| FICTION:
After a couple of years, it became possible to make buckets of this
stuff on short time frames. Something about phased arrays of solid-state
cooling lasers or something. The stuff looked a little like a clear
rainbow. The first ones were made with Rubidium which was
toxic and had to be kept very cold. Later a less non-toxic version
came out that was fine unless it got wet when it warmed up. You couldn't
see reflections in it. Nevertheless, the location property - or
make that delocation property - turned out
to be quite strange. |
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| This
was first demonstrated by cooling down a glass rod in liquid helium.
When the glass rod was stuck into the goop, it would emerge from a
completely different direction, as if it had been refracted or something.
However, if the rod was pulled out, it was just like before. If the
rod was at room temperature, the goop would just evaporate and nothing
would happen. But when the goop was cool, sometimes the rod would emerge
in one place, only to be replaced by a copy in another direction altogether.
These copies would move around like the spires of a milk drop on impact.
Sometimes the rod would break, and then the end couldn't be recovered
while the goop was cold, as if it had gone somewhere. If the glob was
split into two globs, and then heated, all that would remain was two
smaller copies of the original broken end. Something explained the
fact that things quit working when the goop heated as collapse of the
wave function or something. You could shine a green laser on the goop,
and the laser light would turn blue and come out the side. |
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| One
scientist explained it this way. The goop was coherent matter. Just
as coherent light has some unusual properties as seen in lasers, so
did coherent materials in the form of the goop. When the goop was poured
onto a super cooled solid plate of glass, it would come out the bottom
as though the glass wasn't there. If it hit the floor, some of it would
keep going, but most would evaporate. |
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| At
first schools started requesting the stuff, then individuals. So the
company that bought the rights started making a little kit that you
could use to store it and a special little fridge to save it in about
the size of a shoebox. Lots of people started buying the kits and doing
the glass rod trick and other things. All the goop was made in one
factory and came from an original large lump, sort of like sour dough
bread from San Francisco. |
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| Every
year at the Cavendish high school in Vermont there was laser appreciation
day. It was actually appreciation for a high school teacher who had
been killed in a car accident. The teacher loved lasers and did many
demonstrations for her physics students. Therefore, after she died,
the students remembered her each year by making quirky laser demonstrations.
Some kids just brought laser pointers to school, to noodle on the walls;
others went to greater lengths with spinning mirrors, bench demos and
measuring distance. |
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| It
was about this time that somebody figured out, quite by accident, that
if you shined a plain old red viewgraph laser down the long end of
the glass rod, which you didn't have to cool the glass rod before you
stuck it in the goop. However, when you pulled the rod out, the end
that was stuck in didn't come back. No big deal really. The strange
part was, back at the plant, or in someone's kit across the nation,
the glass rod would pop out of the goop and hit the ground, or the
floor, or the ceiling or the wall of the Dewar with a distinctive plinking
sound. |
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| Somehow,
word got out about this, and everybody with one of the goop kits got
marbles and fragments of glass and clear plastic, shined the laser
on them, and then dropped the object into their goop. Back at the factory
and randomly across the nation came the fragments… Since the
factory had the biggest glob those fragments appeared by the ton. However,
it would also pop out of someone's goop cooler, sometimes when they
were dropping their own marble in. It almost put out an eye in New
Jersey, and back at the factory, it almost started a fire when the
garbage from all across the nation and the world started popping out
at the factory. Somebody tried it in a car, then on a truck, then on
a private jet. The fragment would come out of the master glob at whatever
speed the fielded kit was traveling. The cat eye that came off the
jet left a hole in the wall of someone's house two feet wide and completely
destroyed their kit when the Dewar broke and the goop warmed up to
room temperature. |
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| Those
days were tolerated with a combination of humor and trepidation on
the part of the factory that made the goop. That fad lasted about two
months until people tired of sending glass chards to each other and
the factory and having to replenish that part of their own goop that
was lost to evaporation when the laser wasn't lined up just right.
The company put out a press release saying that they couldn't predict
where stuff would emerge because of the location property, but that
it might have something to do with whose goop was lined up with somebody
else's goop in the original lump. |
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Things
were fine until it dawned on someone that you could freeze water
and it would work the same as glass. Then someone noticed that some
cells are clear and can be illuminated with a laser. I'll go light
on the details except to say that frozen globs would sometimes come
out at the most unusual times from the strangest sources.
The
tragedy was that some terrorists in the northeast figured out they
could drop all kinds of wicked frozen chemicals, viruses and anthrax
into their copy of the goop, which they had accumulated a fair amount
of, and it would just randomly victimize people. That period was called
goop wars and pretty much brought the goop craze to an end. |
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