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head had been a fraction of a second before. I'm sure she could see his fist
go by her face. 'Becca rolled through the handspring and onto her feet into a
traditional back stance with a knife hand outer block (I think by accident,
but it looked amazingly cool). She side kicked Bob to hold him off as the
timer beeped.
"Stop!" I yelled.
Every person present looked on in awe. I said, "Hell Yes! That was awesome."
Jim applauded and whistled. Rebecca fell to the floor gasping for air, her
mouthpiece falling to the floor as she threw her headgear off.
"That was impressive! You rock!" Alisa cheered and clapped.
I had never seen anything like that outside of a movie. I seriously doubted
that I ever would again. I
guess that I should mention that Rebecca did her undergraduate schooling on a
cheerleading and gymnastics scholarship at Auburn University. She still
tumbles every now and then at the karate studio, just to show off I think.
Keri helped drag a gasping 'Becca to the side of the rings and Bob organized
another fight. After about three more rounds it was all over. Everyone had
passed.
An hour later we were sitting around a table at one of our favorite sports
bars just off of University
Drive. We were on our second pitcher of beer, waiting for our food. Bob and I
talked about when I
would be back in class and if I thought I could compete next month. I wasn't
quite sure about either, so I
lied about both. Eventually the conversation turned to the various topics that
are covered after three pitchers of beer.
"Who sang that song?"
"Just how tall is the Empire State Building and what would happen if you
dropped a penny off of it?"
I actually make my freshman physics students work that one out every semester.
"Don't be silly," I say to them. "A raindrop weighs about the same as a penny
and they fall from as much as forty thousand feet high during thunderstorms.
You ever see a raindrop crack the sidewalk?"
Terminal velocity is tough for some people to grasp.
And so the conversations continued. "If you were driving along at the speed of
light and you turned your headlights on, what would you see?"
"Could Jackie Chan whup Bruce Lee?"
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"Which Heinlein book was the best?"
"Was Kirk, Picard, Sisco, Janeway, or Archer the coolest -captain?" I always
voted for "Q" myself, but didn't he always make himself an admiral?
"Who was the best guitarist of all times?" No contest there. Hendrix, period,
exclamation point.
"Second best?" Stevie Ray Vaughn. Of course you can't discount Robert Johnson,
George
Thorogood, Jimmy Paige, Joe Perry, Slash, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, B.B. King,
Ron Wood, Kirk
Hammett, and that new kid, what's his name, and of course our local great,
Microwave Dave. But there is an order of magnitude problem between second and
third best that I'm sure the other guitarists would point out.
A pitcher later and Tabitha came through the door. Rebecca waved at her and
she joined us.
"Did you call her or something?" I asked.
"None of your business," she replied.
'Becca introduced her while I tried to figure out just how I was supposed to
react. The group accepted her willingly and didn't quiz her too hard about
being an astronaut. Alisa asked her a question that I never really thought
about.
"Did you have to take some sort of self-defense stuff in the Air Force?"
"We had some training, yes. I'm sure it wasn't as involved as what I hear all
of you do."
I responded to that, "Well, none of us have ever flown a Space Shuttle,
either." She seemed to like that remark. I seemed to recall having used it the
first time I met her. Maybe I just thought I did. That day is still pretty
fuzzy.
Our food finally got to the table. Well, mine almost did. Some crazy drunk guy
in the middle of a story made a big hand gesture and knocked my plate right
out of our waitress's hand. I laughed at first, until I realized it was my
food. It all went downhill from there.
I slept in a little Monday morning and got to the lab about eleven. Tabitha
was coming by after her
Space Camp thing later that evening to see our experiments. I spent some time
explaining it to her, but without seeing it, it's hard to explain. Rebecca and
Jim were already in the warp bubble experiment lab
setting it up. We had never figured out why the electrons had completely
disappeared on us, although, the experiment is actually kind of simple.
There's a one-and-a-half-meter-long glass tube with an electron gun attached
at one end. The tube has huge electromagnets situated along it to steer,
accelerate, and focus the electrons. The other end of the tube is a larger
vacuum chamber in the shape of a cube about a half meter on a side. In the
middle of the chamber is a misshapen toroidial superconductor with coils
around the upper and lower half the device looked kind of like a squished and
twisted donut with thousands of wires wrapped around it in random looking
fashion. A few centimeters away is a second misshapen toroidial superconductor
with similar coils around it. A high current is set up moving counterclockwise
in the first toroid and clockwise in the other and a rather complex
alternating current function is set up in the coils. It's in the region
between the two toroids that the spacetime metric should change to allow for
the warp bubble if the field strength is large enough, and if the theory is
correct, that is. We based the field shapes on approximations to the Einstein
equations and numerical solutions, but there still hasn't been any real closed
solution discovered. If I could only have that dream again, maybe I'd figure
it out.
All the apparatus is inside a clear plastic sphere that has electron detectors
deposited on the inner surface of the sphere. This way electrons scattered at
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any angle could be detected. The problem is that you can't see the experiment
because of the detectors there are so many of them and they're all in the way
from an outside viewer's standpoint. So, we modified the sphere by drilling a
few holes here and there between the electron detectors and placed tiny CCD
cameras in them. We sealed the holes around the camera connections with epoxy
and vacuum sealant that was an ordeal within itself. Now we could rerun the
experiment and actually see what was happening inside the sphere. Some of the
cameras are for ultraviolet, some for infrared, and some for visible
wavelengths. We hoped that would shed some, ahem, light on the problem.
Jim and 'Becca had completed the modifications early and now had the chamber
pulling down to a vacuum. That would take several hours. In the meantime we
decided to have a bull session about the next step for the energy collectors.
"There has to be a way to make them more efficient or smaller."
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