| |
Anonymous: I’ve got good news for you. We figured out why everyone is after you.
Benny: Thank God! Please, tell me!
Anonymous: You invented antigravity.
Benny: Ha! Very funny! Look, I appreciate your help. But that’s the one thing we didn’t do. Yes, our publication was about generating gravity waves using MEMS technology. Even with ten billion tiny wave generators giving us ten-billion-fold focusing, we were only able to levitate a single grain of sand. And we explicitly proved that antigravity is impossible with present technology, and any foreseeable technology. It’s just a laboratory curiosity.
Anonymous: That’s not what some of the most respectable research labs in the world think.
Benny: Well, all I can say is, they’re wrong.
Anonymous: You believe in the scientific method, don’t you? Peer review? Hypothesis falsifiability? Duplication of results by independent researchers?
Benny: Of course. So?
Anonymous: So you invented antigravity. I can prove it using information network theory.
Benny: Look, I’m a little busy for games. I know what we published. We showed how to create and focus gravity waves that were barely but reliably detectable in the lab. Dorothy and Bodin designed a thing that makes microscopic gravity waves. Dalton built it, since he’s a micro-mechanical expert. And I programmed it. It’s a pretty simple design. Well ... for certain values of “simple”. Have you ever seen a paint shaker at a hardware store?
Anonymous: Sure.
Benny: Well, if you shake something that’s really dense and heavy, like tungsten, that shaking will make very weak gravity waves. By itself, that’s nothing. The gravity waves are so weak you can’t detect them even in a laboratory. But now shrink that paint shaker down to microscopic size, so you can fit a hundred of them in a millimeter. Then you can print a hundred thousand of these microeletromechanical systems in one meter using any MEMS-printer.
Anonymous: Okay, I follow you.
Benny: By itself, that’s still nothing. Then we built an array of these things. It was one meter by one meter. That’s one hundred thousand shakers by one hundred thousand shakers. So the array held ten billion of those little shakers. Still a whole lot of nothing. But here’s the clever part that Dorothy and Bodin came up with: They found a way to synchronize the shaking of all those little shakers in just the right way so that they all focused their gravity waves onto a single grain of sand.
Anonymous: You can focus gravity waves?
Benny: You can focus any waves. Light waves, radar waves, water waves, sound waves, it doesn’t matter. The focusing process is called phasing, so the array of shakers is called a phased array. Now there’s a rule about phased arrays that the amount of focusing, which is also called gain, is equal to the number of shakers. Since we had ten billion shakers, we could focus the gravity waves for a total gain of ten billion. That was just enough to lift a grain of sand.
Anonymous: Right! Antigravity! Like I said!
Benny: Bullshit. It’s a laboratory curiosity, nothing more. We followed standard lab procedure and filed a patent on the setup. As if anyone would ever want to repeat the boondoggle. What a laugh. We proved the technology couldn’t grow beyond that. I mean PROVED. You can’t make the array any bigger or it gets too far from the target to have any effect. We were five orders of magnitude away from anything even theoretically useful. You understand FIVE ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE? A factor of 100,000? That’s the difference between a trip to the grocery and a trip to the moon. It’s not something we’d make a mistake about.
Anonymous: Not according to a bunch of well-funded researchers with mutually-agreeing conclusions.
Benny: They must be scamming their funders. So tell me, how did you figure this out? Maybe I can tell you where you went wrong.
Anonymous: Okay, I’ll walk you through it. Keep an open mind, though. This is a new science, but it’s still a science, as valid as your physics and microtech. It describes the behavior of information in large networks.
Benny: I’m listening. Amuse me.
Anonymous: As you know, the stock markets around the world had major fluctuations when they opened today. They were all shut down almost immediately. The official explanation is that terrorists planted a very clever virus in the stock markets’ global communications network, and it will take some time to clean it out. Well, a lot of people don’t believe that. There’s a lot of people doing google searches to try to explain the recent fluctuations. They are looking at all sorts of crazy explanations including impending asteroid impacts, nuclear war, alien invasion, plague, zombies, immortality, free energy, antigravity, and Godzilla, to name just a few. We analyzed all of them and found only one search topic that started BEFORE the fluctuations started. That topic was antigravity. It started about a week ago. Then we looked at all the topics to see if any came from respectable sources, like research labs or government agencies or major corporations. Only one topic was respectable: antigravity. We also found that only one topic was being researched by advisors to the super rich: antigravity. Oddly, it appears that the US government is the only global power that has been totally ignorant of what’s going on, at least until yesterday.
Benny: That’s not proof. That just says someone started a viral rumor. There’s nothing to it.
Anonymous: You should have more respect for the crowdbrain. You don’t seem to understand the massive brain power, massive wealth, and massive political power involved here. False rumors, even if viral, have been proven to have no effect on such masses. You can treat these massive institutions as physical masses. They simply don’t move for insubstantial reasons. They physically can’t. That would violate the laws of information network behavior as much as the laws of physics. Look at it this way: You know from thermodynamics that information is a real, physical entity that can be described in terms of energy and statistical entropy. Well a massive network is a form of information that follows similar physical laws.
Benny: Look, thanks for trying to explain it to me. But I know what we wrote. Your network theory, and all the people in it, are wrong.
Anonymous: Dammit, Benny, if I disagree with a physics equation, we both know I’m wrong. Personal opinion, agreement, and disagreement have nothing to do with questions of physical laws. If you disagree with these physical laws, you’re wrong. You only need to determine why you’re wrong. That’s what I’m telling you. You are disagreeing with a physical law.
Benny: It’s getting late. I need to do some things. And I need some sleep. How ‘bout we chat again tomorrow. Bye.
[VPN Disconnected]