Doug’s Dynamic Drivel

I love science fiction, always have and always will. I’ve probably read somewhere in the vicinity of a 1000+ books that fit that genre. However SF (do not ever call it sci-fi please - that term belongs to those B-grade Japanese movies - classic cult flicks on their own grounds) has run into hard times recently because of the pace of discovery and the massive leaps and bounds in human knowledge. SF has always used the future to talk about today, that is a given as no one has demonstrably visited the future and returned. What we write today must, of necessity, be based on what we know and then extrapolate from.

What was science fiction 10 years ago, placed in a future several hundred years hence, is now taking shape. It has almost become impossible to dream big enough. The basis for instantaneous matter transmission - your basic Star Trek transporter - is evolving in numerous labs. It started with the transport of a single photon a couple of years ago and has worked its way up to more “massive” particles recently. Not even the most avid Trekkie would have guessed this much progress this quickly and neither did the SF writers. I’ve harped on the explosion ofknowledge before. Currently the sum total of human knowledge doubles every two years or so (the estimates vary from 2 years to 5 years at present) but the pace is constantly quickening. To be a SF writer today you have to be bold in your statements and be prepared for your “science fiction” to become science fact long before your book hits the remainder shelves.

So that brings me saround to the book I’m currently reading: Sawyer, Robert j., Hominids, Tor Books, N.Y, 2002, that combines an old concept , parallel universes, long the forte of dime store pulp novels, which is starting to get some serious attention:

it all started when superstring theory, hyperspace and dark matter made physicists realise that the three dimensions we thought described the Universe weren’t enough. There are actually 11 dimensions. By the time they had finished they’d come to the conclusion that our Universe is just one bubble among an infinite number of membranous bubbles which ripple as they wobble through the eleventh dimension.

with that of another old story homo Sapiens vs Neanderthals.

Quantum physics pretty much demands the existance of multiple universes to explain certain phenomena and other phenomena the solution for which a hypothesis exists in clasical physics but also in quantum physics and the two do not agree with each other (I know use Occam’s razor and classical wins out, but that’s not nearly as much fun .)

Classic physics problem. Take a dark room and shoot a single photon at a barrier with two slits in it and behind the barrier a pice of photographic paper. Remember this is a single photon - single being the operant word here. On the one hand, logic would dictate that the photon would go through one or the other slit and register on the photographic paper. However what happens is the impression on the paper shows an interference pattern and in classical physics you would say that the photon turned into an energy wave before it reached the slits then when it hit the slits it would split in two and pass through both slits thereby producing an interference pattern (valleys and troughs) on the photographic paper. Of course that leaves you with the sticky problem of wave vs. particle and how did a particle spontaneously turn into a wave.

Quantum physics, on the other hand, with its parallel universes can offer another explanation. In this instance the universe splits into two and one photon, still a particle, passes through the right hand slit in one universe and one photon passes through the left hand split in another universe then the two universes collapse back together and the interference pattern we see is that collapse.

It is at this point the book picks up and postulates that in one instance the universes did not come back together again and we have two parallel earths . On one, ours, Homo sapiens sapiens thrived and predominated on the other Neanderthal man did. The book centers around a group of scientists on both worlds conducting their experiments, here on neutrinos, there on quantum computing, when an accident (there’s always an accident) there sends a neanderthal here.

I must confess that one of the attractions of this book is its setting - Sudbury, Ontario home to the world’s foremost nuetrino lab, the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, situated some two kilometres below the planet’s surface in a nickel mine. Lot’s of mentions of real politicians and people’s names that many Canadians will recognize (like one doctor taking a shot at Mike Harris, the former premier of Ontario, for his budget cuts that negatively impacted healthcare in the province). I’m only about halfway through the book and it will be intersting to see how this all pans out but what’s truly interesting (aside from the physics) is the social contrasting of how we developed and how neanderthals might have developed had they remained the dominant species and we had died out. So far I can say we do not come out on the winning side of that comparison.

of course what really turned the tide for me with this book was when I read:

Rueben Montego had wind chimes in his backyard; Mary thought all people with wind chimes should be shot

All light sleepers will nod their heads when I say “right on Mary!”

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