LETTERS from CRICKET SONG

LETTERS from CRICKET SONG

Missive the Second

He Who Swaggers

Faster Than Light (c).

Dateline: Tuesday, July 25, 2000, at 1900 hours CDT.

Conway, Arkansas, USA

By D. Ebenezer Baldwin Bowles

CornDancer & Company

(A change in the weather is known to be extreme.)

At this crisp moment, when ('round midnight) the cool, north summer wind flows so surprisingly through the open windows of Cricket Song, my Spirit has the audacity to soar, to become expansive and embrace the realm of dreaming and aspiration.

The heat wave is broken.

Instead of the hum of refrigerated air, I hear the song of the crickets, the rustling of magnolia branches, the sweetly tuned wind chimes jingling in the night. What a perfect counterpoint to the grit and friction of the daytime frenzy, when business and discourse ruled the succession of appointed hours.

All can be right and good in the universe -- for an uncertain time, in a certain kind of insulated and isolated world, where the intellect becomes superluminal, and the heart is becalmed, and the questing is momentarily satisfied.

Here in the ordered privacy of my urban hermitage, the midsummer night is rich with harmony.

The Cold Eye Casts a Warning

I had intended to write about politics, specifically the technology campaign agendas of U.S. presidential candidates George Bush and Albert Gore -- to dissect and analyze, compare and contrast, judge and pontificate -- but I was lured into other avenues by the arrival of Calliope, a most welcome visitor. Just as well. Mr. Bush's Technology and the New Economy and Mr. Gore's Building American Prosperity in the Information Age will have to wait.

Instead, I've got new, interlinked ventures to tend and nurture: CornDancer & Company, Wilton's Blue Nudes, the developmental web site, computer networks, youthful aspirations. The Cold Eye looks upon all this newness and casts a warning.

Being awash in the swift current of a beginning is a heady, exhilarating, dangerous time.

To launch an independent venture on the shoestring of intellectual capital demands a bit of swagger. Any being who swaggers, however, surely will fall. (Trust me. I'm an expert in this particular area of endeavor.) How do we react to the inevitable setback? Right oneself, move forward with a purposeful stride, pass stage one, and continue the enterprise.

The exhilaration of a beginning is too quickly tempered by the discovery of a long road ahead.

"We were always outstanding at the forty-yard dash," my spiritual advisor Gerald would say when we pondered the meaning of a strange, new thing we called sobriety. "The problem was that the race we ran, again and again, was a hundred yards long."

This missive, the second from Cricket Song, is delivered with the swagger of the sprinter taking his starting block. Forty yards, full speed ahead. Nothing to it; swift, emotive, certain. This time, however, the start also supposes continuance, further development, a middle, the inevitable end. How far shall I carry the enterprise? "The full hundred yards," observes Oksob de Opposite, cold-eyed guardian of my Opposite Loft.

I'll Gladly Pay You Thursday for a Hamburger Today

I was driven to the starting block by the momentum of a ruling passion for computer technology and its rich library of metaphor. If I could hitch on ride on light ( c ) as it passes through cesium, for instance, I would already be done with it. In fact, I very well could have run the full hundred yesterday and got to the end before I even started. None of this would be necessary. (Editor's Note: There's a fallacy to Ebenezer's speculation. It involves the dead weight of information whenever it rides upon light's swift back. The fallacy may reveal itself a few paragraphs hence. You can't be certain of anything in the quantum flux.)

"Our experiment shows that the generally held misconception that nothing can move faster than the speed of light is wrong," Dr. Lijun Wang announced in a news release from NEC Research Institute on July 19, 2000. "Einstein's Theory of Relativity still stands, however, because it is still correct to say that information cannot be transmitted faster than the vacuum speed of light."

One of the reasons I so enjoy science, especially its fanciful branch of theoretical physics, is the close ties it maintains to the Spirit of Lewis Carroll. Dr. Wang is another manifestation of Alice in a quantum wonderland.

What moves faster than the speed of light? Light does, of course.

Optically pumped-up ("optical pumping") with laser beams, the natural cesium inside Dr. Wang's 6-centimeter-long test tube becomes so excited that it allows a pulse of light to race through the tube at incredible speed. The pulse arrives at the other side exactly 62 nanoseconds sooner than it was launched. (Read it again if you must. I'm sure I got it right Click this link, "Detailed statement on faster-than-c light pulse propagation," and see for yourself.)

"Our experiment does show that the generally held misconception 'nothing can move faster than the speed of light' is wrong," Dr. Wang stated. "The statement only applies to objects with a rest mass. Light can be viewed as waves and has no mass. Therefore, it is not limited by its speed inside a vacuum."

Faster-Than-c Superluminal Light Pulse Propagation

To put it another way, light in a vacuum travels only as fast as light. To travel faster than itself, light needs the addition of an "anomalous dispersion," something "not naturally occurring on earth," to excite it to previously unheard-of speeds. Replace the vacuum with cesium, chill the cesium with laser blasts to minus 273.15 degrees Celsius, pump a "smooth light pulse" through it, and presto: 62 nanoseconds ago the light pulse has crossed over to the other side.

The implications for computer technology are profound beyond measure. (OK. Almost beyond measure.) So profound that the online computer trade press reported the news a full day before its wider release in the popular journal "Nature." (An editor at "Nature" complained that the news got out before it was released.)

If Dr. Wang's research could be translated into a cesium chip, think how fast information could be sent across the network!

However, the prospect that one of us could sit down at the screen and watch as Windows 2000 boots before the power switch is engaged -- well, that is a flight of fancy. If I understand anomalous dispersion correctly, information attached to light just slows light down. "Information coded using a light pulse cannot be transmitted faster than c using this effect," the report states. Dr. Wang is perplexed by this apparent speed break. "The detailed reasons are very complex and a still under debate," he wrote. "However, using this effect, one might be able to increase information transfer speed up to c."

A superluminal speed limit makes good sense to me. The dead weight of ones and zeroes means that we can't get too far ahead of ourselves for our own good. We've just got to run the race the natural way -- and run it all the way to the finish line.

WATCH FOR MISSIVE THE THIRD in your mailbox just before midnight on Friday, July 28, 2000. If you don't want any of my missives, let me know. I'll remove you from the subscription list immediately upon demand. On the other hand, if you want to add a friend or associate to the list, please forward their name and email address to ebenezer@corndancer.com

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