5
The Hyundai had parked in the lot at the Glastonbury Abbey at 20:40 GMT. A warm rain had begun to fall. Ken had plenty of time to go over his checklist again, not that he really needed any more preparation.
Ken had retired early from LIGO/NANO a year ago. For twelve years he had worked at the University of Sheffield, but he had moved to a little cottage (a new cottage, true, but small) in Pilton when he had convinced the University and LIGO/NANO that he could work as well at home as in the lab, not a difficult task in the time of high-speed optical cables. He had wanted to be close to Glastonbury. For three more years he had stayed on, but now he had no official duties. His parents and many of his friends had tried to convince him to continue in what they called his career. His parents, who lived in London, had repeatedly told him that he was wasted at Sheffield, that he would be welcome at Cambridge or someplace in the United States. His mother had hoped for Cambridge, where she could see him more often. His father had hoped for the University of Washington, where there was more money. But Ken liked where he was, in the backwater of Sheffield. He had access to any work anyone was doing with gravity waves anywhere, but his required contributions were low. He had enough money and enough time to pursue what interested him most.
There had been other protests about his move to Pilton, and not even into some historic weaver’s cottage but into a new prefab unit that could have been anywhere. His father thought it was not suitable for a young man about whom everyone had had such great expectations. (Is one still a young man at 37? There wouldn’t be much more time for him to do the Great Work that would result in a Nobel Prize.) His mother was more concerned that he was leaving behind the person she had chosen as the great love in her son’s life, Marcus Rutschman. Marc did nanotech research, exploring biological based semiconductors. Everyone said he was a genius. Nora Davidson liked his eyes, and how polite he was. Although it seemed to her that Ken and Marc were an obvious pair, Ken had never seemed to be as interested in a mate as she. She never quite understood what it was that interested him.
What interested him were waves. LIGO had ‘discovered’ gravity waves in 2016, but there were still many things about them that were understood only theoretically. Now, if we live in spacetime, as we clumsily have said more or less since Schopenhauer, and maybe since the Incas, then the wave is a perfect analogy, Ken thought: it has a spatial extension, its amplitude, and a time extension, its frequency.
Human beings had long developed sensors to detect many kinds of waves. Our skin picked up heat. Our inner ears detected seismic waves. Our eyes detected a range of light waves. Our ear drums resonated with sound waves. And we had learned to detect many kinds of waves with post-meatware evolution. Thermometers and microphones and seismic sensors and microphones and photography all extended the range of waves far beyond those known to us with our biological senses. Radio antennae of many kinds allowed us to use a broad range of frequencies. Sometimes we would discover a wave with our new extra-biological senses, as Roentgen and Curie did with photographic plates. Sometimes our theories of physics would lead us to look for ways to detect waves. It was the theory of gravity waves that had led to the development of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory and the LIGO Scientific Collaboration of which Ken’s work at Sheffield was a part.
But Ken’s work there had been as much that of a spy as a collaborator. He had certainly done his fair share of analysing the often thin and sometimes almost contradictory data about gravity waves that the Observatory had accumulated. But he was also always looking for ways to build a detector for time waves. Ken expected time waves to have very long periods--that is, very low frequencies--so that we would hardly notice them at all, just as we hardly notice the tides, which usually have a frequency of about twelve hours, much shorter than Ken predicted for time waves. But he also expected them to have very small amplitudes, so again we would hardly notice them. And yet, everything
we do, we seem to do in time. It was his search for a way to detect time waves that had attracted him to the work of Min-seo Lee at Kenstel, an Indian company that had started building antennae dishes and repeaters for home data systems, and had grown with the support of the Indian government and the Bharatiya Janata Party to be a leader in just about anything that catches a wave except surfboards. They were taking up the tradition of the Janta Mantars. Whatever the excuse, they had made some helpful devices.
What Ken hoped he was riding at the Glastonbury Abbey parking lot was a sort of gravity wave surfboard. He thought he could surf on gravity waves, and that he could ride on time.
6
When the search for gravity waves had begun, the apparatus to detect them was huge. LIFO used two antennae with two 4 km arms each, separated by several thousands of kilometres. NANO had used radio telescopes the size of football fields or bigger. But that had been twenty-four years ago. LISA had planned for three antennae five million kilometres apart. Now miniaturization of long wave--really long wave, since gravity waves might have a period as long as the width of the solar system--antennae had begun, based on the constructions of the gwishin one could now see walking along the Liffey River on the arm of a tall white angel with a silver helmet. Both the ghost and the angel were nerdy enough that despite their efforts, they had less interest in the costumed revelers around them than they did in what had started the reveling. Had it been some sort of revelation, a reveiling? Were there other worlds brushing against ours everywhere and all the time, or did they come closer at some times, as the traditions behind Samhain and the other celtic cross-quarter time traditions suggested. Min and Rafe knew little of the celtic traditions, but they were aware of the vast arrays of data moving through the universe, most of which are assumed to emanate from some past time in our universe. But, what if they were instead immigrants, so to speak, waves that had come from some other universe. And so it was that they stopped off at a cafe by the old convention center, not so much for food and drink as for cocktail napkins to draw their invention on. Raf folded his wings and removed them so he could sit down. Min removed the void that had hidden her face. They ordered ‘Halloween Brain Dip’, ‘Spiced Bat Wings’, and a bottle of Malvasia Bianca. It began to feel like they might be on a date.
Min’s big engineering breakthrough had been a kaolin matrix of strands of clay just a molecule thick onto which were printed extremely fine meshes of other materials, or of a pair of materials, usually but not always a semi-conductor and superconductor. An array of these matrices with different combinations of mesh were lined up sequentially and could together detect an immensely wide spectrum of waves. The results were recorded and analyzed not electronically, but photonically. The antennae then could be used under ‘normal’ conditions, i.e., outside of a lead box or a deep hole, and the data searched for any waves whose behaviour had not been predicted in the calibrations. Min’s antennae, which had brought a great deal of business to Kenstrel, had the advantage of being able not only to search for what was expected, but also to detect anomalies that were not expected.
How, Min and Rafe were now wondering, would anomalies that came from some other universe present themselves.
The Hyundai had parked in the lot at the Glastonbury Abbey at 20:40 GMT. A warm rain had begun to fall. Ken had plenty of time to go over his checklist again, not that he really needed any more preparation.
Ken had retired early from LIGO/NANO a year ago. For twelve years he had worked at the University of Sheffield, but he had moved to a little cottage (a new cottage, true, but small) in Pilton when he had convinced the University and LIGO/NANO that he could work as well at home as in the lab, not a difficult task in the time of high-speed optical cables. He had wanted to be close to Glastonbury. For three more years he had stayed on, but now he had no official duties. His parents and many of his friends had tried to convince him to continue in what they called his career. His parents, who lived in London, had repeatedly told him that he was wasted at Sheffield, that he would be welcome at Cambridge or someplace in the United States. His mother had hoped for Cambridge, where she could see him more often. His father had hoped for the University of Washington, where there was more money. But Ken liked where he was, in the backwater of Sheffield. He had access to any work anyone was doing with gravity waves anywhere, but his required contributions were low. He had enough money and enough time to pursue what interested him most.
There had been other protests about his move to Pilton, and not even into some historic weaver’s cottage but into a new prefab unit that could have been anywhere. His father thought it was not suitable for a young man about whom everyone had had such great expectations. (Is one still a young man at 37? There wouldn’t be much more time for him to do the Great Work that would result in a Nobel Prize.) His mother was more concerned that he was leaving behind the person she had chosen as the great love in her son’s life, Marcus Rutschman. Marc did nanotech research, exploring biological based semiconductors. Everyone said he was a genius. Nora Davidson liked his eyes, and how polite he was. Although it seemed to her that Ken and Marc were an obvious pair, Ken had never seemed to be as interested in a mate as she. She never quite understood what it was that interested him.
What interested him were waves. LIGO had ‘discovered’ gravity waves in 2016, but there were still many things about them that were understood only theoretically. Now, if we live in spacetime, as we clumsily have said more or less since Schopenhauer, and maybe since the Incas, then the wave is a perfect analogy, Ken thought: it has a spatial extension, its amplitude, and a time extension, its frequency.
Human beings had long developed sensors to detect many kinds of waves. Our skin picked up heat. Our inner ears detected seismic waves. Our eyes detected a range of light waves. Our ear drums resonated with sound waves. And we had learned to detect many kinds of waves with post-meatware evolution. Thermometers and microphones and seismic sensors and microphones and photography all extended the range of waves far beyond those known to us with our biological senses. Radio antennae of many kinds allowed us to use a broad range of frequencies. Sometimes we would discover a wave with our new extra-biological senses, as Roentgen and Curie did with photographic plates. Sometimes our theories of physics would lead us to look for ways to detect waves. It was the theory of gravity waves that had led to the development of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory and the LIGO Scientific Collaboration of which Ken’s work at Sheffield was a part.
But Ken’s work there had been as much that of a spy as a collaborator. He had certainly done his fair share of analysing the often thin and sometimes almost contradictory data about gravity waves that the Observatory had accumulated. But he was also always looking for ways to build a detector for time waves. Ken expected time waves to have very long periods--that is, very low frequencies--so that we would hardly notice them at all, just as we hardly notice the tides, which usually have a frequency of about twelve hours, much shorter than Ken predicted for time waves. But he also expected them to have very small amplitudes, so again we would hardly notice them. And yet, everything
we do, we seem to do in time. It was his search for a way to detect time waves that had attracted him to the work of Min-seo Lee at Kenstel, an Indian company that had started building antennae dishes and repeaters for home data systems, and had grown with the support of the Indian government and the Bharatiya Janata Party to be a leader in just about anything that catches a wave except surfboards. They were taking up the tradition of the Janta Mantars. Whatever the excuse, they had made some helpful devices.
What Ken hoped he was riding at the Glastonbury Abbey parking lot was a sort of gravity wave surfboard. He thought he could surf on gravity waves, and that he could ride on time.
6
When the search for gravity waves had begun, the apparatus to detect them was huge. LIFO used two antennae with two 4 km arms each, separated by several thousands of kilometres. NANO had used radio telescopes the size of football fields or bigger. But that had been twenty-four years ago. LISA had planned for three antennae five million kilometres apart. Now miniaturization of long wave--really long wave, since gravity waves might have a period as long as the width of the solar system--antennae had begun, based on the constructions of the gwishin one could now see walking along the Liffey River on the arm of a tall white angel with a silver helmet. Both the ghost and the angel were nerdy enough that despite their efforts, they had less interest in the costumed revelers around them than they did in what had started the reveling. Had it been some sort of revelation, a reveiling? Were there other worlds brushing against ours everywhere and all the time, or did they come closer at some times, as the traditions behind Samhain and the other celtic cross-quarter time traditions suggested. Min and Rafe knew little of the celtic traditions, but they were aware of the vast arrays of data moving through the universe, most of which are assumed to emanate from some past time in our universe. But, what if they were instead immigrants, so to speak, waves that had come from some other universe. And so it was that they stopped off at a cafe by the old convention center, not so much for food and drink as for cocktail napkins to draw their invention on. Raf folded his wings and removed them so he could sit down. Min removed the void that had hidden her face. They ordered ‘Halloween Brain Dip’, ‘Spiced Bat Wings’, and a bottle of Malvasia Bianca. It began to feel like they might be on a date.
Min’s big engineering breakthrough had been a kaolin matrix of strands of clay just a molecule thick onto which were printed extremely fine meshes of other materials, or of a pair of materials, usually but not always a semi-conductor and superconductor. An array of these matrices with different combinations of mesh were lined up sequentially and could together detect an immensely wide spectrum of waves. The results were recorded and analyzed not electronically, but photonically. The antennae then could be used under ‘normal’ conditions, i.e., outside of a lead box or a deep hole, and the data searched for any waves whose behaviour had not been predicted in the calibrations. Min’s antennae, which had brought a great deal of business to Kenstrel, had the advantage of being able not only to search for what was expected, but also to detect anomalies that were not expected.
How, Min and Rafe were now wondering, would anomalies that came from some other universe present themselves.
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