Page 12 - Unlikely Stories 4

The Discontinuator

“Thank you. Although your research is not well-publicized, I am
aware of work in your field. I believe your novel approach to creating
a classical vacuum via unexplored implications of quantum
electrodynamics is, despite its radical nature, the most likely to
succeed.”
“You do, eh? Well, it’s nice to receive a vote of confidence from a
member of the tax-paying public.”
Gregorian, noting that the professor’s prandial progress was a
direct function of his listening rather than talking, hurriedly resumed.
“Briefly, the traditional notion of an absolute vacuum has persisted
as an abstract possibility despite the modern understanding that no
region of the cosmos can be utterly void. In the quantum field, virtual
particles and energy cannot be quiesced to zero. Cryogenic
molecular-beam pumps, even in the advanced form your laboratory
has designed, still leave a density greater than that of interstellar
space. What you have already achieved in that experimental apparatus
is noteworthy, but you saw what others did not: the addition of
quantum entanglement as a forced complement of pumped vacuum
to purge a minute region of all possible mass-energy contents.”
“That is a crude way of putting it,” said Killeton, lifting the top
slice of his sandwich’s bread sufficiently to verify the age and
chemical composition of its stratified components. “And certainly
incomplete.”
“Agreed. But you combined that hypothesis with the practical
application of the new hyperspheric quantum field entanglement trap,
creating the device you are about to test: a discontinuator that might
somehow, against all logic, create a classical vacuum.”
“Discontinuator? That’s not what’s it’s called, even in the few
articles I have not been able to prevent being published. It’s the
world’s first absolute hypobaric chamber at nanometric scale. It will
draw a lot of power for a very short period of time: we’ve been
accumulating huge storage batteries for a single surge of around one
hundred megavolts. During that instant, in that very small space,
every sort of particle and wave, real or virtual, will be drawn away
from the central point. Every quantum of mass or energy will be
forced by a global centrifugal force to chase its entangled partner on
the periphery and collapse or cancel out when it gets there, a one way
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