Nano Waves: An Hypothesis

Beginnings

Fred had become involved with science as a teenager both because it was something that he was good at, and because there was a certainty and a kind of security in experiments and supported facts.  Plus he felt no such security in talking to strangers, or even people he knew, but not well. That had remained true throughout his life. So the fact that he would soon be broadcasting live on television, with networks around the world picking up across the world, was quite intimidating to him. What if he just froze and could not speak? That was a distinct possibility. He would just have to focus on the microphone, and imagine that he was talking to one of his most trusted colleagues, or to his bathroom mirror.

He had long been fascinated by wave theories. When he was taught in  physics class in high school about the particle versus wave theory debate between Isaac Newton (particle) and the much less popularly known Dutch physicist Christian Huygens (wave), he thought that what came to be known as Huygens Principle made more sense to him. He remembered saying to himself “Newton is over-rated”, hoping that no one of his classmates or his teacher would hear him. 

Sure, Fred now accepted the dual nature of light as involving both photons and other particles, whose flow was considered a wave. But waves had grabbed firm hold on his imagination at age 16, and never let go. He was going to be a wave theorist. He decided that before he graduated from high school.

Career Path

While Fred was painfully awkward and clumsy in social interaction not related to science, his mind, and his hands had a delicate touch with scientific thought and instruments.  As a university undergraduate, he developed truly innovative experiments that dazzled his professors.   His work spoke to them, like his words rarely could.

As a graduate student, he quickly went from research assistant, to lead researcher, with his peers working for him. Once he became Dr. Fred, he was snapped up by a university that wanted its new hires to enhance its reputation for research.

His crowning achievement was what he referred to as his ‘wave detector’. It was a very basic instrument at first, but successive refinements made it more and more sensitive to invisible-to-the-human-eye waves.

He was testing the detecting capacity of the third version of his invention, when he made a discovery that he found hard to explain.. He was conducting an experiment in a field between the university and an old church.  He wanted to see whether there were some subtle waves in nature that had never been sensed before, but that would be registered on his ultra-sensitive wave detector. He had no worries about what passersby might think. They would just guess that he was either dousing for water (his invention looked a lot like linked douser rods), or seeking out treasure with a metal detector. He really didn’t care what people who saw him from a distance might think.

 As he walked out into the field, the detector lights began to go off. Waves were definitely being picked up.  He walked around with his device in different directions, trying to discover where the source or sources might be. The closer to the university he went, the weaker the signal. He turned around and made his way towards the church. The reaction from his machine was quite different. The lights on the detector flashed bright and often. There were waves coming from there for sure.

Seeking Another Source

Fred’s second experiment involved testing his device while he was walking down the sidewalk that went past the university   He wouldn’t do this in the daytime, of course, as there would be sure to be snide comments from those that he encountered.  So he went out late at night, when there would be a smaller number of people that he would pass by, and they would be more likely to be under the influence of alcohol, and therefore fundamentally incoherent. There were several bars along the part of the sidewalk where he was conducting his experiment.

As soon as he began his walk, he felt that he was on some kind of adventure, being an explorer for the future of science. That feeling only lasted for about the first 15 minutes of the experiment. No waves were being detected. His invention was not picking up anything . It went like this for about half and hour, and Fred was beginning to think that this had been a bad idea. Then, a few small lights went off, as he approached a large building. It was the local hospital, and it was increasingly causing the machine to react. He would have liked to have gone inside, but felt they would put him in a back ward with a strait jacket on. “Sure, you’re a university professor doing research. We’ve heard that one before.” Those words appeared in his mind too quickly for him to doing anything but circle the building. He found that one room that seemed to be in the basement caused a lot more reaction than all the others. He would have to find out, without his machine, what happened or existed there that caused such a reaction.

Coming back, he kept the detector on, ‘just in case’. He was glad that he did. For at one spot, in front of an old house, the lights on his device kind of twinkled. A few steps away and the lights went out. Fred wondered why nothing had been detected when he had passed the house the first time.

When he got home, and shut the machine off, Fred began to wonder what a church, a hospital and an old house had in common in terms of wave generation. He had no ready answer.

Revisiting the Churchyard.

Early the next morning, Fred drove to the churchyard, detector device in the front passenger seat ready for action. He walked straight to the church, and up the front steps. There was no reaction from the machine. Fred was happy about that. He didn’t fancy having to explain to the minister why he wanted to go into the building ‘for scientific reasons’.

Then he walked around to the back of the church. Behind it was a small and ancient graveyard. He did a quick count—something he was good at- and figured that there were about 40 gravestones there. As he went between the stones, the detector reacted dramatically everywhere that he walked. Fred then sat down on a bench facing the graveyard and wrote down his first speculative thoughts on the matter. He then went back to his car, ready for the next stage of this part of the experiment.

On his way to the hospital, he saw an ambulance parked in front of the old house where his detector had reacted the night before. After what he had thought and had written down in the graveyard, that did not surprise him at all.

When he reached the hospital, he left his car in the hospital parking lot. Then he walked up to the front entrance, not taking his detector with him, although he wished that he could do so without raising a lot of questions. He had his story ready for front reception.

“I know that this is going to sound strange, but do you have a floor plan of the hospital? I am part of a committee putting forward a proposal to build a small hospital on the other side of town, and we want to follow the model of this wonderful place.”

It worked. It surprised him how convincingly he could lie. To complete the deception, he took pictures of the floor plan with his cell phone, although he had seen what he had expected in the basement in the back: the hospital morgue.

A Hypothesis that Goes Viral

Fred was presenting a paper at a conference a month later. It bore the innocuous title – “Nano Waves: A Hypothesis”.  He liked the word ‘nano’ as it made him think of a little old grandmother.  It began innocently enough with his short, but still kind of tedious description of the process through which he developed a device for detecting very small waves. The reception to his presentation perked up when he talked about his ‘field experimentation’. He caught the attention of the audience with that. But that was nothing compared with his final statement. “I cannot say with certainty whether or not there is life after death. But I can safely submit the hypothesis that dead bodies emit waves, nano waves – energy after death.”

A reporter who had felt that he was ‘condemned’ to the science beat, had the good fortune of attending Fred’s presentation.  After the lively questions and answer session, he sought out Fred, and interviewed him, a first for the shy scientist. It became front page news.

So now Fred is standing in front of a microphone, feeling very uncomfortable, about to announce to an audience estimated in the millions his pronouncement of energy after death. He hopes that this audience understands the tentative nature of much of science, even his own work.