“Not likely.” Thomas grinned and relaxed.
“I didn’t expect it. But seriously, between ourselves, I’ve got to pull something out of the hat, and it’s got to be good. The scientific staff is beginning to crowd me, particularly Colonel Calhoun. There’s no damn sense in their making miracles in the laboratory unless I can dope out some way to apply those miracles in strategy and tactics.”
“Have they really gone so far?”
“You’d be surprised. They’ve taken that so-called ‘Ledbetter effect’ and shaken it the way a terrier shakes a rat. They can do anything with it but peel the potatoes and put out the cat.”
“Really?”
“Really. ”
“What sort of things can they do?”
“Well — ” Ardmore took a deep breath. “Honestly, I don’t know where to begin. Wilkie has tried to keep me posted with simplified explanations, but, between ourselves, I didn’t understand more than every other word.
One way of putting it is to say that they’ve discovered atomic control
— oh, I don’t mean atom-splitting, or artificial radioactivity. Look — we speak of space, and time, and matter, don’t we?”
“Yes. There’s Einstein’s space-time concept, of course. ”
“Of course. Space-time is standard stuff in high school these days. But these men really mean it. They really mean that space and time and mass and energy and radiation and gravity are all simply different ways of thinking about the same thing. And if you once catch on to how just one of them works, you have the key to all of them. According to Wilkie, physicists up to now, even after the A-bomb was developed, were just fooling around the edges of the subject; they had the beginnings of a unified field theory, but they didn’t really believe it themselves; they usually acted as if these were all as different as the names for them.
“Apparently Ledbetter hit on the real meaning of radiation, and that has given Calhoun and Wilkie the key to everything else in physics. Is that clear?” he added with a grin.
“Not very,” Thomas admitted. “Can you give me some idea of what they can do with it?”
“Well, to begin with, the original Ledbetter effect, the thing that killed most of the personnel here, Wilkie calls an accidental side issue. Brooks says that the basic radiation affected the colloidal dispersal of living tissue; those that were killed were coagulated by it. It might just as well have been set to release surface tension — in fact, they did that the other day, exploded a half of beefsteak like so much dynamite.”
“Huh?”
“Don’t ask me how; I’m just repeating the explanation given me. But the point is, they seem to have found out what makes matter tick. They can explode it — sometimes — and use it for a source of power. They can transmute it into any element they want. They seem to be confident that they know what to do to find out how gravity works, so that they will be able to handle gravity the way we now handle electricity. ”
“I thought gravity was not considered a force in the modern concepts.”
“So it isn’t but, then, ‘force’ isn’t force, either, in unified field theory. Hell’s bells, you’ve got me bogged down in language difficulties. Wilkie says that mathematics is the only available language for these ideas.”
“Well, I guess I’ll just have to get along without understanding it.
But, frankly, I don’t see how they managed to come so far so fast. That changes just about everything we thought we knew. Honestly, how is it that it took a hundred fifty years to go from Newton to Edison, yet these boys can knock out results like that in a few weeks?”
“I don’t know myself. The same point occurred to me, and I asked Calhoun about it. He informed me in that schoolmaster way of his that it was because those pioneers did not have the tensor calculus, vector analysis, and matrix algebra.”
“Well, I wouldn’t know,” observed Thomas. “They don’t teach that stuff in law school.”
“Nor me,” admitted Ardmore. “I tried looking over some of their work sheets. I can do simple algebra, and I’ve had some calculus, though I haven’t used it for years, but I couldn’t make sense out of this stuff.