Kert Rats meets Red Frawd title

the previous generation
These are the voyages of the Starhip Boobyprize,
her continuing mission:
to deplore strange new worlds,
to shriek at strange new life and new civilisations,
to cautiously come from where
no man(1) will come from again.

Ian Stewart

1 Relative it Ain’t

Captain’s log: stardate the day before yesterday, whatever that is. Was? The situation has become extremely confused. The Boobyprize has become reflected in time into a past series that never existed. The cast has become hoplessly muddled and I wouldn’t be surprised to find that some of them are from a different programme altogether. (Were we originally accompanied by the Jupiter Corporation Deep Space Mining Vessel Red Frawd?) The plot-line has become even more muddled and seems unaware of which series we are in. At first Mr Outa-Data supected we had seeped through the fabric of space-time into an alternate universe, but we now put the problem down to serious case of overindulgent channel-hopping in Virtual Unreality. We are not in another Universe we are in the wrong lane of the information superhighway, reversing the wrong way down the contraflows of the continuum. Situation normal.

Lieutenants Woof and Outa-Data were just finishing up their shift when they heard a faint whining noise. It seemed to be coming from one of the holodecks. Woof was worried: it could be a cyberspatial break-in. Physical security was unbeatable in the year 2366 the Boobyprize had DNA-sensitive robot guards, for example but electronic security was another thing altogether. There were just too many smart aliens with advanced degrees in electronics.

The room was full of an acrid smoke. It had to be a physical break-in, which was impossible. Woof started to sweat, wishing himself safely back among his fellow Klingfilms. The smoke began to clear...

There was a strange contraption in the middle of the holodeck, a delicate framework of shiny metal, glass, and what appeared to be off-white plastic. It had an old-fashioned look. A humanoid alien was sitting in the middle of it, hidden inside a black cloak. He moved.

"Security," Woof barked. "This room is sealed. Come out with your hands raised. Do not touch any lasers, phasers, dazers, grazers, razors, or other weaponry, or you will be instantly annihilated by our biocybernetic defence systems." Woof was bluffing, but maybe the strange being wouldn’t know that. The alien climbed out. "Identification?" Woof growled.

"Uh you want to know my name, sir?"

He sounded polite, and rather old-fashioned. What was he trying to pull? "Identify yourself immediately," Woof said, thumbing his tricorder to call Captain Emeritus Kert on the bridge. Kert would alert the rest of his Rats to the danger, Kert was smart.

"You may call me the Time Traveller. I am a friend of a Mr. Herbert Wells."

Outa-Data ran the statement through his memory banks. Herbert wait, did he mean Herbert George Wells? H.G.Wells, the famous science fiction writer? Woof spread the alien out against a wall and searched him. He found some very strange items, including a quill pen. He looked closely at the machine. It was made of steel, tin, glass, and crystal, with beautifully engineered brass fittings. Some parts were made of a white plastic material which Outa-Data couldn’t place.

He knew the alien’s story made no sense but somehow it sounded convincing. There was a kind of ancient feel to the equipment, a genuine antique.

"This is very interesting," Outa-Data said. "My sensors are registering a massive newtino field, of the kind normally associated with time warps."

"How did you get here and what are you up to?" Woof snarled.

"I had no choice, gentlemen. I was on my way to the distant future when I smelt smoke. I turned off the machine, but too late. The temporal selection gear has stripped its teeth." He fiddled inside the machine for a moment and pulled out a very sad-looking disc of the plastic stuff, a wisp of smoke still rising from it. "Perhaps you could make me a new one."

"That depends on what sort of plastic you need," replied Outa-Data.

"Excuse me, sir, but what is ‘plastic’?"

He was either a very good actor or he was telling the truth. He didn’t know what plastic was. "White stuff, like that," said Outa-Data.

"Oh, this? This is ivory."

At that moment Outa-Data became convinced. Nobody could get hold of ivory in 2366. For one thing, trade in the stuff had been prohibited for a thousand years. For another, the last elephant had been killed by poachers nine hundred and fifty years ago. What ivory remained was in museums, priceless, and had aged to a dull yellow. This stuff was fresh.

"I am afraid we cannot help you," said Outa-Data, explaining why. The Time Traveller looked close to tears. "Then I am trapped," he whispered.

"Possibly," said Outa-Data. "Then again, possibly not. If there’s a way, the Kert Rats will find it."

"Kert Rats?" he enquired anxiously.

"The Crew of the Starship Boobyprize, under the joint command of Captain Emeritus James T Kert and Captain Renault Pickup(2). Now, tell me how this machine functions, and I will see what I can come up with."

"You may recall that in the 1894-5 issue of The New Review my friend Mr. Wells published a story called ‘The Time Machine’."

"Of course," replied Outa-Data, who knew everything. I have always felt it was fitting that the magazine could not decide which year to be published in."

"It was based on a true invention. Mr. Wells himself explained the main idea, when he said that ‘There is no difference between Time and any other of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it.’ This machine moves in a different direction from our consciousness, that’s all. When it works."

"Interesting," said Outa-Data. "Not entirely true, but interesting."

"Not entirely true?" So Outa-Data had to explain to him some basic relativity, the kind the kids get in third grade. Starting with Special Relativity.

"The main thing to remember," he said, "is that ‘relativity’ is a silly name."

"Then why use it?" asked Pickup.

"It is a historical accident, sir, but we are stuck with it. Unless the alien can get his machine working, go back, and persuade Einstein to invent a better one."

"I’m not an alien."

"Where are you from?"

"Hampstead Heath."

"Isn’t that somewhere near the Yuppon Cluster, Mr Outa-Data?"

Outa-Data explained that the whole point of Special Relativity is not that ‘everything is relative’, but that one particular thing the speed of light is unexpectedly absolute. If you’re travelling in a shuttlepod at 50 kph and you fire a positronic beamer forwards, so that the positron moves at 500 kph relative to the pod, then it will hit a stationary target at a speed of 550 kph, adding the two components (Fig.1a). However, if instead of firing the beamer you switch on a torch, which ‘fires’ light at a speed of 1,079,280,000 kph (2.998 x 105 kps), then that light will not hit the stationary target at a speed of 1,079,280,050 kph. It will hit it at 1,079,280,000 kph, exactly the same speed that it would have had if the shuttlepod had been stationary. (Fig.1b)

fig 1

Figure 1 (a) In Newtonian mechanics, relative velocities combine by addition. (b) In Relativistic mechanics, the speed of light is constant.

"You can prove this for yourself," Outa-Data told him. "You need a cardboard box about the size of a shoebox, a torch, and a mirror."

"Cardboard? Torch?"

"Oh, excuse me you would call them a wooden box and a lantern." Outa-Data looked around and found a suitable box in a corner. He picked it up and it miaowed. He opened it and looked in. "Schr dinger, come out of there." The ship’s cat scrambled out.

"Stupid cat," growled Woof. "Never knows whether it’s alive or dead."

"It is in a quantum superposition," said Outa-Data.

"Yes, a superposition of the states ‘asleep’ and ‘greedy’."

"Interesting... Anyway, you cut a small hole in the front of the box permit me to borrow your phaser, Mr Woof, I promise to use low power. This lets the light in. Now cut a flap in the top like this so that you can open the box and look inside; and write ‘THE SPEED OF LIGHT IS 1,079,280,000 KPH’ on the bottom of the inside of the box. Stand still, close the flap, aim the lantern at the mirror so that the beam reflects back into the box through the hole, and open the flap to read off the speed of light. Then run towards the mirror and repeat the experiment. Strangely enough, you will get the answer 1,079,280,000 kph both times..."

"That," said the Time Traveller haughtily, "is a silly experiment."

"True," admitted Outa-Data. "But with more sophisticated equipment you get the same answer as Albert Michelson and Edward Morley discovered between 1881 and 1894. They were trying to detect the motion of the Earth relative to the ‘ether’, all all-pervading fluid that was thought to transmit all electromagnetic radiation, light included. If Newtonian physics were correct, that motion would show up as a difference in the apparent speed of light when the Earth was at opposite points of its orbit, moving in opposite directions. But they could not find any difference in the speed at all, even with very sensitive equipment."

"Yes, I know about their work," said the Time Traveller. "It seems to me that all it proves is that the Earth must carry the luminiferous ether along with it when it moves in orbit."

That, thought Outa-Data, had never occurred to me. I must recompute...

To Be Continued in Epsiode 2: Something Strange About Light

Ian Stewart

1 Relative it Ain’t

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