A lot of people have queried me about this “wild idea” in the book, but as I mention in the main description, it’s a writer’s hodgepodge that derives from the work and notions set forth by astrophysicists like Edward Harrison, Ernest Sternglass, Alan Guth, Lee Smolin, Andrei Linde, and many others.  The concept encompasses ideas drawn from string theory, loop quantum gravity, inflationary cosmology, information theory, relativity, good old quantum theory, and other areas—in short, a soup of different conceptual streams that suggest, as a net description, that different spacetimes are constantly budding off from each other. 

            There are two probably unfamiliar concepts which it helps to be acquainted with here:  (1) Conservation of mass-energy is only an approximation as shown by general relativity, and (2) a “spacetime bubble” or universe can be crudely conceived of as a collection of (evolving) events and information.  The notion of conservation of mass-energy as an approximation may seem difficult to grasp, but in fact this too results directly from the equations of general relativity—fundamentally, conservation can be stated as an approximate case for a nearly flat region of spacetime.  In GR, spacetime is described as curved (and thus light and other electromagnetic waves travel down curved geodesics), and in any curved region the very notion of conserving mass-energy is nonsensical.

            With regard to the latter concept, if you peer deeply enough into all the tenets of relativity and the quantum theory, you can see a wealth of statements that essentially impart physical significance to questions that involve the transmission and receipt of information, and the oddities and strange exceptions that crop up on occasion pertain to situations in which information seems to behave in ways that contradict other parts of the theory:  the complementarity principle for example, or the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, or the EPR paradox and nonlocality.  When we transmit forces or matter or photons, we can describe this in terms of transmitting information in different guises, and in fact some recent ideas involving the Holographic Principle for example—in which the information contained within a black hole can be described by that provided on its event horizon, and by extension the information of any 3-D object can be gleaned by what is present on a 2-D surface spanning the object—explicitly apply this information concept to physical problems.

            In variants of inflationary cosmology and some other theories, spacetimes (information-containing regions) are constantly budding off from each other into new regions, that bud off more and more, and so on.  Thus as you can probably surmise, it’s not a difficult stretch to conceive of “engineering” new spacetimes specifically as Harrison, Guth, and others have done.  The new universes would be endowed with a subset of properties introduced in the engineering process, and voila!, a new spacetime with its own distinctive elements is produced.  For sci-fi inspirational purposes, this notion is useful not only for its physical implications but because it links in nicely with some old philosophical notions.  In fact, the old notions of the afterlife, apocalypse, and special regions inhabited by celestial judgment makers—common to many old religions and philosophical systems—all tend to involve the idea of information transfer (one’s deeds and personality) from one zone of operation to another, from the temporal earthly region to the atemporal, eternal region in which one’s actions in one are judged and weighed in the other.  The judgment imparts an extra significance to the actions in the first realm since those deeds affect the permanent state in the second.  The modern notion of budding spacetimes thus naturally provides grist for sci-fi writers in this respect, since it allows for the transmission of information from one realm in such a way that it becomes elemental to the character of the second (or elemental to the experience of someone carrying that information within the second).

            In my book, this capacity to bud off spacetimes has become a technology and led to the field of “vacuum engineering” in which the main character is a participant.  Vacuum engineering is practiced as regularly as people rig up electrical generators and computer chips in the 21^st century.  The book has several descriptions of the engineering process throughout it, though one chapter in particular is devoted to depicting the process.

n      Wes Ulm

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