The US Department of Defense is responsible for managing the affairs of the various branches of the US military. That means they play a pivotal role in the development of new weapons systems and part of that role is approving funding requests by corporations for funding of those development programs. To get government funding for a weapons development program, a corporation has to submit a proposal outlining the type of weapon system being developed and a justification of why the DOD should budget money for that system development.
The justifications are always glowing descriptions of the new weapon systems's capabilities and how those capabilities will improve the fighting capabilities of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. They're filled with technical jargon and acronyms that are pretty confusing to most of the people reviewing the proposals because most of those people come from the military and don't have the background to understand the science involved.
I'm sort of the exception to that rule because I have a PhD in Physics. As a result, I consult for those making the decision about a particular funding request. That means I review the program and evaluate it for the possibility of success and practicality.
When I went to Hygraph Magnetics that day, I was certain I was going to find their proposal to be impossible to achieve. That wasn't because Hygraph Magnetics had a bad reputation like some companies. Hygraph had done a lot of the preliminary development on the Navy "rail gun", the weapon that accelerates projectiles to supersonic speeds and is devastating to targets. Hygraph had very talented physicists and electronics people, but on the surface, this project just seemed to violate the laws of physics.
The Hygraph Magnetics proposal was to use an intense magnetic field to reduce the physical size of an object in order to enable more efficient transport as well as to improve secrecy of said transport. One can imagine the strategic advantage of transporting hundreds of trucks, tanks, and the like to a battle zone in one aircraft. The enemy would think only a few pieces of equipment were landing when in fact, it would be possible to transport all the equipment for an entire army on that aircraft. Those were some of the words in the justification.
In theory, it would not be possible to reduce the size of an object by using a very strong magnetic field to force the atoms closer together. The electrical force that keeps the protons, electrons and neutrons in their normal spatial relationships would have to be overcome and since the force would increase as those particles were forced closer together, the magnetic force required would be gargantuan. The other problem is that some neutrons would probably escape and collide with other atoms which would release more neutrons to collide with other atoms. That's how the first atomic bombs worked. An explosive charge forced the atoms together releasing neutrons and created a chain reaction of neutrons bombarding atoms and releasing the resultant energy.
Even were such a thing possible, the practical difficulty is creating a strong enough magnetic field to shrink the object and then maintaining that field during transport. The other problem is unless the mass of the object can be reduced, i.e. some of the atoms are removed, the object would remain at the same mass, so even though it might be very small, it wouldn't be any lighter in weight.
I voiced these concerns to my supervisor, Major General Hayes, but he said Hygraph had done the impossible with the rail gun, and they may well have done it again. The next week, I drove into the parking lot of Hygraph Magnetics and then went through the armed guard's admittance process.
He eyed me up and down, then checked his roster of approved visitors. Upon finding my name, he looked up and asked me for identification. I showed him my Department of Defense ID and he compared the number with the number on his list. I then had to put each finger on a print reader and wait for the prints to be sent to NCIC for verification. My prints came back as verified, so he took my cell phone, locked it in a cabinet, and had me stand in an airport-style x-ray enclosure while he looked at the screen. He nodded, told me to have a seat in front of a camera, and then took my picture. About ten seconds later, a credit card sized badge with my picture and name appeared from a slot on the machine.
He attached the badge to a neck cord, handed it to me, and said "Welcome to Hygraph Magnetics, Mr. Robinson. I'll call the scientist who'll show you around." I was a little surprised I hadn't been strip-searched.
The scientist wasn't what I'd expected because Rhonda Sims wasn't a man and she wasn't wearing glasses thick enough to use for telescope lenses. Rhonda was a redhead about my age of twenty-eight, and was about like any other woman except she was pretty plain and she had bigger than average breasts. I knew they had to be pretty big because she couldn't get her lab coat buttoned all the way up. Under that lab coat was a frilly blouse, also open at the neck, and under that was some really fantastic cleavage.
Rhonda had a nice ass too, and as she led me back to the conference room for the introductory meeting, I wondered if she was intentionally making her ass sway like that or if it was just natural.
The meeting wasn't going to be a full-blown drinks and canapés type of meeting. General Hayes had already attended that meeting. Instead, I'd be meeting with Rhonda and two other scientists who would explain the theory and answer my questions. After that, I'd be shown the progress of their research to date.
I'd read the report from the first meeting, so I already knew the theory Hygraph was trying to translate into practical application, and it was pretty sketchy. There were no detailed descriptions of the process or equipment involved. In this meeting, I got the same presentation I'd already read and it didn't change my mind. I did ask a couple of questions and got answers I wasn't supposed to understand.
That's pretty common when you deal with very intelligent people who stake their jobs and reputations on some new theory. They'll speak in scientific terms either because they can't speak in simple terms or out of the hope you'll be impressed. They got a lot more reasonable when I informed them I had a PhD in Physics. Their answers weren't any better, but at least they weren't trying to bullshit me.
When the meeting was over, Rhonda said she'd show me the lab and the state of their equipment to date. I said that would be fine. What I was hoping was after a short review of equipment I was sure wouldn't work, I could go back home.
After Rhonda swiped her badge through the badge reader, the lab door buzzed to let us in.
"Matt? It was Matt, wasn't it? Matt, this is where we shrink things", she said. "At first, we could only achieve a few milliseconds of minimal change no matter how large the magnetic field or how small the object. Once we removed the magnetic field, the object expanded to normal size again.
The second problem was that we could shrink things in size, but not in mass. That was one of your questions during the meeting -- what did we do about mass. Unfortunately, the answers you got were those prepared by our program security department and don't really contain much useful information.
"The answer was both simple and complex. As you know, Einstein developed the equation we all use relative to energy and mass -- energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. That equation has been shown to be correct for any reference system in which the mass is measured. Energy is always a constant for any object and is determined by the mass of the object in a particular frame of reference and the speed of light."
It was obvious Rhonda knew what she was talking about, but I wasn't convinced their proposal had any merit.
"It would seem then, that to reduce the size of an object, one would have to reduce the mass of the object. That's possible, but only if you can separate some of the protons and neutrons, and even if you could, you'd generate a lot of heat and radiation. You'd essentially be creating an atomic explosion."
Rhonda smiled.
"Yes, that's true...unless you can find a way to reduce the energy in the system relatively slowly. I did."
I grinned what was probably a condescending grin.
"You're not going to tell me you figured out a way to reduce the speed of light are you? The speed of light is a constant in any frame of reference. That's the basic premise of Einstien's theory."
"No, we thought about that before deciding it wasn't possible without warping the space/time continuum and there were several rather nasty unintended consequences from doing that. I thought we could remove energy from the system though. That's what I designed, sort of an energy sponge. We add enough energy to the system via an electromagnet to start the reduction process going, and then siphon off the energy until the object is as small as we want it to be.
That energy is converted into electricity to power the electromagnet, so the process is somewhat self-sustaining. After the initial application of electricity to the electromagnet, most of the required energy comes from that scavenged from the process. The result is a reduction in both physical size and the mass. It still happens pretty fast -- just a few seconds -- but not so fast the object explodes. It also lasts so there's no need for any equipment to continue the electormagnetic field. When we want to return the object to it's original size, we just add the energy back to the system."
"And how do you do that -- add the energy back into the system?"
Rhonda frowned then.
"That's the part we haven't worked out yet and why we need the funding."
I was still skeptical.
"I'll have to see a demonstration before I'm convinced."
Rhonda grinned.
"We knew you would, so I've prepared a specimen. It's by the reduction chamber over here."
