Jenny looks at the orderly line of vibrating Styrofoam balls hovering just out of reach. She can see Jones from the corner of her eye, fervently adjusting parameters on his keyboard. The balls respond by changing formation, a bit like those acrobatic airplanes, only there are at least twenty, sometimes more balls flying in perfect synchronicity. Occasionally a number of balls would drop out of formation for no apparent reason, only for more balls to arise from the table, resulting in a different pattern to materialize as if out of nothing. These pattern changes could be subtle, almost indiscernible from the previous, or dramatically different. Jones keeps telling her something about sound waves, standing still in some locust or was that low keys but anyway there the balls all fall down and Jones is looking at her with a grin that says "was I a good dog ?"
“They say the Vedic Indians used this to move huge stone slabs to build their monumental temples and things.”
This seems to grab Jenny's attention. Anything that sounds like magic is cool to her, and thus far the only contribution she had was to stare at the magically suspended Styrofoam beads in silent wonder and slightly shocked trepidation. Grounding this experience in something she is familiar with, myths and fables, permits her wits to gather and rise above the mist of incomprehension. After a moment's hesitation, she brightens suddenly, turns to Jones with all the excitement of a puppy and all the guile of a kitten.
“So we can just float things? Like, we go stand outside a jewelry store and the diamond come floating out the widow?”
Jones promptly messes up any chance of romance by bursting out in patronizing laughter. ”No, no! We can only do it here, on this table, with these very light objects. We could set up the equipment on another table, but the time and effort involved make it easier to move this,” and with this he sweeps his hands over an entire room full of electronic equipment, tool benches and weird metal skeletons hung with rows upon rows of what looks like little speakers. To move this would be ridiculously difficult. Her mood falls in between the disappointment of not perpetrating the prefect crime and Jones' ridicule, and it feels like time to go, when she suddenly brightens:
“But you said the Indians moved huge rocks. I thought they made their totems of wood, and soil mounts, and…” Jones decides not to risk it, she’ll find out about the other kind of Indian some day.
“Yes, but that is just a theory. It will take years before we lift a marble, i guess. The power is not there to lift actual mass.”
“But these are tiny little speakers, why don't you use the things Pink Floyd has on stage?”
That would help very little. The sound pressure needed to lift a marble is huge, it would be impossible to fit enough speakers in the required space. Besides, the bigger the speaker, the more difficult to generate the really high frequencies we need…”
“But the Indians...”
“Yes, so the theory goes, but just because this looks the same as the stories, does not mean it is the same. They could have used vastly different technology. In any case, the legend speaks of melodious sounds propelling the ancients, and as you can hear, this buzz ain’t no melody. Besides, most of the frequencies we use, are inaudible anyway, no music there, so I think comparing this to the Vedic myths is laughable.”
Jenny feels like she lost a dream before it even started.
“…And rocks are not magnetic anyway”, she concedes broken-heartedly.
“Neither is Styrofoam. The reason they work is because the air pressure needed to suspend so little weight with such large surface area, is easily attainable. Ping pong balls have been used, for example. Besides the fact of magnetic rocks, which do exist, the sheer bad aerodynamics of rocks make this approach useless, we think.”
“So it is not magnetics.”
“No, it is about the little quiet places created by the interference between multiple sound waves.”
“You mean like two notes being tuned together, send they go www ww w wh who woo woooo...As they get closer to each other?”
“Exactly!” Jones is rejoiced to have an audience with a sprinkling of understanding. “We are creating a string of whoos in three dimensions, and the balls float inside small pockets of relatively still air while being buffeted in all directions by pulses of high pressure outside that bubble. By changing the frequency of one of the many sources we shift the position of that bubble of low pressure this way or that slightly. By changing many tones at once, we can totally destroy one pattern and instantly replace it with another.”
“So, no diamond rings, then.” Suddenly her face brightens with the brightness only a bright idea can bring. As quickly, her face falls. Jones just had to ask what that was.
“I was thinking one could use magnetic speakers and lift the ring that way, but I remembered that gold is not magnetic.”
Jones had to smile at her cleverness, you could take this one to mom. ..
“Actually, the same power problem exists. Generating magnetic fields fast enough and strong enough to lift significant mass, is hard”, and with this he rubs his two fingers together in the universal sign of low fiscal security. “Mostly, though, the frequencies are way up in the microwave range, you'd probably cook your rocky ring before you carry it anywhere.”
“And gold is not magnetic anyway.” Jenny knows things, too.
“Oh, that's not a problem. When you subject any conductor to an electric field, it creates is own magnetic field, and vice versa, from there electro magnetic. You can move lead with magnets, as long as it carries current.”
Jenny accepts this quietly, he can see her mind is ratcheting somewhere again. He likes that about her, that little ratchet that keeps adding mental gains into new questions. Her frown deepens a moment before she carefully articulates, as if she just learned something by herself.
“Has anyone tried this in water?”
Jones has thought about this: “To filter impurities with bubbles, like raining down to sediment or something?”
Jenny frowns slowly “I was just thinking, if you do this in water, or oil, you could lift bigger things?”
Jones is only in his second year, and suddenly he does not feel like the clever scientist. Where is this chick going with this?
“And, and, if things float better in water, can you use metal or stone then?”
Jones is still wondering if someone had tried this. Out loud he mulls the question over.
“The problem still lies with the frequencies. I am pretty sure water under so much microwave radiation would just evaporate. Don't quote me, but i don't think flooding your jewelry store will help.”
“Yeah, i guess I'll die poor, nothing new there.” They giggle together for a moment, when Jenny suddenly gets serious again.
“Wait a minute. If we suspend our particles in oil, they would really float well, yes?” Jones nods agreement. Jenny thoughtfully continues
“Provided the particles are real small, we should be able to manipulate them with the right frequencies, whatever those might be, right?”
Jones nods slowly, “I see, you want to filter oil, take out suspended particulates, yes? Always some money to be made from the oil guys...”
“I was thinking more of vaccines.” Jones had no answer, his brain paddling backwards to find the last relatable statement. He falls miserably, but Jenny just continues:
“You know the whole mercury scandal?” Jones looks blank.
“You know, all the kiddies dying or getting brain damage from mercury in the vaccines?” Jones sees a dim light winking from the chambers of his memory.
“That was unproven nonsense…”
Jenny nods. “The mercury thing was sort of nonsense, but it turns out aluminium is the only constant in all those vaccines, well very nearly all, like ninety nine percent, and iron and chrome, but a friend of mine who has worked in factories say those are probably the same metal shavings you find in breakfast cereal or bread. From the machines grinding and stirring ingredients.” Jones' imagination fills in the rest of the picture, and he is not hungry anymore.
“So there's aluminium shavings in the vaccines?” Jenny finds his lack of horror absolutely mystifying.
“Aluminium in the vaccines? Hallo? Why would you want to have that one metal in almost every vaccine? Nanoscopic little particles, neatly folded into little lumps of organic matter? All I'm wondering now, are they going to move the metal, or use the metal to move the ball of organic material?” Jones looks at her with no comprehension.
“Think about it, they are injecting us with these metallic contaminants, then they manipulate those metals inside or bodies, using electric magnets...” Jenny starts describing a horror-movie, where millions of metallic nanoparticulates gather together in his body, forming a thin little microscopic wire, that proceeds, under the manipulative effects of broadcast electromagnetics, slicing through tissue and veins and arteries, like a demon-possessed boomerang.
“Woah, wait a minute. That's crazy. First of all, the frequencies you’d need would be…” Jones does some quick mental arithmetic, “tens of millions of kilohertz, like fifty or hundred gigahertz, and you would need them to be really close, many of them, it's just not possible.”
“What about cell phones?” Jenny spits. She hates the things…
“No, they operate at barely gigahertz frequencies, you would need more, like the stuff the police are using for their live body cams, TETRA I think they call it…” Jones' eyes glaze over for a second, then widen in disbelief. “...or the new 5G network, with transceivers on lamp posts every so many meters. ...and they are running deep into microwave, higher than anything we ever tested for safety. ...oh. ..my. ..god. ..”
Jenny looks at Jones with sympathy. When they met, she thought he had a good heart, if a bit too impressed with his own cleverness. She accepted his invitation to come see the "cool stuff at the lab" the way a girl accepts an invitation to admire a young gentleman's art collection, or extends a midnight offer of coffee. She was rather surprised when she actually ended up in an actual laboratory, fully dressed. Right now, however, Jones seems upset, as if in the initial realization of complete cognitive dissonance, that moment when you realize reality does not conform to the rules you are used to.
Jenny prepares for the inevitable hysterical outburst of the highly educated but emotionally invested when it encounters it's first cognitive discord. Educated people consider criticism of their specialty as a personal attack on their own integrity. Questioning science is apparently a sin to scientists, like conspiracy theory is to a media graduate. Both professions exist purely to question commonly held truths, but somehow that has been lost on the way to Truth. Jones surprises her by not freaking out, instead he walks up to her, and while he reaches to take her by the waist, he blurts:
“Young lady, it seems you and I have much to discuss. Shall we retire to my humble abode,” and Jones wiggles his eyebrows in a really unsexy way, “where I may entrainment you by showing you some pictures of etchings while I try to get you drunk on fairly good wine?” Jenny feels as light as an ultrasonic foam ball as Jones gently draws her in for a kiss.
