“We’d already guessed, of course, that the process of particle annihilation inside the reaction chamber somehow induces a curvature in Einsteinian spacetime around the volume in which the process takes place. In other words, it mimics the effect normally produced by a large mass, which is not news to you any more. From what I know now about Brad’s theoretical work, I can see now how it does it—qualitatively at least, that is.”
“What you’re really doing is amplifying by a factor of a few billion what happens naturally anyway,” Aub supplied.
“That’s a good way of putting it,” Morelli agreed. “If I’ve understood what you’ve been telling me, the gravity field around an ordinary mass results from the tiny fraction of particles inside it that are annihilating spontaneously at any instant. Okay?”
“That’s right,” Clifford confirmed. “Only a very small proportion of the mass contributes anything to the field . . . is gravitationally active if you like. Most of it is purely passive; it takes up space and has bulk but contributes nothing to the field. As we said earlier, that’s the part that really departs from classical ideas—gravity turns out to be a dynamic effect, not static.”
Morelli nodded and then turned his head toward Aub, who was obviously about to add something. He took up the point. “In fact, your experiments are a good demonstration of just that. What you’ve effectively done is scrap the passive mass entirely. The particles that annihilate inside your reaction chamber can be thought of as a mass that’s 100 percent gravitationally active. Every one of them is involved in the process, unlike in ordinary mass.”
“You’re just doing what Nature does anyway, only on a much more concentrated scale,” Clifford commented. “You’re concentrating inside a few cubic centimeters the same number of annihilations every second that would normally take place in . . . oh, I don’t know . . .” he shrugged and turned up his hands, “a whole mountain or something.”
“And we get a smooth, detectable resultant field,” Morelli concluded. “Yeah, that’s what I meant when I said I can see better why it works now. It also explains more specifically why we can increase the strength of the field by increasing the beam density or by focusing into a smaller volume—they both give you more annihilations per cubic centimeter per second, which brings me back to what I was about to tell you.” Clifford and Aub waited expectantly.
Morelli went on. “Recently we’ve been pushing the limits to find out how far we could take it . . . how far we could bend Einsteinian geodesics. The result has been pretty sensational—something we sure didn’t bargain for. You see, fellas, what we’ve managed to do is generate a field so strong that nothing can get out of the annihilation volume at all—not even light! We have to push the volume right down to microscopic dimensions to do it, but it sure works okay. The space-time curvature at that level is so great that everything gets bent right back in to the middle. What do you say to that?”
For a few seconds that seemed a lot longer, the two young scientists stared at him in mute astonishment as their minds struggled to take in his meaning. Here was something that had been widely talked about for decades, it was true, but all the same, to be told quite matter-of-factly that it had actually become a reality and was just part of a day’s work at Sudbury . . .
“A black hole!” Clifford’s jaw sagged. “You mean you’ve produced an artificial black hole here . . . ?”
“Jeez,” Aub exhaled slowly. “Man, have I been wasting my time. . . .”
Morelli smiled, unable to conceal his amusement.
“Thought you’d be impressed,” he said. “We may not be theoretical hotshots here, but we haven’t exactly been standing still all the same.” He looked from one to the other and nodded his head. “Yes, we can produce black holes artificially if we go to high enough power; they’re tiny, but they’re genuine. But these are black holes with a difference. We don’t need enormous amounts of mass to make them, and we can switch them on and off when we feel like it. Now, did you ever hear of a black hole like that before?”