ScienceDirect - Technol Rep Tohoku Univ ... - Garryck Osborne

98 The Hunt for Zero Point
scientists, therefore, were thinking "way out of the box" to come up with
science that would enable them to reach another star system by the end
of the century, maybe someone, somewhere had experienced that same
feeling.
If anyone at Marshall had sensed such a presence, it would have been
George Schmidt. Lyles recommended I go talk to Schmidt, because
Schmidt, being a project engineer, was right on the cutting edge. A big,
genial man with a football player's physique and a marine-style haircut,
Schmidt, as head of propulsion, research and technology on the ASTP
effort, waded routinely through the theory that could one day transform
Lyles' interstellar vision into real hardware. Still under escort, I found
him down a maze of corridors in a different part of the von Braun
administrative complex.
Schmidt punctuated his remarks with references to "superluminal
velocities"—faster-than-light speeds—and "space-time distortion,"
phenomena that weren't even accepted by mainstream physics ("although
General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics don't discount the
possibility"). By the same token, he said, there were some holes
in current thinking—"some windows of opportunity we may be able to
take advantage of—that might transition the theory sooner rather than
later. One of these related to so-called "wormholes," shortcuts through
the universe that could be created with large amounts of "negative-energy
density matter": material that existed only on the very fringes of theory.
Since it was known from the established physics of General Relativity
that gravity, electromagnetism and space-time were interrelated phenomena,
he said, it followed that any distortion of space-time might well
yield an antigravity effect.
Questioned on the principles of a wormhole, Schmidt quickly warmed
to his theme. "It's based on the idea that you can actually curve space,"
he told me. "Einstein discovered that large masses curve space. Well, it's
the same thing with a wormhole. You're curving and distorting space so
that you don't have to follow the usual dimensions—you can go up and
out, so to speak, into another dimension, if you will. And that allows you
to travel much faster than the speed of light."
I asked him if he ever got the feeling that anyone was working on this
stuff elsewhere; that there may even have been breakthroughs—ten,
twenty, maybe forty years earlier. His reply was more candid than I had
anticipated.
"That's always a possibility. I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but
we've learned about things that governments and organizations have
been involved in in the past."