Hermione learns a thing
- Thread starter mp3.1415player
- Start date
???
What does AMDAHL stand for?
"Accidental Magic Detection And Homing Lister"
It's the device that's designed to detect accidental magic but keeps getting 'anomalies' so they turned its sensitivity down
Ace Dreamer
Verified Reality User
- Location
- Between The Unknown & The Known
There should be no problem there, as that is 'voodvork', not 'woodwork'
Probably worth mentioning a chap called 'Gene Amdahl', and the 'Amdahl Corp.', who might have had something to do with making and selling (mainframe) computers...
Odds are that there will be very few 'HOP master engineers', and what you'll get far more of are people trained to be 'HOP mechanics'. They will be able to 'talk' to existing HOPs, and (maybe with some difficulty) locate HOPs with no obvious physical tether. So, yes, that sort of engineer may need the 'HOP maintenance code' to do much that a (skilled) HOP user couldn't do.
HOPs might also be networked via the (recently deployed) Internet, though anyone smart will quickly see the IP4 32-bit address space will be woefully inadequate. Remote logging of maintenance changes to HOPs would be entirely reasonable, and it would be strongly desirable that the maintainer's 'signature' would be one of the things logged. I doubt 'Econet' would be used, no matter the provisions for it on the BBC Micro (even over TCP/IP)...
I suppose TCP/HP (TCP over Hermione's Protocol, using 128-bit addresses), might be one option... Letting the existing Internet go on using 32-bit IP4, in the short term, in a tiny namespace within the bigger one. After a while, the whole Internet might be running over HOPs...
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That would be a problem, though it wouldn't really be a problem with using HOPs - since a malicious HOPper doesn't need a pre-existing HOP to wreak havoc. They can slap together a vector-control HOP and launch half your house into the next county from a standing start.
- Location
- On a speck of dust, floating through the void.
Which means some bright chap will come up with a hop that nullifies any hops applied to a surface it was applied to, or a hop that holds the house down to the ground.
And then some malicious hopper will try to take apart the house instead, and someone will come up with a hop to reinforce the integrity of the walls...
The arms race is on.
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17. Hermione learns a thing XIV - Thinking about things...
- Location
- The general area. Possibly behind you.
Blinking awake, Hermione rolled over and stared at the window, seeing brilliant sunlight coming past the curtains. After a little while, feeling very relaxed, she stretched under the sheet and yawned widely. Checking the clock next to the bed, she saw it was only just after seven in the morning. They didn't need to be at the university until half past nine, so there was no real hurry to leap out of what had turned out to be a very comfortable bed.
Tugging one side of the curtains open with telekinesis, she hastily closed her eyes as a beam of sunlight hit her directly in the face. Letting go, she put her hands over her eyes and winced. "Ow," she mumbled, feeling a little silly. When she was no longer seeing spots she opened them again. Sitting up she yawned once more before sliding out of bed and padding across the room to where she'd left her backpack, grabbing a notebook and pen out of it and floating them to the bed even as she went into the bathroom to get a drink of water. Once she'd done that she went back to bed, plumping the pillow up then leaning on it while picking up the notebook and flipping it open. She leafed through it until she got to a blank page, then made some more notes on ideas she'd had overnight as a result of the earlier day's work, and thoughts on what to ask Professor Hawking when she met him.
Of course she already had half a notebook full of those, but more wouldn't hurt, she felt. She wasn't likely to get this sort of chance very often and wanted to make the best of it while she could.
When she'd filled another four pages, she put the notebook to one side and closed her eyes, relaxing back against the pillow. Slowly pushing her energy sense outwards in a well practiced manner, she examined every aspect of the H-Field locally that she could detect. That odd textural change was more apparent now she was looking for it and knew it was there, and more or less where the source lurked. Or at least, she was assuming that the epicenter was the source, which seemed plausible, as the alteration to the H-Field got steadily stronger towards that point then decayed away again as they'd gone past it the last time.
It seemed quite likely that the effect kept on going past where she could no longer sense it herself, simply being below the detectable threshold. Having it abruptly cut off seemed less probable than a steady fading away into the background and would match her own observations. Once again she wondered if it was a completely isotropic effect and would produce the same results above it, or for that matter below it, but determining the first would take a little more effort and the second much more effort. Neither was all that important right at this moment although she was quite curious.
There also didn't seem to have been any changes since the last time as far as she could see, but considering how minute the effect was anyway, it might again just be too subtle for her to sense. The point where she initially picked it up was roughly the same as well, although it seemed to have moved outwards slightly, which she put down to her own energy sense steadily getting more range and sensitivity with practice.
She made a few notes on a blank page with the pen floating mid-air, still with her eyes closed, and felt somewhat pleased that she'd learned to write telekinetically. It came in handy quite often. Opening one eye she checked the time, then nodded and closed it again. Moving on from her investigation of the local oddity she began simply observing Oxford through the energy sense, not really looking for anything in particular, but basically practicing with being able to determine what it was she was sensing. There was an awful lot more to sense here than at home as they were near the center of a fairly large and very active city, after all.
Right on the edge of her range she could detect the currently quiescent University MRI machine, the superconducting magnet still powered up as she'd learned they had to be all the time, and generating an immense magnetic field which noticeably warped the H-Field around it in a very distinctive manner. It was a steady if extremely tiny distortion which she'd recognize instantly now.
In a similar but not identical manner, she could feel linear paths of knotted H-Field energy all over the place, going right through her range, which she knew were high power electricity lines. She'd seen that before at home, as on the other side of the golf course behind her house there was an EHT power line on tall metal pylons snaking its way across the countryside. Such things connected to large transformer installations, then lower voltage lines branched out from those to smaller substations around the area, finally ending up going into buildings as either single phase or three phase mains. With a little effort she could trace the entire network and was amazed at how complex it all was. Much more so than around her house, again because of being in a city.
She amused herself following the wiring for a while, tracing out the power cables in the hotel all the way from the basement to the roof, and feeling various ones become more obvious as loads were put on or taken off. The lifts starting up took quite a lot of electricity as their cables showed up really very nicely when the lift was in motion.
After a while she stopped watching electricity work and spread her sense further, feeling all the people wandering around in the building and the streets outside, in cars and buses, and even in a couple of small aircraft passing overhead. Much smaller distortions were visible as pigeons flew around in the park across the road, a couple of slightly larger ones probably being crows, and she could sense dogs, cats, a fox, and lots and lots of small rodents. Even insects and spiders if she pushed harder, the sheer number of them astounding. By the time she was picking out the individual trees in the park she finally decided it was time to get up and get ready for the day, but it had been an interesting exercise, even though it was the same thing she did every day and every evening. The change of scenery made quite a difference, she mused as she hopped out of bed again, quickly put the covers straight, and went to brush her teeth and floss.
By the time she emerged into the common area of their suite, her mother was sipping a cup of tea, the kettle by her elbow on the small table near the window, steam rising from it. Hermione could feel her father in the bathroom, apparently in a good mood as far as she could tell. "I made you one too, sweetie," her mother said, floating a cup to her, which she took with a smile.
"Thank you, Mummy," she replied, sitting in the other chair. Her mother smiled back, then turned the page of the newspaper that was hanging in the air in front of her, while holding the cup in both hands and intermittently sipping from it. "You're getting very good at that," she added, pleased with her mother's progress.
"Constant practice certainly lets you improve," her mother laughed. "Although you have such a large head start I'm not sure I'll ever be in your league."
Hermione giggled, before taking another sip of her own tea. She peered at the little tray of tea, coffee, and sugar packets next to the kettle, noticing that there were some individually wrapped chocolate biscuits there too if her eyes weren't deceiving her. Reaching out she picked one up and looked at it. They weren't. Glancing at her mother she saw an amused expression. "I think we can allow a little treat every now and then, as we're technically on holiday, Hermione," the older woman confided. "I'll have one as well."
The girl pushed another one across the table, then both of them opened the wrapping and tasted the contents. "Ooh, that's very nice," Hermione commented approvingly. "I like it."
"They're rather good, aren't they?" her mother agreed.
"Save one for me before you scoff the lot," a voice said, making both look around at Hermione's father peering around the corner of the bathroom door. "Helen, do you know where I put my spare razor blades, by any chance?"
"In the small black bag, I think."
"Oh." He went into their bedroom. "Aha! Yes, there you are," he said triumphantly, making both the others look at each other and smile. Coming back, he held the packet up. "Thank you. That blade was going to cut me to ribbons."
Ten minutes later he came out of the bathroom, clean-shaven and looking satisfied. Hermione flicked one of the biscuits to him with a quick mental action and grinned when he caught it in the same way, her eyebrows going up as he unwrapped it without touching it then took a bite out of the thing, both hands engaged in doing his tie up. She giggled at his look of rather smug pleasure and how her mother shook her head and sighed a little.
"Sometimes you really are a child, dear," she commented mildly.
He grinned at her. "One has to stay mentally flexible. And you're only as old as you feel."
"You must feel about five years old quite a lot of the time then," she replied, making Hermione laugh again.
Her father winked at her, finished fastening his tie, snagged the remaining bit of biscuit out of the air and popped it into his mouth, then dropped onto the small sofa facing them.
"Some of the time. Not a lot of it." He smiled at them. "Well, then. I expect today is going to be at least as much fun as yesterday was, what with Professor Hawking and his colleagues arriving. I'm very intrigued to see if he can shed any light on all this."
"Hopefully he will be able to eventually," Hermione replied. "Although as Doctor Blakely said, it's probably going to take some time. And I would expect that we'll need other experts at some point. That's how science works after all. It's a team effort."
"You certainly managed to spark off the formation of quite a team," her mother noted. "They all seem very motivated and talented."
"I'm just happy that they took it all seriously," she replied quietly. "Although it was rather embarrassing, what Doctor Langham was saying about me…"
"It's well deserved, dear," her father told her with a smile. "Don't worry about it, you earned the praise. But don't let it go to your head either."
"I'll try not to," she assured him, smiling back.
"I think breakfast is the next step," her mother announced with a glance at her watch. "One biscuit isn't quite enough for me, I'm afraid. Shall we head down?" She stood, and only a few minutes later they were all sitting at a table in the restaurant. After another rather nice breakfast, and some coffee for her parents, they quickly found themselves driving towards the university a couple of miles away, negotiating the Oxford traffic as it moved slowly but mostly steadily. When they arrived, Hermione's father drove into the staff car park at the rear of the building where Doctor Langham's new department was, a different one than the place the lecture hall had been. Referring to a small card he tapped in the code that he'd been given on the keypad next to the barrier, then rolled his window up as the access barrier lifted. Shortly they were getting out of the vehicle.
Hermione turned her head towards where she could feel Doctor Younan approaching from, his own car coming around the corner a few seconds later. He smiled at them, parked, and got out, locking it behind him. "Good timing," he called as he walked over. "Did you all sleep well?"
"Very well, thank you," her mother replied with a nod. "And we had a nice breakfast too."
"Excellent." He glanced at his watch. "The Cambridge group should be arriving in about twenty minutes, I believe. We'd probably better get upstairs and make sure everything is ready for them."
The four of them headed into the large building, Doctor Younan politely holding the door for Hermione and her parents, and went up in the lift, soon walking into the Psionics department after he'd slid his keycard through the reader and typed in an eight digit code. Inside, almost everyone else was already there. She could feel familiar presences all through the various rooms, and even as they entered, a slightly harried-looking Doctor Langham popped out of his office. "Ah, good, you made it. The traffic was terrible this morning. Some sort of problem with roadworks, I think."
"There were temporary traffic lights near the hotel," her father replied with a nod. "Looked like they were doing something to the phone lines, as far as I could see. There were a pair of British Telecom vans there."
"They've been adding new ISDN lines all over the city for the last year or so," Doctor Younan put in. "It's caused chaos a few times."
"Anyway, we're here now, so we'd better get to work," Doctor Langham said, looking at them, then his watch. "Professor Hawking's team are arriving at ten. I spoke to them last night and there were no problems at their end, so unless something catastrophic happens we've got about ten minutes. Hermione, we're going to use the conference room for meeting them." He indicated over his shoulder with a finger to a door at the end of the large open area, which she knew from the previous day had a quite big room behind it, with a long table, a video projector and screen, lots of chairs, and various other useful things including one wall entirely lined with whiteboards.
She nodded agreeably. "That sounds sensible, Doctor."
"The schedule calls for three hours up to one for the first session, a break for lunch, then around two or so we'll pick that up again for as long as is required, or six, whichever comes first," he continued. "Farouk and Christine will be sitting in, along with a number of others with specialties in the physical sciences. It's about… hmm… eleven people plus the Cambridge group, I believe. The rest of us will be doing more testing with your parent's help and going over the scans and other results from yesterday. I'll certainly be checking in on you all at times, and if Professor Hawking or his people need anything from us, we're all ready to pitch in."
Hermione nodded her understanding again. This was essentially what had been discussed the day before, with a few changes as result of some of the experimental results from then. "Will you be all right in there by yourself, sweetie?" her mother asked with a concerned expression.
The girl smiled widely. "I'll be fine, Mummy. It'll be fascinating to see what comes of discussing all this. And you're right here, after all."
Her father ruffled her hair while smiling as well. "I expect we'll come and check on how it's going between experiments too, dear. I have to admit I'm very curious to listen to what you'll be talking about although I'm sure a lot of it will go over my head."
"Given the chance we'd probably have everyone sitting and listening," Doctor Langham chuckled. "Including myself. But we have a lot of work to do and limited time in which to do it. I'm sure there will be other chances to repeat this sort of exercise in the future. For now, I want to make sure that by the time you three leave we have as much solid data as possible so we can work on it without taking up your time."
"I'm having a lot of fun, Doctor," Hermione assured him, meaning it. This was enormously interesting and something she was very pleased to be part of.
"I think we all are, Hermione," he replied, grinning and looking much less worried than he had earlier. "Despite being profoundly confused at the same time. Or possibly for that exact reason, thinking about it. The heart of scientific discovery is, after all, running into something apparently inexplicable."
"Which we very firmly did," Doctor Younan put in with a laugh.
"Possibly harder than any one else in history," his colleague agreed. He looked at his watch for a moment. "They'll be here very soon."
"They just got out of a van in the car park," Hermione reported, grinning a little when he raised an eyebrow, then shook his head in resigned wonder.
"If it was anyone else I'm not sure I'd believe that, but after yesterday…" He looked somewhat amused with his own words. "Good. All right, I'll go down and meet them, I think, and bring them up here. Farouk, make sure everyone's ready, will you, please?"
"No problem, Jerry," the other man replied as Doctor Langham turned and left the department. "Shall we?" he added to the Grangers, waving towards the conference room. All of them headed that way, several other scientists and students following, popping out of other rooms on the way. Inside the conference room a couple more people were already present, sitting at the table and talking quietly while surrounded by notebooks and sheets of paper. Hermione took a seat, her parents sitting on either side of her, while Doctor Younan went to the end of the room and worked on the computer there for a while, before coming back.
"I've got everything set up for both the computer data from yesterday, and the video recordings as well of all the tests," he told them. "And of course you can do live demonstrations if needed."
She nodded, smiling. Doctor Langham, who had gone down in the lift, was now coming back up, along with a number of other people, including Professor Hawking and Doctor Thurgood. All of them felt excited, as well as focused, from what she could detect. Only a couple of minutes later the door to the room opened, Hermione and her parents already looking at it, which had caused most of the others present to do the same.
Doctor Langham held the door as Doctor Thurgood preceded Professor Hawking's wheelchair through the opening, casting a quick glance around the room as he did, then turning to watch his colleague. The chair maneuvered through the doorway, guided by small twitches of the Professor's hand, and following it came his assistant Miss Rutgers. Both the students who had accompanied the Professor the last time brought up the back. Allowing the door to close when everyone was inside, Doctor Langham waved to the table. "We've left a position free for you, Professor. If everyone would care to sit down?"
The entire room was filled with the sound of people moving around for a minute or so, lots of rustling paper and a couple of coughs going along with it. Soon Professor Hawking's chair was on the opposite side of the table to Hermione's seat, the man meeting her eyes and if she wasn't imagining it very briefly almost winking at her. She smiled back. He seemed in a good mood. The rest of the Cambridge group nodded to her and her parents, Martin the maths student smiling at her for a moment.
Moving to the end of the table where the projector screen was, Doctor Langham waited patiently for everyone to finish getting their notes ready, and after a few more seconds when the room fell silent, opened his mouth. "Hello, everyone," he began calmly. "Thank you all for attending. And thank you, Professor Hawking and your team, for agreeing to join us in this research project. I suspect we're all going to have our work cut out for us, but that's half the point, isn't it?" He smiled a little and Hermione found herself nodding, as did a number of other people. "We all know what we're here for, and why. This particular session is to start off our research into the physics and mathematics behind psionics, with the aim of understanding how it works, why it works, and to come up with testable hypotheses for the entire phenomenon. Clearly this will likely be the work of years, if not decades, before we can ever fully understand it and how it all connects to everything else we understand about science, but one has to start somewhere."
He looked around the table. "We have gathered a significant amount of data both in our initial test series, and in the first series of this set yesterday. Doctor Younan has all the results to hand, and there's a printout of the entire testing methodology and schedule on the table there." Doctor Langham waved a hand at a stack of printed material in the middle of the table. "Please help yourselves and ask any questions you think of. As the bulk of what will be discussed here is far outside my own knowledge, Doctor Younan and Doctor Blakely will be running this discussion while I get back to work that is closer to my own specialty. However, if I'm needed, don't hesitate to call me back."
Pointing at the back of the room, he added, "Refreshments and drinks are available, so help yourselves as needed. We'll break for lunch at one, and resume at two or thereabouts, although there's no real set time, so if that needs to change, we just change it." Casting his gaze around those present once more, he smiled. "Have fun, and let's see if we can extract some new knowledge from this extraordinary situation. Let me, before we start, once again thank the Grangers for allowing us this opportunity, and Hermione in particular for having the sheer determination to get as far as she already has. I have little doubt that we're going to see a lot more result from all this in the near future."
Hermione went pink again, and ducked her head. She heard her mother stifle a small laugh and felt her father pat her shoulder. "All right, I've said my bit for now. Farouk, the room is yours. Michael, Helen, if you'll come with me, we've got a whole new series of things to try next." He nodded to Doctor Younan, who got up and took his place, then walked around behind Hermione and her parents. Both of them got up too.
Her mother leaned over and said quietly, "If you need either of us don't hesitate, sweetie. We're very proud of you." Her father squeezed her shoulder at the same time, making her look at them and smile.
"I'll be fine, Mummy," she replied just as quietly. "Have fun."
"We'll see you soon," her father added, then they followed Doctor Langham out of the room. The scientist looked back for a moment, met her eyes, and smiled. She nodded to him, getting an approving look, then the door swung shut.
Returning her attention to Doctor Younan, she found that everyone was watching her. Sitting up straight, she picked up her pen and poised it over a blank page in her notebook. "I'm ready when you are, Doctor Younan," she said politely.
He chuckled, nodding. "In that case, let's begin. If everyone would like to take a copy of the test schedule from yesterday, I'll briefly go over what we've achieved so far, our preliminary notes which are mostly on what psionics isn't, and the relevant measurement data resulting from the experiments to date. We have everything on video tape if required and all the experimental results are ready to hand on the computer here. I know everyone will have endless questions, but if you can let me get the introduction out of the way first so we're all reading from the same script, that would probably be more useful than jumping right into those. Everyone all right with that?"
Hermione, along with almost everyone else, nodded agreement. A couple of people who had got up to take the pile of documentation and hand it out now sat again. "Excellent." Checking his own notebook, he looked up and took a breath, then began speaking. Everyone took notes, Hermione included, and she saw that Professor Hawking was occasionally twitching his computer's controls, while listening very carefully. Very curious to learn his thoughts, she made sure to add any new ideas she came up with to her list.
It really was becoming rather long, she thought as she wrote, finding this whole experience immense fun. And much more interesting than school.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Watching the testing process carefully, Jerry made a few notes as Helen answered a series of questions the researcher on the other side of the glass asked. This series of tests was aimed at characterizing what he would have termed ESP and what Hermione called the energy sense. The girl herself was almost supernaturally good at it, to the point that he was having considerable trouble understanding how a human brain could handle that much information from what seemed like literally everywhere within a volume far larger than seemed plausible. Everything they'd learned the day before had opened up vast numbers of new questions, and he was resigned to the idea that he might never see the answers to all of them. That didn't mean he wasn't going to bloody well try, though. He'd been handed the answer to his dreams on a platter and he intended to take full advantage of it, no matter how much some of his thoughts about the implications of all this left him in a cold sweat.
Helen and Michael were nowhere near as… powerful? Practiced? Gifted? Who knew what the right terminology would end up being… as their daughter, but they were still far, far more effective at whatever it really was that they were doing than any example of ESP he'd ever even dreamed of. The fact that all of the Grangers could do this all day without any effort, on request, was one of the most amazing things of all about the whole situation. It was straight out of science fiction, what they could do, and he found it endlessly interesting. The mechanism behind how it worked was a complete mystery right now, aside from Hermione's H-Field explanation, which he thought was almost certainly going to end up being the right one, although likely only part of the truth. He certainly had nothing better.
Flipping the page, he quickly made a note while he thought about it of Michael's comment earlier that his own considerations of what was going on made him suspect that the neuroplasticity of a young brain might well explain just how Hermione had become so much better at the whole process than her parents. It was certainly a plausible hypothesis, Jerry thought. Children were known to be far better at learning multiple languages than adults in almost every case, even though no one yet knew exactly why. Expose them young enough to the right environment and they practically picked things like that up through osmosis. But after a certain age, in most cases, the rate of learning such things tended to drop off dramatically.
Possibly this was another example of that. It made a certain amount of sense, as much as anything about the whole situation did.
Turning back to the previous page, he listened to Helen's answer through the headphones he was wearing, nodding slightly as he made more notes. She hadn't been wrong once, although her description of a few things didn't quite match how he'd have said it. Which, from her own explanation, was down to how the 'energy sense' didn't really map to normal vision, resulting in what she sensed being sometimes somewhat hard to explain in such terms. However if you took that into account it was obvious that the end result was correct.
Shaking his head in mild wonder, even after all he'd seen so far being nowhere near inured to how incredible this all was, he finished writing and took the headphones off. The researcher was just finishing the test set and looked pleased as well as slightly baffled, an expression everyone in the department was very familiar with. Checking the time he nodded, then closed his notebook and got up, taking it with him as he left the room.
He spent the next hour checking in on various sections of the department, chatting to a few of the scientists, and observing a couple of Michael's test sets as well. In the medical section, he spent a while discussing the very preliminary genetic results with Peter, none of which seemed to show anything much out of the ordinary as far as the biologist was concerned. A full workup would take months, of course, but the initial analysis was basically entirely normal. None of the people whose specialty this was appeared particularly surprised by that, although several were somewhat disappointed as it would have been quite the breakthrough to immediately find something that jumped out.
Which, of course, matched all the other results they had so far. Nothing did jump out at present, other than the obvious. Hermione and her parents weren't aliens, or superhuman, they were perfectly ordinary people, if at the extreme end of the bell curve as far as intelligence went in the girl's case, who happened to have a very strange talent. So far there was no apparent biological or medical reason for that talent that anyone could identify, not that they'd really thought they'd find it if it did exist that quickly.
Possibly something would eventually turn up. Advances in genetic research were happening very fast, even Jerry was well aware of that, and who knew what would come out of that over the next few years? That was why they had so many samples, most of which were being very carefully stored for such time as a new test method came about. But right now, he rather suspected that particular path might well be something of a dead end.
No, it was something else, he thought. Something deeper than mere biology, something quite unlike anything science was currently aware of. Which matched all the other oddities around telekinesis and all the aspects so far discovered about psionics and the H-Field.
Jerry suspected that as and when they did manage to find an answer, something he very much hoped would come about, it would teach a number of very interesting things about how the mind worked, and even how consciousness itself did. A subject that even after hundreds if not thousands of years of consideration and experimentation was still mostly a blank slate, in his view. Many people had come up with hypotheses, but almost none of them were amenable to testing, and even the ones that were had significant questions.
Possibly the H-Field was the missing part of the equation…
He didn't know, but he dearly wanted to find out.
Leaving the biology lab he crossed the main part of the department to the other side and went into a smaller room where Gerald Hastings, the university's de-facto expert in computer imaging, especially as it related to medical areas, and two of his brightest students were hard at work on a very powerful computer system. The room was rather dim, the four huge monitors the three were gathered around providing a lot of the light. Closing the door quietly behind him, the sound of voices from outside cutting off abruptly to be replaced with the hum of innumerable fans in the rack of equipment next to the desk, he stood and watched as the three conversed in low voices. Gerald was pointing to lines of programming code on one monitor with the rubber end of a pencil, one of his students, Cynthia Edwards, nodding as she scrolled the text with the keyboard. The other student, Vince Brown, was flipping through a large stack of printout paper, highlighting things here and there as he occasionally paused.
"All right, try recompiling that and see what we get this time," Gerald finally said after Cynthia had made a number of changes, her fingers flying over the keyboard with a rattle. She hit a couple of function keys, the display changing, typed a command, and hit return.
"It'll take a couple of minutes to build and link," she commented, looking over her shoulder at Jerry, smiling at him, then going back to watching various messages scroll up the display one after another. Jerry peered over her shoulder but couldn't make heads or tails of the complex text, although the other three seemed satisfied with its progress.
"How's it going?" he asked.
"Not bad," Gerald replied absently, still watching the monitor. "I managed to persuade Ogawa's team in Japan to let me have an alpha version of some new imaging software they're working on. Completely new approach to MRI imaging. Probably going to be extremely useful in the longer term for brain research, as it should allow us to watch neural activity almost in real time. Early days yet, of course, but we think we can modify it to reprocess the raw data your first scans produced to extract some more useful information with a bit of luck."
"In theory we may see something interesting," Cynthia added, leaning forward for a moment to read one of the messages, then nodding and sitting back. "Assuming we can get the bloody thing to actually compile without…"
The scrolling messages stopped, the last line apparently showing something had gone wrong.
"...doing that every time," she finished with annoyance. "Damn it all. Now what's wrong with the poxy thing? The Japanese know their stuff but would it kill them to document it a bit more effectively? Half the comments don't make any sense at all." She hit keys while grumbling to herself, Vince looking up from his printout to grin for a second before going back to work.
"Another array out of bounds," Gerald sighed. "That's the problem with alpha code. It's alpha code. They did say it was still a work in progress."
"Just a little," she muttered, tapping the cursor key repeatedly as she read the code on the screen. Leaving her to it, Gerald turned to Jerry.
"As you can see it's not quite ready," he said with a shrug and a small smile. "We'll work it out, but it may take a little while."
"There's no particular hurry so don't strain yourselves," Jerry replied, returning the smile. "Let me know when you sort it out. But we have a lot of other data to be getting on with for now."
"How's the physics party going?" the other man asked with a wider smile, nodding in the direction of the conference room.
"The last time I checked Hermione was arguing with Doctor Thurgood, very politely of course, while everyone else was listening and looking puzzled," Jerry grinned. "He seemed to think she'd made a mistake in her symbolic logic H-Field documentation, and she was dismantling every point he raised. Professor Hawking looked like he was trying not to laugh."
Gerald shook his head, appearing rather amused. "Remarkable girl, that one."
"I can't disagree there," Jerry chuckled. "Right, better get on with it, I suppose. Good luck with the programming."
Gerald nodded, then turned back to lean over Cynthia's shoulder, the young woman immediately starting to discuss something so technical Jerry didn't have a clue what she was talking about. Amused, he left the room, closing the door behind himself. He checked his watch, seeing that there was only about twenty minutes to lunch. He felt that everyone would probably need the break, as they were all working very hard indeed.
He was extremely pleased with the team he'd built, and how they'd thrown themselves into the job without any hesitation. There was no doubt in his mind that the outcome of all this was going to be remarkable in time, and produce discoveries that would go down in the literature as some of the most important work ever done. Smiling a little, he headed towards his office to drop off the paperwork he was carrying, mostly reports from various labs. As he opened the door he heard another one open behind him, turning his head to see Helen Granger coming out of one of the test facilities next to Jennifer. "Hello," he said, pausing with his hand on the door handle. "Done for now?"
"Yes, we got some very intriguing data," Jennifer replied with a nod, looking at the clipboard she was holding, a high quality camcorder in her other hand. "I'm not entirely sure what it means yet, but it's intriguing nonetheless."
Helen quietly laughed, causing Jerry to smile as well. "That does seem to be a consistent theme with all this, doesn't it?" she said.
"Very much so, yes," Jerry nodded. Jennifer shook her head and headed for the other end of the department with a nod to Helen, Hermione's mother remaining behind. Pushing his door open he waved her into the office, then went behind his desk and sat, putting all the folders he was holding down as he did. Helen took a seat as well.
"How are you holding up with all this testing?" he asked, examining her. The woman smiled at him.
"To be honest it's rather fun," she replied calmly. "I can't say I'd want to spend weeks doing it, of course, but a few days is perfectly fine. And while I'm not a researcher like most of the people here, or for that matter my daughter, I certainly am interested in discovering what might lie behind all this."
"I'm just enormously grateful that I'm in a position to be able to study such a remarkable situation," he noted, leaning back in the chair with a slight sigh of relief. He'd been walking around or standing for nearly two and a half hours now and his knees were protesting. "Meeting your family was the answer to every wish I've ever had."
She laughed slightly. "Hermione does seem to have set the cat among the pigeons with her work," she replied.
"That is indeed one way to put it," he snickered. "If rather understating the whole situation."
He examined her for a moment, then got up and went over to his door, closing it, before returning to his chair. She watched this with a raised eyebrow. "I wanted to ask something before I asked Hermione," he said after thinking for a few seconds.
"Oh?"
Jerry sighed faintly, almost dreading the answer he was fairly sure he was going to get, but also in some deep part of his mind excited almost beyond belief. "Hermione taught both of you how to perform telekinesis, the whole H-Field manipulation thing, didn't she?" he finally asked.
Helen eyed him for a moment, then nodded. "She did, yes. Hermione is the one who discovered telekinesis, as she said yesterday. A chance discovery, I suppose, but she obviously had the talent already, then she put in an enormous amount of thought and effort to learn everything she has done. We're extremely proud of how hard she's stuck at it, even before she finally told us." Helen paused, then went on, "She'd been experimenting for months by the time she came to us and showed us what she could do. We were… somewhat shocked."
He couldn't help laughing at the dry tone of her voice. "I can imagine. When I saw it for the first time, I nearly fainted…"
They shared a moment of amusement. "When she'd explained what she could do, and her initial discoveries, she raised the idea of seeing if she could teach anyone else to do the same thing. In other words, us. And Michael's mother, to be complete, although that happened somewhat later." Helen shook her head a little. "I still find it remarkable that she actually managed it."
"How did she do it?" he queried curiously.
Helen smiled. "She tried a number of ideas, but the one that worked was essentially creating one of her H-Field knots that was fairly powerful, then making it go through each of us while we tried to feel a difference. It did take some trial and error, but in the end she succeeded. Once we were… I suppose aware is as good a word as any, of the H-Field, once we could feel it, we were slowly able to build on that and have her teach us how to perform the same sort of manipulation she can do. So far we're obviously nowhere near as good at it as she is, and neither Michael nor I think that we will become as good as Hermione is, but we've been steadily improving with practice. Hermione commented that it took her months to get to the point we managed in half the time, but then she was working it out entirely on her own while we have the advantage of her being able to show us what to do."
"Fascinating," Jerry finally said, having been listening closely with a sense of almost lightheaded mild disbelief. "And so far she's taught three other people how to do this…"
"Yes. All related to her, of course, but whether that's important or not I'm not sure," Helen replied, smiling. "It might run in the family. Or it might just be something anyone can learn. I have no idea which is more likely at the moment."
"We'd need a larger sample set," Jerry mused out loud. "Difficult to do a control, though. Either it works or it doesn't…"
"You'd like to have her teach someone else?" the woman asked, looking expectantly at him.
He sighed a little. "Oh, so much, yes," he replied. "Part of me is screaming 'teach me' even now. But at the same time I'm worried about the implications of getting caught up in my own research project… I'm also just a little concerned about what might happen if we do manage to have her teach a lot of other people."
She raised a questioning eyebrow at him.
"It's very obvious from what we've learned in the last couple of days that telekinesis is far more effective and potentially very dangerous than I ever expected," he expanded to the unasked question. "At one point I was almost giddy at the idea she might be able to lift half a pound or so, which would have been absolutely earth-shattering in its own right. But if what she'd mentioned in passing is even half what I suspect it is, she can manage a lot more than that."
"Oh, much more, yes," Helen laughed. "Even without one of her HOP amplifiers."
"I almost don't want to ask, but how much?" he finally questioned.
"Unaided I know she can lift our car off the ground without any real issue," Helen replied, looking amused as he felt his face pale. "With an amplifier?" She shrugged. "I honestly don't know the limit."
"Jesus," he breathed. "Every time I start to think I might be coming to grips with all this, I learn something else that puts it into a completely different perspective." Staring past her at the whiteboard on the wall, and the notes he'd scribbled there, he tried to calm his racing mind.
"You're worried that someone who would misuse this sort of thing might learn how to do it," she commented. He nodded, returning his gaze to her.
"That's one problem, yes," Jerry admitted. "I can think of quite a few, but that one is… concerning." Sighing, he tapped his fingers on the desk. "Your daughter, from what I have learned about her, is a very careful and conscientious person even at such a young age. I've seen no signs that she would misuse her talents without severe provocation, and Alan agrees with that assessment. Both of you are similarly sensible. I trust all the people out there too, although I can think of a few names that might need some ground rules laid out first, just in case." He sighed a little. "But some random member of the public learning to throw a car at you with their mind? Or even just a paperweight. It could be… problematic at best."
"I can see your point, I have to agree," she nodded after a moment or two. "I can't say I haven't had similar thoughts, as has Michael. There are obviously risks involved, and I expect many of them none of us have thought of yet. This is an entirely new situation, after all. Such things always have their good points and their bad ones. On the one hand, as I understand it, Hermione's discoveries could be a breakthrough unlike almost anything else in history in many fields of study. On the other, there are undoubtedly potential dangers involved. But that's always the case with any new discovery, isn't it? Someone invented the car, and car accidents came along with that."
"Which is true, of course, but this has the potential to be much more of a change to society than the car was," he replied quietly. "Never mind all the things Hermione is inventing with HOPs, just the telekinesis is something that could have ramifications I can't even conceive of right now."
Both of them were silent for thirty seconds or so, lost in their thoughts, until she said, "I don't think this is a problem we can solve quickly, I'm afraid."
"No. It's going to take some careful thought." Jerry shook his head again, sighing. "For now, I think asking Hermione to teach anyone else is something we need to be somewhat circumspect about, until we can work out how to do that without causing total chaos. And we do have more than enough to go on with for this week without adding a completely unplanned experimental method to the mix. We should probably wait until next time at least."
"I'll ask her not to mention it, if you'd like," she offered.
"That might be best for now," he agreed. "Christine and Farouk also worked it out, and I'd expect that others have as well, but we'll avoid bringing it up for the moment. Once we've had a chance to go over our results we can revisit the idea. If nothing else, I'd need to work out who our subjects would be…"
"You'll not lack for volunteers, I expect," she smiled.
"I doubt it myself," he chuckled. Glancing at his watch he added, "Time for lunch, I think. If we can drag everyone away from science for an hour or so."
They left his office and went to round everyone up, Jerry mulling over what they'd discussed and wondering what the long term effects of all this would end up being. He didn't know precisely how it would alter things, but he was utterly convinced it would.
Tugging one side of the curtains open with telekinesis, she hastily closed her eyes as a beam of sunlight hit her directly in the face. Letting go, she put her hands over her eyes and winced. "Ow," she mumbled, feeling a little silly. When she was no longer seeing spots she opened them again. Sitting up she yawned once more before sliding out of bed and padding across the room to where she'd left her backpack, grabbing a notebook and pen out of it and floating them to the bed even as she went into the bathroom to get a drink of water. Once she'd done that she went back to bed, plumping the pillow up then leaning on it while picking up the notebook and flipping it open. She leafed through it until she got to a blank page, then made some more notes on ideas she'd had overnight as a result of the earlier day's work, and thoughts on what to ask Professor Hawking when she met him.
Of course she already had half a notebook full of those, but more wouldn't hurt, she felt. She wasn't likely to get this sort of chance very often and wanted to make the best of it while she could.
When she'd filled another four pages, she put the notebook to one side and closed her eyes, relaxing back against the pillow. Slowly pushing her energy sense outwards in a well practiced manner, she examined every aspect of the H-Field locally that she could detect. That odd textural change was more apparent now she was looking for it and knew it was there, and more or less where the source lurked. Or at least, she was assuming that the epicenter was the source, which seemed plausible, as the alteration to the H-Field got steadily stronger towards that point then decayed away again as they'd gone past it the last time.
It seemed quite likely that the effect kept on going past where she could no longer sense it herself, simply being below the detectable threshold. Having it abruptly cut off seemed less probable than a steady fading away into the background and would match her own observations. Once again she wondered if it was a completely isotropic effect and would produce the same results above it, or for that matter below it, but determining the first would take a little more effort and the second much more effort. Neither was all that important right at this moment although she was quite curious.
There also didn't seem to have been any changes since the last time as far as she could see, but considering how minute the effect was anyway, it might again just be too subtle for her to sense. The point where she initially picked it up was roughly the same as well, although it seemed to have moved outwards slightly, which she put down to her own energy sense steadily getting more range and sensitivity with practice.
She made a few notes on a blank page with the pen floating mid-air, still with her eyes closed, and felt somewhat pleased that she'd learned to write telekinetically. It came in handy quite often. Opening one eye she checked the time, then nodded and closed it again. Moving on from her investigation of the local oddity she began simply observing Oxford through the energy sense, not really looking for anything in particular, but basically practicing with being able to determine what it was she was sensing. There was an awful lot more to sense here than at home as they were near the center of a fairly large and very active city, after all.
Right on the edge of her range she could detect the currently quiescent University MRI machine, the superconducting magnet still powered up as she'd learned they had to be all the time, and generating an immense magnetic field which noticeably warped the H-Field around it in a very distinctive manner. It was a steady if extremely tiny distortion which she'd recognize instantly now.
In a similar but not identical manner, she could feel linear paths of knotted H-Field energy all over the place, going right through her range, which she knew were high power electricity lines. She'd seen that before at home, as on the other side of the golf course behind her house there was an EHT power line on tall metal pylons snaking its way across the countryside. Such things connected to large transformer installations, then lower voltage lines branched out from those to smaller substations around the area, finally ending up going into buildings as either single phase or three phase mains. With a little effort she could trace the entire network and was amazed at how complex it all was. Much more so than around her house, again because of being in a city.
She amused herself following the wiring for a while, tracing out the power cables in the hotel all the way from the basement to the roof, and feeling various ones become more obvious as loads were put on or taken off. The lifts starting up took quite a lot of electricity as their cables showed up really very nicely when the lift was in motion.
After a while she stopped watching electricity work and spread her sense further, feeling all the people wandering around in the building and the streets outside, in cars and buses, and even in a couple of small aircraft passing overhead. Much smaller distortions were visible as pigeons flew around in the park across the road, a couple of slightly larger ones probably being crows, and she could sense dogs, cats, a fox, and lots and lots of small rodents. Even insects and spiders if she pushed harder, the sheer number of them astounding. By the time she was picking out the individual trees in the park she finally decided it was time to get up and get ready for the day, but it had been an interesting exercise, even though it was the same thing she did every day and every evening. The change of scenery made quite a difference, she mused as she hopped out of bed again, quickly put the covers straight, and went to brush her teeth and floss.
By the time she emerged into the common area of their suite, her mother was sipping a cup of tea, the kettle by her elbow on the small table near the window, steam rising from it. Hermione could feel her father in the bathroom, apparently in a good mood as far as she could tell. "I made you one too, sweetie," her mother said, floating a cup to her, which she took with a smile.
"Thank you, Mummy," she replied, sitting in the other chair. Her mother smiled back, then turned the page of the newspaper that was hanging in the air in front of her, while holding the cup in both hands and intermittently sipping from it. "You're getting very good at that," she added, pleased with her mother's progress.
"Constant practice certainly lets you improve," her mother laughed. "Although you have such a large head start I'm not sure I'll ever be in your league."
Hermione giggled, before taking another sip of her own tea. She peered at the little tray of tea, coffee, and sugar packets next to the kettle, noticing that there were some individually wrapped chocolate biscuits there too if her eyes weren't deceiving her. Reaching out she picked one up and looked at it. They weren't. Glancing at her mother she saw an amused expression. "I think we can allow a little treat every now and then, as we're technically on holiday, Hermione," the older woman confided. "I'll have one as well."
The girl pushed another one across the table, then both of them opened the wrapping and tasted the contents. "Ooh, that's very nice," Hermione commented approvingly. "I like it."
"They're rather good, aren't they?" her mother agreed.
"Save one for me before you scoff the lot," a voice said, making both look around at Hermione's father peering around the corner of the bathroom door. "Helen, do you know where I put my spare razor blades, by any chance?"
"In the small black bag, I think."
"Oh." He went into their bedroom. "Aha! Yes, there you are," he said triumphantly, making both the others look at each other and smile. Coming back, he held the packet up. "Thank you. That blade was going to cut me to ribbons."
Ten minutes later he came out of the bathroom, clean-shaven and looking satisfied. Hermione flicked one of the biscuits to him with a quick mental action and grinned when he caught it in the same way, her eyebrows going up as he unwrapped it without touching it then took a bite out of the thing, both hands engaged in doing his tie up. She giggled at his look of rather smug pleasure and how her mother shook her head and sighed a little.
"Sometimes you really are a child, dear," she commented mildly.
He grinned at her. "One has to stay mentally flexible. And you're only as old as you feel."
"You must feel about five years old quite a lot of the time then," she replied, making Hermione laugh again.
Her father winked at her, finished fastening his tie, snagged the remaining bit of biscuit out of the air and popped it into his mouth, then dropped onto the small sofa facing them.
"Some of the time. Not a lot of it." He smiled at them. "Well, then. I expect today is going to be at least as much fun as yesterday was, what with Professor Hawking and his colleagues arriving. I'm very intrigued to see if he can shed any light on all this."
"Hopefully he will be able to eventually," Hermione replied. "Although as Doctor Blakely said, it's probably going to take some time. And I would expect that we'll need other experts at some point. That's how science works after all. It's a team effort."
"You certainly managed to spark off the formation of quite a team," her mother noted. "They all seem very motivated and talented."
"I'm just happy that they took it all seriously," she replied quietly. "Although it was rather embarrassing, what Doctor Langham was saying about me…"
"It's well deserved, dear," her father told her with a smile. "Don't worry about it, you earned the praise. But don't let it go to your head either."
"I'll try not to," she assured him, smiling back.
"I think breakfast is the next step," her mother announced with a glance at her watch. "One biscuit isn't quite enough for me, I'm afraid. Shall we head down?" She stood, and only a few minutes later they were all sitting at a table in the restaurant. After another rather nice breakfast, and some coffee for her parents, they quickly found themselves driving towards the university a couple of miles away, negotiating the Oxford traffic as it moved slowly but mostly steadily. When they arrived, Hermione's father drove into the staff car park at the rear of the building where Doctor Langham's new department was, a different one than the place the lecture hall had been. Referring to a small card he tapped in the code that he'd been given on the keypad next to the barrier, then rolled his window up as the access barrier lifted. Shortly they were getting out of the vehicle.
Hermione turned her head towards where she could feel Doctor Younan approaching from, his own car coming around the corner a few seconds later. He smiled at them, parked, and got out, locking it behind him. "Good timing," he called as he walked over. "Did you all sleep well?"
"Very well, thank you," her mother replied with a nod. "And we had a nice breakfast too."
"Excellent." He glanced at his watch. "The Cambridge group should be arriving in about twenty minutes, I believe. We'd probably better get upstairs and make sure everything is ready for them."
The four of them headed into the large building, Doctor Younan politely holding the door for Hermione and her parents, and went up in the lift, soon walking into the Psionics department after he'd slid his keycard through the reader and typed in an eight digit code. Inside, almost everyone else was already there. She could feel familiar presences all through the various rooms, and even as they entered, a slightly harried-looking Doctor Langham popped out of his office. "Ah, good, you made it. The traffic was terrible this morning. Some sort of problem with roadworks, I think."
"There were temporary traffic lights near the hotel," her father replied with a nod. "Looked like they were doing something to the phone lines, as far as I could see. There were a pair of British Telecom vans there."
"They've been adding new ISDN lines all over the city for the last year or so," Doctor Younan put in. "It's caused chaos a few times."
"Anyway, we're here now, so we'd better get to work," Doctor Langham said, looking at them, then his watch. "Professor Hawking's team are arriving at ten. I spoke to them last night and there were no problems at their end, so unless something catastrophic happens we've got about ten minutes. Hermione, we're going to use the conference room for meeting them." He indicated over his shoulder with a finger to a door at the end of the large open area, which she knew from the previous day had a quite big room behind it, with a long table, a video projector and screen, lots of chairs, and various other useful things including one wall entirely lined with whiteboards.
She nodded agreeably. "That sounds sensible, Doctor."
"The schedule calls for three hours up to one for the first session, a break for lunch, then around two or so we'll pick that up again for as long as is required, or six, whichever comes first," he continued. "Farouk and Christine will be sitting in, along with a number of others with specialties in the physical sciences. It's about… hmm… eleven people plus the Cambridge group, I believe. The rest of us will be doing more testing with your parent's help and going over the scans and other results from yesterday. I'll certainly be checking in on you all at times, and if Professor Hawking or his people need anything from us, we're all ready to pitch in."
Hermione nodded her understanding again. This was essentially what had been discussed the day before, with a few changes as result of some of the experimental results from then. "Will you be all right in there by yourself, sweetie?" her mother asked with a concerned expression.
The girl smiled widely. "I'll be fine, Mummy. It'll be fascinating to see what comes of discussing all this. And you're right here, after all."
Her father ruffled her hair while smiling as well. "I expect we'll come and check on how it's going between experiments too, dear. I have to admit I'm very curious to listen to what you'll be talking about although I'm sure a lot of it will go over my head."
"Given the chance we'd probably have everyone sitting and listening," Doctor Langham chuckled. "Including myself. But we have a lot of work to do and limited time in which to do it. I'm sure there will be other chances to repeat this sort of exercise in the future. For now, I want to make sure that by the time you three leave we have as much solid data as possible so we can work on it without taking up your time."
"I'm having a lot of fun, Doctor," Hermione assured him, meaning it. This was enormously interesting and something she was very pleased to be part of.
"I think we all are, Hermione," he replied, grinning and looking much less worried than he had earlier. "Despite being profoundly confused at the same time. Or possibly for that exact reason, thinking about it. The heart of scientific discovery is, after all, running into something apparently inexplicable."
"Which we very firmly did," Doctor Younan put in with a laugh.
"Possibly harder than any one else in history," his colleague agreed. He looked at his watch for a moment. "They'll be here very soon."
"They just got out of a van in the car park," Hermione reported, grinning a little when he raised an eyebrow, then shook his head in resigned wonder.
"If it was anyone else I'm not sure I'd believe that, but after yesterday…" He looked somewhat amused with his own words. "Good. All right, I'll go down and meet them, I think, and bring them up here. Farouk, make sure everyone's ready, will you, please?"
"No problem, Jerry," the other man replied as Doctor Langham turned and left the department. "Shall we?" he added to the Grangers, waving towards the conference room. All of them headed that way, several other scientists and students following, popping out of other rooms on the way. Inside the conference room a couple more people were already present, sitting at the table and talking quietly while surrounded by notebooks and sheets of paper. Hermione took a seat, her parents sitting on either side of her, while Doctor Younan went to the end of the room and worked on the computer there for a while, before coming back.
"I've got everything set up for both the computer data from yesterday, and the video recordings as well of all the tests," he told them. "And of course you can do live demonstrations if needed."
She nodded, smiling. Doctor Langham, who had gone down in the lift, was now coming back up, along with a number of other people, including Professor Hawking and Doctor Thurgood. All of them felt excited, as well as focused, from what she could detect. Only a couple of minutes later the door to the room opened, Hermione and her parents already looking at it, which had caused most of the others present to do the same.
Doctor Langham held the door as Doctor Thurgood preceded Professor Hawking's wheelchair through the opening, casting a quick glance around the room as he did, then turning to watch his colleague. The chair maneuvered through the doorway, guided by small twitches of the Professor's hand, and following it came his assistant Miss Rutgers. Both the students who had accompanied the Professor the last time brought up the back. Allowing the door to close when everyone was inside, Doctor Langham waved to the table. "We've left a position free for you, Professor. If everyone would care to sit down?"
The entire room was filled with the sound of people moving around for a minute or so, lots of rustling paper and a couple of coughs going along with it. Soon Professor Hawking's chair was on the opposite side of the table to Hermione's seat, the man meeting her eyes and if she wasn't imagining it very briefly almost winking at her. She smiled back. He seemed in a good mood. The rest of the Cambridge group nodded to her and her parents, Martin the maths student smiling at her for a moment.
Moving to the end of the table where the projector screen was, Doctor Langham waited patiently for everyone to finish getting their notes ready, and after a few more seconds when the room fell silent, opened his mouth. "Hello, everyone," he began calmly. "Thank you all for attending. And thank you, Professor Hawking and your team, for agreeing to join us in this research project. I suspect we're all going to have our work cut out for us, but that's half the point, isn't it?" He smiled a little and Hermione found herself nodding, as did a number of other people. "We all know what we're here for, and why. This particular session is to start off our research into the physics and mathematics behind psionics, with the aim of understanding how it works, why it works, and to come up with testable hypotheses for the entire phenomenon. Clearly this will likely be the work of years, if not decades, before we can ever fully understand it and how it all connects to everything else we understand about science, but one has to start somewhere."
He looked around the table. "We have gathered a significant amount of data both in our initial test series, and in the first series of this set yesterday. Doctor Younan has all the results to hand, and there's a printout of the entire testing methodology and schedule on the table there." Doctor Langham waved a hand at a stack of printed material in the middle of the table. "Please help yourselves and ask any questions you think of. As the bulk of what will be discussed here is far outside my own knowledge, Doctor Younan and Doctor Blakely will be running this discussion while I get back to work that is closer to my own specialty. However, if I'm needed, don't hesitate to call me back."
Pointing at the back of the room, he added, "Refreshments and drinks are available, so help yourselves as needed. We'll break for lunch at one, and resume at two or thereabouts, although there's no real set time, so if that needs to change, we just change it." Casting his gaze around those present once more, he smiled. "Have fun, and let's see if we can extract some new knowledge from this extraordinary situation. Let me, before we start, once again thank the Grangers for allowing us this opportunity, and Hermione in particular for having the sheer determination to get as far as she already has. I have little doubt that we're going to see a lot more result from all this in the near future."
Hermione went pink again, and ducked her head. She heard her mother stifle a small laugh and felt her father pat her shoulder. "All right, I've said my bit for now. Farouk, the room is yours. Michael, Helen, if you'll come with me, we've got a whole new series of things to try next." He nodded to Doctor Younan, who got up and took his place, then walked around behind Hermione and her parents. Both of them got up too.
Her mother leaned over and said quietly, "If you need either of us don't hesitate, sweetie. We're very proud of you." Her father squeezed her shoulder at the same time, making her look at them and smile.
"I'll be fine, Mummy," she replied just as quietly. "Have fun."
"We'll see you soon," her father added, then they followed Doctor Langham out of the room. The scientist looked back for a moment, met her eyes, and smiled. She nodded to him, getting an approving look, then the door swung shut.
Returning her attention to Doctor Younan, she found that everyone was watching her. Sitting up straight, she picked up her pen and poised it over a blank page in her notebook. "I'm ready when you are, Doctor Younan," she said politely.
He chuckled, nodding. "In that case, let's begin. If everyone would like to take a copy of the test schedule from yesterday, I'll briefly go over what we've achieved so far, our preliminary notes which are mostly on what psionics isn't, and the relevant measurement data resulting from the experiments to date. We have everything on video tape if required and all the experimental results are ready to hand on the computer here. I know everyone will have endless questions, but if you can let me get the introduction out of the way first so we're all reading from the same script, that would probably be more useful than jumping right into those. Everyone all right with that?"
Hermione, along with almost everyone else, nodded agreement. A couple of people who had got up to take the pile of documentation and hand it out now sat again. "Excellent." Checking his own notebook, he looked up and took a breath, then began speaking. Everyone took notes, Hermione included, and she saw that Professor Hawking was occasionally twitching his computer's controls, while listening very carefully. Very curious to learn his thoughts, she made sure to add any new ideas she came up with to her list.
It really was becoming rather long, she thought as she wrote, finding this whole experience immense fun. And much more interesting than school.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Watching the testing process carefully, Jerry made a few notes as Helen answered a series of questions the researcher on the other side of the glass asked. This series of tests was aimed at characterizing what he would have termed ESP and what Hermione called the energy sense. The girl herself was almost supernaturally good at it, to the point that he was having considerable trouble understanding how a human brain could handle that much information from what seemed like literally everywhere within a volume far larger than seemed plausible. Everything they'd learned the day before had opened up vast numbers of new questions, and he was resigned to the idea that he might never see the answers to all of them. That didn't mean he wasn't going to bloody well try, though. He'd been handed the answer to his dreams on a platter and he intended to take full advantage of it, no matter how much some of his thoughts about the implications of all this left him in a cold sweat.
Helen and Michael were nowhere near as… powerful? Practiced? Gifted? Who knew what the right terminology would end up being… as their daughter, but they were still far, far more effective at whatever it really was that they were doing than any example of ESP he'd ever even dreamed of. The fact that all of the Grangers could do this all day without any effort, on request, was one of the most amazing things of all about the whole situation. It was straight out of science fiction, what they could do, and he found it endlessly interesting. The mechanism behind how it worked was a complete mystery right now, aside from Hermione's H-Field explanation, which he thought was almost certainly going to end up being the right one, although likely only part of the truth. He certainly had nothing better.
Flipping the page, he quickly made a note while he thought about it of Michael's comment earlier that his own considerations of what was going on made him suspect that the neuroplasticity of a young brain might well explain just how Hermione had become so much better at the whole process than her parents. It was certainly a plausible hypothesis, Jerry thought. Children were known to be far better at learning multiple languages than adults in almost every case, even though no one yet knew exactly why. Expose them young enough to the right environment and they practically picked things like that up through osmosis. But after a certain age, in most cases, the rate of learning such things tended to drop off dramatically.
Possibly this was another example of that. It made a certain amount of sense, as much as anything about the whole situation did.
Turning back to the previous page, he listened to Helen's answer through the headphones he was wearing, nodding slightly as he made more notes. She hadn't been wrong once, although her description of a few things didn't quite match how he'd have said it. Which, from her own explanation, was down to how the 'energy sense' didn't really map to normal vision, resulting in what she sensed being sometimes somewhat hard to explain in such terms. However if you took that into account it was obvious that the end result was correct.
Shaking his head in mild wonder, even after all he'd seen so far being nowhere near inured to how incredible this all was, he finished writing and took the headphones off. The researcher was just finishing the test set and looked pleased as well as slightly baffled, an expression everyone in the department was very familiar with. Checking the time he nodded, then closed his notebook and got up, taking it with him as he left the room.
He spent the next hour checking in on various sections of the department, chatting to a few of the scientists, and observing a couple of Michael's test sets as well. In the medical section, he spent a while discussing the very preliminary genetic results with Peter, none of which seemed to show anything much out of the ordinary as far as the biologist was concerned. A full workup would take months, of course, but the initial analysis was basically entirely normal. None of the people whose specialty this was appeared particularly surprised by that, although several were somewhat disappointed as it would have been quite the breakthrough to immediately find something that jumped out.
Which, of course, matched all the other results they had so far. Nothing did jump out at present, other than the obvious. Hermione and her parents weren't aliens, or superhuman, they were perfectly ordinary people, if at the extreme end of the bell curve as far as intelligence went in the girl's case, who happened to have a very strange talent. So far there was no apparent biological or medical reason for that talent that anyone could identify, not that they'd really thought they'd find it if it did exist that quickly.
Possibly something would eventually turn up. Advances in genetic research were happening very fast, even Jerry was well aware of that, and who knew what would come out of that over the next few years? That was why they had so many samples, most of which were being very carefully stored for such time as a new test method came about. But right now, he rather suspected that particular path might well be something of a dead end.
No, it was something else, he thought. Something deeper than mere biology, something quite unlike anything science was currently aware of. Which matched all the other oddities around telekinesis and all the aspects so far discovered about psionics and the H-Field.
Jerry suspected that as and when they did manage to find an answer, something he very much hoped would come about, it would teach a number of very interesting things about how the mind worked, and even how consciousness itself did. A subject that even after hundreds if not thousands of years of consideration and experimentation was still mostly a blank slate, in his view. Many people had come up with hypotheses, but almost none of them were amenable to testing, and even the ones that were had significant questions.
Possibly the H-Field was the missing part of the equation…
He didn't know, but he dearly wanted to find out.
Leaving the biology lab he crossed the main part of the department to the other side and went into a smaller room where Gerald Hastings, the university's de-facto expert in computer imaging, especially as it related to medical areas, and two of his brightest students were hard at work on a very powerful computer system. The room was rather dim, the four huge monitors the three were gathered around providing a lot of the light. Closing the door quietly behind him, the sound of voices from outside cutting off abruptly to be replaced with the hum of innumerable fans in the rack of equipment next to the desk, he stood and watched as the three conversed in low voices. Gerald was pointing to lines of programming code on one monitor with the rubber end of a pencil, one of his students, Cynthia Edwards, nodding as she scrolled the text with the keyboard. The other student, Vince Brown, was flipping through a large stack of printout paper, highlighting things here and there as he occasionally paused.
"All right, try recompiling that and see what we get this time," Gerald finally said after Cynthia had made a number of changes, her fingers flying over the keyboard with a rattle. She hit a couple of function keys, the display changing, typed a command, and hit return.
"It'll take a couple of minutes to build and link," she commented, looking over her shoulder at Jerry, smiling at him, then going back to watching various messages scroll up the display one after another. Jerry peered over her shoulder but couldn't make heads or tails of the complex text, although the other three seemed satisfied with its progress.
"How's it going?" he asked.
"Not bad," Gerald replied absently, still watching the monitor. "I managed to persuade Ogawa's team in Japan to let me have an alpha version of some new imaging software they're working on. Completely new approach to MRI imaging. Probably going to be extremely useful in the longer term for brain research, as it should allow us to watch neural activity almost in real time. Early days yet, of course, but we think we can modify it to reprocess the raw data your first scans produced to extract some more useful information with a bit of luck."
"In theory we may see something interesting," Cynthia added, leaning forward for a moment to read one of the messages, then nodding and sitting back. "Assuming we can get the bloody thing to actually compile without…"
The scrolling messages stopped, the last line apparently showing something had gone wrong.
"...doing that every time," she finished with annoyance. "Damn it all. Now what's wrong with the poxy thing? The Japanese know their stuff but would it kill them to document it a bit more effectively? Half the comments don't make any sense at all." She hit keys while grumbling to herself, Vince looking up from his printout to grin for a second before going back to work.
"Another array out of bounds," Gerald sighed. "That's the problem with alpha code. It's alpha code. They did say it was still a work in progress."
"Just a little," she muttered, tapping the cursor key repeatedly as she read the code on the screen. Leaving her to it, Gerald turned to Jerry.
"As you can see it's not quite ready," he said with a shrug and a small smile. "We'll work it out, but it may take a little while."
"There's no particular hurry so don't strain yourselves," Jerry replied, returning the smile. "Let me know when you sort it out. But we have a lot of other data to be getting on with for now."
"How's the physics party going?" the other man asked with a wider smile, nodding in the direction of the conference room.
"The last time I checked Hermione was arguing with Doctor Thurgood, very politely of course, while everyone else was listening and looking puzzled," Jerry grinned. "He seemed to think she'd made a mistake in her symbolic logic H-Field documentation, and she was dismantling every point he raised. Professor Hawking looked like he was trying not to laugh."
Gerald shook his head, appearing rather amused. "Remarkable girl, that one."
"I can't disagree there," Jerry chuckled. "Right, better get on with it, I suppose. Good luck with the programming."
Gerald nodded, then turned back to lean over Cynthia's shoulder, the young woman immediately starting to discuss something so technical Jerry didn't have a clue what she was talking about. Amused, he left the room, closing the door behind himself. He checked his watch, seeing that there was only about twenty minutes to lunch. He felt that everyone would probably need the break, as they were all working very hard indeed.
He was extremely pleased with the team he'd built, and how they'd thrown themselves into the job without any hesitation. There was no doubt in his mind that the outcome of all this was going to be remarkable in time, and produce discoveries that would go down in the literature as some of the most important work ever done. Smiling a little, he headed towards his office to drop off the paperwork he was carrying, mostly reports from various labs. As he opened the door he heard another one open behind him, turning his head to see Helen Granger coming out of one of the test facilities next to Jennifer. "Hello," he said, pausing with his hand on the door handle. "Done for now?"
"Yes, we got some very intriguing data," Jennifer replied with a nod, looking at the clipboard she was holding, a high quality camcorder in her other hand. "I'm not entirely sure what it means yet, but it's intriguing nonetheless."
Helen quietly laughed, causing Jerry to smile as well. "That does seem to be a consistent theme with all this, doesn't it?" she said.
"Very much so, yes," Jerry nodded. Jennifer shook her head and headed for the other end of the department with a nod to Helen, Hermione's mother remaining behind. Pushing his door open he waved her into the office, then went behind his desk and sat, putting all the folders he was holding down as he did. Helen took a seat as well.
"How are you holding up with all this testing?" he asked, examining her. The woman smiled at him.
"To be honest it's rather fun," she replied calmly. "I can't say I'd want to spend weeks doing it, of course, but a few days is perfectly fine. And while I'm not a researcher like most of the people here, or for that matter my daughter, I certainly am interested in discovering what might lie behind all this."
"I'm just enormously grateful that I'm in a position to be able to study such a remarkable situation," he noted, leaning back in the chair with a slight sigh of relief. He'd been walking around or standing for nearly two and a half hours now and his knees were protesting. "Meeting your family was the answer to every wish I've ever had."
She laughed slightly. "Hermione does seem to have set the cat among the pigeons with her work," she replied.
"That is indeed one way to put it," he snickered. "If rather understating the whole situation."
He examined her for a moment, then got up and went over to his door, closing it, before returning to his chair. She watched this with a raised eyebrow. "I wanted to ask something before I asked Hermione," he said after thinking for a few seconds.
"Oh?"
Jerry sighed faintly, almost dreading the answer he was fairly sure he was going to get, but also in some deep part of his mind excited almost beyond belief. "Hermione taught both of you how to perform telekinesis, the whole H-Field manipulation thing, didn't she?" he finally asked.
Helen eyed him for a moment, then nodded. "She did, yes. Hermione is the one who discovered telekinesis, as she said yesterday. A chance discovery, I suppose, but she obviously had the talent already, then she put in an enormous amount of thought and effort to learn everything she has done. We're extremely proud of how hard she's stuck at it, even before she finally told us." Helen paused, then went on, "She'd been experimenting for months by the time she came to us and showed us what she could do. We were… somewhat shocked."
He couldn't help laughing at the dry tone of her voice. "I can imagine. When I saw it for the first time, I nearly fainted…"
They shared a moment of amusement. "When she'd explained what she could do, and her initial discoveries, she raised the idea of seeing if she could teach anyone else to do the same thing. In other words, us. And Michael's mother, to be complete, although that happened somewhat later." Helen shook her head a little. "I still find it remarkable that she actually managed it."
"How did she do it?" he queried curiously.
Helen smiled. "She tried a number of ideas, but the one that worked was essentially creating one of her H-Field knots that was fairly powerful, then making it go through each of us while we tried to feel a difference. It did take some trial and error, but in the end she succeeded. Once we were… I suppose aware is as good a word as any, of the H-Field, once we could feel it, we were slowly able to build on that and have her teach us how to perform the same sort of manipulation she can do. So far we're obviously nowhere near as good at it as she is, and neither Michael nor I think that we will become as good as Hermione is, but we've been steadily improving with practice. Hermione commented that it took her months to get to the point we managed in half the time, but then she was working it out entirely on her own while we have the advantage of her being able to show us what to do."
"Fascinating," Jerry finally said, having been listening closely with a sense of almost lightheaded mild disbelief. "And so far she's taught three other people how to do this…"
"Yes. All related to her, of course, but whether that's important or not I'm not sure," Helen replied, smiling. "It might run in the family. Or it might just be something anyone can learn. I have no idea which is more likely at the moment."
"We'd need a larger sample set," Jerry mused out loud. "Difficult to do a control, though. Either it works or it doesn't…"
"You'd like to have her teach someone else?" the woman asked, looking expectantly at him.
He sighed a little. "Oh, so much, yes," he replied. "Part of me is screaming 'teach me' even now. But at the same time I'm worried about the implications of getting caught up in my own research project… I'm also just a little concerned about what might happen if we do manage to have her teach a lot of other people."
She raised a questioning eyebrow at him.
"It's very obvious from what we've learned in the last couple of days that telekinesis is far more effective and potentially very dangerous than I ever expected," he expanded to the unasked question. "At one point I was almost giddy at the idea she might be able to lift half a pound or so, which would have been absolutely earth-shattering in its own right. But if what she'd mentioned in passing is even half what I suspect it is, she can manage a lot more than that."
"Oh, much more, yes," Helen laughed. "Even without one of her HOP amplifiers."
"I almost don't want to ask, but how much?" he finally questioned.
"Unaided I know she can lift our car off the ground without any real issue," Helen replied, looking amused as he felt his face pale. "With an amplifier?" She shrugged. "I honestly don't know the limit."
"Jesus," he breathed. "Every time I start to think I might be coming to grips with all this, I learn something else that puts it into a completely different perspective." Staring past her at the whiteboard on the wall, and the notes he'd scribbled there, he tried to calm his racing mind.
"You're worried that someone who would misuse this sort of thing might learn how to do it," she commented. He nodded, returning his gaze to her.
"That's one problem, yes," Jerry admitted. "I can think of quite a few, but that one is… concerning." Sighing, he tapped his fingers on the desk. "Your daughter, from what I have learned about her, is a very careful and conscientious person even at such a young age. I've seen no signs that she would misuse her talents without severe provocation, and Alan agrees with that assessment. Both of you are similarly sensible. I trust all the people out there too, although I can think of a few names that might need some ground rules laid out first, just in case." He sighed a little. "But some random member of the public learning to throw a car at you with their mind? Or even just a paperweight. It could be… problematic at best."
"I can see your point, I have to agree," she nodded after a moment or two. "I can't say I haven't had similar thoughts, as has Michael. There are obviously risks involved, and I expect many of them none of us have thought of yet. This is an entirely new situation, after all. Such things always have their good points and their bad ones. On the one hand, as I understand it, Hermione's discoveries could be a breakthrough unlike almost anything else in history in many fields of study. On the other, there are undoubtedly potential dangers involved. But that's always the case with any new discovery, isn't it? Someone invented the car, and car accidents came along with that."
"Which is true, of course, but this has the potential to be much more of a change to society than the car was," he replied quietly. "Never mind all the things Hermione is inventing with HOPs, just the telekinesis is something that could have ramifications I can't even conceive of right now."
Both of them were silent for thirty seconds or so, lost in their thoughts, until she said, "I don't think this is a problem we can solve quickly, I'm afraid."
"No. It's going to take some careful thought." Jerry shook his head again, sighing. "For now, I think asking Hermione to teach anyone else is something we need to be somewhat circumspect about, until we can work out how to do that without causing total chaos. And we do have more than enough to go on with for this week without adding a completely unplanned experimental method to the mix. We should probably wait until next time at least."
"I'll ask her not to mention it, if you'd like," she offered.
"That might be best for now," he agreed. "Christine and Farouk also worked it out, and I'd expect that others have as well, but we'll avoid bringing it up for the moment. Once we've had a chance to go over our results we can revisit the idea. If nothing else, I'd need to work out who our subjects would be…"
"You'll not lack for volunteers, I expect," she smiled.
"I doubt it myself," he chuckled. Glancing at his watch he added, "Time for lunch, I think. If we can drag everyone away from science for an hour or so."
They left his office and went to round everyone up, Jerry mulling over what they'd discussed and wondering what the long term effects of all this would end up being. He didn't know precisely how it would alter things, but he was utterly convinced it would.
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- Location
- Maine
- Pronouns
- They/Them/Theirs
I assumed it was a reference to the Punnett Square, as technically he's in charge of tracking genetic drift, if indirectly. Because, you know, he runs the accidental magic detection device and it's good for looking for muggleborns.
See, the thing with car crashes is that while nations like Sweden and the Netherlands have drastically reduced car crashes due to their Sustainable Safety programmes (including reducing Vehicle Miles Traveled), the rest of the world has been incredibly lazy when it comes to road safety.
Look at the US right now; there is a massive problem with increasing deaths and serious injury, and ever increasing vehicle sizes with large blindspots, and blindspots for people outside (have you noticed carparks becoming more dangerous because you can't see properly out of parking spots?) The death rate has reduced over the decades due to safer vehicle design, but nowhere near these other levels.
Like, you go into a community meeting discussing a road safety project that have been done a gazillion times overseas already, but you will often hear 'but it will destroy the economy!'
One of the largest protests in Dutch history was the 'Stop de Kindermoord!' that happened in the 70's. Parents and others were tired of the amount of children dying on the streets. What preceeded that was a movement in the 60's to stop people taking shortcuts through residential areas; who are usually in a hurry and more prone to speed.
Look at the US right now; there is a massive problem with increasing deaths and serious injury, and ever increasing vehicle sizes with large blindspots, and blindspots for people outside (have you noticed carparks becoming more dangerous because you can't see properly out of parking spots?) The death rate has reduced over the decades due to safer vehicle design, but nowhere near these other levels.
Like, you go into a community meeting discussing a road safety project that have been done a gazillion times overseas already, but you will often hear 'but it will destroy the economy!'
One of the largest protests in Dutch history was the 'Stop de Kindermoord!' that happened in the 70's. Parents and others were tired of the amount of children dying on the streets. What preceeded that was a movement in the 60's to stop people taking shortcuts through residential areas; who are usually in a hurry and more prone to speed.
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Wait, didn't Hermione say she planned on telling them she can teach telekinesis to other people?
Hermione: "I told them The Thing(TM)."
Helen: "Oh dear, what poor timing, I wanted you to NOT tell them The Thing(TM)."
Hermione: "Why wouldn't you want me to NOT tell them The Thing(TM)?"
OR
Hermione: "Doctor Thurgood needed to put into his place, so I told them The Thing(TM)."
Jerry: (nods in understanding) "Ah, I see. Many a secret has been slipped when browbeating a belligerent underling."
Hermione: (appreciates Jerry's compassion)
If people have worked out that she can teach it, then there's no reason to hold back. Right now it looks like Hermione is the bottleneck anyway since she has to "activate" a new psion. So the danger of people learning it on their own is rather low.
It would be so much fun if Professor Hawking was the first to be taught.
It would be so much fun if Professor Hawking was the first to be taught.
I suspect it may be possible for a 'muggle' or as the wizarding Americans rightly prefer nomagge to achieve without the "activation", however it would I suspect still require knowing enough about what to look for and furthermore spending a lot of time meditating and searching in the right kind of environment. The amount of time, experimentation, and real world knowledge of science and lore needed for some mystic nomagge to achieve psionics independent of or even albeit to a lesser extent informed by Hermione's written findings would presumably be impressive and unlikely to come about under most circumstances.
I predict a dedicated group of monks with access to Hermione's written work, a lot of scientific knowledge, and an interest in trying would be the most likely to independently replicate Hermione's work, assuming it is possible for nomagges.
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- Location
- Australia
She could just make a powerful knot and leave it there. Anyone can go meditate in it to "open their eyes" >.>
Additionally, since it is known to Hermione that strong magnets and electrical currents cause distortions in the H-Field, the obvious next experiment would be to create a very strong knot to deplete or concentrate the H-Field in a small area and see whether electrical devices can be made to pick it up.
EDIT: we actually already know the answer to this in canon HP since electrical devices have issues at Hogwarts, so magic does have a detectable effect, even if it's just microchips letting out the magic smoke.
(and also run every material known to science through it to see if any of them interact with the H-Field natively)
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No ideas/talk from Stephen Hawking this chapter
It would be interesting to see if different isotopes have an impact under some conditions.
There are certain isotopes in our brain whose spins change how our body and brain react.
For example, xenon without a nuclear spin has stronger anesthetic properties, while xenon with spin has a weaker effect. And various isotopes of lithium with different spins change development and parenting ability in rats.
Radical pairs may play a role in xenon-induced general anesthesia - Scientific Reports
Aberrant parenting and delayed offspring development in rats exposed to lithium - PubMed
Entangled radicals may explain lithium effects on hyperactivity
It is known that bipolar disorder and its lithium treatment involve the modulation of oxidative stress. Moreover, it has been observed that lithium’s effects are isotope-dependent. Based on these findings, here we propose that lithium exerts its ...
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
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- Location
- Australia
Just had a dumb thought.
Hermione gets her Letter and the scientists go wtf. Some of them have friends at MI5 and those guys get involved (wtf, we have a secret society? I'm getting promoted when this is done! )
So she goes off to Hogwarts to learn everything she can about the mysterious wizards and send everything back to Oxford for the scientists.
While the scientists and low level intel guys are running an impromptu operation, the wizards are about to start another civil war, all while the Prime Minister (who could have just answered all their questions) have no idea this is going on.
Hermione, 11 year old schoolgirl, Agent of Her Majesty's Government, super spy.
Hermione gets her Letter and the scientists go wtf. Some of them have friends at MI5 and those guys get involved (wtf, we have a secret society? I'm getting promoted when this is done! )
So she goes off to Hogwarts to learn everything she can about the mysterious wizards and send everything back to Oxford for the scientists.
While the scientists and low level intel guys are running an impromptu operation, the wizards are about to start another civil war, all while the Prime Minister (who could have just answered all their questions) have no idea this is going on.
Hermione, 11 year old schoolgirl, Agent of Her Majesty's Government, super spy.
- Location
- Russia
Unfortunately I think that she is way too valuable as a one-woman think tank to be used as a spy. They're more likely to already have muggleborn agents of their own.
as she already has?
Also can anyone think of a more deserving student than Hawking himself?
- Location
- Australia
The problem with this power is that, if anyone with psionics can teach anyone, it only takes one leak before the whole thing is blown open. It takes time to learn, so it would be a slow leak over months or years, but unless you learn to detect and hunt down psions, in 10 years time thousands or millions of people could have the ability to splatter someone else on a whim. It would have to take a really long time for someone to go from taught to able to teach before the spread becomes controllable. At that point you're getting into epidemiology, except spread has no external symptoms and everyone in the know wants to be infected.
- Location
- Sol;Terra;EU;D;NRW
Thanks for the gift of WORDZ.
It's the gift that keeps on giving... wordz. 🤔
I wonder if dreaming about rings of power can be attributed to this.
Or lizards, it's almost always lizards when strange things happen.
It's the gift that keeps on giving... wordz. 🤔
I wonder if dreaming about rings of power can be attributed to this.
Or lizards, it's almost always lizards when strange things happen.
- Location
- The general area. Possibly behind you.
"Let's hold off on teaching any new people how to use telekinesis; the long term societal effects are unknown."
"Oh yes, play it safe. That seems very sensible."
Hawking: "The fuck it does, you assholes! I'm almost fully paralysed! Teach me telekinesis asap, you bunch of colossal pricks!"
"Oh yes, play it safe. That seems very sensible."
Hawking: "The fuck it does, you assholes! I'm almost fully paralysed! Teach me telekinesis asap, you bunch of colossal pricks!"
- Pronouns
- Mr
Cat's already out of the bag on the whole teaching other people thing, only thing you can do is prioritise teaching people you believe will be trustworthy first so that by the time it spreads to some psychopath there's plenty of people around who can stop them.
As a suggestion for an experiment Hermione should try making a hop that just produces thrust in a single direction and reports it's distance to a second hop. This would quickly ascend into space and then because it would never stop accelerating it would get fast enough to make it into interstellar space.
This would tell several things, firstly if the H field extends into space (because if it kept going/reporting the H field must still be there), and into interstellar space, also if the hops are affected by gravity, and if they are capable of moving/communicating with each other FTL
If no on the FTL thing, she could make a more complex one later that carries a wormhole on it to report through. Maybe one with a sensor or camera.
As a suggestion for an experiment Hermione should try making a hop that just produces thrust in a single direction and reports it's distance to a second hop. This would quickly ascend into space and then because it would never stop accelerating it would get fast enough to make it into interstellar space.
This would tell several things, firstly if the H field extends into space (because if it kept going/reporting the H field must still be there), and into interstellar space, also if the hops are affected by gravity, and if they are capable of moving/communicating with each other FTL
If no on the FTL thing, she could make a more complex one later that carries a wormhole on it to report through. Maybe one with a sensor or camera.
A minor HOP wonder that people can go to cultivate their HOP field sensitivity if you will.
Ace Dreamer
Verified Reality User
- Location
- Between The Unknown & The Known
A few things to work out... HOPs are not physical objects, and so I think it would need to be tied to something, that's actually moved. Also, I don't think Hermione has yet got more than short-range (touch?) communication going between HOPs. Unsure how it would measure inter-HOP distance, too.
I'm pretty sure she will figure-out how to get a signal to travel through the H-field, and, yes, whether 'c' is relevant will be interesting. Breaking causality will really stir-up physics...
Yeah, a long-range probe of the Sol-local structure of the H-field is definitely worth it - several in the plane of the ecliptic (think about the direction the Sol-system is going in), and at least one 'up' and 'down', look a good idea.