TGIF Part 7: The Three Genies

The Kovachi Temporal Gravitational Interlacing Force (TGIF)Grand Unification Theory
TGIF Part 7: The Three Genies

Kovachi concluded that time, energy, and gravity are the three building block elements of the universe and energy is created through the combined force of the other two. Let's examine that by looking at the mother of all gravity wells: black holes. Some modern theories that warp the gravitational constant through branes or create higher dimensions to resolve gravity’s anomalies, negate the mathematical need for the black hole. In some ways it’s trading one metaphor for another. However, in the Kovachi model the black hole is the crucible of matter. In fact, the big bang was a black hole. If we suppose that all that existed in the beginning was time and gravity, where does matter come from?
As expressed earlier, Kovachi proposed that time is in fact the fundamental particle. The vibration itself is what makes up energy and therefore mass. The higher the cycle of energy, the greater the mass. So the universe starts with one single vibration of infinite energy and infinite time creating infinite gravity which expresses itself as infinite density. This is what makes up all black holes, but the original one, the big bang, began with a single vibration.

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TGIF Part 8: The Big Bang

The Kovachi Temporal Gravitational Interlacing Force (TGIF)Grand Unification Theory
Part 8: The Big Bang

Expressing the singularity as a vibration also helps answer a few other conundrums. For instance, what caused this infinitesimal nugget of a universe to become unstable in the first place and explode it’s goodies to create space, matter, and ultimately us? Observational physics informs us that we know everything back to the first microseconds but can't see the original moment. Or do we? We can’t compress time and space and energy all into that tiny place without leaving ourselves open to a million questions.
However, if we suppose that those ‘microseconds’ were in fact millennium or billions of years on a compressed time scale because, as relativity demonstrates, the faster we go, the slower the observed time, and the more compressed space becomes, that makes the bang inevitable. Assume for a moment that there is no objective speed of light, then it is subject to the velocity context it exists in. The same goes for time, because as velocity increases, time decreases. Is there really a T=0? That only supposes that the original bang is ‘ground zero’ giving T a value of 0. But relativity does not teach us there is a bottom or a top. So we have velocity of our vibration increasing, time slowing and density (gravity) going through the roof. A volatile cocktail that has to reach a tipping point and explode.
Remember that density in this case is a manifestation of gravity, not the other way round. Gravity itself is a relative constant tied to the vibration of time. In fact, if we take our quantum equations as predicted down to the planck scale, we get a very different response from gravity than we do on a general relativity scale. A more consistent and controlled response because the vibrations create the density/gravity. We only recognize gravity as a weak force in the greater universe because we assume that it should respond more uniformly as it does on a quantum scale. But the fact that it has incredible reach through what can be fundamentally considered empty space indicates that the planck scale time/gravity vibration preexists matter. In some way, we could consider that each particle/vibration of time is a mini gravity well or black hole, an ‘event’ which could be called ‘a particle of time’ that connects to other events and makes up the fabric of space.

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TGIF Part 9: Conclusions Anyone?

THE KOVACHI TEMPORAL GRAVITATIONAL INTERLACING FORCE (TGIF) GRAND UNIFICATION THEORY
Part 9: Conclusion.

This model also answers the question of how do you pack all of existing matter into a dense singularity that occupies no space. The single vibration that encapsulates all of time doesn’t require all of matter to exist at that moment. Time creates matter. Time plus gravity is matter. After the Big banged the vibrations slowed, time sped up, and the universe cooled. Slower vibrating time particles form quarks, hadrons, muons that carry the nuclear and electromagnetic force signatures which then collaborate into electrons, neutrons and unstable hydrogen atoms.
And the rest, as they say, is history.

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Top 10 SF Movies Of All Time - My Pick

Since everyone's doing their top 10 this time of the year and we're talking about the demise of SF, I'm going to list a few real juicy films that deliver on all fronts. These are stories and ideas worth emulating in books and movies. They all include: strong story all the way through, consistent universe that's true to itself, original ideas and delivery, good characters and character interaction, and always worth a rewatch.

Okay, in no particular order:

Dark City.

Maybe an all time fave. Hard to commit in such good company. Dark, unassuming and full of original creepy stuff.

The Matrix. (First movie only)

Contender for all time best. Has it all: Originality, hero action, on the edge SF. A bit too many bullets maybe but....

The Day The Earth Stood Still.

Gort Rules. Michael Rennie as Klaatu nails the cold war alien.

2001:A Space Odyssey & 2010.

While very different, both films create aliens we can't understand and pit man against himself while trying to understand them.

Star Wars (Episodes IV, V, VI)

The Skywalker trilogy was brilliant then and brilliant now.

Independence Day.

Love the retake on War of the Worlds with a 'virus' killing the aliens who just don't care who we are.

The Abyss.

Another great alien that is beyond our comprehension. Well told tale.

Terminator 2: Judgement Day.

Sure, you need T1 for backstory but this one is the balls for great action SF with cyclical story.

Outbreak.

Different kind of SF. Too close to reality. Sharp as a razor.

Red Planet.

With the exception of the robot cat, this is a great story of man vs. environment. No monsters, no evil genius, no insane computer. Just wits against the wild.

A couple of honorable mentions:

Planet of the Apes (1968), Sleeper, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, ET: The Extra-Terrestrial, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Bladerunner, The Handmaid's Tale, Galaxy Quest,

Alien, Forbidden Planet.

Stay tuned for top 10 novels...

Is Science Fiction Dying?

This blog entry is a response to the question: Is science fiction dying? The original question was posed on Mark Newton's blog with a long and very interesting discussion.

http://blog.markcnewton.com/2009/12/03/why-sf-is-dying-fantasy-fiction-is-the-future/comment-page-3/#comment-2203

I find the bandwidth of this discussion fascinating because in the end no one made the definitive case for or against the question is SF dying. It all came down to opinion and how to interpret stats and trends. Whatever the state of affairs, I don’t want SF to die. I’ve only recently published and started on the road to finding readers and a voice in the fiction world. So I have a stake in keeping SF alive. Hell, I’ll give it mouth to mouth if that’s what it takes! I grew up on Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, etc. I went to the moon with Neil and Buzz in 69, I stared at the stars so hard every night that I can tell you where the constellations are during the day. “Why, oh, why,” I’ve cried, “didn’t ET land in my backyard!”

Here’s my take on the problem:

As has been said, technology is big, science isn’t. I believe the turning point was the advent of the calculator. Who needs to learn math when the machine will do it for you? Likewise, technology and special effects have made the reading and movie audience lazy. Star Wars supplanted Star Trek with battles and FX. Who needs to think and imagine when someone else will do the heavy lifting? So writing space opera and military SF became the cash cow and who can blame the writers who milk it. But it put us question posers and science thinkers in the back seat as writers and readers.

On the sexism issue, in the heyday of classic SF, Rocket Jockeys, along with everyone else in the world, were all men. Women were meant to be by their side, like Maureen Robinson in Lost In Space. Most male writers at the time couldn’t imagine it differently. Sally Ride, Desert Storm, and Hillary Clinton has put self assured women who don’t behave like men in politics, space and battle. But while the world has changed, much of SF hasn’t.

As far as waiting for the next voice in the genre, we shouldn’t hold our breath if Mark’s comments about finding publishers to push the genre for us holds any water. Which I believe it does. Publishers print books to sell. They can’t print books that are ‘good for the genre’. The marketplace is too tough for that. From what I understand, 90% of books published in a given house are held up by the 10% of writers who actually turn a profit for them. That translates to a lot of risk for publishers trying like crazy to find the next big thing to sustain themselves on before one of their current wells go dry.

So where does that leave us writers? Let’s see... we need to excite the audience with some action, include science without boring them, create complex women characters so that we can attract complex women readers. Anything else? Oh yes, and fit it into a cross over space where fantasy readers can dig it, too.

Not a small order. Since no one in this discussion actually offered solutions, let me be the first to stick my neck out to fellow, and successful, writers on where I think we can help make it work:

Science is exciting. It shouldn’t have to sell itself. But we have to sell it the way it excited us in the first place. Remember the epiphany you had when SF first spoke to you? That’s what you want to give your readers. Take small bites. don’t over explain. You can’t bring a new reader in to quantum gravity by discussing MOG theory compared to Dark Matter. Create someone in the story who is as confused as the reader, someone who can share the frustration, someone who is overwhelmed and needs to be brought along.

Another great ally is humor. Laugh at how bizarre it all seems that this science stuff is baffling.

Have characters explain some stuff while involved in other drama. If you stop the story to give a lecture, it’s time to zip up the body bag - you’re dead.

Women. Women are the same...only different. For male writers to write female characters we have to be careful not to just plug our own stereotypes into them. The ‘same’ part is that women are jealous, angry, loving, stupid and physically challenged by a brain in a frail body just like men. For storytelling the ‘different’ part is that many women solve problems from a different perspective. This is one place where many SF (and other genre) female characters break down. No matter if we’re writing about drama or relationships, or combat many male writers just put a woman’s name on their male character. We’ve heard it often said that ‘women like to read more relationship and emotional conflict driven stories’, not so much on the guns ‘a blazin’. So creating females that jock up their gritted pearly whites while they pull back the bolt on that blast action murdalizer only take our girl readership so far. Those ladies exist, but not in high numbers.

When it comes to conflict resolution, women might prefer cunning, dealing, compromise, and leadership, over bullets and battle. Use science to help them find these kinds of conflict resolution. Allow female characters to be resourceful as well as smart. Create a different frontier for plot resolution than you might consider for a man.

My first stab at a female lead was in a first person narrative. I made it work by allowing her to be vulnerable but not stupid. She learned from her hard knocks and took on the conflict through teamwork and understanding. Not the first tools most male heroes would reach for. She didn’t understand the science needed to overcome obstacles, but she learned to rely on those who did.

If you’ve read this far, well, I hope it helps. Personally, I believe that dark matter, higher dimensions, and other quantum concepts are exciting and I want to share them with readers. However, as I’m sure many of you have found, when you talk to friends about these concepts, their eyes glaze over. At the same time they become instantly impressed that I understand such ‘advanced’ concepts and they wish they knew more. That belies a serious curiosity about quantum concepts amongst the reading population. They’d like to understand, just don’t feel they can.

There’s our challenge: how to make science accessible so the audience is brought along with our imagination while the story keeps their eye somewhere else, like a good magic trick. It’s a delicate balance but I firmly believe that the writers who can pull it off, will create the next SF Harry Potter or Buffy series.

Quantum Physics as Mythology

Perhaps I'm searching too hard to explain reality beyond our senses, as I posited in my last post. The problem, as I see it, is trying to describe a reality beyond the one we know and connect it to the world we live in. Since we live in a world of cold matter on one hand and abstract thought and emotion on the other, maybe I don't need to look so hard.

As I said in the previous post, explaining the contents of kibble to a dog is beyond purpose. The dog can't grasp it and the owner should know that. Yet when marketers sell tinned dog food with chunks of meat, carrot and peas, some owners imagine that this makes a difference to the dog. It's the same conversation, only visual. These owners imagine the dog will understand the concept of peas and carrots if they look like them more than if they were pureed or freeze dried.

Advertizers personify everything into talking images that tell us we should love them so much we want to brush with them, chew them up, cure our ills or kill our environment with them.

So how could a lowly SF writer such as myself take advantage of the human need to personify everything we see and touch to describe and define a quantum world? I think the physics community treats the layman as the dog in this analogy instead of the owner. They explain it to each other in mathematical metaphors like branes, multi-dimensions, strings and so forth that require a good deal of noodle work and leave us poor dogs staring uncomprehending at the mess of peas.

The ancients like Greek and Mayans were on to this long before Madison Avenue. Creating myths to personify the universe helped to explain complex ideas to common folk. For example, the Titan, Cronus, devoured his children because the sages told him one of his sons would overthrow him one day. So his wife, Rhea, feeds him rocks and hides her baby Zeus who grows up to kill the old man. This story reaches us profoundly on a gut level so that we don't need to overexplain it.

I wonder if there's a way to reach people with quantum mechanics on a similar wavelength? I guess I have my work cut out for me.

New Year's Resolution: Let's reinvigorate science for our readers

Developing a theory of quantum gravity that both fits my own concept of how the universe works (the heavy lifting done by all the physicists I read) and being able to describe it in my novel are two very different challenges. The ins and outs can be explained to physicists and other interested parties. But making it accessible to a wide range of readers who may barely be familiar with the basics of higher dimensional theory is like explaining the ingredients of kibble to the dog. They hear the words, they just don't understand...or care.

It's not so hard to talk Einstein and relativity, even to kids. Most people can relate to red shift and black holes and time slowing down as velocity picks up. We learn it in school and it's now part of science 101.

However, discussing quantum mechanics and gravity loop theory with friends and family usually dulls the eyes of even the most polite listener. Most people nod off watching PBS's version of a string theory lecture that barely scratches the surface of the science. Unless quantum physics is a subject you love, it's about as exciting as metric vs. standard lug nut wrenches. That goes double for readers. So, how to introduce it into the story in enough spurts and bits to bring the reader along without losing them completely?

I want, no, I need them to relate to quantum gravity, to feel the power of a planck universe on our lives. I am trying to create a link between our universe and something so foreign that it is virtually indescribable, yet is the backbone of what we are. Not an easy task.

In storytelling, you don't get a second chance to tell it right. So spoon feeding relevant bits and hoping they stick, while introducing the next concept somewhere in the mix of adventure, romance or plot is a balancing act.

That leaves me on the precipice of totally losing my reader before I've even engaged them. Worse, it leaves me with a sense of pointless humility at how so many have lost interest in the sciences. We have to work very hard to bring it back.

Merry Christmas, Sam.

Quantum computing here we come...

Pack your bags, Sam. We're leaving pentium computing and making the move to a quantum processor.

An exciting move forward in quantum computing has just been achieved where chilled beryllium ions passed the threshold of performing a computing task. Maybe it's not enough to go out and sell all your Intel stock and invest in qubit venture captital, but the VAX computer wasn't much compared to what we use now. However, it was an important step along the way.

I wonder what will happen when a bazillion qubits send that dissertation you've been working on for 2 years into the alternate state of a partner qubit on the other side of the universe. Or just as bad, Heisenberg kicks in so that you're paper is but isn't really there, depending on where you don't look.

This could be a nightmare. Be careful what you wish for...

What if the world was like Heaven

I suppose the obsession with superhero stories these days is because the world is so stressful and problems seem so overwhelming that people dream about larger than life characters that can swoop in and save us all. I read Spidey and Thor when I was a kid because when you're a kid your immediate world is so overwhelming that dreaming heroes that understand and take charge is a parental kind of thing.

But, as adults do we really want to admit that our obsession in movies and TV with superhero, military hero, vigilante hero worship is really telling us that we're longing for mommy and daddy to swoop in and save us from the big bad world? All the adults in these stories are power hungry jackboots or buffoon 'yes men' who put obstacles in the hero's way. Unless, of course, it's a gorgeous blonde hiding behind black rims, a nuclear physicist in a D cup and compassionate lover of all things good. Is that how we really see society - through the eyes of a teenage male who is too young to even understand what he sees?

I wonder what we would make of it if one day we all woke up, our petty grievances resolved, our childhood problems washed away, bigotry and greed vanquished to irrelevance, leaving us with a clean conscience, positive attitude, and truly adult perspective on the world.

Who would save us then? I get the willies just thinking about it!

The Quantum Quack

Last month a bird with a baguette flew into the LHC collider at CERN wreaking minor havoc and confusion. Sounds to me like the time is ripe for a new genre in monster movies.

Ever since Oppenheimer and the boys donned dark glasses in Nevada to watch the mushroom release of radiation into the Earth's unsuspecting atmosphere, SF stories have been dripping with radioactive mutants from giant insects and lizards to incredibly shrinking men that leave us with the lesson that nature is not to be tampered with so frivolously.

Well, enter the light speed particle travelling at 18 TeV. Imagine what could happen during the crucial collision period where Higgs meets boson and a new dimension of the universe is about to unfold. Picture this: A poor baby duck has been separated from his mother where they were nesting unbeknownst in the collider ring. She's caught in the beam. Doctor Planckmann presses the booster button just as the red digital countdown clock hits 000.0.

The moment, a bizarre culmination of hazardous forces where Uncertainty begats Dark Energy Force begats Johnston and Masters and zippo --- the duck gets goosed into a higher energy dimension where it exists and doesn't exist. Where time and space are meaningless in our short sighted optical view, where even the low beaked thoughts of a baby duck can alter the reality of our universe.

Ah, the possibilities. Welcome to a new and exciting era in SF monsters -- Godzilla: the Quantum Lizard.

countdown to stupid

If life was like the movies, in order to capture all the bombers in the world, Homeland Security would only need to track the sale of large digital timers that beep a red countdown to zero before the blast goes off. There could only be a couple of reliable companies for this product so the feds only need follow their sales and our problems with terrorism are over.

In movies, SF, thrillers, and mysteries are all guilty of overusing this corny and really outdated device. "The explosives are ready, Bob, but I haven't finished designing the oversized timer." Give us a break. Even bombs strapped to chests have these stupid clocks on them like a bomber has to let their victims know how many seconds they have left.

Here's a SF twist. What if we all wore digital countdown devices wired to our quantum biorhythms that told us when we are going to die? Imagine it starting at 90 years and beeping it's way along. You start smoking and it drops a couple of years. Cancer? Suddenly you have 5 years. Go into chemo, it adds another three.

You're walking home and it drops to 10 minutes. Realizing you're 10 minutes from home, you imagine a killer is waiting there. You cell 911 and tell the cops to meet you there. On your way there, you get hit by a bus and die on the way to the hospital on the 10 minute mark.

Would it convince us to live healthier lives? Not likely. No more than the disconnect Americans seem to have between gun violence to guns.

Schrodinger's Car

Another idea for space travel propulsion would be employing the all too oft repeated entanglement paradox of Schrodinger's cat. If we imagine the paradox not only suggesting we don't know the state of the cat in the box, we can apply it to the state of our entanglement particle engine as long as we don't look under the hood.

As long as we leave the hood down we'll never know whether the engine is broken or working and can merrily continue on our way. Alas, that's how many of us treat the monster under the hood of our all too 20th century engines.

That's Why Special Relativity is so Special

It seems there's some news from the Big Bang. The recent gamma ray bursts from the bowels of cosmic history (13.1 billion years ago) have given us a bit of experimental evidence to confirm special relativity down to the Planck Scale. Physics World.com reports that the "speed of light does not vary with wavelength down to distance scales below that of the Planck length. They say that this disfavours certain theories of quantum gravity that postulate the violation of Lorentz invariance."

The reason for this is some quantum gravity theories modify special relativity in order to balance the macro with the quantum world. Specifically Quantum Loop Gravity theory takes a hit but others have to do some reconsidering as these data get examined and absorbed into the physics community.

This is cool stuff here, Sam, don't you think? Not only does it add to the discussion and help us whittle down the GUT options but having information like this arrive 'out of the blue' as it were, reminds us that an untold amount of information is coming at us from afar every day.

Who knows what tomorrow brings.

Dear Sam,

It's hard to keep up with a blog when finding time to write anything is hard enough. When I do, I'm trying to finish my novel. My apologies to my probable one reader who may look forward to my cursory look at the physics/SF conundrum to get them past their morning cuppa.

After watching a series of lectures and panels streaming from the Perimeter Institute's Q2C Festival all last week, I came to the conclusion that I'm drawn to the quantum gravity theories more than dark matter and dark energy. Not being a physicist, I can't draw these conclusions on my own and rely on the books and material I read from those in the field.

What I discover from a variety of sources is that, while pro-dark matter advocates insist a breakthrough is imminent and there is no other way to describe the universe, the question is still wide open. The anecdotal evidence on the dark matter side of the equation relies heavily on past scientists concluding the existence of atoms, magnetic fields, etc., without evidential proof only to be vindicated when experiments caught up with theory. All well and good, I suppose but it isn't enough on it's own to hang one's hat.

On the other side, Loop Gravity, MOG, and other space-time fabricators, imagine, as Einstein did, that the universe is complicated enough without having to invent new particles. So, while we don't have the answer, it doesn't mean we need to add complexities just to balance the equations. That notion appeals to me. The idea that space-time is the fabric of existence rather than a background to existence also appeals to me.

I intend to explore these avenues, both in science and SF, to better understand and to create possible universes for storytelling. For now, I think I'll make up some flash fiction for the blog and also publish the Evan Kovachi Particles of Time theory here for you to mull over.

Maybe I should give my solo reader a name. How about Sam? That would cover both genders.

q2c Festival 2009 Online

There's a wonderful event this week at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario. It's called the Quantum2Cosmos Festival and they have great lectures, panels and ideas. The good news for us far away is that all the discussions are on live streaming video at their website or on file to watch whenever you like at q2cfestival.com/.

Take a look!

Quantum Chaos Propulsion Drive

Reading some articles on dark matter theory, I came across an interesting quantum chaos theory on physicsworld.com. Essentially, chaos theory suggests that all events connect through a series of seemingly unrelated events. Therefore if a dog fart in Alabama can affect a typhoon's intensity on the Pacific Rim. The connection string is long and impossible to follow but it essentially implies, we're all in the same soup together, like it or not. Cause and effect on a grand scale.

The new concept in this theory is taking it to a quantum scale so that if a string shivers in a Planck universe, the mass of a graviton on the other side of the galaxy might get a GUT ache.
If it sounds like I'm not taking this too seriously it's because I'm not. Chaos is a great concept but you can't prove or disprove it. Randomness is just that. However, in the spirit of Douglas Adams, I had an interesting notion. What about a Chaos Propulsion System?

If the basic purpose of the universe is to transfer energy, why not create a Chaos Drive that randomly disturbs a quantum particle in order to feed a rocket system down the chaotic vibe?

Anyone want to tackle the logistics of that?

Bombing the Moon for Fun and Profit

I loved today's moon mission attempting to find water by dropping a missile near the pole! I've been disappointed ever since Apollo that we didn't pursue a moon base and realize the importance of a permanent human footprint on the Moon, instead of just a shoeprint.

I watched the gab on the news shows as the missiles struck and they all talked about being disappointed that there was no plume, and lost expectations and what a failure it must have been, etc, blah blah blah. What did they want? Krakatoa erupting before their very eyes?

These turkeys have no idea what astronomy and astrophysics is. They've been watching too much Star Wars and CSI. Somehow they think that scientists really do have computers where you press a button and a 3D image of the brain they just scanned rotates around in front of them, showing where the lesions are. Or grabbing a cheap image off an ATM surveillance camera and managing to magically regenerate the focus of a black spot driving by at 40 miles an hour into a recognizable face.

We're starting to believe our own hype. Special effects in SF at least say 'its the future' but in crime dramas and military shows, they expect you to believe they actually have this far out equipment. It sets reality up to be a real let down.

What the general public needs to remember is that astronomy includes a healthy dose of imagination. Flights of fancy into the improbable where we dream about future reality. Today's demonstration was for NASA to learn, not for the public to get a YouTube rush and then go back to dancing hamsters and fish that sing pop tunes, forgetting completely that this was the friggin' Moon, man and we are looking for ways to survive there!.

As SF writers and dreamers, we need to lower expectations of the visible and inspire the imagination for the possible. It'll make it easier for the public who want the spectacular or nothing at all to realize that what happened today was spectacular.

Have Space, Will Travel

I've been meaning to do a video short of all the different spaceship designs that have graced fiction over the past 75 years. When I do, I'll post it here. In the meantime, a quick overview of where they've been and what comes next could be fun.

The original rockets blasted off with fires raging out their tails, much like the real thing. We all have images of cartoon and movie rockets from the 50's: basically missiles with some poor slobs strapped inside. Then came flying saucers. I don't know why the aliens always got the cool saucers and we had the exploding rockets. "The Day The Earth Stood Still" flying saucer barely impacted the crowd that gathered on the ground. SF during the early days of nuclear testing, called them 'nuclear powered'. Whatever that meant. I guess if it had nuclear power it could rise slowly into the air to the tinny strains of the theremin.

I think that the Jupiter II on Lost In Space was the first human flying saucer. It, too, ran on "nuclear" power so it just floated away on whimsy. Star Trek, way ahead of it's time on this, created the Enterprise, a ship that never landed and was powered by something completely unprecedented - crystals that held unimaginable power. They transferred this power to their engines, which had the capacity to accelerate them beyond the speed of light on a 'time warp factor'. A very nice gimmick to get them across great gaps in space in a short time.

This was followed up, a decade later by Star Wars and 'hyper drive'. These engines catapulted the ship across the galaxy in seconds by passing through hyperspace, which I suppose occupies a different dimension of space and is quicker to cross.

Since then, we've stuck with that basic concept for SF space travel. Hit the button, see you next Thursday. There are logistic problems but they're easy to gloss over because all we're trying to do is cover great distances in a hurry.

As an alternative, and we have to give Star Trek some more innovative credit, there is the personal transportation idea. Beam me up by transferring matter into coded energy and then reassembling it in its original form. This works better for short distances because the energy only travels at the speed of light. But there are gimmick ways around that, too. Ion propulsion, graviton waves, halcyon particles, the works.

A nod has to be given here Doug Adams "Hitchhiker's Guide" series and his improbability drive. Using the Heisenberg Principle, he fantastically imagined a mode of transportation that works on unlikely, and therefore necessary probabilities.

The big joke there is that modern physics experiments with particle transfer puts Adams ideas closer to the mark than any warp engine or hyper drive. The nifty thing that's going on right now is that a muon or lepton or some such teeny speck of a particle has been sent from New York to London by breaking it down and transporting it.

Here's the rub. What actually happened was that the original particle was broken down to the quantum level and then a new, identical particle was created in the destination location. You might think this is cloning. In a way it is. But the only way to succeed in this transfer was to destroy the original when it was sent. So you now have a clone but no original. The clone would be so identical that it might as well be the original.

Here's where the hand rubbing, speculative SF ideas get to come into the mix. New York to London sounds like going from Detroit to Flint. Who cares? But if we can extend the trip using the quantum principle where two identical particles can communicate across the galaxy instantaneously, then we got ourselves a quantum rapid transit system that requires no warp drive or stable worm holes.

Let's dehumanize this for a sec. Don't send people, send nano satellites that can gather data and send it back from, say, the core of our universe. Seriously, if the only data that reaches us from the center of the universe is 14 billion years old, wouldn't it be something to find out in a flash what's going on there right now? We could send quantum satellites all over the universe with one mission: signs of life. They could be designed to send signals back only if they are tampered with.

Scientists are already considering nano satellites launched from Earth, but transporting them on a quantum wave would be a cheapo way to explore the galaxy. We can work on how to shrink an astronaut into one later on.

Out of the Mouths of Babes

Stepping off topic today, I was climbing a tree with my seven year old grandson last summer talking about writing a story. I asked what he'd call his story and he said 'The Witches Daughter'.

I love this idea. There are so many angles to what you could do with a concept like this. Imagine the witches daughter going to school, her gingerbread house off the beaten track, an outcast because of her mom. This could be a picture book or a novel.

How about the witches daughter as a teen torn between her mom's life and the village life. Would she protect her mom from the torch wielding mob or join them because of peer pressure.

Imagine the middle aged woman dealing with her young life in therapy after being raised under the shadow of her mother's wicked life.

Of course, there is the version where she is an acolyte into the world of witches, either ala Samantha Stevens or a dark tale of being inducted into the world of evil.

There are so many richly complex notions in this one title that I almost wish I wrote magic tales.

Chalabi-Yowza

M Theory, the composite string theory, supposes that there are 11 dimensions (10 spatial and one of time). All these dimensions above and beyond the 3 we see around us are supposedly curled up and so tiny that they fit right in a planck scale pocket (that is 10-33). The universe, according to this theory, is made up of countless compacted dimensions rolled up in "Chalabi-Yau" shapes, which are multi dimensional units.

These ideas, still completely conceptual, are great fertile ground for Quantum SF. What would a life form be like in a curled up dimension like that? If these dimensions are that small they can be living among us by the bazillions right now, more prolific than dust mites or amoeba, or atoms. The concept that we could be living with alternate dimension life forms blows my mind.

Here are two questions that start the ball rolling for me. How do we define life forms (always a great science and SF question)? Second, if they exist here, do we call them Earthlings or alien?

Hey, who knows, they may be our ticket out of here to the great beyond of outer space.