October 2029, Jinsheng Province, Bright Country
The Lingguang probe suffered an accident as it approached Lingshen Star. Its electrical equipment was completely destroyed, and the mission failed.
Daphne Braun had poured her heart into the project and was deeply curious about Lingshen Star, only to be met with a cold, disappointing result.
Michael Max understood how Daphne felt. Space exploration took a long time and carried great risks; one small mistake or an unforeseeable accident could lead to failure.
Michael had lost count of how many times he had failed, but for Daphne, this was her first time.
Because of his work, Michael often traveled between Rocket City in Sazhou and the Bright Country Space Administration research center in Jinsheng Province.
Two days earlier, Michael and Professor Braun had gone to Jinsheng Province for a meeting. He had persuaded Daphne to come along and visit her alma mater to clear her head.
Daphne's alma mater was Jinsheng University of Technology, which had long collaborated with the Bright Country Space Administration and trained many astronomers and aerospace specialists.
Martha, an intrepid reporter who seemed to be everywhere, had somehow learned of Daphne Braun's itinerary. The two had arranged to have afternoon tea at an outdoor café. After some seemingly aimless chitchat, Martha leaned forward and lowered her voice to ask:
"I heard Michael went to meet Prince Harufa. Did he mention it to you?"
After Daphne answered in the affirmative, Martha asked again:
"Daphne, my dear PhD in astronomy, could you explain in simple terms what kind of experiment Michael plans to conduct on Enceladus?"
Daphne knew that Michael's company, Acebe Company, had launched a probe bound for Enceladus, one of Saturn's moons. The publicly announced purpose of the mission was to investigate whether there were signs of life beneath Enceladus's icy crust.
She had once asked Michael out of curiosity whether the experiment's purpose really was just to look for signs of life. Michael had smiled without answering, claiming it was top secret.
When Martha learned that Michael had kept Daphne in the dark too, she looked surprised, with a hint of disappointment. That only made Daphne more curious. Pressed for details, Martha shared some of the clues she had uncovered.
One of Martha's sources was a researcher at Sìruile University in Country F. He claimed that Nikola Tesla's theory, which the Bright Country had kept classified for many years, could be used to create a super-energy source.
A research team in Country F had studied all the celestial bodies in the Solar System and concluded that Enceladus was the ideal testing ground for building such an energy source.
Daphne Braun was astonished. For a moment, it seemed she could find confirmation in the things Michael had let slip in the past. Given his personality, how could he be content merely to languish in a capsule on Mars?
He had shown great interest in Mars's core, the water ice beneath its soil, and the dry ice at its south pole. Could he really have mastered a theory for creating some kind of super-energy source?
As Daphne pondered this, Martha posed another startling question:
"Daphne, I can tell you're deeply in love with Michael. Are there limits to your love for him? In other words, no matter what he does, would you always choose to stand by his side?"
Daphne froze and looked up at Martha, lifting her chin as if to ask, "Like what?"
"For example, what if Michael's device on Enceladus could destroy Saturn's rings?" Martha asked meaningfully.
"How could that be acceptable? Whatever the reason, no one has the right to destroy Saturn's rings!" Daphne declared firmly.
Daphne Braun's Mars Burst Hypothesis had begun to take shape while she was at university. As she researched and gathered evidence to support it, she had turned her attention to Saturn and its moons.
Saturn was a gas giant with no rocky surface, so according to Daphne's theory, it would not burst apart. But it had more moons than any other planet in the Solar System.
So far, 149 moons had been discovered around Saturn, while the more massive Jupiter had only 95. Saturn had more moons than all the other planets in the Solar System combined. Where had so many moons come from?
Michael and Professor Braun were attending a seminar at the Jinsheng Aerospace Research Center to discuss the technical feasibility of a lunar mass tumor experiment. During a break, Michael explained his Enceladus plan to Professor Braun.
Enceladus lay in Saturn's outer E Ring. Its semimajor axis was 238,000 kilometers, while Saturn's radius was just over 62,000 kilometers.
If they built a base on Enceladus's equator and launched a small spacecraft toward Saturn, the spacecraft could remain connected to the base by a sufficiently long Carbon Fiber Tube. They could adjust its orbit so that, at a distance of 1,000 kilometers from Saturn's surface, it would maintain the same angular velocity as Enceladus.
Since Saturn's tides had locked Enceladus in place, the base on its equator would always face the center of Saturn, without turning.
"The Carbon Fiber Tube between the spacecraft and the base would be about 175,000 kilometers long, longer than the wavelength of Superluminal waves. So that's why you said Enceladus is the best place in the Solar System to build a Superlight Wave Power Station," the professor said.
"Enceladus isn't just at the right distance. The most important thing is that Saturn's rings lie between it and Saturn," Michael replied. "After the Carbon Fiber Tube absorbs Superluminal wave radiation, it heats up, evaporating the water ice in the rings revolving around Saturn directly beneath it."
Michael emphasized that the rings inside Enceladus's orbit rotated faster. The heated Carbon Fiber Tube would not simply melt a straight line of ice along its normal axis. Instead, as Saturn's rings spun rapidly, it would evenly absorb water vapor from the entire ring system. Water droplets would condense around the Carbon Fiber Tube, forming the structure needed to increase the Superlight Wave Power Station's output.
Professor Braun considered Michael's plan intently, then spoke with his customary rigor:
"The last time you said in front of Mr. E that Saturn had a natural support for a Superlight Wave Power Station, I immediately thought you meant the rings. Your plan is theoretically feasible, but the risks of extracting water from them still need to be carefully calculated and assessed."
Looking at the brilliant, wildly imaginative explorer before him, Professor Braun thought, What an extraordinary coincidence.
After studying Nikola Tesla's theory of gravity in depth, the professor had designed another ingenious experiment, in addition to the lunar mass tumor experiment. The site he had chosen was Saturn's rings.
Saturn's rings were divided into many bands, stretching from a few thousand kilometers to hundreds of thousands of kilometers from the planet. They consisted of ice particles ranging in size from micrometers to meters, and averaged only ten meters thick.
The prevailing theory used the law of universal gravitation to calculate and predict the orbital periods and speeds of the different bands in Saturn's rings.
According to those calculations, the thin "disk" of Saturn's rings did not orbit the planet as one whole. The inner rings felt a stronger pull from Saturn and moved faster, while the outer rings felt a weaker pull and moved more slowly.
Nikola Tesla's baffling theory of gravity claimed otherwise!
He believed that the gravitational force acting on an object depended on the strength of the energy it displaced. In an ideal gravitational field, a gravitational event was usually simplified as one central point mass attracting another orbiting object, such as Saturn and its moons.
That simplification contained an implicit assumption: all the energy displaced by the orbiting object came from radiation emitted by the central energy source. In that case, the results calculated using Nikola Tesla's energy-based gravity and the law of universal gravitation would be exactly the same.
But what if the radiation source were not just a central point of light? What if, in addition to the point source, there were a bright "disk"? The orbiting object would receive radiation from the central point source, whose intensity decreased with the square of the distance, as well as radiation from nearby objects in its environment. The strength of the energy it displaced would then be the sum of those two contributions.
The environmental energy from sources other than the point source had no effect within the framework of universal gravitation. But according to Tesla's theory of gravity, it would increase the gravitational force acting on the object.
In the 1970s, observations revealed a "strange phenomenon" in another kind of bright disk: spiral galaxies like the Milky Way. Stars near the edge of the Milky Way's disk violated the law of universal gravitation. Rather than the stars closer to the center moving faster, they all traveled at nearly the same speed.
If they moved faster than the speed calculated using the law of universal gravitation, there had to be more undetected mass. Unless the law of universal gravitation was modified, scientists had to assume dark matter existed. To account for the difference between theory and observed speeds, the hypothesized dark matter had to amount to five to ten times the visible matter. That was how the dark matter hypothesis came about.
Returning to the question of Saturn's rings, before 1980, the orbital periods of the different bands were estimated using the law of universal gravitation: the inner rings moved faster and the outer rings more slowly.
Since Saturn's rings were made up of tiny chunks of ice that were difficult to distinguish from one another through a telescope, astronomers still did not know the orbital period of each individual ring.
The Voyager 2 probe observed numerous large structures on Saturn's B Ring. Arranged in a radial pattern, they were called "spokes." The name was apt: in simple terms, the spokes were like the bars on a bicycle wheel.
The spokes spanned several of Saturn's rings and extended along their normal axis—the perpendicular direction pointing toward Saturn. Their orbital period was easy to identify. To the astonishment of astronomers, the spokes' dynamics violated the law of universal gravitation: their outer edges did not move more slowly. Instead, like the bars of a wheel, they all had nearly the same angular velocity.
Mainstream scientists, whose explanations could account for anything, came up with a way to defend the law of universal gravitation: the spokes were not attached to the rings, but floated above them. The spokes moved at the same speed throughout, while the rings beneath them moved faster on the inside and slower on the outside.
In other words, the spokes and the rings below them each rotated independently, without moving in sync. With that explanation, they had brilliantly saved both the law of universal gravitation and the dark matter hypothesis.
Who was right? After all, experiments were the sole criterion for testing truth!
Professor Braun's experimental plan was to scatter radio-frequency markers along the normal axis of different bands, from the outer rings to the inner ones, then use the signals to determine the period and speed of each band.
The law of universal gravitation predicted that the periods of the markers would grow longer from the inner rings to the outer rings, while their angular velocities would slow down.
Nikola Tesla's theory of gravity predicted that the angular velocities of the markers from the inner to the outer rings would be nearly identical.
If Tesla was right, the spokes on Saturn's rings—which violated the law of universal gravitation—would display exactly the same phenomenon as the anomalous behavior of stars in the outer Milky Way. In other words, if Tesla's prediction was correct, there would be no need to introduce the dark matter hypothesis.
More interestingly, bright rings would rotate faster than dark ones relative to theoretical calculations. In the Milky Way and other galaxies, this phenomenon appeared as stars in bright spiral arms moving faster. Observations supported the prediction: stars in the bright arms received more additional radiation from their surroundings, so they moved faster.
As the different bands orbited Saturn, they would not move as classical dynamics predicted, with the outer rings moving more slowly and the inner ones faster. Instead, like the spokes already observed on Saturn's B Ring—and like the outer parts of the Milky Way—the different rings would all have the same angular velocity!
This "sheet of ice" that was Saturn's rings was like a single "wheel," rotating in sync, with one violation of the law of universal gravitation after another—like bicycle spokes—"fixed" between them!
Poem assembled from collected lines:
Hailstones fall; at first they seem a mass of fallen pearls. — Song, Zhao Fan
Among them, great and small alike vie in their differences. — Song, Chen Pu
Who can discern the turning and tilting of the wheel? — Song, Shi Zhengjue
A sheet of ice emerges from the forge. — Ming, Zhu Duozheng
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