You've never heard of me, but that's all right because I'm
not a writer, at least not a writer of the English language. I
work in a small programming shop and we write our programs in
BASIC and C. My hobbies include what I like to call
pseudo-science, because when I try to explain to a friend what
string theory is, or where the neutrinos probably went, I can
feel sure that they know that they have reached a point where my
actual knowledge runs out and wild speculation takes over.
It was two o'clock and I'd just fallen asleep when the
doorbell rang. I have always considered this unfair as you can't
leave a door off the hook, or connect it to an answering machine,
but as I've yet to figure out another way out of the house, the
door stays. At the door was a friend who is involved
peripherally with an agency of the federal government concerned
with domestic intelligence. Now if you believe that the term
government intelligence is an oxymoron, remember, he is on the
fringe, in many ways.
I had met Joe in the 70's, he attended an S.F. convention,
that quite frankly, got him a bit wobbly. Not a social drinker,
Joe had downed most of a fifth of blueberry schnapps and before
he had realized how smurfed he had become, he had told us what he
did for a living. Next day, hungover, he had sworn us to
secrecy. I see Joe on occasion, he no longer drinks.
Joe had an envelope full of photographs that he emptied onto
the dining room table, I grabbed one before the cat did, Joe
grabbed the cat.
"If you rub him under the chin or scratch behind his ears
he'll probably stop biting you.", I said absently as I looked at
the photo,"What do we have here, scope sights on a
Cassegrainian?"
"Not exactly," said Joe as he disengaged himself from 18
pounds of irate orange Tom, "what you are holding is one of the
first shots taken of a rather distant exploding galaxy. The ring
and dot in the center of the photograph combine to make a
mystery, however."
"What's your peoples best guess?"
"I've got guesses that range from Bussard ram jet and first
contact in a couple hundred years to a new black hole. The one
thing that bothers everyone is that this thing seems to be
traveling faster than light."
"Really?"
"Yea, well the object is right on the extreme edge of
measurability using parallax shots, quite frankly we're not
really sure about the velocity."
"Must be driving the traditionalists nuts. It's not, by the
way, exceeding light's velocity. If it were, you wouldn't have
this photo."
"One of the astro-physicists mentioned a tachyon drive."
"Did he or she specify the type of tachyon? The math allows
for at least four distinct types."
"You're kidding me of course?"
"Not really, any object that travels backwards in time can
automatically be considered to be traveling faster than light,
that's one type. I think I can work out a case for the negative
energy tachyon that travels forward in time, faster than light.
There are two more that kind of approach space-time on a slant
through the folded dimensions, but they get nowhere fast." (He
didn't laugh at this if you're wondering.)
"You sure about the physics of this?"
"Physics doesn't come into it, this is all creative
pseudo-science, actually, I didn't come up with any of this, I've
just read various papers by various people and realize that they
were talking about more than one tachyon."
"Well all this doesn't help explain these photographs."
"Oh, I think I know what this is. I do hope I'm wrong . . .
" I went to the living room and pulled an issue of Science News
from a stack, then selected an issue of Sky and Telescope from
another stack. I handed them to Joe and said "I think the
answers you're looking for are in these, one has an article
concerning the possibility that quasars are not quite as far away
as they seem to be, the other describes the ongoing controversy
about a gaseous jet that is being ejected from an exploding
galaxy at a measured velocity slightly faster than the speed of
light."
"So?"
"So put them together, what you have is an interstellar
phenomenon that you might call a streaker, a naturally occurring
object that accelerates itself to a very close percentage of
light speed."
"How?"
"This is an interstellar ram-jet, but not a Bussard
ram-jet, this one uses gravity."
"A black hole?"
"Got it in one, Joe. I think streakers are formed when
massive stars with close dark companions go supernova. If
conditions were just right, the black holes are released from
orbit at a high enough velocity to begin fusion burning."
"Fusion, how? I thought that anything falling into a black
hole was gone."
"For the most part you're right. Any bit of matter directly
in the streaker's path is 'eaten', however this thing is moving,
so matter at a certain distance from the path will fall behind
the streaker and concentrate, if the mass of the object is high
enough then inertial confinement will be enough to start the
fusion process, the black hole will accelerate and build up
relativistic mass to augment the actual mass. Eventually, of
course, the object could achieve a mass sufficient to wreak the
galaxy that produced it, actually I think that sort of thing may
be rare as there appear to be many more streakers than exploding
galaxies."
"If you were viewing the object from an angle it would appear
to be a jet. Traveling faster than light because the light from
any two successive 'frames' along the objects motion would be
arriving only slightly faster than the object. As an example, if
your object was ten light-years distant, moving at 90% of light
speed, you would see an object that could appear to be as much as
nine light years in length."
"O.K., then why does this object look different from what
you've just described, and any thing else we've seen?"
"The rings tell the story Joe, these rings you see are the
light of the fusion torch being warped around the object by a
gravity lens effect. The reason this particular object looks
different from the other objects of its type is simply that this
is the first one we've ever seen that's coming directly at us."
"By the way Joe, just how far away is this streaker?"
Joe picked up his photographs and left without answering me,
perhaps he didn't actually know the answer. Two weeks later NASA
told the press that they had inadvertently left the lens cap on
the Hubble telescope, again, regrets all around, and I received a
check from uncle Sam, my first.
I'm setting here trying to remember whether the rings in the
photographs were really perfect circles and trying to decide
whether it would make any difference if they weren't.
If there is a way around this problem, and if I figure it
out first, maybe they will pay me another consulting fee. If I
can't, I suppose me and my orange cat will find some way to
follow the neutrinos. That, I'm not looking forward to.