Saturday, April 7, 2012

The Portal

There are no doubt many methods for building spacetime machines of various kinds.
            I am sure you have your own pet approach. 
            But I began mine with a set of Thorne plates.  When originally proposed, such plates had a theoretical diameter of several miles.  But that was before the discovery of Compendium, the superdense metal now used in the solar sails of starships.  This metal allowed me to fashion four circular, conductive Thorne plates that were only ten feet across.  Small enough, in other words, to set up in my workshop.  Positioning these in parallel and quite close together, on the order of a few atom widths apart, created a powerful negative energy field by the well-known Casimir effect.  This in turn created adjacent slices of identical spacetime (for full explanation see Slicing the Loaf of Duration by that Chinese fellow who disappeared).  Next, by separating the two pairs of Thorne plates by a distance established through the Corn-Hepperman equations, I was able to create a connecting wormhole between the pairs of plates.  This wormhole would eventually serve as my tunnel through spacetime, with each pair of plates acting as a gateway into it.
            So far so good and the astute reader will note that I am far from the first person to create a private wormhole.  But as anyone who has studied such matters knows, the next step is a bit tricky.  You would normally have to put one of these pairs of plates in a rocket traveling at near the speed of light, while the other remained stationary (relatively speaking, of course) thus placing each pair in a separate and increasingly disparate spacetime frame.  Once an appropriate duration had passed – decades, years, eons? -- the two pairs of plates would be sufficiently separated in the continuum to warrant using the wormhole between them as a tunnel. 

            So there are the problems: that the gateway was weeny while I am a size 44 regular, that light is fast and I am slow, and that time is long and life is short.  Yet it was all solved quite a bit easier than one would expect from some of the technical papers on the subject.  Like most inventors, I always feel that where there is a will there is a way, and I found that my natural stubbornness, rather than any native genius, was the crucial factor in surmounting this problem.
            The first problem concerned the fact that the portals created between each set of plates were themselves only a few atoms thick, barely big enough to breathe through let alone leap into.  I resolved this in the obvious way…by using a fusion pump polygas laser to insert a huge amount of additional negative energy into this space.  This created a much larger antimatter plasma which widened the field and the eventual portal. 
            The second obstacle involved the need to send one set of plates rocketing at the speed of light to slow down its space/time field relative to the other.  Obviously this was beyond my resources as an individual with a mortgage and so another means was needed.  After many trials and errors, I managed to overcome this problem by rotating one set of plates at a high speed using frictionless Buckyball bearings in a nitrogen soup.  The rotational momentum at these speeds created enough disturbance in the gravity field to mimic near lightspeed as predicting by Vranisi, the son that is, not the father who went crazy.
            The third problem involved having to wait possibly light years for a spacetime gap to be established between the two portals that was long enough to warrant all the effort.  With this method you are not so much sending one portal into a different spacetime as keeping it more slowly in its present place than the other.  When enough time has elapsed – the light years I refer to above – one pair is simply less not here and now than the other one is. 
            The problem plagued me for months until I realized – with the help of the Insight Enhancer, which I am happy to announce will soon be made available from Tesla Retail for an affordable price – that our understanding of spacetime was wrong in the first place.  It is not at all like Einstein’s warping matrix nor like Lu’s undulating and recursing conga line and nothing like those crazy string theories.  Not at all like these. 
            No, spacetime is in fact a lot more like spit.
            Yes.  Spittle, that is, or to put it slightly more elegantly, like foam.  That was the insight that made my whole little gambit possible.  Think of the place moments of existence as the bubbles in a mass of foam, forming, joining, popping, reforming.  So that rather than the river of time and place or the grid of space and time or the right here and the way over there, imagine a dynamic, shifting, dimensional shabazz of instants never lost, never passed, never gone. 
            With this in mind, you simply have to set everything in motion and wait.  Plunge the plates into the spacetime foam, so to speak, and like a bubble-riding speck you end up where you are going.

            If course you need a really good Reimannian-Fultz 3D map of the expanding universe because, of course, nothing is where it is.  Consider, for example, that the earth is rotating at 820 mph while also revolving around the sun at 66,527mph.  And that both are speeding through our stellar neighborhood at 43,200 mph which is whipping around at 490,000 mph while the Milky Way galaxy itself careens through our local supercluster at 180,000 mph, as the supercluster bounds away at 540,000 mph.  Not to mention that all of this is blasting from the center of the Big Bang that started the whole tizzy at the speed of 1,159,000 mph. 
            So you can see that a map is a really good idea or who the hell knows where and when you might end up including nothing, nowhere, notime.  Or worse.

            My own first stab wound up being a bit of a shock.  I entered the first gateway and emerged from the second in the exact same time and place.  As though I had simply turned around where I was standing.  This puzzled me at first and so I checked all the equipment, double checked, and tried again.  Sure enough, I stepped out of the wormhole and was still in my lab with virtually no time passed on the clock on the wall.
            What was wrong?
            All the technicals were working, all the readings right, all the measures correct.  Yet every time I stepped through the portal, I emerged as though nothing had happened and I had either gone nowhere at all or traversed the great cosmos at light speed only to end up back in the exact same place.
            Curious.
            Was this some strange effect of the Einsteinian curvature or of the internal logic of self-recursing foam?  I had no idea.  Then it hit me.  I had not taken into account the multi-dimensions of later string theory, the idea that an infinite number of alternate universes exist co-dimensionally with ours.  What I was doing, in effect, was stepping from one reality of my existence into another one.  A different reality either rather similar to the one I left or quite different, how was I to know?  In each one the world seemed just right although no doubt wholly different from the one I had left.  The past, my past, was what I had experienced in that reality.  But the future would be completely different except that I would not be able to tell since I had not experienced the future in any reality, including my original one.
            So here I sit, here in the here and now, writing all this down, knowing what happened and trying to tell it but having no idea whatsoever what is to come.  All I know is that I will step through the wormhole again today; I will exit into another reality that looks quite like this one but with a very different outcome.  I have no idea what that will be.  So I will have to decide what to do next when the time comes.  Or rather, when I come to it.
             It is all rather exhilarating actually.

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