Gravity Sucks

Gravity Sucks

Gravity always sucks, it has sucked since the Big Bang and it will suck until the whole shebang goes away.

This true statement has nothing to do with sex.  It simply means that the force of gravity is unipolar and cumulative.  There is no such thing a negative mass, and apparently no such thing as repulsive gravity.  Electrogravitics is probably not a gravity thing but an electromagnetic thing, if it exists.

Higgs Boson at CERN

Electrons and protons come in positive and negative, so, on the scale of the universe, the plusses cancel out the minuses.  This is a good thing, since the forces between them is much, much stronger than gravity.  

When enough mass gets together, their gravity gangs up on the stronger forces and overwhelms them.  Particles all have mass and therefore they have no choice but to clump up.  The other forces, electromagnetism, the weak and the strong nuclear forces, cancel each other out or cannot work at a distance.  They are handicapped when it comes to cooperation.  Not so with mass and gravity.  That’s how we get neutron stars and black holes.  Gravity wins the contest by sheer numbers.

But what about antimatter?  Exotic particles?  Could they have negative mass? 

There is a recent test, the Alpha Experiment, that has accumulated some antimatter in a “box” of laser beams.  The amount is tiny but enough to weigh.  Damn it, they weigh the same as their normal particles.  Science Fiction does’t get a break there, either.

Standard Model

What about other exotic matter?

We are just about out of exotic particles.  The Standard Model shows everything we should expect to find, even the Higgs boson that gives all the other particles their masses.  Nothing new there.  

What about SUSY, supersymmetric particles?  There’s a whole ‘nother set of particles with weird names like squark, photino, selectron.  Problem is we haven’t seen any of those yet.  We don’t think they will have negative mass either.  Why?  If there was such a thing as negative mass, a particle that loses energy would go faster and faster, until it reached the speed of light.  Everything with negative energy would escape to c, and that is both chaos and the speed of light.   The universe would be a dangerous place for humans and aliens alike.

Supersymmetry Model

With my license to create “science” as an SF writer, I did create exotic particles with a negative mass in my (incomplete) novel, “The Curtain of Heaven”.  An ancient and extremely advanced alien race broadcast a complete description of the physics of this universe.  It went out in all directions from an untraceable source.  In it was the secret of unlimited power from the vacuum.  I called it a “Burgess Generator”.  As it runs and puts out stupendous power it also cooks up a batch of exotic matter.  One of my characters, a thief, accidentally discovers that an old Burgess Generator has negative mass in it.

Never letting such an opportunity go to waste, another character uses this exotic matter in an Alcubierre-Wilson Warp Drive (see last blog) and mankind goes to the stars.  

Otherwise, gravity only sucks.

Faster Than Light?

Faster Than Light?

Zila's Space Yacht in "Sage of Sagittarius"?

 Ever consider how dull it would be to read about the thousand year passage for some hero to join the war against the alien princess?  Yeah, I’ve tried that in “Cosmic Rift”, but I only managed 100 years.  

Science fiction at the speed of light is confining.  Read my last blog on the size of the universe and see why.  We are like ants crossing the Pacific.  Precisely like ants who can’t swim.

In my novel, “Sage of Saggitarius,” I invented a new method, the Allurion Seed, a 6-dimensional object with peculiar attributes, that enabled those few FTL ships that could afford one.  They cost about the same as a small country, but Zila, the protagonist, gets an FTL yacht and a crew for her adventures.  It’s made-up physics, sure, but at least I tried and it is plausible physics.  Most writers just hand-wave at the problem:  the Captain announces “Warp Speed” and the ship disappears in a cone of horizon lines.  

That’s cheating.  Why not just invoke the power of the charcoal yellow gemstone and go “POOF”?

But there is hope, all you star-farers.  Spanish physicist Miguel Alcubierre worked Einstein’s field equations for General Relativity backward and found that there was a math solution to go faster than light.  His ideas have been expanded by NASA’s Dr. Sonny White in his paper, “Warp Drive 101”.  

While no information, object or energy can travel faster than c (the speed of light in a vacuum), space itself can expand at unlimited speeds.  In fact it's doing that right now, out beyond the parts we can see with the most powerful telescopes, still stretching out after the Big Bang.  Of course, while a myriad of galaxies are retreating from us faster than c, we can never see them or have any causal interaction with them.  

Alcubierre calculated that a vehicle could stretch space behind it and compress space in front of it in such a way that it rode a wave of shaped space.  In this warp bubble, passengers would feel no acceleration and their watches would keep Earth time while the bubble traveled at, maybe, 1000 times c.

Of course there is a hitch.  Actually, a lot of serious hitches.  

The warp bubble requires negative mass, which may not even exist.  It requires so much of it that we would have to convert a moon to negative mass.  As an SF writer, I’ll call this one and just claim my people have access to “exotic matter”.  There may be such a thing.

No one has a clue as how to start a warp bubble without already having a warp bubble.  

The transition from warp to inertial motion may create a kind of Bremstrahlung, high energy rays caused by your slowing down, that would destroy your destination just as you reached it.  Imagine coming home after your successful space battle to a cooked Earth, all your fault.  

Still in all, I’ve done the research and some calculations and I’m using the Acubierre-White Warp Drive  (AWW Drive) in my new novel, the Curtain of Heaven.  I’m using the 6-dimensional version of it.  

I hope you like it!