Lower than the Angels

Chapter 5, The Bottom Line

Kore was starting to look bored, so Tengri said, "I'm sure you know all this. The part that everyone missed for a long time was that even when hydrogen gets cold enough to be in its lowest normal energy state, it still has extra energy. A hydrogen atom in its lowest normal energy state still has an electron in orbit around its proton. But 'lowest' only means that its electron is as close to its proton as it can easily get by giving up energy to other cooler atoms nearby.

"Here's what they were missing. They knew that in a high energy state the atom's electron was quite far away from the nucleus, in what's called an 'outer shell'."

Kore had perked up, but only a little.

Tengri said. "Okay, maybe I can cut to the chase. A hydrogen atom nucleus by itself is a proton that's not hooked up with an electron to make an atom. But a free proton has a positive charge, so it can capture a free electron and make an atom. That's because an electron has a negative charge, exactly opposite to the charge on a proton. And opposites attract, so they're drawn together."

Kore gave him another blank look. Tengri was getting a little frustrated. He said, "I know, this all sounds stupidly technical. Maybe Ray or Newt could explain it better than I can. But I've talked to them about all this and they tend to get even more technical, talking about electron volts and stuff. Anyway, I'm almost to the dark matter part, so can you stick with me? You know a lot of arcane lore. This is more of the same. It just isn't in these books yet." He waved his arm at the bookcases they were surrounded by.

Kore said, "I'm sorry, I don't mean to be rude or dense or impatient. Now I know how most people feel when I try to tell them about something I learned from Sedna. What's in these books." She waved her arm just as he had done. "So I know you're right. And I do feel like I'm mostly getting it. Go ahead and say what you want to say."

"Thank you, Kore. Here's the bottom line." He smiled at his own inadvertent technical pun. "An electron is considered to be fully captured when it has given up as much orbital energy as it can in its approach to the proton. At this level it's believed to make one full orbit per period of its vibrational frequency. In the higher levels it makes two or more vibrations per orbit."

Tengri looked closely at Kore but it appeared this hadn't fazed her. He relaxed and smiled.

"For a long time it had been assumed that this one vibration per orbit level was the so-called ground state, in which the atom had given up all the energy it could and was completely stable. Nobody had questioned that for almost a century.

"Then it was found that the atom could give up still more energy, allowing the electron to move closer to the proton. The electron could jump to fractional orbital levels, getting closer to the proton by half the distance so it took two orbits to match its vibrations, then a third of the remaining distance so it took three orbits, and so on. This is how dark matter is formed from normal matter.

"The reason this wasn't discovered earlier was that for a long time even making that final jump to the theoretical ground state was technically very difficult. So difficult that no one believed another jump was possible. The idea that the true ground state might be even lower was simply dismissed. Until dark matter was found.

"Now that we know about dark matter it has become almost obvious that even bigger jumps, to even lower levels, have been happening right along. Not only in regions of the distant cosmos. Lightning strikes, the solar corona, even electrical arc welding equipment, all show the signature spectrum of energy emitted by dark matter transitions, once you know what to look for.

"The first dark matter jump already gives off an amazing amount of energy. It's over five times what burning hydrogen in oxygen produces. In other words, it's five times better than the best rocket fuel. Ten times better if you can make both the dark matter and the light emission push in the same direction."

Tengri paused for effect. Kore's eyes had gotten very big.

"And that's not all. With each fractional step closer to the nucleus it goes, the electron gives up energy again, increasing its orbital speed at each new level, giving up more and more energy at each step. There's a theoretical limit at 137 steps, where the electron's orbital speed would approach the speed of light. So the total energy released from a hydrogen atom could theoretically approach 1,370 times what you get from burning hydrogen, a nearly incredible amount of energy."

Kore's whole face was now glowing with wonder. And Tengri wasn't done.

"Notice that this isn't nuclear energy. It's still chemical energy, in a sense, as dark matter is still a form of hydrogen. For comparison, the simplest hydrogen fusion reaction produces almost 50 times as much energy as the theoretical maximum available from dark matter. But the fusion reaction has proven to be much more difficult to manage.

"So we can see that even the energy available from the simplest dark matter energy release would be a big advance over the usual use of chemical energy. And even a few times that, a few more steps, would be huge."

Kore said, "What's been done so far is already huge. I really had no idea. And I guess that's true for most people. Thank you, Tengri, for explaining it all so patiently."

Tengri said, "After all that, I really only want you to remember one thing."

"What's that?"

"There are 137 different kinds of dark matter."