Jupiter’s Bones. Faye Kellerman
“Which means?”
She stopped, took in a breath and let it out. It appeared as if she was used to confusing people. “Words don’t do it justice. The mathematics is beautiful, but that won’t help you either. Please interrupt me if I’m going too fast.”
“Oh, I will. Go on.”
“All right. This is the standard model used to explain it. Picture a train pulling away from a platform. To the person on the platform, it appears as if he is standing still and the train is moving, right?”
“Right.”
“But to the person on the train, it seems as if the train is standing still and the platform is moving—”
“But we know the train’s moving.”
“Only because you’ve been taught that it’s the train that moves.”
“But the train is moving. It’s going from place to place. The platform isn’t budging.”
“In space, Lieutenant, you have no way of knowing who or what is actually moving. You always have the option of assuming that you’re moving and other guy is standing still.”
Decker said, “But if you’re moving, you’re moving.”
“Sorry. Motion is relative. So is time, distance and mass. And the faster you go, the more relative it is. Now, at slow speeds, the relativity factor isn’t going to make much difference. Suppose you’re cruising at sixty miles an hour on the freeway and I’m stalled on the shoulder with a flat tire because I didn’t have the time to take my bald retreads into the garage. If you zoom past me at one o’clock in the afternoon, what time will my car clock read?”
Decker said, “It’s not going to read anything because your motor’s turned off.”
She laughed, showing teeth. She had a nice smile when she chose to use it. “It wasn’t a trick question, sir.”
Decker smiled boyishly. “One o’clock.”
“Brilliant.”
“Thank you.” Decker noticed that talking about science loosened her up. That was good. Loose people had loose lips.
She continued. “But as your speed approaches that of light, everything changes. For instance, say you’re in a spaceship going ninety percent the speed of light. Now, inside your ship, everything looks normal to you. The clocks run on time, your spaceship has the same dimensions and your clothes still fit you. Are you with me?”
“I’m here.”
“But to another ship out in space, your rocket will look shorter by a factor of two, your clock will appear to run half as fast and your weight will be twice as heavy.”
“So you’re saying fast speeds distort things. I can buy that.”
“But here’s the entire point of relativity. To your eye, everything inside your spaceship is normal. To your eye, it’s the other guy who’s distorted. His clock is slow, his rocket is shorter and his mass is twice as heavy. To your eye, he’s distorted. But to his eye, you’re distorted.”
“So who’s right?”
“You both are.”
“A Solomonic approach to physics,” Decker stated.
Again, she smiled. “It’s all perspective.”
Decker said, “Getting back to your father, you’re saying he based his theories of teleportation on Einstein’s relativity. Something like he could transport himself from one place to another because everything’s relative?”
“Actually, Einstein wasn’t a major factor in my father’s theories.”
“So there’s more.” Decker held up his pencil. “Shoot, Doc. I’m ready for you.”
She chuckled. “Einstein’s theories kicked off a revolution, but he wasn’t the final word on cosmology. That belongs to quantum physics.”
“Is this going to make me feel really stupid?”
“I’ll keep it simple,” Europa said. “There are two distinctly different aspects to how we view light or any electromagnetic radiation. Now, Newton stated that light acts like a wave, that it’s continuous and uninterrupted, that it has rises and falls, peaks and troughs. Okay so far?”
“I’m with you.”
“Quantum theory says light is not a wave, but discreet packets or bundles made up of particles called photons. Two contradictory theories—light as wave, light as particles.”
“Dare I ask? Which one is right?”
“They both are. Sometimes light behaves as a wave, sometimes it behaves like photons. If you thought relativity was bad at pinning things down, you don’t even want to know about Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. It says that although you can make predictions on how these photons will behave over the long run, you can never say exactly how they will behave over the short run. At any given moment, you have no way of knowing which energy state any given photon will occupy. Are you with me?”
“No. Can I ask what photons have to do with teleportation?”
“You’re a single-minded man, Lieutenant.”
“A bad physicist, but a decent cop.”
“Photons, sir, have been one of the links implicated in instantaneous travel. Before Dad dropped out, he was one of the few men who was trying to prove that photons originating from the same packet of light had this instantaneous link between them. Whatever was happening to photon one was also happening with photon two no matter what the distance between them was. All because once they had shared the same light bundle. Are you with me?”
“Instant communication.”
“Instantaneous communication,” Europa corrected. “Now, since mass can convert to energy at the speed of light—E equals MC squared—then atoms—like the kind that make up your body—can be converted to electromagnetic energy or light in the form of photons. And since there is an eternal, instantaneous link between photons from the same packet, you can transport your atoms—now in photon form—instantaneously from one position in space to another using this superluminal link. Which is considered a scientific lost cause. Although things can move faster than light, they can’t seem to transport meaningful information … things like organized atoms. Which is what my father spent his scientific life trying to prove. He hit walls, but that didn’t stop him. When he couldn’t do it as Emil Euler Ganz, he went metaphysical and tried to prove it as Jupiter.”
She frowned. “But you know how things get messed up going from theory to actuality. Sometimes we physicists predict it right on—like with the atom bomb. We knew the math way before we had the technology. But most of the time, we sit there and wallow in our own mistakes. Like a baby with a dirty diaper, just crying and squirming while waiting for someone who knows better to clean it up.”
Oliver said, “I can buy the thing about time slowing down. Ever been to an opera?”
Decker laughed, but Marge said, “I like opera.”
“That’s ’cause you’re a woman.” Oliver bit into an egg roll. “Sure you don’t want one, Deck? They’re vegetarian.”
“No thanks.” He added sugar to his tea. “So when are you two meeting with the death certificate guy … what’s his name? Omni?”
“Nova,”