Vanishing Points

Gravity guns, secret labs, and a missing astrophysicist. All wrapped up in a desert setting somewhere between existence and non-existence.

A vanishing point is not where reality ends, but where our descriptions lose resolution.

The deserts of New Mexico are, in many literal ways, out of this world.

A rare intersection of ancient human presence and modern human ingenuity, the red-rock plateaus and deep white sand basins are the most space-on-earth place you could find.

They’re home to lunar training enterprises (Rio Grande) and lava tubes (El Malpais) that are studied for their resemblance the famous caves on Mars; the ‘Very Large Array’ of 28 massive radio antennae is regarded as the world’s ear to the cosmos and the whole landscape is brimming with commercial spaceports, space agencies and space labs.

It’s the perfect setting for the off-record facilities that sci-fi novelists dream of — the kind that conspiracy minds get lost in, for good reason. NASA, Virgin Galactic, The Air Force and Space Force, Boeing, Lockheed et. al. — they’re over the map in the dusts of New Mexico, not to mention the more captivating narratives that leak out of Bob Lazar’s Los Alamos and Paul Bennewitz’ Sandia National.

And it was inside one of such industrial flexspaces somewhere in an arid stretch of the desert that Dr. Ning Li was trying to unravel the potential of high temperature superconductors in an effort to defy all known physics.

Li toyed around with locking ions in place by effectively manipulating the one force that has eluded our understanding more than any other: gravity. Doing so wouldn’t only bridge the gap between classical and quantum physics, it would revolutionize just about everything we knew about matter; it would birth a whole new chapter in our technological evolution, not to mention disrupt major industries like energy and war. Think Jetson’s.

“I told them 1,000 years from now or a million years, the problem is always going to be parking.”

-H. Grabar

Whether the ‘mother of anti-gravity’ actually worked between the black budget lines to weaponize gravitation remains a provocative idea, as does the premise that she had been discretely hired and eventually black-shelved by the US government.

What’s undeniable is that Li had been working to create a new form of propulsion that shrouded the whole enterprise in a clandestine air, one that would implicate her in UFO storylines and shadow government conspiracies well after both her suspicious disappearance and sudden death.

Whatever the case may be, Li wasn’t bending the laws of physics in the land of Roswell without reason. Among the superconductive disks and torsion fields, her ambiguous creation of a gravity generator would simultaneously generate the kind powerful meaning that became infused into her story, punctuated by a rather abrupt and ominous ending.

Because it’s such inherently ambiguous stories that captivate our attention — those narratives or ideas or possibilities that lay somewhere just out of reach in the unknown arcanum of reality.

“A strange kind of physical reality between existence and non-existence.”

- F. Capra

The ultimate dichotomy that we wrestle with is between existence and non-existence; the unreal and the real, the ideal and the actual, life and death.

We try to fill in the gap the best we can. From start to finish, we use the strange adventure of life to try and figure it all out.

We turn ideas into actions that have real consequences; we use stories to our advantage by drawing fiction from non-fiction; we create and destroy and play with all the possibilities that allow us to invest meaning like a golden currency towards purpose.

Pitting the absolute truths of subjectivity against the apparent laws of objectivity and weaving individualized strands of meaning into complex tapestries of greater purpose, we ride the collapsing wave functions of chance and fate, allowing perspective to act as the vehicle that cruises the open roads of possibility.

In this world of the unbelievable, we discover something indescribably meaningful. It’s the spaces between the binary structures of reality that we’re drawn to — the indecipherable architecture and implicitly mysterious matrices underlying everything.

These things pull us in for a reason that grows from the roots of our conscious experience, tugging at our curiosity and prompting us to explore reality amidst our incessant expansion through it.

“Be it clearly understood that space is nothing but a mode of particularisation and that it has no real existence of its own… Space exists only in relation to our particularising consciousness”

— Capra

A world-class physicist through the 90s, Li had published work on creating ‘gravito-magnetic’ fields by distorting space.

Well, by manipulating what was occupying space.

She’s alleged to have created a gravity-warping device — colloquially regarded as an ‘AC gravity generator’. A gravity gun.

By 1999, she had formed the private company AC Gravity and reportedly received nearly half a million dollars in DoD grants. Working within a tumbleweeds roll from DARPA and Area 51, Li became another quiet silo in the off-record abyss of the New Mexican desert.

But not long after publishing a series of peer-reviewed papers proposing how rapidly rotating superconductors could generate measurable gravitomagnetic fields and filing patents for the devices — Dr. Li straight up vanished.

The orbiting rumours were galvanized by the immediacy of her sudden disappearance (so close of a proximity to the greenlit funding and patent submissions). Those rumours were later magnetized by the nature of her short-lived re-emergence.

“Physics is an attempt to grasp reality as something that is independent of its being observed.”

— A. Einstein

The idea of relativity broke as many paradigms as it did ceilings to our understanding.

Not only did it allow us to look into the cosmos with some semblance of comprehension but it also empowered the whole idea of a subjective existence brushing up against an objective and inaccessible realm of untouched information — the great unknown.

Our consciousness took on a new form — less an effect and more of a cause, prompting us to lean into patterning the nonsense and exploring our way through the indiscernible.

Relativity pushed truth to become less objective and objectivity to become less absolute.

We had reached something of a divergence in how we measure everything from our selves to our interactions with the world around us, coming upon a vanishing point where space, time and information can suddenly lose all classical meaning.

An event horizon of ultimate perspectival boundary — a limit of observability and knowability.

But at the precipice of this new frontier, we come to find that there’s something of a light that guides us through the murky, undetermined states of existence; one thing that makes any kind of sense across subjective and objective streams of perception: meaning.

“Do you know, I don’t know how one can walk past a tree and not be happy at the sight of it?”

— F. Dostoevsky

While crossing a street at her alma mater campus in 2014, Dr. Li had been struck by a nondescript vehicle, suffering permanent brain damage which led to her eventual death several years later.

Her husband, who witnessed the accident, experienced an immediate heart attack, eventually passing away himself.

The information of the driver had never been made public, maybe because it happened on campus or because Li maintained top secret security clearance while employed at Redstone Arsenal, regarded as the ‘Pentagon of the South’ — a critical defense, space, and intelligence industry. Another silo.

Dr. Li’s story has all the markings of a prime conspiracy, making it itself a enigma beyond the reach of discernibility, ever-captivating to the spotlights of our conscious scrutiny.

It’s beyond the vanishing point of our scrutiny, but it’s not quite beyond bounds of our imaginative potential.

Treating something unknowable not as something to be disregarded but as a testament to the fact that subjectivity may beat out objectivity as we drift over the event horizons and into the black holes of [un]knowable reality.

In this way, relativity applies to Dr. Ling’s story as much as it applied to the ions that she sought to suspend; the gravity of the lesson being that meaning orbits around the mass of consciousness that generates it.

And so vanishing points are not the end of things — they’re simply the point whereby our discernment loses its grip.

They remind us that meaning, like measurement, depends on where we stand.

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