'd you hurt yourself?" She seemed sincere and looked concerned. Then is when I realized her eyes were brown. I think that's common for redheads, or is it green?
"Well, I was in the International Sport Karate Association Championship yesterday. I left my right elbow up when it should've been down." I made a motion like a right backfist showing how it leaves your ribs open, and I placed my left hand on my right side. "I caught a side kick full-bore right here. I still won though!" I couldn't tell if she was impressed or not.
"So you do karate to stay fit?" she asked.
"Yeah, also a lot of mountain bike riding and some runnin', but my favorite is karate," I replied. "If I ever do get accepted into the astronaut program, I still have to meet the fitness requirements."
"Good, you have the right attitude," she said. "I do a lot of running and swimming and a little aerobic kickboxing. A lot of astronauts that I know are into karate and a lot are into cycling. Whatever works best for you."
The remainder of the flight consisted of small talk and my fascination with how things worked on the ISS. Of course, I had studied the spacecraft. I even worked on one of the modules as a subcontractor to one of the big aerospace firms in my late graduate school years. But there is no substitute for actually being there. I asked about the Space Shuttle ride and if she ever got sick. She said that she never did. I'm sure this was a lie. Doesn't everybody get sick the first time? I asked when she planned to go up again and her response was very political.
"I just want to do what is best for the program," she replied. I guess astronauts have to be good natured and careful about what they say around everyone. Things have definitely changed from the old "who's the best pilot you ever saw" Mercury astronaut days.
I did find out one thing about astronauts. They're not, or at least Colonel Ames is not, particularly good at chess. Mid-flight I beat her hands-down three games in a row and one of those with a fool's mate. Then again, all those hours I spent playing my laptop chess, she was practicing how to land the Space Shuttle and I sure wish I could trade!
The flight attendant was gently shaking my shoulder. I didn't even realize that I was asleep. God, we had already landed in Baltimore and were at the gate. When did Colonel Ames leave and when did I stop talking to her? Who turned off my laptop? Beer and painkillers, don't mix them.
The flight attendant helped me with my overhead bag and I headed for a very crowded rental car counter. Thank God for all the air miles I had that made me a gold medallion customer, which enabled me to go to the front of the line. Then I had to catch a shuttle from the rental car desk to the rental car parking lot.
The trip to the hotel was typical. I took Interstate Ninety-five down to Highway One. The "Parkway" was bumper-to-bumper and it took thirty minutes to get off One and onto the Greenbelt where my hotel was. By the time I got checked in to the hotel I was beat. I tried to rehearse my view graphs, but after about three of them I said, "screw it" and went to bed.
The alarm clock scared the living daylights out of me! I was so tired I don't even remember dreaming. I hate nights like that. Since I sleep on my back, I tried to raise myself sit-up style; nothing doing! My ribs still were causing me a lot of pain. I broke my hand once when I was a teenager. It seemed to take about a week before the really big pain subsided to a dull ache. I still get a dull ache in it just before it rains and it's been over twenty-three years. It must have something to do with the low-pressure systems usually accompanied by rain. I've asked physicians about that before. They always laugh and say it's in my head. There's enough crazy stuff in my head. Why would I put that in there too? Stupid alchemists.
Anyway, I had to tuck my left hand over my ribs and hold myself tightly. Then I rolled over counterclockwise and sort of fell out of bed. Getting shaved, showered, and dressed was just as tough, and I said many bad words that my great aunt Meg would've been proud of.
The "Breakthrough Physics Propulsion" Workshop or BPP Workshop was held in an auditorium-sized room. The start of the meeting was fairly standard for a technical conference. The director of the conference said a few words and corrected a few scheduling mistakes. One in particular caught my attention.
"Our guest speaker and new director of the BPP, Colonel Tabitha Ames has requested to be moved from first speaker this morning to last. So, make a note of that. Let's get started then. This change makes the first speaker this morning Dr. Anson Clemons from Metric Engineering Inc. Dr. Clemons is also a faculty member of the Physics Department at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and he is a member of the National Space Science and Technology Center or NSSTC as it has come to be known. Dr. Clemons."
It was a damn good thing I wasn't late. I slowly moved up to the front of the auditorium and handed a CD with my slideshow to the audio/visual person. I fiddled around with the clip-on microphone for a minute or so, then got comfortable with the slideshow remote/laser pointer. Clearing my throat, I began.
"Hello, I'm Anson Clemons as you were just told, and I plan to talk to you today about the status of spacetime metric engineering and how close we're to demonstrating faster-than-light space travel. Of course, everybody realizes that we can't go faster than the speed of light in the vacuum, but as Miguel Alcubierre showed us in 1994 it is possible to effectively create a region of spacetime that's 'warped' in such a way that the vacuum speed of light is increased tremendously. So, instead of the vacuum speed of light being one, assume it can be increased to one thousand. This means that a spacecraft could possibly travel at hundreds of times faster than the vacuum speed of light and never notice any Special Relativistic effects: no time dilation, spacetime contraction, nothing.
"Alcubierre himself stated up front in the abstract of that wonderful 1994 paper in Classical and Quantum Gravity that in order to accomplish this 'warp bubble' that a tremendous amount of exotic matter would be required. Of course, we all know that the exotic matter implies negative energy and the number of papers supporting, opposing, or correcting the Alcubierre warp theory absolutely snowballed over the next decade. I know that many of us here in this room are guilty of writing several of them." I gave a quick guilty smile and harrumphed in response to the chuckles coming from the audience, and then I added, "On a more personal note, it was one of these papers that inadvertently caused me to leave NASA and start my own company.
"This was the theoretical paper that showed up at the BPP Workshop in '07 on the possibility of using a very large static electric field on oppositely rotating conductor plates to cause a gravity-shielding effect. This paper was at first dismissed as the old Podkletnov spinning superconductor effect shown in the late nineties. It turned out to actually be a correction to the General Relativity. Where General Relativity must be gauged, using the Dirac type zytterbewegung oscillations as the reference frame thus yields an ungauged General Relativity! This was first reported by Maker in 2000. Then it was more precisely described in the '07 paper. Discovering this, I immediately gathered up as many grad students as I could find and started my own research effort to measure this effect.
"Thanks to funding from the BPP and almost three years of hard work, we at Metric Engineering can say that the experiment not only works, but we have observed electrons moving at near the speed of light simply disappear after passing between the spinning plates. We have no idea where they went!"
I paused at this point to see what type of reaction I'd get. Claims have been so strange in the past BPP Workshops that most folks wait until all the data is displayed before they decide whether or not you're a nut. Well, I'm not a nut, and most of the people in the room knew that I was a careful scientist. I don't make cold fusion claims or yell that the sky is falling unless it really is. But nobody is perfect and I'd been wrong in the past. That is part of science; you can't be right all the time.