BRIAN'S ToE. -- OR THEORY OF EVERYTHING...

THINGS I’VE NEVER BEEN ABLE TO GET MY HEAD AROUND

 

or

 

I’M NOT A SCIENTIST, BUT…

 

or

 

MY BIG ToE.

 

by

 

Brian Lumley

 

Anyone who has read the Psychomech or Necroscope series -- or even The House of Doors -- will most likely have noticed that quite a bit of Science Fiction finds its way into my Horror.

 

Not the hard stuff, God no! Not the stuff that’s almost as much science as fiction, because I’m not a scientist and I know that a lot of those other guys – those big-time SF writers -- I know that they are … or if not scientists, then they’ve at least read-up on and probably understand “all that stuff” much better than I do. (That stuff being quantum mechanics, twistor and string theories, dark matter, branes, etc., und so weiter; I mean literally all of that theoretical physics malarkey.)

 

No, the science in my fiction is pretty basic, but it does allow me to cross genres, catering to my need to create horrors that have a degree of internal logic as opposed to being purely supernatural. Not very much of my fiction deals with the purely supernatural, though I will admit to fantasy and fantasy world-building. But the fact is I got past ghosts and ghoulies a long time ago.

 

Anyway, one of the reasons, apart from not being a scientist, why I can’t get my head around much of this stuff, is that when I do start to look at science -- I mean at some of the hard scientific principles or so-called universal laws of physics -- I’ll occasionally bump into something that stops me dead in my tracks because it doesn’t jive with my own little theories, or rather with what little I thought I did know about science…

 

Does that make sense? Maybe not, but I’ll go on anyway:

 

The BSTs (Big Scientific Types: not your writers but your actual theorists, your inventors of theories) have these ideas about the “shape” of the universe -- and that alone was sort of baffling to me! I mean it’s up, down, forward, back, and sideways, and goes future and past time wise, right? Well at least, that’s the design we live in, the one we can see, measure, and bump into. But that’s not exactly what the BSTs mean when they talk about the universe’s “shape.”

 

However, I’ve tried to understand this shape thing, and I believe I’ve finally got it … something of it. But I won’t go into all that because you probably understand it better than I do. So when I was exploring shapes (universally speaking), and once I’d accepted that what we see isn’t always what we’ve got, I was reminded of an old idea of mine that had seemed so daft, so non-science, that knowing it wouldn’t work I’d long ago cast it aside. I couldn’t build a model of it -- not even a mental one -- because at the time, oh, some twenty or more years ago, I didn’t understand all this stuff about shapes … I couldn’t picture the universe, which is, as you know sort of a pretty big ungainly mother of a thing, floating around on the surface of some weird shape!

 

All right, so what was my big daft idea, my ToE or Theory of Everything? Well, I’ll get to it … in a minute. It’s much easier to say how it came about than just to shout it out loud. And it came about when right or wrong I made several scientific -- or maybe unscientific? -- connections which all had to do with what I knew or accepted about our universe.

 

I knew or accepted that there had been a Big Bang followed by a brief period of supra-light expansion, following which the universe had gone on expanding (and still is) until we’re where we are now. I knew or accepted that since the end of that rapid expansion period nothing has or can travel faster than light -- not in this universe. I knew or accepted that there are -- probably -- things called black holes, and that some and maybe all of them are so heavy and their gravity is so enormous that not even light can escape them. I accepted them, even though nobody has yet found one, not for sure.

 

I knew or accepted that “before” the Big Bang there’d been no space, no time. No space in which time could begin to function, and no time for space to develop its dimensions … like, the Biggest Nothing ever.

 

And I knew certain other things; like every school kid I could tell you that if you throw a BB slug, a Harley Davidson motorcycle, and a battleship off the Eiffel Tower at the same time, they’ll all splash down together -- and probably kill an awful lot of people, also at the same time. So there you go, I knew about Isaac Newton and apples.

 

Which means that even aside from black holes I knew about gravity, too. Not what it is (does anyone know what it is other than a force?) only what it does: but at least I knew that much about it.

 

And lots of other stuff. For instance, that Nature abhors a vacuum, which is odd considering that the universe is crammed full of near-vacuum! Not only a physical paradox, as it seems to me, but as I have it here a contradiction in terms, too.

 

Perhaps most importantly, though it may not seem important as you read it, I knew that no matter where we are in space and time, the farthest thing away from us must always be the absolute nothingness in the “moment before” the Big Bang. (I’ll ask you to remember that.)

 

So then, I knew, or accepted, these things.

 

And of course because I was into SF and Fantasy and Horror I knew about parallel dimension -- other universes, that is -- and had accepted them, at least in the fiction I was reading or writing, many years before they gained their current popularity in the esoteric spheres of the theoretical physicists and BSTs.

 

But I had questions, and I still have some of them. Let me mention one or two. But again I’ll have to build up to them…

 

Okay, let there be light.

 

BIG BANG -- and suddenly there’s light, suddenly there are photons. A photon is an elementary particle with zero mass that travels at the speed of light.

 

Question: How can a “particle” have no mass? But since we have to have terms, however inadequate, with which to describe this sort of stuff, I’ll accept it.

 

Question: If at the speed of light (186,000 mps or 300,000 kps) time stops -- stops for the traveller, that is -- are photons immortal? It would seem they have to be, because until they crash headlong into a non-reflective solid, or disappear down a black hole, they just keep right on going.

 

Question: If the universe is around fourteen billion years old, does that mean it’s about twenty-eight billion light-years side to side? Seems it must be, since the BSTs can look through their instruments in all directions and see star stuff fourteen billion light-years away -- but since that’s in all directions, doesn’t that put us at the center of the universe? Okay, that’s “a silly question,” because it’s one that the BSTs haven’t answered satisfactorily, but I’m sure you get my point.

 

Question: So if someone were, say, looking back at us from twenty billion light-years away, he wouldn’t be able to see us because our light hasn’t reached him yet -- and won’t for five or six billion years yet!?

 

Question: If light hasn’t got there yet, then neither has time, and neither has space; so surely “Out There” is still the outer reaches of the BIG NOTHING, waiting for time and space to begin when finally light gets there. (Like, deep!) And that’s another question I seem to have answered myself.

 

Let’s move on.

 

Gravity, BB slugs, Harleys, and like that.

 

On Earth they fall to earth at 33 ft. per sec / per sec. And the escape velocity from Earth is 7 miles / sec. (From the sun it’s 390 miles / sec., at which speed you could race right round the Earth in a little over a minute!) So the sun is one heavy heavenly body -- and how then a black hole?

 

Now keep that in mind while we look at one of those “universal laws,” the one that has everything falling at the same speed into the same gravitic well; relatively slowly onto to surface of the moon, painfully onto the surface of the Earth, and like a bat-out-of-hell into Sol. And again I’m obliged to ask, how then a black hole?

 

For even photons are dragged back into a black hole, and at the speed of light at that, because light can’t be speeded up or slowed down. But if photons fall in at 300,000 kps, just think what the escape velocity would be if we could exceed the speed of light! In fact if we compare Earth ratios (not scientific, I know, but I’m not a scientist) it comes out something like 12,000 x light-speed, or two and a quarter billion miles / sec!

 

Anyway, here’s the question:

 

If everything is drawn into any given gravity well at the same speed, surely everything that falls into a black hole does so at the speed of light (okay, I’m not sure whether that was a question or a statement, but you get my meaning anyway). Which means of course that everything falling in would first have to be stripped down to “elementary particles” of zero mass -- like photons -- because not even a small solid or material body can move at the speed of light, not in our universe.

 

Now how the hell could that happen? Like how do you shred maybe entire planets, solar systems, to so much confetti, then shred the confetti down to its elementary particles? Say what? you never heard of E = mc², Einstein’s famous equation, where mass may be exchanged for energy and energy for mass?

 

Mass into pure energy, weightless and travelling at light-speed, in the moment it passes down the black hole’s gullet…

 

And did I just hear someone ask where I’m going with this? Like, where’s Brian’s ToE, his Theory of Everything? Be patient and we’ll get to it.

 

In fact I began to incorporate it into Necroscope III: The Source until I realized that wasn’t what I was writing; that if I did all of this in the middle of a horror novel it would only serve to slow the story down, right down. So I threw it in anyway but much foreshortened as a bit of SF mumbo-jumbo. (It was, in fact, the Möbius Continuum, a sort of space-time wormhole my hero Harry Keogh could use to go places instantaneously, or at the Speed of Life.) But before its SF transition it had been my ToE. And here it is…

 

…But first of all, let’s look at a Möbius Strip. Or…

 

…Let’s not, instead you can look it up in your dictionary or encyclopedia. Okay? So here’s my ToE.

 

The “shape” of the Primal Nothing is an infinitely wide, infinitely long Möbius Strip, and the space-time area that our universe exists in is the area of light expansion since the Big Bang. Beyond that area of light expansion lies the rest of the strip, which will stay Big Nothingness until light gets there.

 

So then, the universe -- still expanding in all directions at light-speed -- on this hell-of-a-big Möbius Strip. And all the galaxies and all the stars and planets are part of the over all expansion … or at least intergalactic space is expanding, if not the actual space and objects within individual galaxies. And the farthest galaxies that we can see are moving away from us -- indeed accelerating away from us -- at ever greater velocities, even moving toward the speed of light. Beyond which we see … nothing.

 

One thing we know for sure: the farthest thing away from us in space and time is the Big Bang. No matter who or where or when we are in the entire universe the single material thing or occurrence that is farthest away from us is always the Big Bang; has to be because it was the start of everything and the expansion is still proceeding.

 

So then, a question: where does everything go after it has been shredded down to its basic particles and nose-dived into a black hole? Travelling at the speed of light, the particles are immortal, undying … indestructible beyond their current, near non-existence except as energy. Mass into energy, remember? And time for them no longer exists. Likewise space, for that’s how it works: no time, no space. That’s what “exists” down the incredible gravity well of a black hole -- of all massive black holes.

 

Well, here it comes:

 

The only “place” we accept of where there was no space, no time, was in that none-“instant” before the Big Bang. Down into the black hole/s, out into the newborn universe!

 

You need convincing? (Or maybe I do.) The farthest thing away from us is the Big Bang. While on the giant Möbius Strip, the farthest thing is the other side of the strip. Go down a black hole -- all black holes on the strip -- and an “instant” later you emerge as raw energy at the birth of the universe.

 

Nothing is lost down a black hole, only converted…

 

As for the continuing and indeed accelerated expansion of the universe: “Dark Matter” and “Dark Energy?” Forget it! It’s simply the lure of the Big Nothingness, where light has still to go. It’s that total, surrounding, only real vacuum sucking on all the matter of the universe. See, the universe is expanding because there’s nothing to stop it. Except in black holes, the universe has no force strong enough to pull back light … and where light goes, there time and space and matter will follow.

 

No, I don’t have the math; I can do a few tricks with numbers but I’m still on my four-x-table when compared with those big boy theoretical physicists. But I can think, and I can ask questions.

 

And maybe someday somebody’s Big Real ToE will supply all the answers. Until then--

 

-- Cheers!

 

Brian Lumley.

 

[ August 19, 2003, 07:41 AM: Message edited by: Silky ]