Inquiring Minds

Cincinnati’s Abandoned Subway

One of the scenes in One for the Money, the first book in the Cat Caliban series, is set in an abandoned subway tunnel. In the late 19^th century, Cincinnati was among the top ten most populous American cities, comparable to Chicago and New York in economic importance, and it suffered from the problems that growth created. In 1888, the advent of the streetcar marked the city’s first major attempt to confront the issue of mass transit. Meanwhile, dividing downtown from the city’s northern neighborhoods and suburbs was the Miami and Erie Canal, once a critical waterway connecting the Great Lakes with the Mississippi River but abandoned by the late 1870s. In 1916, a plan was developed to drain the canal and use the canal bed to build a subway that would form a 16-mile loop through the city and its suburbs. A bond issue allocated $6 million to the project, but construction was delayed until after World War I. By the time construction began in 1920, postwar inflation had doubled the cost of the project. Six stations and a little over two miles of tunnels were constructed.

Then came a shift in the political wind. The political machine that had long run the city government was successfully challenged in 1926 by a new reform party, the Charter Party, which was committed to ending the subway project. The bond money ran out in 1927, with only seven miles of tunnels completed. The arrival of the Great Depression in 1929 sealed the subway’s fate. While there have been periodic attempts to revive the project, they have all failed. Even the 1960s boom in subway construction in cities like San Francisco and Washington, D.C., passed Cincinnati by. The bonds were paid off in 1966 at a total cost of more than $13 million.

Alternative proposals for the tunnels have likewise been doomed to failure. A local winery’s bid to store wine and create a bottling plant there fell through over the issue of permits. A 1970s scheme promoted by local television celebrity Nick Clooney (brother of Rosemary and father of George) to build an underground mall and night club there faltered over insurance problems. In the 1980s the city’s pitch to filmmakers needing underground sets (think Batman Forever) fell on deaf ears. And a recent proposal  to construct a light-rail system there failed two-to-one with Cincinnati voters. However, if you find yourself in Cincinnati in a post-pandemic future, you can book a tour of Cincinnati’s famous white elephant.

The event that launches the plot of Bayou City Burning is a scouting trip to Houston by two men affiliated with NASA and charged with assessing the city as the future site of NASA’s manned space flight command center. They arrive in advance of President Kennedy’s historic speech announcing the moon mission, and well in advance of NASA’s official announcement that it is searching for a site for a new mission control center. Their presence is the result of behind-the-scenes political maneuvering by prominent and powerful Texans. But could that really happen?

According to Henry C. Dethloff, author of Suddenly Tomorrow Came . . . A History of the Johnson Space Center (NASA, 1993), it could and it did. At the time, Lyndon Johnson wielded considerable power, not just as Vice President, but as chair of the Senate. One of Johnson’s protegés in the House, Houston Congressman Albert Thomas, did not chair a major committee, but he chaired the subcommittee that oversaw NASA’s budget; if the budget didn’t pass his subcommittee, it would never get to the House Appropriations Committee, much less to the House floor for approval. Meanwhile, Johnson had insured that one of his major Texas backers, George R. Brown of Brown & Root, sat on the Space Council and was privy to insider information regarding plans for manned space flight. In early 1961, the Mercury Space Program was already underway, and there was a “Manned Lunar Landing Task Group” discussing the possibility of a moon mission. But when Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth in a Russian-engineered spacecraft on April 12, 1961, everything changed. The time for leisurely contemplation was over; the Space Race was on. The United States had to establish its supremacy in outer space, in the minds of American Cold War strategists.

NASA’s new director James Webb argued for the necessity of creating a separate center for manned spaceflight. Discussions resulted in a $60 million item in the NASA appropriations bill. According to Dethloff, it was Abe Silverstein, founding director of the Goddard Space Flight Center and later director of the Office of Space Flights Program, who first raised the question: “I wonder where Albert Thomas’ district is?” In fact, Thomas had been lobbying NASA directors for years to locate a facility in his district. On May 16, 1961, his wish finally seemed to be coming true: as described in the novel, Philip Miller, Chief of the Facilities Engineering Division for Goddard, and John F. Parsons, Associate Director of the Ames Research Center, paid Houston a visit. The next week, President Kennedy announced the moon mission to a joint session of Congress.

Once specific site criteria for a manned spacecraft center were made public, applications flooded in. In early August, a site selection team chaired by Parsons narrowed the list of contenders to 23 cities, all of which the team visited in the two weeks between August 21^st and September 7^th. They ranked MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, as their top site. Houston was ranked second. But in very short order a decision was made not to close MacDill as a Strategic Air Command base after all. Was the ranking a ruse? We may never know. In any case, Houston now topped the list.

But wait. In his 1966 memoir, Decisive Years for Houston, Houston Chamber of Commerce executive director Marvin Hurley does not record the May visit by Parsons and Miller, even though in Henry Dethloff’s account, the two men were met at the airport by George Brown and Ed Redding, who was “representing the Houston Chamber of Commerce.” It’s inconceivable that Hurley wouldn’t have known about the visit. But five years later Hurley writes, “Early in June, while on a trip to Washington, I heard rumors of some type of new installation for the nation’s space effort, and made calls at the office of Vice President Johnson and upon Congressmen Albert Thomas and Bob Casey. While the project was still in the planning stage, I was assured that Houston would receive consideration as a location for the project. I was advised that Houston should make every effort to convince any site-selection team visiting the area that it could fully and completely meet the criteria that would be under investigation.”

 

Who’s right? Dethloff cites as his source a memorandum written by Philip Miller himself and deposited in the Johnson Space Center History Archives. Perhaps Hurley is telling the truth, but not the whole truth.  Here is a mystery indeed.

On Parallel Universes and Other Cosmic Weirdness

by Tom Burns

     It all began with a cat.  Well, no. Not really. I’m not sure whether the cat exists or not, and therein lies the possibility of parallel universes, or parallel dimensions as this and many other science-fiction novels refer to them.

In fact, it all begins with quantum uncertainty.

Quantum uncertainty is one of the reasons I have been a big fan of science fiction since my misspent youth. I love the way science fiction imagines instantaneous travel from one place to another and into parallel dimensions and other universes, whatever (or wherever) they are. Uncertainties, quantum or otherwise, are what make science fiction so much fun to read although they seem to violate common sense because they do violate common sense.

I can love these ideas and scoff at them at the same time. Such is the joy of the true astronerd. Before we get things going, let me scoff a little. If such parallel dimensions exist, they are almost certainly beyond our ability to detect and verify. Science depends on such verification. It experiments. It measures. It quantifies. Therefore, on a practical level, I concern myself with matters I can substantiate or disprove. As an old teacher said to me once, “Just because the laws of nature allow something to happen doesn’t mean that it did happen.” However, it’s fun to speculate about the weirder aspects of the universe, so here goes.

For starters, let’s discuss that mysterious word “quantum.”

Physics can be divided into two types: classical physics and quantum mechanics. Classical physics explains most physical interactions, like why a ball bounces when it drops and why it dropped in the first place—in short, gravity. It can also be used to predict physical interactions, like what will happen when you drop a ball. All of those things happen on the level of the very large, in other words, the world of human experience, on a daily basis.

However, there are some physical interactions that it does not explain; for instance, how light can be turned into electricity and what that mysterious term “gravity” actually means.

For those explanations, quantum physicists dive into the level of the very small. They study the nature and interaction of subatomic particles, called quanta. Quantum mechanics thus provides a way for physicists to explain on the deepest level of the very small why those things happen on the level of the very large.

Bringing the two sets of explanations together has become the grand obsession of many people who study the two forms of physics, and with good reason.

The laws of classical physics can be tested and quantified. In that regard, Einstein’s relativistic theories simply explain what happens to the laws of physics at high velocities and masses.

On the level of the very small where quantum physics rule, that act of observation affects the result and makes accurate measurement quite difficult. That principle is known as quantum uncertainty.

Let’s say one subatomic particle is moving in such a way that its motion will carry it around another particle. Now imagine that all the other forces involved (the presence of other subatomic particles, etc.) balance out in such a way that the first particle has an equal chance to pass to the left or to the right of the second particle.

As long as it remains unobserved, the first particle could pass on either side. Where it actually goes will determine its interaction with other particles. The process continues ad infinitum with an increasing number of interactions and possibilities.

If we try to observe the interaction of the two particles, we would have to send photons or some other particles streaming in its direction. We would thus influence the motion of the particles and, in effect, choose one of the possibilities. If we don’t observe it, then all the motions remain possible.

It’s as if we threw a bowling ball down an alley and the only way to detect its motion toward the pins was to throw another bowling ball at it and listen for the sound of the impact. Before we threw the second ball, all the possible paths of the bowling ball remained possible, in potential at least. Throwing the second ball both discovered its path and changed the path at the same time.

What makes sense on the mathematical level in quantum physics seems patently absurd on the level of the gross physical world where classical physics rules. The ball goes where it goes. It knocks down 10 pins or nine.

On the level of the large, where we live, speculations about all the possible motions of the bowling ball seems silly. We do our best to understand why the bowling ball goes where it goes. We factor in the quality of our bowling shoes. We practice throwing the ball. We examine our strides and our release. But we also understand that we cannot consider all the factors involved. We do our best, but then we let ‘er rip and expect that the result is the only one that can happen even if we don’t understand everything that’s going on.

Thus, on the level of the large, imagining all the potential paths of the bowling ball seems pretty useless at best. Imagining that they actually happen in some parallel universe seems to violate both the laws of physics and the rules of logic. But that’s exactly what quantum physicists do. In other words, when we project the behavior of subatomic particles on the larger material world, weirdness prevails.

And that’s where the cat comes in.

In 1952 Edwin Schrodinger attempted to explain the uncertainty problem, which is at the heart of the attempt to reconcile quantum and classical physics.

Schrodinger described a thought experiment in which a cat was put in a steel box with a vial of hydrocyanic acid and with a tiny amount of a radioactive substance. If just one atom of the radioactive substance decayed during the test period, that atom would trigger a sequence in which a hammer would break the vial of acid and kill the cat.

As long as the box stayed closed, you wouldn’t know whether this had happened or not, so according to quantum principles, the cat is both alive and dead at the same time. It’s only when you take a measurement, i.e., look in the box, that the uncertainty ends and the cat is either alive or dead.

In fact, Schrodinger was trying to show the absurdity of trying to project quantum uncertainty into the level of the gross material world. For all his obsession with thought experiments, he was a pragmatist who believed that the cat was either dead or it wasn’t.

But that didn’t stop highly qualified physicists from claiming that the cat is indeed both dead and alive.

Since every subatomic interaction suggests a different set of possibilities and many, many subatomic particles are interacting, every interaction generates an infinite set of possibilities.

Trace that set of possibilities back to the Big Bang that created our universe and the number of possibilities becomes, well, even more infinite, if you will excuse the expression.  Project all of those possibilities onto the immeasurable enormity of the universe in which we reside, and the mind boggles (if it hasn’t boggled already).

On the level of the large, did you hit the snooze button on your alarm this morning? If you did, the act generates at least two possibile realities, and those two suggest at least two more. Did you have orange juice for breakfast? Did you gulp it or sip it? Well, you get the idea. And all of those alternative sequences of events happen only in universes where you existed in the first place.  Because of the large number of interactions that happened before you arrived on the scene, the number of universes where you exist is a much smaller infinity than the infinity as a whole.

Now add to the picture all of the universes that might have come into being from big bangs other than our own. Proponents of such multiverses, as they are called, insist that the mathematics support their conclusions, and we’ll have to take their word for it because those multiple universes are probably separated from each other by an impenetrable firewall. They probably all operate under quite different physical laws.

All those possibilities might be all around us in separate but unequal equal spacetimes separated from each other by the different laws that rule them.

Or the parallel universes might be like membranes that exist in parallel like the many thin layers of an onion. In that case, perhaps the detection of them and travel between them is possible in ways that we cannot yet imagine except in the most imaginative sphere of all—science fiction.

     Who know? I certainly don’t, and therein lives the joy of science fiction. The writers don’t understand it either, but they have the courage to speculate about some of those infinite possibilities.

Tom Burns is Director of Perkins Observatory in Delaware, Ohio, as well as a columnist and Part-Time Professor of English at Ohio Wesleyan University.

On Space, Time, and Spacetime

by Tom Burns

      Jane gets into a spacecraft and travels to a nearby star. From her point of view, she has taken most of her lifetime to get there and back. But when she returns, she finds that all of her relatives are dead and Apple no longer supports her version of the iPhone. What gives?

What gives is Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, which has the reputation of being difficult to understand. There are good reasons that this is so.

Einstein’s theory is meant to explain the behavior of the world at all levels of velocity and massiveness. We live in only a tiny part of that world relative to the universe as a whole—the small and the slow. For our day-to-day purposes, the older Newtonian physics work just fine, thank you very much, and we aren’t much interested in what happens on the level of the very large and the very fast.

However, if we want humans finally to travel to the stars, we’d better start getting interested.

To do so, we need to shed some light on light. (And now, gentle reader, please prepare yourself for a long but necessary digression.)

For most of human history, people, scientists included, assumed that light got where it was going instantaneously. Galileo tried to measure the speed of light with signal lanterns set at varying distances from each other. He failed because the lanterns were much too close to measure differences. Light can travel several times around the earth in one second. In our very small neck of the universe, light in effect takes no time at all to get from one place to another.

Things changed dramatically when astronomers started to use telescopes to study the universe at astronomical distances. As with most matters scientific, a revolution in our understanding of light occurred when astronomers were studying something else entirely.

Over the years, Giovanni Domenico Cassini had plotted the orbits of the four main moons of Jupiter. Periodically, the moons pass behind Jupiter and are eclipsed by it. Once he knew the time each moon took to travel around Jupiter, Cassini should have been able to predict when each moon should pass behind the planet. But mysteriously, the intervals between eclipses weren’t always the same.

Ole Roemer, one of Cassini’s assistants, studied Cassini’s data and noticed that when the Earth and Jupiter were far apart, the times between eclipses were longer. Six months later, when the Earth was on the other side of the sun and closer to Jupiter, the intervals got shorter.

Roemer realized that the light from Jupiter’s moons simply had to travel farther when the Earth and Jupiter were farther apart. That meant that the light took time to get where it was going!

Roemer noticed the difference because his “lanterns” were hundreds of millions of miles apart. From the data, Roemer was able to calculate the speed of light with amazing accuracy, his lasting contribution to science.

Scientists concluded that since light was traveling from one place to another, it had to be traveling through some medium. Common sense dictates this. Sound needs the medium of air or water to go from its origin to somebody’s ear, for example.

This medium came to be called the luminiferous aether. Everything, including our own planet, moved through the aether.  For the purpose of living life on our planet, we entertain the pleasing fiction that we are stationary, but we are not. We are plowing through space at 30 miles per second as we orbit the sun.

Thus, from our point of view, the aether wind should be blowing in our faces.

This is much like a dog hanging its head out a car window. The wind might not be blowing at all, but from the standpoint of the dog, it’s going to seem like he’s stationary and the wind is plastering him in the face.

By 1887, Albert A. Michelson and Edward W. Morley had attempted to chart the flow of that aether wind. Using a complex set of mirrors and prisms, Michelson and Morley projected a beam of light and analyzed its return speed of light in different directions at various different times. By detecting small variations in the light’s speed, they thought they could detect the motion of the Earth though the aether.

To their—and everybody’s—surprise, they detected no difference in light speed. The speed of light seems to be constant both against and with the flow of the aether.

In fact, the constancy of the speed of light is intimately woven into the fabric of space and time, which astronomers refer to as one entity that they call Spacetime.

If the notion of Spacetime seems strange to you, try considering time as a fourth dimension. In order to exist, an object certainly has to have the first three dimensions: height, width, and breadth. Now consider the same object without the fourth dimension—duration. An object without duration simply doesn’t exist at all. Time is therefore a necessary fourth dimension. As such, the forces of nature can change it in similar ways to the other three dimensions.  Time can be stretched and bent in ways that are analogous to the ways that objects in space can be bent or stretched.

Now at this point, some of you are probably thinking, “Wasn’t this scribbling supposed to be about time? What’s with this light obsession? Why doesn’t he just get to the point?”

But light IS the point, gentle reader. The universe, not I, is obsessed with light and its velocity.

It is the key number affecting everything the universe does and, by extension, what we do. Let’s say you are driving down the highway and you have to speed up because Einstein is in the road, and you want to run him over because you just flunked a test on cursed relativity.

As you accelerate, your mass increases, i.e., you get heavier. The effect isn’t noticeable in our low-velocity world. But as you approach the speed of light, you get much heavier, so much so that it takes an enormous amount of energy to keep going faster.

If you could get to the speed of light, your mass would become infinite. You would weigh more than the entire Universe. It would take an infinite amount of energy to reach the speed of light. Both infinite mass and infinite energy are absurd on the face of it.

Thus, any object with mass cannot travel as fast as the speed of light. Light can do it because it has no mass.

Physics has its God particle. If any number could be called a God number, the speed of light is it. That magic number is woven into the fabric of space and time itself.

Where were we? Oh, yes. Now we can finally get to the point. How then does acceleration of an object with mass toward the speed of light affect time?

The fixity of light speed turns out to be a key feature of the mathematical equations that describe the way things work in Spacetime. It is thus fundamental to any description of how Spacetime functions.

At low masses and speeds, nothing much seems to happen, but something does. If you hop into your car and drive to visit your Aunt Earline in Albuquerque, you are traveling at a very low velocity of only, say, 65 miles per hour. Both you and she will think you took exactly the same amount of time to get there, but in fact, although neither she nor you can detect it, from her point of view, you took a fraction of a second longer to get there than you thought you did.

At very high masses and velocities, Spacetime is a very different thing, and thus the Universe is a very different place. All of that happens because the speed of light always remains the same.

The revolutionary implications of the invariability of the speed of light came to fruition in Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity.  He demonstrated mathematically that for an object in motion, time slows down. It, in effect, stretches out. That effect has been verified many times over the years with careful experimentation. It’s real.

On Earth, we are moving very slowly with respect to, say, the International Space Station in orbit around Earth. Our clocks tick off the seconds at what we think of as a fixed rate. But the clocks on the International Space Station, which is moving more rapidly than we are, tick more slowly. In fact, the astronauts aboard the Space Station age 0.014 seconds more slowly for every year the are aboard the ISS. Their internal clocks are ticking more slowly as well.

As our astronaut approaches the speed of light, the effect intensifies dramatically. If she is moving rapidly enough with respect to Earth, her clock would seem to slow down to a crawl if an observer on Earth had a camera pointed at it. To the astronaut, the clock would tick normally.

Our astronaut could never actually achieve light speed, of course. Her spacecraft would reach infinite mass. From the observer’s point of view, it would be bigger than the universe that surrounds it, which is silly. Time also stretches out to infinity. If the clocked ticked, the tock would never occur.

If the astronaut could observe events on Earth, she would see events happening in rapid motion as if the video of those events had been dramatically speeded up.

Thus, when and if that astronaut returned to Earth after what for her was a lifetime of travel, she would have aged normally from her point of view, but all her relatives would have long since passed away. She, the legendary space traveler, would perhaps be greeted by her great-great-grandchildren, like some latter-day Rip Van Winkle, a quaint representative of an earlier, more primitive age.

Tom Burns is Director of Perkins Observatory in Delaware, Ohio, as well as a columnist and Part-Time Professor of English at Ohio Wesleyan University.