CHAPTER NINETEEN
It had been nearly sixteen years since Mitch stepped foot onto the grounds of his old university. From accepting his degree to now, he hadn’t given another thought to his days studying nor the grounds he covered for four years.
The silent hours at library tables under the yellowy glow of a desk light were from another life. Mitch enjoyed his time at Uni and the carefree life it afforded, but it was about studying and gaining qualification. A platform for his career, to build a life his father promised was available through commitment to education. Factory life killed Brian Atherton and be damned if it would take Mitchell’s too. At eighteen he hadn’t realised that. He was guided more by the ghostly voice of his fathers’ lectures over the nightly meal with his mother and brother. But as the years passed, Mitch understood their importance and thanked his father for being so adamant on the matter.
As a seat of technical studies the university grounds lacked the romance of its more fancied rivals focused on the medical and literary arts. No sandstone buildings with regimented spires, nor clock tower throwing shadows across a Parisian inspired courtyard; its pathways lined by dwarf hedgerows. It was modern and sterile. Inspired to fill the minds of mathematicians and engineers with no distraction of architectural magnificence. No garden discussions pondering Shakespearean prose. Ironically, those grounds were tendered by less educated gardeners toiling laboriously for their sons and daughters so they might someday walk the hallowed turf with books underarm.
Mitchell’s university was about fact, not philosophy, but produced its own beauty all the same; well it did to him anyway.
He walked the corridor of a dated building of linoleum floors and steel framed windows. Memories flowed with every echo of his shoes through the cavernous space. Mitch called the professor of electrical engineering the day after finding the mysterious coil in the telephone pit, and as an alumnus, granted time in the busy mans’ schedule to discuss the strange device. Mitch wanted to see if he could shed any light into its origins, though he didn’t mention that during the call. Mitchell had taken elective modules in electrical studies as part of his degree but they weren’t enough to explain the twisted wirings in the pit; or enough to even recognise them.
Contrary to stereotyped depictions in movies, professors’ chambers are less glamorous than one would expect. Mitch had visited many lecturers’ offices during his university days and knew that as fact. No grand staircase leading to a laced corridor of mahogany doors. No brass nameplates or bookshelves lined with sequential leather-bound journals. The absence of grandly carved desks defining teacher from student belied all movie directors’ notions of factuality. A typical office was crowded with piles of unbound papers stacked on the floor and any other level surface. It is said those who can, do, and those that can’t teach. Mitchell always thought George Bernard Shaw’s assumption to be unfair, however a professor’s private dominion was a constant reminder to that postulation.
He found the professors office with a half glass door ajar and the faint sound of a Pearl Jam song coming from within. Behind the cluttered desk sat a bearded man with unwashed, straggly shoulder length hair. He wore a faded T-shirt with the old Apple rainbow logo printed on the front. He looked nothing like Mitch’s tutors of two decades before. Mitch rapped lightly on the glass not to startle the man and cautiously asked,
“Professor Hargreaves?’
Owen Hargreaves, professor of electrical engineering, looked up from his papers and almost shouted,
“You must be Mitchell. Come in, come in and sit down. Shut the door behind you.”
Mitch had recently turned thirty-eight but the academic couldn’t have been more than thirty years old. He was either extraordinarily bright or proof Bernard Shaw was indeed correct. It was un-easing seeking counsel from a junior but Mitch quickly let that pass.
“Professor Hargreaves, thanks for seeing me. I wanted to ask you about something. Something odd I was hoping you might help explain.”
“Mitch, can I call you Mitch? I’m Owen. Hell even my students call me Owen. I’m only a professor because they couldn’t find another sap to take the shitty pay.” Owen laughed firmly and Mitch quickly understood why he was asked to close the door. He returned the laugh and pulled his phone from his pocket to find a photo.
“Owen, can you tell me what this is?”
He handed the phone to the professor and leant back into his chair scouting Owen’s eyes for any hint of acknowledgement. The academic studied the image for only a few seconds before returning the phone to Mitchell who couldn’t tell if the device had been recognised or not.
“You studied here Mitch, you told me on the phone, right? Didn’t your tutors teach you anything?” laughing again, “It’s a Caduceus Coil.”
Mitch couldn’t believe it. In only a matter of seconds, the hirsute upstart instantly knew what he’d spent hours of research trying to define.
The Caduceus Coil, also known as a Tensor Coil, was a single winding of copper wire laid over a ferrite core. Configured into a caduceus pattern, the wire was wound in opposite directions and crossed on the same, opposite diameter points each time around. The key to the device working was using a single length of wire wound from the centre of the rod toward the opposing ends. The coil was believed to be an energy sink causing any current fed into it to simply disappear, and when operating, showed any number of resonance points and demonstrated to have zero impedance with no production of radiation or even heat.
“It’s funny Mitch, many believe this device belongs to the realm of ‘Pseudo Science’.” The term threw Mitchell but before he could ask, an explanation followed. “That’s a derogatory term used by academic scientists to discourage scientific research among non-academic scientists. The insinuation being, all true science, past, present or future, is their own work or their property.”
Mitch was still lost. Clearly Hargraves was no ordinary professor, refusing to conform to the normalities his colleagues or college required. Owen was freethinking and spirited. Mitch regretted his initial assumption of the man and now thankful he’d closed the door when asked.
“I apologise Owen, but I don’t understand what you mean.”
“Mitchell. There are many things about the Caduceus Coil we don’t understand. It is commonly referred to as the ‘Smith Coil’ after its main proponent, Wilbert Brockhouse Smith. He was an American scientist who in the 1950’s became involved in a top-secret government sponsored program called ‘project magnet’. The project was allegedly set up to produce an aircraft that operated on the same propulsion and flight principles of U.F.O.'s….do do do do.” Owen mocked his last words in a sci-fi musical tone while spookily gesturing his hands. “At some point ‘project magnet’ was officially terminated, but Dr Smith continued to tinker with new styles of coil windings. During that period of renegade research he developed the Caduceus Coil.” Professor Hargreaves was like a child reciting a tale of mythology otherwise regarded as eccentric parable by his peers. He continued though in earnest.
“The coil is said to produce electromagnetic waves travelling parallel to the coil windings. Now, that violates all accepted electromagnetic convention! The standard rule of electromagnetism is that waves are produced perpendicularly with respect to the coil windings. A demonstrated fact! But more importantly, with the proper frequency and voltage, the coil supposedly creates scalar electromagnetic waves that travel at super-luminal velocities…that is, faster than the speed of light.” Even Mitch knew what that meant yet it didn’t stop a sardonic smile appearing on the already smug face of the unorthodox professor.
“OK. But there are loads of stories about secret experiments held in the 1950’s that many dispute. And many more believe. So why was this relegated to the annuals of Pseudo Science? Because of the U.F.O. connotation?” Mitchell asked genuinely.
“Perhaps. But probably not. More likely because of further findings the good doctor made as his experiments expanded. Smith discovered that unlike an ordinary coil that resonates chiefly at its fundamental frequency, and more weakly on the second or third harmonic, the coil had infinite resonance! A Tensor Coil would resonate strongly on any frequency. But, any signal pumped into it couldn’t be quantified by standard radio frequency detection. So, against all conventional belief and theory, the magical coil produces neither heat nor a measurable signal. You see now Mitch why those pompous gits found that hard to accept?”
“Shit. So what’s the theory Owen?” Mitch was very interested in Dr Smith and his coil of nil detection.
“Well, Wilbert was definitely onto something. Although it was only the 50’s, he calculated it came down to the cross over points of the wires in the helix. When a high frequency current flows in opposite directions through the two wires, the magnetic fields essentially cancel out on the sides of the coil. But…on the top and bottom, where the crossovers are made, the fields overlapped forming magnetic vectors parallel to the coil axis. Appositely orientated to each other. If you were to observe the coil from the side you would see the consecutive vectors along the coil axis forming several closed toroidal loops circulating into the iron core. Effectively, they disappeared! Pretty basic stuff really.”
As he spoke of the loops Owen turned over an exam paper he’d been previously grading and crudely sketched a diagram of the coil and the circulating fields the electricity produced. It looked complicated, but really wasn’t. As he said, basic stuff. Mitchell easily followed his diagram and descriptive.
“Smith also reported some other unexpected inertial effects in conjunction with the coil. When pulsed with a microwave frequency, he claimed the coil and the rod lifted from the table in a periodic series of little hops in line with the pulses. Why the rod would jump like that has no explanation under standard electromagnetic theory. It can only be attributed to the field effect produced by the unique coil windings and the trapped toroidal magnetic field.”
The hairy man in the ragged t-shirt leant across his desk and looked Mitchell dead in the eye. He had his audience’s attention now and was about to drop a bombshell.
“Now this is really cool. What I love best about the coil, and not just because my learned colleagues think it bullshit, is that the scalar waves generated could be neither seen nor measured. Smith theorised they might only be measurable in the fourth dimension.” Owen said with a wicked grin scarcely hidden beneath his un-kept beard.
“By the fourth dimension…you mean time?” Mitchell asked stunned. He’d purposely avoided mentioning anything about time travel, or the plate. He might have had it been necessary, however clearly it wasn’t. Without drawing on any reference material or even needing to cast his mind to some journal read long ago, Owen Hargreaves had possibly explained the magic of the plate with a cursory glance of a grainy photograph.
“Yes Mitch. Time. Smith furthered his experiments and claimed timepieces placed within the Caduceus Coil's area of greatest magnetic flux density measured time at a different rate and direction of flow. Freaky huh! As an electrical engineer, there is one thing that comes to mind regarding that.”
Owen Hargreaves leant over the desk getting as close to Mitchell as possible to conclude his lecture with a ‘eureka moment’.
“When an electromagnetic field is created, anything within the densest portion of the field tends to take on the same potential, polarity, frequency, and velocity of that field. That applies to both life forms and inanimate objects.”
“Are you saying the Caduceus Coil is capable of creating a means of travelling through time?”
“With respect to what I've mentioned Mitch, Einstein's theory of relativity states…if an electromagnetic wave were to be propagated at velocities beyond the speed of light, then that wave would move backward in time…You tell me? Einstein had the idea, but Smith may have found a way to make it happen.”
Mitchell sat in silence. It was a feasible explanation and one credited no less by a professor of electrical engineering.
“Do you believe in the theory Owen; do you think it possible? That the coil, and the right frequency, could make time travel a reality?”
Owen Hargreaves reclined his chair stroking his beard in thought. It was a tough question possibly exposing the scholar’s belief in something others widely regarded as fanciful. After some time, he spoke from the heart and not the manual.
“Mitch, too often in life we’re told what to think and believe. As children we’re taught from textbooks written by our teachers who were in turn taught by their predecessors. But at some point, ideas need to be proven. Prior to any proof, they’re thought to be unrealistic.”
There was purpose in his speech that clearly ran deeper than Mitch imagined.
“History has seen many great visionaries with ideas about the universe and what possibilities existed. But they were ahead of their time and lacking the resources to bring their ideas to fruition. Plato, Di Vinci, Galileo all had notions beyond technology at the time. They could only record their thoughts until someone else proved them right or wrong. Because they possessed the technology. Steve Jobs conceived the iPod years before it was made but waited for the nano-chip to be created. And hell, even Stephen Hawkins is coming up with shit we can’t even fathom right now!”
Hargreaves was onto something and Mitchell saw where it was headed.
“A theory needs three things Mitch. The talent of course. Technology. But the most important element is belief! A deep inner knowing that it is possible. You have to believe in the fantastic for the fantastic to be believable.”
No truer words were ever spoken Mitch thought.
“Magellan gambled the world wasn’t flat. And sought to prove it. He had the ships; the technical element, but more importantly he possessed the belief to keep sailing farther than any other. To push further across the horizon anxiously waiting to fall off the edge. But he didn’t. His confidence and faith keep him believing the fantastic. The world now benefits from that faith. But, if it wasn’t him taking the bold step to push his head out further than the pack… someone else would have.”
“Kennedy put his catholic arse on the line in front of millions of people declaring he would ‘before this decade is out, land a man on the moon and return him safely to the earth’. At the time they had no fucking idea how that was going to happen, but JFK wholeheartedly believed in it and inspired a nation in making it now history.”
The professor was animated in his lecture but calmed before finally answering Mitchell’s question.
“It’s just a matter of time Mitch. Eventually everything the human mind can conceive to be possible, will be. Wild ideas just need to wait for technology to catch up to become a reality. Does that answer your question?”
As Mitch was leaving Owen shouted out to him.
“Oh, and one last thing…why don’t you check out the origins of the caduceus pattern...you’ll find it very interesting.”