“What Aub is saying, Pete, is that when a hi-wave is generated, say, in the GRASER, and picked up, say, in the detector, the time delay between the two events is zero . . . to an observer in normal space who records it as two events. The propagation is instantaneous!”
Hughes looked at them incredulously. The reason for their excitement when they had first burst into his office was now becoming clear.
“And you say you’re now receiving hi-waves from all over the universe,” he said slowly. “Are you getting at what I think you’re getting at?”
“K-astronomy!” Aub confirmed. “Or hi-astronomy, whatever you want to call it—yes, that’s exactly what we’re getting at. With telescopes you can get information from stars and galaxies and stuff, but most of it’s millions of years out of date. But with hi-waves you can get information on what’s going on out there now . . . without any time delays! And distance is no object either, since the same thing applies!”
Hughes frowned disbelievingly.
“But that’s faster-than-light,” he told them. “It implies all kinds of causality paradoxes. Relatively says so. You’re being absurd.”
“No, Pete,” Morelli answered. “We’re not talking about something moving through normal space at some high velocity. We’re not talking about anything moving through normal space at all. Think of it in an instantaneous . . . transformation, if you will . . . from one point in space to another. Forget anything like ‘velocity’ being involved at all.”
Aub thought about that for a moment then turned to Morelli. “Relativistic causality paradoxes all stem from the fact that two observers moving faster-than-light couldn’t even agree on the order in which two events happen, let alone on the time-interval between them.”
“Well, doesn’t that apply here?” Hughes asked.
“No,” Morelli replied. “You see Pete, for paradoxical events to be observable, there’d have to be some period of time for them to be observed in. In the process we’re talking about, the transformation happens in zero time, and there’s no opportunity for paradoxical events to happen.” He shrugged. “If there’s no way you can detect a paradox, then there isn’t any paradox.”
“And since we’re not introducing the notion of velocity, there’s no problem with acceleration either,” Aub added. “All the problems about an infinite mass needing infinite energy to accelerate it—they go away too.”
Hughes blinked at him in astonishment. For a while his mind struggled to come to terms with the things he had been told, but when he spoke his tone betrayed that he was as good as sold on the idea.
“So what happens next?” he asked. “Where do we go from here?”
“Well, you can’t just make a telescope or something you can point at places in the sky,” Aub answered. “From the things we’ve been saying, a hi-wave doesn’t do anything simple like come at you from any particular direction. That background noise that we’ve been picking up contains information from everywhere and every direction all at once . . . all scrambled up together.”
“So what do you do to get round that?” Hughes queried.
“Aub’s not sure yet,” Morelli said. “But he’s been talking to Brad about it, and Brad thinks there might be ways of processing the information to somehow isolate the part of the signal that comes from a given object of interest—say, a star. Then it might be possible to construct some kind of image out of it . . . we don’t know yet. Brad’s still working on it.” Morelli paused and rubbed his chin for a moment. “They proposed a schedule of modifications to the detector to make it better suited for responding to external hi-waves rather than GRASER hi-waves, but when Aub and I discussed it, we figured we’d do a lot better if we started out from scratch with something new, designed especially for the job.”
“A Mark II detector,” Aub came in. “One built for just this kind of work. It would give us a chance to cash in on all the lessons we’ve learned with the one we’ve got and to add some features that we haven’t got.”
“So we came to see you to talk about it,” Morelli added needlessly.