A study about gravitational waves, effects and applications

Author: Umbre Fallenstar

Original post: https://forums.eveonline.com/t/yc120-writing-contest-a-study-about-gravitational-waves-effects-and-applications/75149

Entry for YC120 New Eden Capsuleer’s Writing Contest in the Academic/News category.

Author: Umbre Fallenstars.

First publication date: 09/04/120

Note form the Author: This is a summary and lightened version of a thesis I published a few weeks ago. I tried to be as close as possible to the original paper, but without the mathematical formulas to keep things easy to read even without a full scientific background. Sadly I think that most of the content will still need at least basic understanding of gravitation and FTL theories.

If you ever want to read the full thesis, you can always ask me.

((OOC, of course, there is no “full thesis” ^^ I like science but it’s not my expertise field, so even if the text is mainly based on real theories, it’s still largely “science fiction” I talk about the actual limit of expension of the clusrer, the triglavian and of course the abyssal deadspace))

Glossary

WH = WormHole, artificial or natural phenomenon that allow nearly instantaneous passage for a place to another. sleepers = one of the ancient civilizations of new Eden, a splinter of the Jove Empire. Triglavian Collective = abbreviated “TC”, a recently discovered civilization, apparently human in origins living in “Abyssal deadspace” Abyssal Dead Space = abbreviated “AD”, Concord’s denomination for a Gravitational Maelstorm.

1) Science of gravitation A) General Definition One of the basic laws of physics state:

A particle attracts every other particle in the universe with a force which is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between their centers.

The most "natural" interpretation is to see the gravitation as a vector, a constant. The illustration on the left show the common representation of a gravitational well. Of course, such representation forgets that the "attracted" object generate it's own gravity well. Generally this well is too small to be of importance versus the planet's one.
Contrary to popular beliefs, planets and stars are not "spherical", because of their spinning force, a stellar body is "flattened", being larger on the equator than the poles. Combined with the fact that a celestial body tilt over time, that mean the gravitational force is not a constant but a wave. But even with the consideration of the gravitation as a wave, we are forgetting that the universe is not one planet in one solar system. The universe is made of billions of billions of gravitational wells. and things can become quite messy to represent, below, there is only two gravity well represented and the picture is already not easily readable. http://khazad-consortium.info/Archive/pic5.gif(image larger than 4 MB) If on that you add the fact that each gravitation attraction alter the orbit of said stellar object, you end up needing super calculator to make the smallest calculation. But now that the bases have been laid, we can dive a little deeper in the theory of gravitation and explain two cases of particular interest in our study. As with any waves, they can mix, cancel or amplify each other. And that allow me to introduce the gravitational Resonance and the gravitational Maelstrom.

B) Gravitational Resonance A Gravitational resonance(GR) is a particular case where the waves interact with each other’s, similar to the process of orbitation where the radial velocity is enough to compensate the gravity of the celestial and is “stable”, a GR zone mean that all gravitational forces are balancing each other so the object is “stable” between them. Of course, the first advantage of such condition is that the object will need almost no course correction during its lifetime. but that also mean that’s a spot from where a Faster Than Light (FTL) jump will need much less calculation to arrive at the desired point, but I will come back at this later.

It too appears that a GR zone is a place where the space time fabric is much more “fragile” and is a perfect place to see the emergence of a wormhole (either artificial or natural) but we will come back to this later too.

But of course, if there are places where gravitational waves are cancelling each other’s, it’s not farfetched to think that an opposite counterpart exist.

C) Gravitational Maelstrom A Gravitational Maelstrom (GM) is the opposite of a GR, the gravitational waves amplify and clash with each other. Professor Mayer first hypothesized the existence of GR some years ago and proof were soon found. This theory explains the formation of planets, for long the scientific community knew how the planets were formed but not WHY they would form in one place and not another. With the GR, it’s the star’s gravitational well that is causing the formation of planets in certain range. that is also why each star’s type has a certain pattern in the number and distance of orbital bodies. But what interest us here is a particularly intense case of GM. On some occasions, the gravitational waves are so powerful that they create “artefacts” in the fabric of the universe, the newly discovered “Abyssal Dead space” on which I’ll come back later.

2) Use in history Along the human’s history, we constantly thrived for technological advancement and that lead the human race to discover the meaning of Science and of course use it in everyday life.

Applied Science? All science is applied. Eventually.

Hilen Tukoss. Program Director, Otosela Neuropsychology Center. And gravitational waves are a good example.

A) Chronology ??? The EvE gate is a construct near the anomaly visible from the new eden’s system. It is supposed that the anomaly is either a collapsed wormhole’s remains or a wormhole still active but pouring radiations and energy from the other side.

≈ -15 000 years Centred around the system of new Eden there is a network of stargates, all dated in a period of 150 years. Who built those stargate is a mystery, the most popular theory is that they were constructed by settlers from the other side. the truth behind this is lost and may well be never sure.

-2064 The amarr build the first “recent” stargate, marking the beginning of the latest known human colonization effort, in the following years, many more gates will be constructed, leading to the meeting of all main four factions of new Eden and eventually of CONCORD.

YC 110 Opening of the “black gate” region to the public, this is the last known colonized region at the time of writing. After this point, less harmony points are found and construction ship traveling for those go black one after the other.

YC 113 Loss of contact with the last construction ship, ending the possibility of expansion of the cluster until a way around is found.

The lack of stargate aged between -15k and -2k is interesting because it means that all ancient civilisations used other method of transportation. Early Joves probably used WH transportation, same for sleepers, the Talocan probably used them too. One of the remarkable note we can make about those old Stargates is that they use almost the exacts same technology than us, denoting a possible common origin of all the actuals civilisations, but eve if the subject of the mythical “Earth” is interesting, it is not the subject of this paper. The recent discovery of the Abyssal dead space and the Triglavian civilisation could actually be linked to the Talocan and be an alternate way of transportation, but it’s way too early to be sure of anything. I’m sadly far less knowledgeable on the Yan Jung I cannot tell, but if an expert can help me, I’ll be glad to alter this part.

B) Actual usage A stargate generate an artificial WH between two “linked” gravitational resonance points (or points of Gravitational Harmony), regarding of the distance. The gates themselves are linked by fluid router to ensure instant communication.

When a vessel asks for transfer, the source node (or gate) send a signal containing data on the vessels, then each node confirm the correct alignment (or make the necessary corrections), active their confinement fields and finally start a graviton beam between the two gates.

Following the Weyl tensor dynamics, this create a temporal distortion, allowing for instant transportation). As the mass boson particle field form and discharge inside the WH, it creates a local visual distortion.

Once the transportation is done, both structures close their end of the WH and the arrival node check the integrity of the ship. The mass boson particle field take up to one minute to dissipate entirely, the visual distortion mimicking the effects of a cloaking device, but the field is still there, even if the ship moves.

This method of transportation, while normally safe, has an effect on the human body and can, in some case, lead to death but to reassure you, the “lethal dose” is reached after more than 100 jumps in an hour.

C) Wormholes As we saw earlier, when a gravitational resonance happens, it create a temporal anomaly and if a corresponding harmony point is available, it can lead to the opening of a Wormholes.

Those anomalies are close to “natural” stargates even if the fact that they do not possess a containment field render them a bit more “random”. In K-space most of these spots are already taken by stargates and it’s therefore limiting the possibility of the appearance of WH.

WH tend to not last very long, hours for most, days at most. WH are now a “common” sight (at least among capsulleers) but it was not always like that. The turning point has been the “Seylin Incident”, a series of Isogen 5 explosion around type-01 stars.

The specificity of the explosions (all around the same star-type) and the simulteaously of the event lead to the emergence of the hypothesis that “incident” was a deliberal act.

But even if it WAS a natural phenomenon, it had the same result: a disturbance of the gravitational waves on a cluster wide scale and the opening of the access to the cluster called “Anoikis”.

In it, with the absence of stargates, the WH connections are much more commons and the primary way of travel between systems.

As we saw in the stargate explanation part, the “way out” a WH can be calculated with the gravitational data of the start point and each harmony point can have a few connection possibilities. That allow the existence of “static WH”, they are certain kind of WH that always lead to the same sort of space.

In some circle, it is even noted as a very peculiar coincidence since EVERY system in w-space have such connection and it could be described as “gravitational balance” or “mathematical beauty” and, for some, it would be the evidence that Anoikis is at least partly artificial. Even of the Subject is really fascinating, It’s off topic.

3) Limits and Theory The actual usage of stargate have serious limitations. This part has been recently re-worked since Abyssal dead space passed from “theorical” to “proved existence”.

A) Limits The actual limits of stargate technology is that you need to travel by conventional ways to the destination spot. Of course, with the use of warp tech, the actual duration of the trip passed from centuries to mere years.

This allowed the rapid expansion of the gate network during the last years. But it also means that the ship is vulnerable during this time. The old man star’s story is only one example in a long list of failed expeditions. Death, plague, mutiny, accidents and unknown cosmic anomalies have claimed the lives of countless crew.

Since we lost contact with the last known construction ship, no more crew have been sent, for multiple reasons. The first reason is a ratification of potential destinations points. As I explained in the II/ B) part, stargates can’t be constructed everywhere. Even if you get a perfect Gravitational Resonance point in an already know system, you still need a destination point.

And with the gravitational calculation needed to locate possible destinations point, fewer and fewer were found in the last years. The points found are either too far to send a ship and hope for it to survive or have already been selected and ships been lost on their ways.

To complexify things, between the opening of Anoikis, the still ongoing colonisation effort of the linked stars of the New Eden Cluster, lack of funding and the loss of all previous expeditions, the empires and Concord have simply stopped officially funding those expeditions (I’m not some kind of conspirationnist, but we all know that all empires have underground activities).

B) Possible way around There are many ways that could lead to a new wave of expansion of the linked map:

WH stabilization: Long theorised and already mastered by drifters, we could manage to stabilize the Wh connected to Anoikis and “fix” them, it would only lead to the colonization of Anoikis and that would be a temporary solution. New jump capabilities: Since the problem is to bring the construction ship on the destination point, if we could build powerful enough jump bridge, we could reach the closest defined point to build the gate, without risking the crew in a decades long travel. WH mastery: If we could open WH at will (without knowing a destination point) we could reach compatible systems and send ships by this WH, reducing the transportation process from decades to hours. More recently, the Abyssal dead space opened new possibilities.

C) Abyssal dead space The abyssal dead space are gravitational anomalies so powerful that they fold space time to the point where they create “pockets” of space.

Those pockets are extremely unstable and will be home of terrible conditions. If the calculations are correct, this kind of environment will be perfect to see the emergence of vast field of electrical and/or plasma storm, could capture gamma ray and generally allow multiple kind of exotic particles to gather.

But It is another kind of particle that interest us in this study. As you may know, around 70% of the universe’ mass is not observable. Since Pr Mayer theorized the existence of Gravitational Maelstrom, it has been hypothesised that those pockets could actually hold huge amount of dark matter.

Since Gravitational maelstrom may “trap” dark matter it is also possible that gravitational pit in those places are so high that they may interfere with WH connections. it could explain many incidents in the history of interstellar jumps like the famous Perrales incident.

Lastly it is also possible that Abyssal dead space will provide a way around the actual limitation of stargate construction. If we manage to map the Triglavian map network in there, we could be able to travel great distance and emerge at places never reached before.

CONCLUSION

As we saw during the paper, gravitational waves have been used for millennia and are still the best way to provide interstellar transportation. We are at a standstill in our colonization efforts but with the discovery of Abyssal deadspace we could well be on the way to more discovery.

SOURCES

There is a lengthy list of sources but to not render this paper harder to read than it already is, I did not included it, but if you want my sources, just ask me, I’ll gladly provide them.