Part 1

I had always loved the short story ‘Light of Other Days, ‘ by Bob Shaw. The idea of slow glass really intrigued me, where glass was transparent but the light traveling thru it took days, or even years, to reach the other side. It seemed to me that using a combination of normal glass and slow glass tuned to twelve hours travel time would provide a source of constant daylight. A six month slow glass would solve the problem of seasonal heating as well, as you would receive the sunshine and heat of summer in the depths of winter.

That’s why I was sitting in my basement, playing with a Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC). I felt with some careful tuning I could create a transparent virtual particle with a non-virtual size that was larger on the inside than the outside, and could thus be used as a sort of micro-sized slow glass. The bench-top apparatus was hand built, and held the BEC in magnetic containment between two superconducting magnetic rings. I had a simple laser measuring tape pointed thru the rings, as a way to test my success. My idea was that if I created any sort of slow down, the laser beam would measure a longer distance between it and the concrete block wall of the basement.

The laser tape measure I had picked up out of the closeout bin at the local Home Depot hardware store, and it had to be activated each time I took a reading as it did not provide continuous measurement. But it did provide an accuracy of hundredths of an inch for distances under 15 feet. The notebook next to it was used to carefully record the date, time, and distance displayed as I ran my experiment at various magnetic intensities, temperatures, and concentrations of BEC between the magnets.

The circular superconducting rings that held the BEC had come from a back-alley deal with an assistant professor at the university. They were as big as I could afford at the time, and had an outer diameter of only an inch, so slightly bigger than an US quarter. I only had about twenty minutes of experimenting time left before the slow drip of the liquid nitrogen onto the superconductors would fail, the magnetic containment would end, and the BEC would transform back into a simple gas and disperse into my custom chamber.

I had managed to get the BEC to fully fill the space between the two circles, and it didn’t seem to be adversely affected by contact with either the liquid nitrogen, or the superconductors. It had become nearly optically transparent, and I continued to fiddle with my adjustments as I attempted to get it completely transparent before time ran out.

My watch was set to beep every minute, and each time it did I took another distance measurement. Fortunately, I had just taken a distance measurement, and was standing a few feet away when there was a loud pop and flash of light. My containment chamber had imploded around the superconducting magnets.

I quickly turned off the apparatus, clicked on my netbook to save the webcam footage, and donned some industrial strength oven gloves to move the whole contraption to my work bench on the other side of the basement. I’d have to disassemble the contraption and rebuild my containment chamber before I could continue. I especially hoped that the magnets in the interior were undamaged as they had been exceedingly expensive, back-alley deal or not.

With the mess out of the way and no sign of fire, I made one last measurement with the laser tape and jotted the measurement down with a note that the experiment had been ended. As I examined the results, something strange jumped out at me: the measurements had not gotten longer, they had gotten shorter! They had, in fact, gotten nearly one inch shorter until the final measurement, which I had taken after the equipment had been removed. This measurement matched my initial starting measurement prior to the forming of the BEC.

Science doing what you don’t expect is always the beginning of the greatest of discoveries. Science doing what you expect only ever tells you that you are not yet wrong. The unexpected results are where new knowledge and understanding come from. I had expected and hoped for something else, but this was new and would need replication. Unfortunately, that would have to wait a week or more until my next paycheck. If the rings were damaged it might be months before I could afford new ones. I had savings, but I also had a very strict budget. I received 2 checks a month from work. The first went to all my monthly expenses, any extra was play money. My second check went into savings, and every six months half my savings went into certificate of deposits.

Two days later I was carefully disassembling the containment container, hoping to recover the most expensive part of my apparatus. I had just peeled back the warped Plexiglas to uncover the superconducting rings. The BEC had long since destabilized and dissipated and only the bent, crushed, and warped frame remained. There, in the center were two perfectly unharmed superconducting rings.

I carefully reached in and removed the first. It seemed undamaged, but I would put it under my microscope to check for microfractures later. As I reached in to pull the second ring out, something magical happened. My finger slipped into the ring, but didn’t come out the other side. I froze for a moment as my mind tried to wrap itself around this event.

I could still feel my finger. There was no pain, or sensation. A quick check showed that the finger had not somehow become invisible as it exited the other side. I could remove my finger, and did so, carefully watching when it came out unharmed.

I slid another finger in, feeling the edge. I could feel the outer edge of the ring, or so it seemed, but the finger went into the hole, and didn’t come out the other side. I glanced down at the other ring, sitting on the worktop, and froze again. There, coming out of the other ring, the one laying on the worktop a full foot from me, was the tip of my finger, carefully feeling the edge of the other superconducting ring.

I snatched my finger back, and looked thru the ring. I could see thru the ring. When I say this, I mean that there was no evidence of anything different, there was no visual clue that extreme weirdness was about to happen. I picked up the ring off the worktop, and slid a finger into it. My heart was beating wildly as I saw my finger reach out of the other ring that I was holding. I slipped that ring over the same finger on the opposite hand. I now had my right pointer sticking out of the ring on my left hand, and my left pointer sticking out of the ring on my right hand. It was bizarre.

A person’s fingers normally fit next to their neighbor, matching the similar contour. Your pointer fingers are not exactly straight because of this, and now mine both appeared to be bending away from the other fingers. I pulled the rings off and sat them on the counter. It was cool, but I needed to do more experiments before I stuck anymore parts of my body in them. I grabbed a small lead box I had constructed once to hold a piece of green quartz, pulled out my pseudo kryptonite, dropped the two rings in it, and closed the lid. Then I went upstairs to get a beer. Maybe two. Maybe more.

The next day I was off work. I spent the morning recovering from my bender, and lunch was spent itemizing a list of testing protocols. I think the part that had me so disturbed was that I could see thru the ring with no visible sign that anything was different. And yet, I put a finger thru and the bizarreness began again.

With my testing protocols set, I gathered my supplies and headed to the basement. After removing the lid off my lead box, my Geiger counter shower no reaction beyond background radiation. I left it on and pointed in the directions of the rings. Then a small steel bar was inserted into the ring. No change in radiation detected, so that was good. Again the impossible happened, and the bar entered into the one ring and exited the other.

I tried both rings, from either direction. There was a correlation: the same entrance side always corresponded to the same opposing ring’s exit side. Even when I turned the rings while the steel bar was sticking thru them, there was no radiation. I was thinking that I’d somehow created some sort of wormhole or gateway. For my next experiment, I shined a laser thru, and it had no effect - the light did not activate the gateway. I blew air thru, and could feel the puff of air thru the gateway. I put a fiber optic cable thru, and finally the laser light transmitted thru the gateway. I put a great many materials thru the gateway: plastics, glass, metals, ceramics, liquids, even a small fridge magnet. All went thru, without trouble, and just the same as any other object.

Next, I took a small LED light attached to a 9-volt battery via a 10-inch wire. The LED stayed lit as it moved thru the gateway, so I knew that it would transmit electricity.

Then I took the rings out to my garage, and slid them over the wires of my arc welder. The arc welder worked fine, in fact the rings made it portable in the sense that my welder transformer could stay where it was, but the rings freed the welding head to go wherever I needed it. The final test was to slide it over the wire to my 220-volt electric dryer. Again, no problems.

So I had learned that any material would go thru what I had begun to call a micro gate in my head, and that light would only transit by moving thru another medium, like a fiber optic cable, that was already in the micro gate.

Now to test other forms of energy. Back in my lab, I put the micro gates in a frame with them pointed so the paired exit/entrance were both facing up. I dropped a marble thru, and it popped up and out the other side, then fell back thru, and out where it came in. It continued to pop up and out each ring in turn, each time not getting quite as high. Eventually the marble stopped, with half sticking out the top side of each micro gate.

I then took a red marker and marked one side of each ring in red, so that the corresponding entrance/exits were both marked the same color. I set the rings in a frame about a foot apart, with the red sides facing each other but in a vertical configuration. I dropped the marble thru. It fell into the lower ring, came out the upper, and fell into the first ring again. It continued to fall, slowly gaining speed. It seemed that it was trapped in a cycle, continually falling until it reached terminal velocity. The marble was glass, and had a pretty low weight; I figured that terminal velocity was likely to only be about 30 mph.

I realized that I was looking at some sort of near perpetual motion, as it was trapped falling inside a gravity well, much like a planet in orbit around a star. I wondered briefly if it would be able to achieve a significant fraction of the speed of light if I did the same experiment in a vacuum? That thought scared me enough to go get a beer, but just one this time.

When I returned, I removed the marble. I had determined that gravity did not pass thru the gateway, but that gravity could move an object thru the gateway. Once it was on the other side of the micro gate then local conditions, such as the direction of up, prevailed. This was a change in a frame of reference that belied all my previous scientific experience

To test this, I placed one ring in a jug of water with the red side up, and held the other over the jug, red side facing down. The water poured out of the ring into the jug. I set the upper ring in a frame to hold it, and pondered what I had.

I needed to discover if I could replicate the original experiment. If so then I had something that would be truly revolutionary. I would need to make some purchases to do that.

I had a good job, I worked 4 days a week as a garbage truck driver. I’m unmarried, happily so, and rent a small older house in an old neighborhood. I have a degree in engineering, which is what got me the garbage driver job. My truck is the only automated truck in use, it only takes one driver to operate, but tends to have small breakdowns, or hiccups, if the driver does not control the system exactly right. So they had to hire an engineer to run it, and keep it running. Since it’s mostly driving, it’s hard to keep my weight down, but I hit the local gym twice a week after work.

Most of my extra play income goes to my hobby of inventing and making. I belong to the local maker group, and teach a welding class there once a month. My lead box was a Maker project for superhero month. The local maker group is part of a statewide organization that has various competitions every other month on various themes, and it had been my entry.

It was going to take about 500 dollars for the materials to recreate the experiment, plus whatever a new set of rings would cost. I kept racking my brain though, trying to think of ways I could make money with the single set of micro gates I had. I could see ways I could use them to save money, like putting one down my well, and letting gravity pull the water thru the gate into the house. Each atmosphere would produce about 14 psi, and it’s about 34 feet for each atmosphere produce by water at depth. The problem is knowing the depth of water in my well, and realizing that the size of the ring would limit the volume that could flow, it would be a good idea but it would take more than one. I also imagined setting them up one above the other with a wire coil suspended inside, and magnets in perpetual falling. Even with a vacuum, the coil would create a magnetic drag so I wouldn’t have to worry about out of control speed.

These were all long term projects that would only save me a little money each month, not make any. The best choice would to be convert a vehicle to run on ac power and simply plug it into the house via a micro gate. I could even run an Ethernet cable thru and hook up a wireless router. A cheap pay as you go plan, and a WiFi calling app and I could save real money. A quick calculation showed that i’d save 120 a month on cell phone plans with data, and over 150 a month on gas.

I had a nice 240v motor already that would be suitable, and even had an old project car that I had been working on in the garage. It was a 1998 factory electric Ford Ranger that I had picked up cheap as it had bad batteries. The seats were badly torn up because an animal got inside as the owner left it parked for several years after it stopped running. I had fixed the interior, but had not yet installed batteries, as until now I was hoping to find a wrecked Tesla. It already had a speed controller, I just needed to replace the motor, and adjust the mounts so it would fit.

After opening it up I realized I was getting too complicated, and just needed to provide a DC current into the controller in lieu of the battery pack. The vehicle was already significantly lighter with the batteries gone.

A quick addition of a new 30 amp breaker to my electrical panel and fed the 2 foot long 110v wire thru the micro gate, and hooked up to a nice 4 plug water proof power box to the wire on the other side of the gate. A little hot glue to hold the gate inside the box, and a quick mount inside the battery compartment. Then I plugged in the DC convertor, and wired it in.

I turned the key, and it showed I was at full power. A full turn of the ignition and I took off, driving around the block. It worked perfect! Back to the garage, I now carefully ran an Ethernet cable thru the micro gate, but from the opposite direction, and fed it out of the hole I had cut in the waterproof box. I ran the cable up into the cab, mounted the router behind the seat, and then plugged it into the second power plug. I still had 2 free plugs for putting power tools to use.

Suddenly, I had an idea. I could use the truck to sell internet access at events, and the power to do things like a hotdog stand or other concession. That would generate income right away. The internet access part would be easy, I would just flash a new rom to my router, and connect up a billing back end. Both were available as open source, and would be easy enough to do, as I could use my existing PayPal to process payments. It would be completely web based, so no customers contact required, just a really powerful antenna, and fast speed.

I setup the router first, I’d have to ask the guys at the Makerspace which places they would suggest. Either way, already I’d be saving money. The more I save, the more my savings would grow. My long term goal was a house off the grid, in the middle of nowhere, as a place to retire to, my short term goal was figuring out the most cost effective way to produce micro gates in quantity.

Once I had them in sufficient numbers it would be all about using them to make tons of money. My mind kept throwing ideas at me. Space travel would become much easier with a micro gate to provide unlimited fuel, water, food, and oxygen, plus FTL communications without the mass penalty of carrying it all with you.

Buy gigabit internet access via fiber from the cheapest provider on the planet, and pipe it thru a micro gate. Then resell it via more wifi micro gates. Partner with an investment company that has stock trade servers to provide faster access to stock data. They could even put their most powerful servers somewhere less expensive to run, yet still milliseconds closer to the major world wide stock exchange centers. It would be the equivalent of being milliseconds from every exchange on Earth all at the same time.

Cable companies would want them as it would give them the same advantages that the satellite providers have, without the excessive start up costs. They could simply mail anyone, anywhere, a cable box that would provide subscription TV service, without any ongoing cable maintenance or paying taxes on miles and miles of company transmission lines.

Tesla would be interested in micro gates I was sure, as I had just made their new battery factory obsolete. I wondered how much cheaper the new model 3 would be if a battery pack wasn’t required.

Micro gates also solved the energy transport problem of satellite based solar power systems. With a cheap micro gate delivery system to space, not low Earth orbit, but inner system solar orbit, each new electric car could not only be self powered with no recharging ever, it could also be used as a power source at home when not being driven.

So many ideas! I’m sure more would come.

That night I dreamt I built a rocket that was propelled by a stream of water sent thru a micro gate. The pressure required was provided by dropping one end of the micro gate in the Marianas trench. It ended up being a bit of a nightmare as I couldn’t find a way to stop the flow. I just kept accelerating, I could turn the ship around and cancel my acceleration, but eventually I would stop for a moment then begin to reaccelerate.

I woke knowing that I needed some sort of fail safe. I needed a way to destroy a gate, to be sure I could put a stop to it. I wasn’t going to do that until I had more, just in case the first was a fluke.

I contacted my source at the University, explained I was looking for more superconducting rings, and wanted as many as I could get. I also explained that I would likely need a permanent source for them and asked where the University got them. I learned I could get 3 more sets, for a total of 6 rings, but that it would cost more. He also gave me the name of the company that produced them.

I drove over after work and purchased the 3 sets for $3000. Then I called the company that made them. I explained what I was looking for, and got a quote for 30 sets, at $750 a set. I told them I would consider it, and call back when ready to order. The company would be cheaper than my source at the University but the 30 set price was the minimum order they would do for a private sale.

Already I could restart the experiment. I had ordered a refill of my dewar of liquid nitrogen and gathered the other materials, including a new stronger plexiglass enclosure. I spent the rest of the evening setting everything up for experimenting after work when I would pick up the liquid nitrogen.

The next day I followed the same procedures. As before there was a blast of light, and the containment structure imploded. The stronger material bent, but did not break or collapse this time. When I tried to open it, I discovered that the implosion was the result of a strong vacuum being created. For some reason the process of creating a micro gate caused all the gas, BEC and other fluid materials to get sucked somewhere other than the container. I had to drill a hole into the plexiglass to release the vacuum as I couldn’t break it any other way without severely damaging the enclosure, which I only had the one.

Once the vacuum released the enclosure popped back into shape. I removed the rings and quickly verified that I now owned a second set of micro gates. A quick reset and I repeated the operation two more times. I now had a total of 4 gate sets. One was still in my truck, the other 3 sets were ready for experimentation!

I cleared my work bench and began my experiments. I soon discovered that these 3 gates acted the same way. Light did not seem to activate the gate function, unless it was crossing thru a medium such as a fiber optic, but the slightest breeze would blow thru. I wondered if perhaps a few photons were passing thru but I just couldn’t detect them. Radio waves too would only transmit when there was a medium to transmit, such as a wire or antenna. Heat and cold passed thru equally well in whatever medium was used. I tested this by taking two copper rods at room temperature, and submerging one end in an ice bath. Because both rods were in the same ice water bath, partially submerged the same amount, and at the same starting temperature, I could compare the temperature change on the other end of the rod. The rod that went thru a micro gate showed the same temperature as the non gate rod. Not super accurate, but enough to show no measurable loss or gain of temperature during transit thru the gate.

It took a bit of work to figure out how to tie a string around one side of a gate. I had to actually loop it around the other gate before I could tie it off on the gate I wanted attached to a string. With the string in place I could determine that the orientation of the ring, and it’s speed had no effect on the other ring.

I did this by swinging the tied ring around my head while sticking a metal rod in and out of the stationary half of the micro gates. The rotation put a small pull on anything inserted into the stationary ring, and as more of the rod passed thru, the spinning ring dropped lower as it’s weight increased. something odd was happening with conservation of momentum and local reference frames.

Finally I tried my electricity generating experiment. I took a very thin walled pvc pipe, wrapped in a tight coil of varnished copper wire. The PVC was slightly smaller than the gate. A little PVC glue held a ring at one end, and a group of neodymium magnets slightly smaller than the pipe were inserted inside. I inserted the magnets so that they were repelling each other inside the pipe. Then I carefully placed the opposing gate on the other side of the pipe, and held it in place, as I tipped the pipe on end. I could feel the weight of the magnets as they slid to the bottom, thru the gate, and came out the top gate and back into the pipe.

A volt meter showed that I was producing dc power, not much, but enough to charge a smartphone. The pipe was only about a foot long, so it was a rather interesting experiment, but not overly useful. I’d have to do some calculations on an 8 foot pipe with multiple windings, and more magnets.

That reminded me that my truck needs a power upgrade. The motor itself was a 3 phase AC motor, and I had researched the speed controller and found it had both an AC and DC input. I left the 110v connection, and added a new 50 amp 240v breaker. I ran the wire thru a second gate, added its exit gate to a new waterproof electric box, and wired it directly into the speed controller.

I tested the truck again, and noticed a slightly quicker response as the power did not have to convert to DC then back to AC again. This also now left me 3 free 110v plugs for running other equipment. I pulled out my spare router that I had been using in the truck and replaced it with my much more powerful home router, which had the internet resale access software installed. I set it for 1 hour of unlimited data for $2. I had an app that would let me start and stop service, or even set a timer so it would start and stop automatically. I would have to set it so that it would not sell access beyond the time I would be leaving with the vehicle.

I put the router from the truck back in the house, as the truck gave me great wifi connection at home when I parked in the garage, but didn’t reach the basement very well.

I was thinking about my truck, and how I was glad I hadn’t installed the motor I had originally considered. It was a motor originally designed for the oil industry, it was waterproof, 800 hp, and 2300 rpm top speed. It would have ripped the tires off the truck. It was the kind of motor you would put in a piece of earthmoving equipment, or an even better idea, in an RV!

I was imagining all the ways I could use micro gates to provide all the comforts of home when it dawned on me that my DC generator was a motor in reverse.

I quickly ran down to the basement where it was still running, and disconnected the cell phone I was charging as a proof of concept. A quick rewire and I started feeding electricity into the coil. The magnets started moving upward, instead of falling. I picked the pipe up of the stand that held it vertical on the workbench. As I turned up the current, it began to feel heavier. I gave it a 180 degree turn, so the magnets were now being propelled down, and it resisted, acting almost like a gyroscope. Once I had it turned around it felt noticeably lighter. I set it on a scale back in the original position, throttled the power back to where the magnets were held steady against gravity. I got the scale to reset to show zero weight. Then I turned up the electricity, as I watched the weight begin to climb on the digital readout.

For every action there is an equal but opposite reaction. The motor was accelerating the magnets up. The result was the motor was pushing itself down. This was understandable. The difference was that it was reusing the same mass. Normally in a closed system you don’t get this effect, but the magnets were behaving as if I was accelerating in an unending supply.

This was awesome! I had imagined selling micro gates to SpaceX so they could refuel their craft, or even pump fuel directly to the rocket motors from an Earth bound tank. This was so much bigger, this was a reactionless drive, something completely out of the realm of possibility of all logic and known science!

There was only one thing to do, shut down the experiments, and go get drunk.

I was into my third beer and was pondering what to do when the magnetic portion of the thruster matched the motors top speed, thrust would stop because the motor was incapable of going faster.

I imagined rotating the pipe, and then running it in reverse, but turning it over like that risked damage at those speeds. I tried to think of some design where one after another would take over, each going a few degrees in a circle until it was facing the opposite direction, then would run backwards gaining thrust from the sliding down of the magnetic projectiles.

Then it dawned on me, I just needed to use 2 gate pairs, and 2 pipes. One pipe would accelerate the magnetic mass in the opposite direction you wanted to travel. At the end it would enter a gate where it’s pair was pointed in the opposite direction, and enter a tube where the moving magnetic mass was used to generate electricity. The resulting drag would impart the momentum of the moving mass in the same direction. At the top of the second tube, the gate pairs would again take the mass and transit it so it was going in the opposite direction. It would then be accelerated and generate thrust.

A constant stream of material would flow thru the gates, both producing thrust in the same direction, while recovering much of the energy. It would take power to get it up to speed, but it could be mostly self sustaining.

One thing I had noticed is that whatever went thru the gate never seemed to touch the inner side of the gate rings. It seemed to be a virtually frictionless, or at least the micro gate acted to center anything going thru, and hold it firmly in the center. That reminded me I had not yet measured what the maximum diameter that would go thru my micro gates.

I was too buzzed to do anything about it but I jotted down notes and a rough drawing, so I would remember the following day, and went to bed.

The next day after another fitful night of sleep, and another boring day at work, I came home with plans. I spent a few minutes re running the wires from my breaker box so that everything only used one gate. That gave me 3 gate pairs to play with. It was time to test one pair to destruction.

My smartphone had a flexible silicone cover, so I plugged my phone charger in the wall, added the 180 degree plug, designed for docking applications, to the end of the charger and connected it thru a gate. The gate and wire got placed behind the silicone case, and now I had a smartphone that would never die.