Navigating Known Space (con't)

To tie this in to hyperspace, we'll look at string theory. It says (at least in one version) that there may be ten dimensions in all, with the extra seven curled up tight at the quantum level. Imagine that instead of being curled up tight, these dimensions were extended, like the three we're used to dealing with in every day life, but that they were curved where our "normal" ones are flat, and vice versa. These dimensions effectively form a strange shadow universe which we call hyperspace, one where our mysterious Force A can be explained in terms of spacial curvature, just as gravity can be. Beyond it, but much more tightly bound to hyperspace than our universe is, is another space where Force B operation. Both A and B may in fact be gravity in another guise, which is plausible since they both act on mass. The Force A shadow universe (hyperspace A) isn't normally accessable to us, being on the other side of a very high energy barrier, but the hyperdrive manages to somehow "pump" a ship across this barrier in a quantum mechanical sense. In the shadow universe the reverse curvature of Force A makes ships "fall" from star to star and tightly bound Force B reacts against Force A. The speed of light remains the speed of light even there, which will make Einstein happy, but because the extra dimensions make hyperspace more closely connected there than our space. Once you drop back into normal space it seems that you broke the universal speed limit, but you didn't, you just took a shortcut. Given this understanding, we can guess how the hyperdrive might work. Macroscopic objects like ships don't behave like single quantum particles, something which is required for us to imagine pumping our ship from one quantum state to another. However it's possible to make many particles effectively act like one, in what's called a Bose-Einstein condensate. Creating a Bose-Einstein condensate is technically challenging, you have to cool the particles to less than fifty billionths of a degree above absolute zero. It's only been done to batches of a few million atoms at once, and then only for a very short time. Cooling a starship like this is impossible, so the hyperdrive will have to use some other method of making the ship behave as a single quantum particle, a method that so far nobody in Known Space actually understands. Once that's done it just needs to be pumped across the energy barrier between universes, and launched on it's way. Well, almost.

Anything which is pumped to a higher energy state will inevitably want to return to it's lowest state, just as a dropped stone falls until it hits the ground. The trick here is to recognize the lowest state, which is not our universe but hyperspace B Our universe is a metastable state, hyperspace A is an unstable state and hyperspace B is the stable state. Once the energy barrier between our universe and hyperspace A is overcome the ship will tend to go all the way to hyperspace B. It takes energy to hold the ship out hyperspace B, and more energy to pump it back into normal space. Because the spaces are differently curved by mass the states get farther apart as you approach one. Get too close to a mass and your engine won't have the power to hold you out of hyperspace B. Force B will take over completely and you'll be zipped elsewhere in a big hurry, return not required. If the curvature is sharp enough just your engine will go, leaving you stranded, perhaps giving you enough energy in reaction to get you back to normal space. Curvature a little less sharp will make the engine take a messy chunk of your ship with it - not a good thing.

And what about the Quantum II hyperdrive? It lets you drop all the way to hyperspace B, where force B acts unopposed. You go hellaciously fast, but it's hard to get from hyperspace B back to A back to normal space and it takes a lot more gear. If you want to know more about how that works, you'll have to ask a Puppeteer, or better yet, an Outsider.

So what about the mass reader that needs an aware mind to watch it, and the blind spot that does strange things to your brain? To explain this we'll invoke the concept of observer collapse of quantum wave functions, albiet we're stretching the science a lot farther than any physicist would. Very simply put, at the quantum level discrete events which might go one way or the other don't seem to be determined until they actually happen. If we through a baseball at a window (one of the old fashioned ones with nine or twelve individual panes of glass) we can, if we know it's speed and launch angle, reliably predict which pane it will break. Doing the same thing at the quantum level (with an electron as the ball), we can only know the probability that a given pane will be hit. What's more, the probability profile acts like a wave in water, and it can, like a wave, be split, recombined, cancel and reinforce itself and in general behave in a way that a single solid object like a baseball cannot. Nevertheless, once the target is hit the electron arrives at one and only one place, very like a baseball and not at all like a wave breaking on a beach. This is called the wave/particle duality and you have to be as clever as Richard Feynman just to realize that you can't possibly understand how that works. The transition from wavelike to particlelike behaviour, the instant when all the various smoothly varying probabilities coallesce into a single discrete actuallity is called waveform collapse, and it occurs whenever you try to observe the electron. Shroedinger's famous "cat in a box" thought experiment was designed to show that this view would lead to an implausibly tangled reality, where a cat could be neither alive nor dead until someone looked at it, and that in fact looking at it would just tangle the observer up in the strange twilight zone the cat had been thrust into. However theory and experiment both bear out the fact that, however strange, the universe really does work this way. Some researchers (fewer now than before, but including such brilliant minds as Roger Penrose, of Penrose tile fame) have speculated that there is something special about an observing mind which causes the quantum state to collapse, or perhaps that minds themselves are built on quantum effects and that this is where free will comes from. We can take that and run with it, and say that a mass reader requires a mind to collapse the ship's quantum wave state to a single position in hyperspace A before it runs to far away from where you thought it would be. That also explains why it's even necessary to have a mass reader. In normal space the average star-to-star voyage will not come anywhere near enough to an intermediate star to pose the risk of running into its gravity well. In radically curved hyperspace A, everything is closer together, and we, quantum superparticle that we are, are not necessarily where we expect to be, so we need to collapse the wave state once in a while to be sure. We can go further and say that Blind Spot is so very weird because our minds are not equipped to deal with collapsing the act wave state in hyperspace A. And given that minds are doing strange quantum things in hyperspace, we have a methodology that will explain Known Space telepathy and Teela Brown luckiness and a few other psi talents, as long as we don't look too closely.

But this is science fiction. What is important is not what is true in our universe but what might be true in Known Space, and that you enjoy the story. I hope you do.

Paul