Twistor by Gene; John; Wolfe Cramer Read Free Book Online Page B

have spin down.'
    'Wait, David, let me get this straight,' said Elizabeth, holding up a hand. 'As I recall, atoms have a permanent "spin" rotation about their axes that also gives them a magnetic field like a little compass needle attached to each atom. If the needle points up or down, then the atom has spin up or spin down. Right?'
    'Right,' said David. The atoms of copper resemble little spinning tops, and can point either way.'
    Elizabeth nodded, measuring coffee beans into the grinder.
    'OK. About two years ago it was discovered,' David continued, speaking more loudly over the noise of the grinder, 'partly by our own dear Professor Allan Saxon and his students, that in these checkerboard crystals of some of the warm superconductors there's a new and previously unsuspected kind of ordering. Waves called holospin waves move through these crystals by changes in the spin directions, rather like the waves you see when the wind blows over a field of wheat. You know, like "amber waves of grain." But these waves are special because instead of being like a regular wave pattern, they're more like a hologram.' He handed Paul some silverware.
    'That isn't much help, David,' said Paul. 'The workings of holograms are not widely understood. I'm not sure that I understand how they work in every detail. There are some tricky phase aspects of the wave interferences—'
    'Never mind the details,' David interrupted. 'The only thing you need to know about them is that if you break off a small piece from a big hologram, it still shows the same picture as the whole thing but with less resolution. That's because the holographic ordering, the encoding of the picture, is spread out over the whole thing rather than localized in any one place on the hologram.
    'And it's the same with the waves that we make in our superconductor samples. It's called "holospin order," and the wave disturbances that move in funny ways through the crystals are called "holospin waves." ' He paused to run the plastic scrubber over the inside of a pot.
    'Allan Saxon told me that those are the hottest thing in condensed matter physics just now,' said Paul. 'He said that a holospin transmission cable made from one pair of warm superconductor strips could carry simultaneously an almost unlimited number of messages of very high bandwidth. It will revolutionize communications, he said, and there are lots of other applications, too. Should I believe him?' He shook some detergent into the dishwasher, closed its door, and turned it on.
    They dried their hands and adjourned to the living room. Paul stirred up the fire he had started in the stone fireplace. David stared into the fire, musing. 'Sure you should . . . at least in this case. The application potential is real enough,' he said. *I turned down a tenure-track faculty job at a pretty good university to come here for a second postdoc so I could work with Saxon and get in on the ground floor of this. And we're beginning the second generation of experiments. These will be the ones where we learn to fully understand the phenomenon: how it works, and what it's good for.'
    ' But you're having problems?' said Elizabeth.
    'Yeah,' said David. 'Our equipment is lying to us. Vickie thinks some funny resonance in the vacuum-readout electronics is the culprit. That would explain all the facts, but it doesn't feel right to me. I've used almost the same hardware in a dozen other experiments, and I never saw anything like this. It's true that we're making some pretty strange electromagnetic fields. The field vectors are rotating, precessing, and jumping according to an intricate program that we set up. But there's no reason that that should produce what we're seeing.
    'Anyhow, Vickie is now checking things out while I'm over here wining and dining. I promised I'd be back about midnight to take over. I'll work a few more hours tonight and try to flush some bugs out of the system. As a psychologist, you should understand this, Elizabeth. If