Chapter 7

Time: Saturday, March 23, 2002 1:30 PM

I'm riding a bus over to a service center to pick up my car. I want it to be in good shape for my trip to Illinois next weekend. I'm getting some new tires and an alignment, new front and rear brake pads and shoes and an oil change. My car is a simple 1998 Chevy Cavalier that I bought used last year. It's never given me any trouble, and I try to take good care of it.

I bought myself a multi-meter a couple of weeks ago. I wanted to track the growth of my power output on a daily basis, and didn't want to risk getting caught in the High School physics lab alone. What would be my reason for being there?

My power output has been growing rapidly, much faster than the expansion of my sense sphere. The force I can exert on objects is also increasing, at a rate just a bit slower than my power growth rate. At 11:30 this morning, I measured:

My sense-sphere radius was 2.024 meters, still doubling every 31 days and 20 hours.

My maximum power output was 19 mW. I pushed the voltage across the 4.7k-ohm resistor up to 9.45 volts. My power growth rate is a clean exponential, with a doubling time of 7 days and 15 hours.

And my maximum force is about 0.0027 Newtons, as close as I can measure it, nine times stronger than when I first discovered it with the paper clip. I'm guessing it's also exponentially growing, with a doubling rate of 7 days and 23 hours. I built a torsion scale in my bedroom to measure this. A stiff steel wire with another stiff wire crossing it at the bottom. I push against the tip of the horizontal cross piece, torquing the main vertical wire, and the maximum angle of my push give me my force.

Last week I indulged myself and bought a high-tech min-flashlight. It runs six high- output white LEDs with 1.4 Watts from a single AA Li-battery, providing 50 lumens of light, 250 candlepower. It's not much compared to a light-bulb. A 100 Watt light-bulb produces 1600 lumens. But for a really tiny flashlight, 250 candles isn't bad.

According to my graphs, I should be able to generate 1.4 Watts in less than two months, May 9'th at 9 PM. Man, that would be so cool, lighting up the flashlight all by myself! And if not, well, I've bought myself a $60 toy...

A guy with a really ugly boom-box boards the bus and sits right next to me. He had the thing blaring, and looked even uglier than the box, a real mean-looking biker dude. He was snarling and trying to make eye contact with anybody who would dare look at him.

I don't back down from necessary fights, but I really don't like to fight. I thought about putting up with the noise and just letting the matter go. My stop was only about ten minutes away. But I got to thinking...

The boom-box was in his lap, the speakers pointing right at me, a little less than two meters away and just within my sphere of influence. Hmmm... I started probing the box, tracing the circuitry. My ability to zoom into details is growing exponentially too, though I haven't thought of a good way to measure it. If I had to guess, I could focus down to about 300 micrograms.

I isolated a single input on a chip in the boom box. I traced the wire coming out of the chip on the printed circuit board and then PUSHED 19 mW in the opposite direction.

The awful rap music continued with the same volume, but it suddenly started to sound very hissy. The biker dude looked down at his box and frowned and started trying to tune the station. I let go after a moment, and the hiss went away. Another idea had occurred to me. I zoomed down with my sense as tight as I could go. At maximum magnification, it was a sphere of about 300 microns radius, and I zoomed right into a transistor-rich region of the micro-chip. And then I pushed that sphere with everything I had, 0.0027 Newtons.

I felt my target area zip away from me in an instant and the boom-box went silent. The biker dude looked extremely, extremely annoyed and I turned away from him so he wouldn't see me smiling.

I got to thinking about what I had just done. Holy shit! I had probably PUSHED that micro-sphere of transistors with hundreds of gravities of acceleration. Where the hell did it go?! Grateful that I didn't seem to have injured anybody, I got off the bus a few minutes later.

Time: Thursday, March 28, 2002 11:47 AM

I picked a quiet area outside the main cafeteria area to eat my lunch. I wanted to be able to talk in private if my cell phone started to ring...

I checked my power level this morning at 6 AM, 11.73 volts on my multi-meter, 29 mW, right on track. Last Saturday night, I also did a few calculations on the boom-box micro- chip I destroyed. My best guess is I accelerated my micro-sphere for about one millisecond at about 1,000 gravities and then hit my power limit. At that time it had probably moved 2.6 mm and was moving around 16 mph relative to the rest of the chip. So, my micro bowling ball probably never left the chip. I've got to watch myself though, and think through the implications of what my capabilities are before I try new stuff...