...And We Will Have Snow

Chapter 10: Dark Matter

Kore appeared in the door of the lounge wearing an apron and said, "Time for dinner!"

Dema immediately looked chagrined and said, "Oh, should I have been helping too?"

"Oh, no. We're being treated as guests. I had to insist." She untied the apron and folded it over her arm. "It turns out that Tengri is something of a culinary artist and likes to prepare the main course for dinner, but Marian is the one who loves to cook and does most of it. Everyone else has free access to the kitchen whenever they need to eat. And everyone helps Marian gather produce from her gardens."

Dema looked only slightly less chagrined. Kore gave her sister a sly wink and said, "Don't worry about it. The cooking is done by whoever shows up. Those who don't help with the prep help with the cleanup." Dema grinned and elbowed Cern.

Soon everyone was seated family style at a big table right there in the large kitchen. Over Cajun catfish, turnips, onions and greens, they discussed the day.

Kore said to Dema, "I heard you mention sun in a bottle. What's that about?"

Dema turned to Cern, who turned to Jack, who responded with enthusiasm, "It's what powers everything on the island. It's supposed to still be experimental, but it's got to be the biggest thing ever. Basically, it condenses water right out of the air, and converts the hydrogen into dark matter. The reaction produces enough power to run a small city, but the unit is small enough to fit in a car. Or a boat." Jack looked hopefully at Tengri, who just grinned at him.

"Seriously, if we had one in the boat it could go anywhere, never need fuel. Or I could put one of those 400-mile Tesla car batteries in the boat and plug it in while it's docked here. We'd never need fuel for it that way either." He looked at Tengri again. This time Tengri nodded.

Naga spoke up. "You mentioned dark matter."

"That's right. It's pretty certain that the mysterious stuff cosmologists call dark matter is actually this lower energy state of hydrogen. It's easy to calculate the UV emission frequency of the power reaction, and the same UV signature is there in deep space if you look for it, or so I've been told."

"You mean hydrogen turns into dark matter spontaneously?"

Jack nodded. He'd obviously studied up on this. "I think so, yes, but not very fast. It's a little like the way uranium spontaneously decays into lead. One of those quantum things where the probability is very small but not zero. So there's a half life. If you calculate backward from the ratio of dark matter to hydrogen in the universe today, assuming there was no dark matter to start with, you come up with a number. A very small number."

"And this incredibly rare reaction only happens in deep space, but now it also happens in your 'bottle'?"

"Well, it's hard to tell where the UV signature originates. Probably mostly in suns."

"Like in our sun?"

"Yes. They say it's been detected there. Seems to have something to do with solar flares and other activity in the corona. I think it possibly also happens in lightning, maybe even in arc welding. We know that welders can get burned by intense UV emissions. I don't think that can be fully explained by the electrical current flow."

"So you're saying dark matter has been created right under our noses all along?"

Jack had to smile. "So to speak. Possibly literally so for welders. No one went looking for one very specific frequency of UV radiation around welders or during lightning storms."

There was a long pause. Apparently it wasn't only the newcomers who hadn't heard all this before. Finally Kore spoke.

"What happens to the dark matter? Is it piling up in the bottom of your bottle?"

Jack laughed out loud. But then he said, "Actually that's a good question. Because if it wasn't dark matter it would be piling up in the bottom of the bottle. What makes dark matter dark is that it doesn't interact with other matter, and that's because it's strenuously neutral, far less interactive than usual. Normal matter can't contain it. The only way it can ever interact again is if a photon that exactly matches the energy it gave up should come along. And that's even more unlikely than that the reaction happens spontaneously in the first place."

"Thermodynamics," said Naga.

"Exactly. The energy from the UV photon ionizes the steam molecule, leaving the electron free to emit in a broad spectrum of lower energies."

"So if the dark matter doesn't stay in the bottle, where does it go?" Kore asked.

"It's electrically neutral, but it still has mass and reacts to gravity."

"So it falls to the center of the earth and piles up there?"

"It would if it had no momentum to start with. But the reaction energy from the emission of the UV photon gives it an initial push. It could fall through the earth and out the other side and just keep going."

"Or it could come this way and go through us?"

"Yes. But that's nothing new. According to the cosmologists, there has to be five times as much dark matter as ordinary matter. For every atom in your body there are five atoms of dark matter sailing through it."

"How comforting." Kore pouted and frowned at the thought.

Drake and Ray stood and started to clear the table as though they were accustomed to it. Dema and Cern started helping with that. Jack had managed to eat most of his fish while he was talking and now hurried to finish the rest and clear away his own dishes. By then Naga was busy helping Cheryl load the dishwasher. Soon everyone had adjourned to the lounge.