The Field Interchange Hypothesis Continued

When I first heard about the supersymmetry and supergravity theories in the mid 1980's (although they had been under development since the early 1970's) I was struck by the apparent similarity to the more intuitive field interchange idea as presented in these pages. The symmetry transformation invoked in supersymmetry entails interchanging the spins of fermions and bosons - the matter and force exchange particles, respectively. This leads to the creation of a whole new class of particles. In this new class, fermions (quarks and leptons) with non-integer spins acquire integer spins, while bosons (the photon, Z0, W+, and W-, and graviton) normally assigned integer spins, acquire non-integer spins.

When supersymmetry is extended from the global level to a local level it is recast as the supergravity theory. In some versions of supergravity there is a one to one correspondence between the particles that make up our existence, and the postulated superparticles which differ in spin from our particles by 1/2 unit. But these superpartners differ in another way from the normal particles of matter. They couple strongly via the gravitational field rather than the electromagnetic field as our particles do. This sounds much like the recipe for the field interchange idea, except the field interchange idea decomposes the gravitational field into its basic constituents - space and time, - and assigns these as the components of a Maxwell type field whose intrinsic strength is 32 billion, billion times stronger than the warpage of space-time associated with ordinary mass. Another bonus that falls out of the field interchange concept is that it lends itself to cancellation of divergences since both the spatial and temporal components of the GC field are bipolar, exactly like the electromagnetic field which serves as a template. The electromagnetic field was long ago renormalized for the same reason.

I hesitate to bring this controversial subject up considering that many of the ideas proposed here are pretty far out and speculative to begin with, and not yet completely solidified. But, there are a number of well documented reports on record that claim temporal shifts as one of the aftereffects of a close encounter with a UFO. I am not referring to the so-called abduction reports where witnesses claim a period of missing time they cannot account for, but to extremely close encounters with unconventional aerial objects that to the witness appear to last but a few seconds or minutes but result in apparent local time displacements considerably longer. These time displacements as measured on several timepieces are typically of the same magnitude despite the fact that the timepieces are physically independent of each other, and in some cases utilize different mechanisms for keeping time.

One such widely publicized case occurred in northwestern Minnesota on August 27, 1979 in the early hours of the morning. A deputy sheriff by the name of Val Johnson while investigating a peculiar light source in the distance suddenly saw the source racing towards his cruiser at lightning speed covering the estimated mile and a half distance almost instantaneously. His last recollection was of a blinding light and breaking glass before he was knocked unconscious. On awakening he found himself on the gravel shoulder of the highway and his vision temporarily impaired. Later examination of the vehicle revealed peculiar damage to the bonnet indicating impact of some hard object from above, and to the windshield indicating, strangely enough, pressure from inside the vehicle pushing outward on the windshield. Additionally, a spring loaded roof antenna was bent over in a clean bend at a 60 degree angle about 5 and 1/2 inches above the base spring. Perhaps the most curious outcome of this apparent close encounter was that the cruiser's electric clock on the dash and the officer's mechanical wind-up wristwatch were both slow by exactly the same amount - 14 minutes, even though they had been set to the proper time at 7 P.M. when the deputy came on duty.

There are numerous other cases where a close encounter with a strange aerial object resulted in vehicle, or household clocks, and wristwatches being advanced or retarded by various intervals of time. To cite just one, on May 29, 1988 a resident of the New Milford, Connecticut area Robert Nellis and his friend Jeff observed a massive lighted object approach their parked truck from across a nearby lake. The object was described as being tear shaped with numerous multicolored lights around its periphery, and at least the size of a football field. Passing directly over the truck at an estimated altitude of 500 feet, the object blocked out the night sky before moving off to the northwest. The total duration of the sighting seemed to have been about 10 minutes, but the clock in the pickup truck, and Jeff's watch were both found to be slow by 40 minutes compared to their clocks at home. This case is described in Contact of the 5th Kind, by Phillip Imbrogno and Marianne Horrigan, on pages 59-60.

If we assume that these events are close encounters with the technological products of star-faring civilizations the strong localized warping of time makes considerable sense. In 1994 Miguel Alcubierre advanced a concept for a warp drive to effectively circumvent the natural velocity limit c. His strategy was to have the space-time manifold be contracted in front of the spaceship and expanded behind the spaceship, while the volume of space containing the ship would remain essentially flat. The result would be a pulling force in the direction of the space-time contraction, and a pushing force from the expanding manifold behind the vessel. As the vessel was propelled along in this fashion the crew in the interior flat-space region would experience no acceleration forces since the distortion of the space-time metric would correspond to a free fall geodesic. Within the overall volume of the warp drive the velocity limit of light c is obeyed, but as Alcubierre has shown any arbitrarily large velocity is possible including superluminal velocities as seen from a global perspective, without violating the precepts of special relativity. This is possible since the fabric of space-time is contracted in the forward direction like a collapsing universe and swollen behind the vessel in the manner of an expanding universe, with the craft swept along in the traveling disturbance.

If the concepts presented in this paper are at all valid, a technological strategy for creating a real working Alcubierre warp drive suggests itself. If spatial charges and chronetic monopoles, with properties as delineated earlier(2nd definintion), could be synthesized in bulk quantity in some ultra high energy particle accelerator, and safely stored for later use, they could be harnessed to induce the warpage of the space-time continuum about a spacecraft. The trick would be to have both types of particles circulate coaxially in the same circular loop to mimic an artificial gravity field that is repulsive on one side of the loop and attractive on the other side. A circular path would produce a uniform field within the area enclosed by the loop, or in the case of an elongated solenoid within the solenoids volume. A non-circular current path like a rectangle, or triangle would produce less uniform regions at the apexes.

In this arrangement the spatial charges would produce a bipolar chronetic field in which the diverging field lines would expand (slow) time on one side of the loop, and the converging field lines would contract (accelerate) time on the other side. The chronetic monopoles circulating in the same track (or perhaps, just inside the radius of the other particle track) would do the same thing for the spatial field - creating an expanding spatial field on one side of the loop and a contracting spatial field on the other side. As long as the polarity of the charges and monopoles, and their direction of circulation were selected properly, the requirement for Alcubierre's warp drive would be fulfilled. Since the GC field associated with these particles is predicted to be some 32 billion, billion times stronger than the space-time warpage associated with ordinary matter, one of the objections to the practicality of the Alcubierre warp drive - insufficient distortion of the manifold with known mechanisms - is considerably mitigated.

In the plane defined by the loop the spatial and chronetic field lines would be parallel and no acceleration forces would be experienced by the crew in this region. However, it doesn't make sense that this region would have identical properties to the flat unaffected space outside the warp system, since the field could be raised to any arbitrarily large value. Something must be different. A logical answer could be that matter in this region becomes more resistant to acceleration in proportion to the strength of the field, but still does not experience acceleration forces. It would constitute a kind of inertial stasis field. The crewmembers immersed in this region would become more immune to acceleration forces.

Another consideration is that it might not be necessary to warp both space and time to simulate Alcubierre's warp drive. It would certainly simplify the technology having to circulate only one type of particle to achieve the desired result. Circulating these particles in the manner it is accomplished in our particle accelerators might not be a practical strategy, since it would lead to synchrotron radiation losses when the particles reach appreciable mass. For spatial charges, or chronetic monopoles, the form of the radiation would be gravitochronetic, rather than electromagnetic, but it would still lead to energy losses. Since the rate at which this radiation is evolved increases as the cube of the particles energy, it would impose a limit on the energy attainable before prohibitive radiation losses occur.

Fortunately, there is a potential way out of this difficulty. If instead of circulating these exotic particles in a vacuated tube, a current of these particles was passed through a loop of wire composed of this exotic G-matter, and originating from some current source (battery, generator) also made of exotic matter, then effectively you would have a setup identical to an ordinary solenoid that generates a magnetic field. But now the problem is effectively mating this structure to the rest of the spacecraft made of ordinary matter. Considering that the spatial and temporal fields of G-matter would couple to ordinary matter 19.5 orders of magnitude less than G-matter to itself, those fields would not be suitable for mating to the main structure of the ship. Similarly, the coupling forces between G-matter and the electric and magnetic fields of ordinary matter would be 19.5 orders of magnitude weaker than the interatomic and intermolecular Vanderwaal's forces in ordinary matter, much too weak to physically mate to the ships structure.

A possible way to resolve this dilemma might be to synthesize hybrid atoms made of both ordinary matter and exotic G-matter. this would be possible if the nuclear binding forces in G-nuclei had the same properties as the nuclear binding forces in ordinary matter. In proposing the existence of G-matter in which the roles of the space-time field and electro-magnetic field are transposed with one another, no mention was made of the fate of the strong force and weak force in this exotic form of matter. If it turned out that the strong color force in G-protons and G-neutrons was indistinguishable to the color force in ordinary nucleons, then the two types of nucleons might be fused together to make hybrid nuclei. There would be no need to include neutrons of either species since the protons of each species would effectively serve as the neutrons of the other because of their entirely different field structures - one possessing electric charge and the other spatial charge. Electron shells s, p, d, and f would form around this hybrid nucleus made up of equal numbers of ordinary electrons and G-electrons. Because of the low coupling forces between the two electron species, the quantitized orbits of each type of electron might be largely undisturbed by the presence of the other type.

A coil of hybrid aluminum or copper could be mechanically fixed to the outer rim of the circular ship. A generator wound with hybrid cable could provide the current source, which when switched on would create a bipolar chronetic field aligned with the major axis of the circular craft. It would also unavoidably produce an equal strength (in terms of electromagnetic field parameters) magnetic field of the same configuration.

While this strategy would probably work to create the chronetic field, the creation of an artificial spatial field by circulating chronetic monopoles in the same manner might not be so straightforward. Whereas it was proposed that spatially charged particles were the analogue to electrically charged particles in ordinary matter, the chronetic monopoles were regarded as the analogue to magnetic monopoles. Consequently, it might not be possible to create facsimiles of G-atoms with chronetic monopoles, any more than it should be possible to create synthetic atoms with magnetic monopoles.

Without the possibility of creating synthetic hybrid atoms containing chronetic monopoles, another approach would be needed to circulate the monopoles. One strategy that would avoid the inconvenience and losses of synchrotron radiation would be to physically rotate a monopole containing structure about the outer rim of the ship. While this sounds awkward and lacks elegance, it has the beauty of simplicity. The electrons in a current carrying cable are typically moving at only a few miles per hour - a snails pace. It is the impulses that move at just under the speed of light down the cable. Yet the molasses like pace of the electrons is all that is needed to create a powerful magnetic field in a solenoid only because there is a vast number of electrons moving in the coil. A comparable number of chronetic monopoles imbedded in a rotating structure should similarly produce a bipolar spatial field. The difficulty would be to prevent the structure from physically blowing apart from the repulsive forces between all the same polarity monopoles.

With respect to these ideas it's interesting to note that the classic shape of a UFO is a relatively flat circular disc. Curiously, a recurrent feature reported by eyewitnesses in close encounter cases is that the outer structure of these objects are often seen to physically rotate around the central portion. Another recurring feature of close encounters with vehicles and households is the temporary loss of electric power that might be attributed to very strong saturating magnetic fields. The peculiar luminosity reported to permeate the airspace around these objects might be some side effect of the spatial and temporal fields interacting with the atmosphere. The bizarre changes in the shape of these objects in flight could be accounted for simply by the warping of the adjacent space which induces the excessive bending of light rays attempting to follow a geodesic in space-time.

The latter possibility brings to mind a report in Australia where a motorist encountered a landed object off to the side of the road possessing an intense luminosity. As he rounded a curve he was astounded to see that the beams from his headlights instead of pointing straight ahead bent towards the landed object, returning to normal only after the object lifted off. Of course, there's an obvious problem with this interpretation, since we're imputing that this field falls off by the inverse square law. A space and/or time warping field bending a light beam to such an extreme extent would correspond to an incredibly strong gravitational field. Even the sun bends starlight grazing its surface over a path length of tens of thousands of miles by mere arcseconds. By this reckoning the car, driver, adjacent ground and trees etc., should be turned into spaghetti streaming towards the object. Unless, perhaps, the field is extremely intense only within a few inches of the supposed field generating coils sufficient to severely bend a light path (that is, the field might fall off by a higher power law than the inverse square law). The question then is would such a field 'grab' a light beam at its extremity, and 'lock' onto it so that the remainder of the beam, further back, tracked the locked portion as if the beam were a rigid body? However, this notion would seem to be obviously at variance with the laws governing the behavior of light in curved space-time.

Other technological possibilities suggest themselves. A superconducting shell of G-matter around a spacecraft presumably would shut the remainder of the vehicle off from outside gravitational and inertial forces if the origin of inertia is indeed a function of instantaneous transmission of spatial and temporal influences through the underlying quantum Higgs' field. This would be analogous to shutting off electromagnetic influences with a superconducting barrier, except in this case it would be gravitochronetic influences that the spacecraft would be shielded from. But this idea is somewhat troubling since it would lead to violation of the most sacred rules of physics - the conservation of energy and momentum.

A beam of GC radiation would probably exhibit interesting properties when passing through our atmosphere or solid matter. An electromagnetic wave propagating through space consists of alternating electric and magnetic fields perpendicular to each other and to the direction of propagation of the wave. An electromagnetic wave (below the X-ray region) interacts only with the outermost shell electrons of any atoms in its path. In contrast, a propagating GC wave would induce alternating expansion and contraction of space in one axis and alternate slowing and acceleration of time in the other axis, both disturbances being perpendicular to the direction of the wave's propagation. A beam of coherent GC radiation would accordingly jostle the nuclei and the electrons of atmospheric atoms encountered in its path by flexing the very space-time continuum in which those molecules were imbedded.

At optical wavelengths a coherent GC beam might stimulate the more loosely bound electrons to radiate electromagnetic radiation at much the same wavelengths. The more massive nuclei having much more inertia might respond more sluggishly radiating at much longer wavelengths. The net result would be luminescence throughout the cross section of a beam of GC 'light'. Since the GC beam's energy would be absorbed by the entire mass of molecules in its path, it's reasonable to expect that its energy would be dissipated fairly quickly, depending on the density of the medium through which it passed and its initial intensity. This would be analogous to ocean waves being damped by debris or an oil slick on the surface. This energy loss would likely translate to a shift to longer wavelengths, so that a visible light beam of GC radiation might shift into the infrared after some distance. To an observer the beam would appear to abruptly terminate in mid air, contrary to the behavior of ordinary light. Assuming a beam of GC light was not attenuated too much in passing through a thin opaque layer of metal, or other material, it would emerge still as a luminous shaft of light on the other side. But, it's important to stress that the light emanating from this beam would originate from stimulated air molecules in its path.

The concept of the Alcubierre warp drive in combination with the notion of virtual spatial charges may be relevant to the phenomena of quantum tunneling. In the 1920's the theory of quantum tunneling was developed by George Gamow to explain the phenomena of alpha decay. Gamow demonstrated that quantum uncertainty allowed the alpha particles to 'tunnel' under the potential energy barrier formed by the immensely strong nuclear binding force, despite the fact that individual alpha particles lacked the necessary energy to pass over this barrier. By invoking the uncertainty principle, in conjunction with the concept of wave-particle duality, Gamow showed that an alpha particle is 'smeared out' in space, and a portion of it actually extends beyond the nucleus. It is thus able to 'leak' out of the nucleus on occasion. When the numbers in Gamow's theory are computed they match precisely the observed rates of decay in various radioactive nuclei. There is also perfect agreement with the reverse process - the fusion of lighter nuclei into heavier nuclei, and other processes involving quantum tunneling.

With such a successful track record it would seem a waste of time to bother tinkering with the concept. But in 1955 Leonard Eisenbud and Eugene Wigner made a surprising discovery. They calculated that under certain circumstances the time required for a particle (or electromagnetic wave) to transit a barrier remained constant over a wide range of barrier widths. In fact, for an especially wide barrier, the transit time would correspond to velocities greater than light. Recent experiments seem to bear out this predicted behavior. Raymond Chiao and his group at U. C. Berkelely have demonstrated superluminal transit times for laser beams passing through interference filters composed of multiple reflecting layers of glass that absorb most of the incident photons. Even more recently Bernhard Nimtz and colleagues at the University of Cologne have demonstrated superluminal transmission of 'data' via microwaves. They accomplished this by modulating an 8.7 Ghz microwave carrier with Mozart's 40th symphony and passing it through a section of waveguide 11.4 cm. long with a reduced cross-section. The calculated velocity of the signal through this barrier region was 4.7c. These results have so far stood up to rigorous scrutiny.

Assuming these measurements are indeed correct, and not a problem of interpretation, or experimental error it's evident that quantum mechanics as presently formulated cannot account for such bizarre behavior. Up to now every quantum phenomena studied has obeyed the letter of the law with respect to the principles of relativity. Incontrovertible evidence of super-luminal transmission of information would result in a clear-cut violation of the law of causality, which states that an effect cannot precede its cause. The breakdown of this ironclad rule would inexorably lead to transformation of our universe into an Alice-in-wonderland type environment with no resemblance to what we actually observe. Even quantum non-locality, which acts instantaneously over any distance does not violate the principle of causality since the information coupled across space is entirely random, and cannot be used for intelligible messages.

If we are to salvage the fundamental laws of physics in the face of this accumulating evidence for superluminal effects in quantum tunneling something has to give. But what? Clearly there are only two choices - the alteration of either space or time in the tunneling environment. Intriguingly, this is exactly what the postulated gravitochronetic field is capable of doing. We might speculate that in quantum tunneling processes lies an actual physical manifestation of the proposed spatial charges, but in their virtual vacuum guise. The idea would work like this. Every spatial charge just like every electric charge would have a miniature dipole field around it, but rather than being a magnetic field it would be a chronetic field - that is a time field. Just as with the dipole magnetic field about an electron or proton this temporal field would arise as a consequence of the circulation of distributed spatial charge in the G-particle. But this is also exactly the same configuration as the proposed version of the Alcubierre warp drive, except that it would be on a microscopic atomic scale, and involve only the temporal component of the continuum.

Now suppose that in the restless, seething environment of an unstable nucleus virtual spatial charges (say G-electrons) are popping up here and there out of the vacuum. Well, if the orientation of one of these G-electrons is such that its south pole region is facing the nucleus it would provide a kind of temporal tunnel through which an alpha particle could escape the nucleus. In the original Alcubierre warp drive space-time is contracted in front of the spacecraft and expanded behind it. The effect is to allow the vessel to tunnel through the continuum by distorting it in just the right manner, and achieve effective superluminal global rates of motion without violating Einstein's velocity limit. In quantum tunneling the virtual G-electron would remain relatively stationary while the alpha particle would be whisked through the dipole temporal field permeating the space around the virtual G-electron (assuming the warp drive would function with only the temporal component of the continuum distorted).

While this scenario might account for atomic scale superluminal quantum tunneling effects, it clearly would not be suitable for macroscopic scale superluminal quantum tunneling, such as was reported by Nimtz's group in Cologne involving a barrier width of 11.7 centimeters (4 and 5/8ths inches). A different mechanism would need to be invoked for this phenomena. Virtual waves immediately comes to mind. Just as particles are allowed in the virtual state by quantum mechanics, so too are waves. Quantum uncertainty ought to allow gravitochronetic radiation of assorted wavelengths to occasionally materialize out of the vacuum, if G-matter really is a potential form of matter.

If the phase, frequency, and direction of a materialized GC wave was just right it could provide a macroscopic conduit through which an electromagnetic wave is accelerated to superluminal effective velocities, and yet not violate the precepts of relativity. This mechanism would mimic the Alcubierre warp drive scenario. In essence, the tunneling EM wave (or photon) would 'surf' the GC wave in close analogy with a surfer riding an ocean wave. The difference would be that the virtual GC wave would locally distort the space-time fabric in such a manner as to permit effective superluminal propagation of the EM wave as seen from a global perspective.