So, when do we leave the real world? Is string theory real? Are extra dimensions of space complete fantasy? Surprisingly, most of this is still reality. String theory has been around for decades and many science fiction writers have relied on it. It speculates that there are additional dimensions of space, ten to be exact. This is far beyond what our simple minds can contemplate, and I decided to just focus on one of those extra dimensions, the fourth dimension, and use the directional names of ana and kata. These names, by the way, are also reality. Some scientists do talk about pointing in the kata direction, which of course we can’t do because we’re three-dimensional creatures. If you want to read a fun book about dimensions, try The 4th Dimension by Rudy Rucker. One of my all-time favorites.
Are there really quantum-sized extra dimensions of space? Certainly, this is where the fiction starts, right? Wrong. String theory is tied to quantum physics because these extra dimensions exist only down at the string level. A string is extraordinarily tiny, so tiny… well, it’s tiny, let’s leave it at that. It’s entirely possible that extra dimensions of space really exist down there, but we have no way of measuring them, so there’s no evidence today.
The fiction of this story comes in when Bradley explains to Daniel and Marie that CERN scientists who discovered the Higgs boson also discovered evidence of string dimensions. They didn’t. I wish they had. That’s not to say that we won’t eventually find evidence of extra dimensions. We might. In fact, finding extra dimensions is completely plausible. Some would say it’s just a matter of time. I’m in that camp.
Additional fiction comes in Chapter 10, “Science.” Dr. Park explains to Daniel and Marie about coherent neutrinos. He says that they’ve learned how to control the phase oscillation, just like a laser. In the real world, neutrinos do indeed have a phase, and they really do oscillate between phases. That’s what gives us the three flavors. But, alas, there is no such thing as a coherent beam of neutrinos locked in the same phase.
The scientists at Fermilab are today conducting several experiments to understand how neutrinos oscillate as they travel. I hope the NOvA team or the LBNF team discovers that neutrinos pop in and out of the extra string dimensions, solving the puzzle about why neutrinos have little interaction with normal matter. Yeah, that might happen.
And then there’s Chapter 20, “Collaboration.” Nala explains to Daniel all about the expansion of a quantum dimension and the resulting compression of another physical dimension. She tells him that the universe behaves like a balloon. You expand in one direction and it compresses in another. Okay, I admit it, I made all that up. Nala writes the “Spiegel equation” and the “Spiegel graph” on a napkin and tells Daniel it will be as famous as E = mc2 someday. Yeah, I made all that up too. There is no Spiegel equation; in fact, there is no Spiegel.
Chapter 20 and beyond were fun to write. As an author, once you’ve left the tracks of reality, you can go wherever your imagination takes you. I wanted the story to remain believable, but I also needed the technology to be able to compress space by 99.99 percent or more. It’s the only way we humans will ever get to the stars.
Traveling to the stars is ridiculously difficult. The Milky Way is a hundred thousand light years across. Even our arm, the Orion Spur, is ten thousand light years long. Our “local” area, where the star VY Canis Majoris is located (yes, it’s a real star), is five thousand light years across. Even with huge advances in our spaceflight technology, we’d need tens of thousands of years to get to VY Canis Majoris. As Daniel points out, a light-speed radio “conversation” would be: “Hi, how are you?” Wait four thousand years. “We’re doing well, how are you?” Wait another four thousand years… It’s absurd. No civilization would do this. The limit imposed by the speed of light is crippling to both travel and communication.
Which brings me to the main premise of the book. The chance that humans are ever going to communicate with alien civilizations using radio communication is slim, maybe none. Sorry, SETI, but you’re not likely to hear anything—ever. We’re listening, but nobody is broadcasting. We’ve been searching large portions of the sky and millions of frequencies, yet SETI hasn’t yet heard a peep. Why? Possibly there is no one out there; we’re alone. Possibly space is just too big, and anyone out there has utterly given up any hope of communication.
But another answer is that radio, or anything based on electromagnetism, is a technology that simply doesn’t fit the requirements. Nobody is broadcasting because at interstellar distances, radio is far too slow, and more importantly—they’ve found some other way.
We’ll need to find that way too, a mechanism to avoid the cosmic speed limit altogether. In this book, compressing space was my way, but there are certainly others (quantum entanglement?). For now, this is science fiction, but if we stay curious and keep exploring, we may yet uncover some aspect of the universe that will solve the problem. When we do, I hope we’ll find that many other civilizations have figured it out too. It’s possible that the galactic conversation is already happening, right now, and that someday it will be our turn to join.
If you’d like more details about the story, plus a lot of pictures that couldn’t possibly fit into the book, please go to my web page: http://douglasphillipsbooks.com and while you’re there, please sign up for notifications for the next book in the series, Quantum Energy!
Thanks for reading! Douglas Phillips.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to all the help from authors at Critique Circle, especially Travis Leavitt, Stephanie Cory, Kathryn Hoff and P Mathison. There’s nothing like a critique from someone who’s down in the trenches writing their own book. Your comments were incredibly valuable in helping me shape the plot and characters, and your ability to consistently locate my numerous mistakes was a humbling (but helpful) experience!
Thanks to my editor, Eliza Dee, who taught me all about novel architecture and point of view. You can read a thousand books, but many of the shared traits among them can still remain hidden until someone else explicitly points them out. Now, I see those structural features everywhere.
Thanks also to Rena Hoberman for the beautiful book cover. I loved it when I first saw it, and I’m looking forward to exploring new concepts for the next book.
Many thanks to my friends and family (John, Phil, Rachel, Jeff, Dave, Jim, Todd, Trevor and others) for your time and feedback on the early versions. I hope you recognize the final story, but if you don’t, it was all your fault.
And finally, thank you to my wife, Marlene, for helping to shape the female characters of the story and for putting up with months of me droning on and on about four-dimensional space and Fermilab.
Quantum Energy
Book Two in the Quantum Series
By Douglas Phillips
Text copyright © 2017 Douglas Phillips
All Rights Reserved.
Quantum Energy, book two in the Quantum series, is coming in 2018. Click here to join my mailing list. I’ll keep you informed on its progress and let you know as soon as it’s ready to download!
Eight months after the astounding discoveries made at Fermilab…
The world anxiously watches as a team of six scientists and diplomats, suit up to participate in the first exchange of emissaries between Earth and an alien civilization. Marie Kendrick is one of the lucky few. What she learns on a watery planet hundreds of light years away could advance human civilization by centuries, or destroy it.
Closer to home, absurd thefts are occurring daily around the world: gold bricks are missing from Fort Knox, a famous painting disappears from the Louvre and the British Royal Sceptre is found in a New York college dorm room. In each theft, the culprits were easily spotted—they smiled into the security camera.
The now-famous cyborg, Core, has much to teach humans, and Daniel Rice acts on one bit of information. At the top of a fourteen-thousand-foot mountain in Colorado, he searches for advanced technology left there more than a thousand years ago.
The second book
of the Quantum series rejoins Daniel Rice, Marie Kendrick and Nala Pasquier as it explores the frontiers of human knowledge and asks whether we are capable of wisdom in the face of enormous leaps in technology.
1 Quantum Energy
Coming soon…
Table of Contents
1 Space
2 Ground
3 Americans
4 Russians
5 Quantum
6 Darkness
7 Insight
8 Chicago
9 Illusions
10 Science
11 Tesseract
12 Booster
13 Magic
14 Corporations
15 Leaders
16 Influence
17 Analysis
18 Conspiracy
19 Motivation
20 Collaboration
21 Surveillance
22 Connections
23 Chinese
24 Message
25 Confrontation
26 Distress
27 Shards
28 Reality
29 Dakota
30 Lost
31 Found
32 Yin
33 Yang
34 Lockdown
35 Bliss
36 Circles
37 Qinhuangdao
38 Layers
39 Puzzle
40 Inspiration
41 Giants
42 Intuition
43 Saturn
44 Hub
45 Paradox
46 Galactic
47 Reunion
48 Humans
Afterward
Acknowledgments
1 Quantum Time
Quantum Space: Book One in the Quantum Series Page 31