It was not going quickly, and every eye followed it. It struck the side of the table and caromed. It was going even slower now as though Priss himself were increasing the suspense and making Bloom's triumph the more dramatic. I had a perfect view, for I was standing on the side of the table opposite from that where Priss was.
I could see the ball moving toward the glitter of the zero-gravity field and beyond it I could see those portions of the seated Bloom which were not hidden by that glitter. The ball approached the zero-gravity volume, seemed to hang on the edge for a moment, and then was gone, with a streak of light, the sound of a thunderclap and the sudden smell of burning cloth.
I've seen the scene on television since-along with the rest of the world. I can see myself in the film during that fifteen-second period of wild confusion, but I don't really recognize my face.
And then we discovered Bloom. He was still sitting in the chair, his arms still folded, but there was a hole the size of a billiard ball through forearm, chest, and back. The better part of his heart, as it later turned out under autopsy, had been neatly punched out. They turned off the device. They called in the police. They dragged off Priss, who was in a state of utter collapse. I wasn't much better off, to tell the truth, and if any reporter then on the scene ever tried to say he remained a cool observer of that scene, then he's a cool liar.
It was some months before I got to see Priss again. He had lost some weight but seemed well otherwise. Indeed, there was color in his cheeks and an air of decision about him. He was better dressed than I had ever seen him to be. He said, 'I know what happened now. If I had had time to think, I would have known then. But I am a slow thinker, and poor Ed Bloom was so intent on running a great show and doing it so well that he carried me along with him. Naturally, I've been trying to make up for some of the damage I unwittingly caused.
What happened at the demonstration, in full view of the world, was the worst possible advertisement for zero gravity, and it's important that the story be made clear.
That is why I have asked to see you. It couldn't be so! If Bloom hadn't despised theory so, if he hadn't been so intent on being proud of his own ignorance of theory, he'd have known it himself. The Sun itself moves in a vast orbit about the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. And the Galaxy moves too, in some not very clearly defined way. If the billiard ball were subjected to zero gravity, you might think of it as being unaffected by any of these motions and therefore of suddenly falling into a state of absolute rest-when there is no such thing as absolute rest.
Priss shook his head slowly. He expected the ball to float in mid-air. However, in a spaceship, zero gravity is not the result of an absence of gravitation, but merely the result of two objects, a ship and a man within the ship, falling at the same rate, responding to gravity in precisely the same way, so that each is motionless with respect to the other.
Everything in that field, including molecules of air caught within it, and the billiard ball I pushed into it, was completely massless as long as it remained with it. A completely massless object can move in only one way. Any massless object, such as a neutrino or a photon, must travel at the speed of light as long as it exists.
In fact, light moves at that speed only because it is made up of photons. As soon as the billiard ball entered the zero-gravity field and lost its mass, it too assumed the speed of light at once and left. But imagine how much friction it would take to slow up an object the mass of a billiard ball going at the speed of light. It went through the hundred-mile thickness of our atmosphere in a thousandth of a second and I doubt that it was slowed more than a few miles a second in doing so, a few miles out of , of them.
On the way, it scorched the top of the billiard table, broke cleanly through the edge, went through poor Ed and the window too, punching out neat circles because it had passed through before the neighboring portions of something even as brittle as glass had a chance to split and splinter. If we were in the city, it might have passed through a number of buildings and killed a number of people.
By now that billiard ball is off in space, far beyond the edge of the Solar System and it will continue to travel so forever, at nearly the speed of light, until it happens to strike an object large enough to stop it. And then it will gouge out a sizable crater. I played with the notion and was not sure I liked it. The billiard ball entered the zero-gravity volume almost at a standstill. I saw it.
And you say it left with an incredible quantity of kinetic energy. Where did the energy come from? Priss shrugged. Wherever the indentation is flattened out, general relativity no longer holds, and energy can be created and destroyed freely. That accounts for the radiation along the cylindrical surface of the zero-gravity volume. That radiation, you remember. Bloom did not explain, and, I fear, could not explain.
If he had only experimented further first; if he had only not been so foolishly anxious to put on his show-'. The molecules of air inside the volume. Each assumes the speed of light and conies smashing outward. They're only molecules, not billiard balls, so they're stopped, but the kinetic energy of their motion is converted into energetic radiation.
It's continuous because new molecules are always drifting in, and attaining the speed of light and smashing out. And that is what we must make clear to the public. Anti-gravity is not primarily a device to lift spaceships or to revolutionize mechanical movement. Rather, it is the source of an endless supply of free energy, since part of the energy produced can be diverted to maintain the field that keeps that portion of the Universe flat.
What Ed Bloom invented, without knowing it, was not just anti-gravity, but the first successful perpetual-motion machine of the first class-one that manufactures energy out of nothing. I said slowly, 'Any one of us could have been killed by that billiard ball, is that right. It might have come out in any direction. Priss said, 'Well, massless photons emerge from any light source at the speed of light in any direction; that's why a candle casts light in all directions.
The massless air molecules come out of the zero-gravity volume in all directions, which is why the entire cylinder radiates. But the billiard ball was only one object. It could have come out in any direction, but it had to come out in some one direction, chosen at random, and the chosen direction happened to be the one that caught Ed.
That was it. Everyone knows the consequences. Mankind had free energy and so we have the world we have now. Professor Priss was placed in charge of its development by the board of Bloom Enterprises, and in time he was as rich and famous as ever Edward Bloom had been. And Priss still has two Nobel. I keep thinking. Photons smash out from a light source in all directions because they are created at the moment and there is no reason for them to move in one direction more than in another.
Air molecules come out of a zero-gravity field in all directions because they enter it in all directions. But what about a single billiard ball, entering a zero-gravity field from one particular direction? Does it come out in the same direction or in any direction? I've inquired delicately, but theoretical physicists don't seem to be sure, and I can find no record that. Bloom Enterprises. Someone at the organization once told me that the uncertainty principle guarantees the random emersion of an object entering in any direction But then why don't they try the experiment?
Could it be that for once Priss's mind had been working quickly? Could it be that, under the pressure of what Bloom was trying to do to him, Priss had suddenly seen everything? He had been studying the radiation surrounding the zero-gravity volume. He might have realized its cause and been certain of the speed-of-light motion of anything entering the volume.
Why, then, had he said nothing? One thing is certain. Nothin g Priss would do at the billiard table could be accidental. He was an expert and the billiard ball did exactly what he wanted it to. I was standing right there. I saw him look at Bloom and then at the table as though he were judging angles.
I watched him hit that ball. I watched it bounce off the side of the table and move into the zero-gravity volume, heading in one particular direction. For when Priss sent that ball toward the zero-gravity volume-and the tri-di films bear me out-it was already aimed directly at Bloom's heart! I don't entirely see whether the Two-Field equations would have a finite solution, which they would have to have, of course, if- '-' And then he went off into a brown study.
I prodded him. We can picture it--' I listened politely. Some reporter-not I, unfortunately-caught him between appointments and asked him to elaborate on that and he said: 'I'll have the device eventually; soon, maybe. He might do it now and save time, but I suppose he won't. He can keep his damned title and his Prizes and his kudos from the scholars.
He said, 'Oh, well, forget it. I called up Professor Priss, to make sure he was invited too. He was. Bloom can produce zero gravity, sir? He was fattening Priss for the kill. He had the look of a man in Hell. Asimov's Mysteries , Dell. Asimov's mysteries , Panther. Asimov's Mysteries , Doubleday. Asimov's mysteries , Doubleday. Asimovs Mysteries January , Books on Tape.
Edition Description One or more pages are missing at the end. Table of Contents The singing bell The talking stone What's in a name? Classifications Library of Congress PZ3. A As, PS S5 As. The Physical Object Pagination xi, p.
Number of pages Naturally it was to be expected that when Priss advanced his Two-Field Theory, Bloom would set about at once to build the first practical anti-gravity device. My job was to find human interest in the Two-Field Theory for the subscribers to Tele-News Press, and you get that by trying to deal with human beings and not with abstract ideas.
Naturally, I was going to ask about the possibilities of anti-gravity, which interested everyone; and not about the Two-Field Theory, which no one could understand. I prodded him. Ed Bloom has had an amazing knack at seeing the unobvious in the past. He has an unusual mind.
Ordinary middle-class. Priss was not wealthy. He saw me look. And I think it was on his mind. Or even a particularly desirable one. Maybe so, at that, I thought. Priss certainly had his own kind of reward. He was the third person in history to win two Nobel Prizes, and the first to have both of them in the sciences and both of them unshared.
We play billiards once or twice a week. I beat him regularly. I never published that statement. As a matter of fact, neither one was a novice at billiards. I watched them play once for a short while, after the statement and counterstatement, and both handled the cue with professional aplomb.
Just what do we mean by anti-gravity? I listened politely. If we picture mass as being associated with weight, as it is on the surface of the Earth, then we would expect a mass, resting upon the rubber sheet, to make an indentation. The greater the mass, the deeper the indentation. Any object rolling along the sheet would dip into and out of the indentations it passed, veering and changing direction as it did so.
It is this veer and change of direction that we interpret as demonstrating the existence of a force of gravity. If the moving object comes close enough to the center of the indentation and is moving slowly enough, it gets trapped and whirls round and round that indentation.
In the absence of friction, it keeps up that whirl forever. In other words, what Isaac Newton interpreted as a force, Albert Einstein interpreted as geometrical distortion.
He paused at this point. He had been speaking fairly fluently-for him-since he was saying something he had said often before. But now he began to pick his way. If we carry on our metaphor, we are trying to straighten out the indented rubber sheet. We could imagine ourselves getting under the indenting mass and lifting it upward, supporting it so as to prevent it from making an indentation. A rolling body would pass the non-indenting mass without altering its direction of travel a bit, and we could interpret this as meaning that the mass was exerting no gravitational force.
In order to accomplish this feat, however, we need a mass equivalent to the indenting mass. To produce anti-gravity on Earth in this way, we would have to make use of a mass equal to that of Earth and poise it above our heads, so to speak. General Relativity does not explain both the gravitational field and the electromagnetic field in a single set of equations. Einstein spent half his life searching for that single set-for a Unified Field Theory-and failed. All who followed Einstein also failed.
It would contract, at least over a small area, and become flatter. Gravity would weaken, and so would mass, for the two are essentially the same phenomenon in terms of the indented Universe. If we could make the rubber sheet completely flat, both gravity and mass would disappear altogether. The electromagnetic field is tremendously stronger than the graviational field, so the former could be made to overcome the latter.
If that is also so in the real Universe, then an infinitely intense electromagnetic field would be required and that would mean anti-gravity would be impossible. His grasp on theory is quite faulty. He-he never earned his college degree, did you know that?
I was about to say that I knew that. After all, everyone did. So I nodded my head as if I were filing it for future reference. And finally Priss nodded and said, The gravitational field can be weakened, of course, but if by anti-gravity we mean a true zero-gravity field-no gravity at all over a significant volume of space-then I suspect anti-gravity may turn out to be impossible, despite Bloom. He let it be known that Priss would be invited to the eventual display of the anti-gravity device as soon as it was constructed, and would even be asked to participate in the demonstration.
Some reporter-not I, unfortunately-caught him between appointments and asked him to elaborate on that and he said:. And you can be there, and so can anyone else the press would care to have there.
And Professor James Priss can be there. He can represent Theoretical Science and after I have demonstrated anti-gravity, he can adjust his theory to explain it. Yet he continued his occasional game of billiards with Priss and when the two met they behaved with complete propriety.
One could tell the progress Bloom, was making by their respective attitudes to the press. Bloom grew curt and even snappish, while Priss developed an increasing good humor. I had a little daydream of him announcing final success to me.
He met me in his office at Bloom Enterprises in upstate New York. It was a wonderful setting, well away from any populated area, elaborately landscaped, and covering as much ground as a rather large industrial establishment. Edison at his height, two centuries ago, had never been as phenomenally successful as Bloom.
But Bloom was not in a good humor. He was wearing a lab coat, unbuttoned. I made the obvious guess. There is no general knowledge about what goes on in my laboratories and workshops. It worked but it was not a world beater. Between the two poles of a magnet a region of lessened gravity was produced. It was done very cleverly.
A Mossbauer-Effect Balance was used to probe the space between the poles. It is an extremely delicate method for probing a gravitational field and it worked like a charm. There was no question but that Bloom had lowered gravity. The trouble was that it had been done before by others. Bloom, to be sure, had made use of circuits that greatly increased the ease with which such an effect had been achieved-his system was typically ingenious and had been duly patented-and he maintained that it was by this method that anti-gravity would become not merely a scientific curiosity but a practical affair with industrial applications.
That so? Well, calculate the energy input in Brazil and here, and then tell me the difference in gravity decrease per kilowatt-hour. Everyone agrees that merely lessening the intensity of the field is no great feat.
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