“Forty orders of magnitude smaller,” Wernstecki pronounced, after calculating a quick mental approximation.
An electrical dipole is an object carrying positive and negative charges concentrated in two distinct regions, such as at opposite ends. An “oscillating” dipole meant a system of two or more charges bound together in constrained motion. An atom would be an example. Although neutral as a whole, an atom’s internal stresses cause the charge of its constituent protons and electrons to be distributed unevenly, making it a dipole. Pang was saying that a tiny attractive force, diminishing as the square of the separating distance, was produced as a statistical residue of the electrical forces between oscillating groups of net-neutral charges.
Such a group would be formed by an assemblage of atoms—in other words, mass. And gravity, the weakest force known to physics, was forty orders of magnitude less than the electrical force. Hence, Pang was saying that gravity appeared as a byproduct of the internal electrical nature of matter. And that much was interesting and exciting in itself, to be sure. But it wasn’t exactly new. Speculations and theoretical studies of such a possibility went back a long way. Evidently there was more to it.
Wernstecki looked at the images on the screens again—metal frameworks filled with arrays of unusual electrical devices, typical thrown-together lab efforts. One showed a technician in clean-room garb floating in midair while making some adjustment—clearly a freefall setting. Then he turned to gaze back at the woman and the youth working on the construction in the area at the rear. The exposed section revealed banks of chip-like devices packed in a system of mounting frames strung with bundles of conductors. But the conductors were too heavy for them to be circuit chips; and woven among them was a forced-flow cooling matrix of capacity no electronic system would have needed. A light of understanding came over Wernstecki’s face, and the pale eyes shone with genuine astonishment. “Artificial gravity? You’ve done it? Experimentally? You have verification?”
Pang waved the last of Wernstecki’s suspense away with a toss of his hand. “That unit behind us at the back there was actually the first prototype that we built on Valkyrie, before we moved down here and Lan’s team joined us. The view on the screen was the final phase of the dipole array wiring.”
Valkyrie was an orbiting platform above Titan that housed an odd mixture of scientific and other facilities, including a spherical swimming pool, a 3-D sports arena, an arboretum featuring some strangely shaped plants, and a school of weightless architecture. However, many of the former occupants had evacuated to the surface since the bombardments caused by Athena began. During his spell on LORIN 5, Keene had learned that the rest of the space was to be vacated too, and the platform converted into a close-range defense station for Titan.
“You’re talking about huge currents,” Wernstecki commented distantly. He was visibly excited, his mind racing over the implications.
“One of the problems with the early experiments was to deliver enough without getting friction or reaction effects that would have swamped the measurements,” Pang agreed. “Solid conductors were unworkable. In the end we resorted to pinch-stabilized mercury bridges. Doing it in zero-g eliminated a lot of spurious background, and the electromagnetic shielding had to be a hundred percent. That was why we stayed so long up in Valkyrie. But in the end, the effect we achieved exceeded the attraction of normal matter by a factor of over fifty. We were measuring tens of nanograms, but it was there. It was real. We could switch it on and off.” He inclined his head to indicate the direction behind. “With power flowing, we can make that array act like a twelve-ton mass. And even with that array, we could improve the figure by a factor of a million . . . if the structure could stand it.”
As Wernstecki leaned back in the chair, thinking, his eyes came unconsciously back to Keene. Keene could almost read him fitting the pieces together. Artificial gravity had been talked about for much longer than Kronia had existed. The immediate applications would be in spacecraft and satellites, eliminating the need for ungainly simulations by rotating structures or whirling modules at the ends of booms and tethers. Later, larger-scale booster systems could perhaps be implanted in low-gravity bodies like asteroids or the gas-giant moons to create Earth-normal conditions at the surface. And after that . . . who knew? Whole new technologies of matter manipulation, weight neutralization, freight handling, earthmoving . . .