Nina sat
awkwardly, trying to figure out what to do with her hands while the sound
technician wordlessly adjusted the boom microphone in front of her.
“Live in
three, two, one,” the man in the sound booth said.
“And
welcome to Science Talk. This is Linda Heinz, your host. We’ve got a good show
lined up for all of you, today. We’ve got Duncan Thomas, an astrophysics
professor from Columbia, who will explain how the Tyson deep space array is
able to capture not just images of other stars, but allow us to peer back to
the origins of the universe in ways that the James Webb telescope could only
dream of. But before we get to Professor Thomas, we have here Dr. Nina Elsbeth who
works for ISA’s Extra Solar Conditions Group. Welcome, Doctor.”
“Thanks
Linda. Please, call me Nina.”
“All right,
we’ve had you and your colleagues on the show before to explain the galactic
weather patterns of dark energy winds, but we have a lot of listeners asking
about how the sails work. Can you explain that to us.”
Oh, great. Guess that’s why Walker
pushed it off to me.
“Sure,
thing, Linda,” she managed a weak smile. “The sails are made from a platinum
and cobalt alloy. We discovered, quite accidentally, that this alloy has
special properties outside our solar system. So far, it is the only substance
that interacts with dark matter and dark energy.”
“And by
interact you mean?”
“Well, all
other normal matter has properties, such as my hand not being able to pass
through this table. They both have mass, and exert forces that prevent one
object from passing through the table. Dark matter isn’t like that. It has
mass, but it can pass through other matter. We call it dark because we can’t
interact with it. We don’t know much about it. We can detect it because it does
interact with gravity, just not EM forces, or nuclear forces, apparently.
“The same is true for dark energy. We
believe dark energy is the counterforce to gravity, pushing and accelerating
the universe apart, whereas gravity pulls and tries to hold it together.
Because there is so much more dark energy in the universe than normal matter,
spacetime is continuing to expand.”
“This is fascinating, Doctor, but
how do the sails actually interact with the dark energy? What makes this alloy
special?”
And
there’s the question we’ve all been dreading.
Nina gave a rueful smile and shook
her head. “We don’t know. We suspected that prolonged ionization of the alloy
might give it special properties.”
“Ionization from what source?”
“Hermes was the first probe with
this particular alloy on it, and it used an ion engine. The platinum-cobalt
mesh was part of that engine, where it was continuously bombarded by the ion
thrust.”
“But you said suspected. Is that no
longer the case?”
“After that we constructed small
sails for Odyssey I and II, and subsequently bombarded them as well. When we
finally launched the Frontier probe with its nanosats, we took the opportunity
to make a few sails that we didn’t bombard with ions. They functioned just as
well as the other sails.”
“So why platinum-cobalt?”
Nina shrugged. “Again, we don’t
know. Platinum has always been a particularly fascinating metal for its
catalytic properties. This could simply be another fascinating property of the
metal.”
“Sounds like there’s a lot of
guessing involved, right now.”
Nina tried not to take that
personally. For over ten years they had theorized and run the math, but the
negative results were very frustrating.
“There is, Linda, but that’s
science. This is an entirely new realm of understanding when it comes to
astrophysics. Let me put it another way. We now have gravity engines and can
make artificial gravity. That discovery came as a result of finally discovering
and understanding graviton particles. But the discoveries that led to gravitons
began millennia ago. Aristotle famously wrote about gravity and falling motion
back in the fourth century BC. But that was the extent of it. We knew that
objects fell. Aristotle attributed it to an object’s nature. He also believed
that things that weighed more would fall faster.
“It wasn’t until almost 1600 AD
that Galileo came along to prove that weight had nothing to do with it. That’s
almost two thousand years without any further understanding of how gravity
works. Newton came along in the latter half of the seventeenth century to
derive his equations. Einstein came along in the early twentieth century to give
us relativity and his prediction of gravity waves. One hundred years after
that, we confirmed the existence of gravity waves. It took nearly a hundred
years after that to discover the graviton, much less figure out how to do
anything with it.
“When it comes to dark energy,
we’re back to Aristotle. We’ve finally observed this phenomenon, but we’re
scrabbling around guessing as to what’s going on. We just don’t have the
instruments and observational data yet to fully understand the why behind it.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t use it until we have a better understanding.”
“Well said, Nina. Well, it’s time
for a quick break, then we’ll be back with Nina to answer some caller
questions.”
“We’re back in sixty,” said the
technician in the sound booth.
“That was really good, Nina,” Linda
said. “You didn’t get too technical, and the history was a nice touch. People
like hearing about that, and it puts the slow process of science in
perspective.”
“Thanks. These shows always make me
nervous.”
“You’re doing fine. The tough part
will be the questions. Inevitably there are some scientists who will call in to
contradict what you’re saying. Some of them can get quite belligerent, but
we’ve gotten pretty good at screening the calls.”
“Okay, good.”
“In five, four, three, two, one.”