Influx Read Free

bullshit to me.”
    Grady took a swig from a forty-ounce beer, then wiped his beard with his gloved hand. “Superfluids are very real, Mr. Johnson. A superfluid is a state in which matter behaves like a fluid with zero viscosity and zero entropy. Looks like a normal liquid, but at ultralow temperatures flows without friction. Point is: In certain extreme environments the standard model of physics breaks down. Look . . .”
    He approached a glass enclosure mounted to one side of the tower and slipped his arms through a pair of thick silvery gloves in its face. The others watched as inside the glovebox Grady unscrewed a smoking ceramic cylinder from the side of the monstrous assembly. He then grabbed a nearby glass beaker and carefully poured a clear, steaming liquid into it from the cylinder.
    “This is helium-4 at slightly below two-point-one-seven Kelvin.” He held the beaker up and to the side. Even though the beaker was made of thick glass, the liquid inside dripped through the bottom as if it were a window screen. It hit the floor of the glovebox and quickly evaporated.
    Johnson looked surprised. “Holy shit. It’s pouring through glass.”
    “Exactly. In a quantum state strange things happen. It’s paring matter down to its essence. Subatomic particles. Slipping between the cracks of standard physics.” He screwed the cylinder back in the monstrous assembly. “Each particle of helium-4 is a boson, by virtue of its zero spin. At the lambda point, its quantum effects become apparent on a macroscopic scale—meaning individual atoms are no longer relevant within the liquid.
Superfluid vacuum theory
is an approach in theoretical physics where space-time itself is viewed as a superfluid. The fluid of reality.”
    Kulkarni frowned. “Superfluid vacuum theory? Why . . . What are you trying to do here, Mr. Grady?”
    “We’re attempting to reflect gravitational waves, Doctor Kulkarni.”
    Kulkarni was momentarily speechless. He turned to Alcot. “Is he serious, Bert? And you agreed to this?”
    Alcot shrugged. “They say it’s important to stay active in retirement.”
    Kulkarni turned back to Grady. “What on earth made you think this was feasible?”
    “Because I can see it right here.” Grady pressed a finger against his head.
    Kulkarni just stared.
    Grady held up a hand. “All right, you’re skeptical. Fair enough.” He gestured to the tower. “A superfluid flows without friction. And superconductors allow electrons to flow without resistance. What we did was suspend a graphene coil within a superfluid.”
    “Why graphene?”
    “It’s a superconducting film. Replicates electrons moving through a near-perfect vacuum. Isolates particles from interference. Graphene also exhibits exotic effects under certain conditions.”
    “I’m still not seeing how this relates to your goal, Mr. Grady.”
    “Right. I needed a charged superconducting sheet. The quantum mechanical nonlocalizability of the negatively charged Cooper pairs, protected from the localizing effect of decoherence by an energy gap, causes the pairs to undergo nongeodesic motion in the presence of a gravitational wave.”
    Marrano threw up his hands. “I told you, Professor, this guy is just stringing words together at random.”
    Kulkarni held up a reassuring hand to Marrano and focused back on Grady. “Go on.”
    Grady shrugged. “The surrounding
non-superconducting
ionic lattice is localized and so executes geodesic motion, moving along with space-time, while the Cooper pairs execute non-geodesic motion—thereby accelerating relative to space-time. The different motions lead to a separation of charge. That charge separation causes the graphene to become electrically polarized, generating a restoring Coulomb force. The back action of the Coulomb force on the Cooper pairs magnifies the mass supercurrents generated by the wave—producing a reflection.”
    Kulkarni grimaced. “Mr. Grady, if this was so, why do Bose-Einstein