I would be lying if I said it had been intentional.
Then again, most of the truly great inventions of our time have been accidental. Alexander Fleming is credited with going on vacation while leaving bacterial cultures strewn about his desk. Upon his return, he noticed that there were areas of the culture plate which had been contaminated with fungal growth. The fungi resembled rocky peaks rising from fecund forests of bacterium - the bacteria were unable to flourish upon them or at their immediate bases. Thus, penicillin was born; perhaps the most important discovery of the twentieth century made mostly due to the chaos of an uncleaned desk.
The modern discovery of vulcanized rubber is generally attributed to both Charles Goodyear's good fortune and clumsiness. It's true that Mister Goodyear was searching for a way to harden and stabilize rubber at the time, a quest that he had set out upon half a decade prior to his accident. In the process of mixing another experimental concoction of rubber, lead and sulfur, he spilled a bit of it upon the hot surface of his stove. The result was a near instant curing of the substance into a much more versatile form. This made way for the modern sneaker, the automobile tire, and the ever popular SuperBall.
So is it, then, that accidental discoveries are truly made by man? Is the hand such a necessary ingredient when said hand is guided by serendipity to a conclusion? It would be convenient for me to answer 'no' to this question, though Mr. Goodyear and Mr. Fleming would almost certainly say 'yes'. The reality is that the hand itself is, in a way, an accident in itself. Darwin's process of natural selection is remarkably elegant in this way. Of course, there is no discrete moment where the hand suddenly appeared; it likely the natural extention of a fish-like creature's rudder-like fins. Adaptations such as the hand, the leg, the ability to breathe oxygen, and the immune system original appear as mutations, mistakes in the transcription process of DNA.
Just as in human affairs, most of these 'accidents' yield negative or neutral results. Dropping a mixture on a stove, for example, would usually only necessitate another batch be made. The sudden appearance of a very small fin mutation on a fish, however, may allow the fish greater locomotive capability. It is thus more capable of reproduction, and thus passes the gene to its offspring. So perhaps it's not the accident that needs steering, but rather a process to recognize the accident, be it a hapless scientist or the force of natural selection. Penicillin, after all, had likely existed for millions of years prior to its human discovery. It only took application.
Is it not just as likely, then, that my work was just a rubber plant in need of a hot stove? Lightning that simply needed a jar? It's true that similar structures exist naturally in the universe, and similar things are probably going on all the time. Without the ability to directly witness them, they remain in the realm of phenomena rather than invention. It's impossible to say, then, that my invention is a simple mimicry of black holes or binary neutron star systems or tremendously powerful supernovae; I would not be surprised in the least, though, as the method is quite similar.
Einstein's theories of special and general relativity may not seem important in any capacity save science fiction and the modern imagination. This is far from the actual truth. In a world where global positioning systems use the time it takes a signal to beam from orbit to earth, relativity is important as a corrective factor. Satellites falling around the sphere of the earth travel at thousands of miles an hour - about eighty-seven hundred miles per hour. Such speeds necessitate a correction by a factor of approximately 1/12,342,857,143, or about seven microseconds per day. Of course, this appears to be a very, very small factor when thinking practically. And for all intents and purposes, it is small in this case.
My discovery exploits this dilation several billionfold. What if the aforementioned factor could artificially be made larger, perhaps much larger? In the case of the orbitting satellite or space station, there is a ratio of nearly 1:1 between the time passage of a point on the orbital structure and a point on the earth. One cannot ignore the rounding error in this assessment, however - an error of approximately 0.000000008%. In order to increase it, my research used another of Einstein's assessments; that a sufficiently dense mass could indeed produce a very similar effect. And indeed, this it did quite well. The experimental setup managed to create a phenomena very similar to a black hole without its characteristic voraciousness. It was theorized that such a structure would evaporate in nanoseconds, but the trick of time dilation stretched nanoseconds into days, years, millennia in a particular frame of reference.
A lauded physicist named Katherine Freese is famous for having declared that given an infinite amount of time, she will one day reappear. This is necessarily true. Given an infinite amount of time, all possible events must happen an infinite number of times. Such is the nature of time and probability.
This was the secret to my 'invention'. This was the secret to how all this mess was made. This was the secret of backward time travel.
Podcast interview on Butter No Parsnips
6 months ago
