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Why should we
bother ourselves with the merits of fantasy worlds? Because
sometimes it can be a good exercise to pull out the stops
and let our minds enjoy unrestricted possibilities. From time
to time, answers to great questions have accidentally emerged
from the muddy waters of unbridled imagination. A light-hearted
and playful romp through the world of science fiction might
uncover interesting viewpoints to difficult questions.
Imagination
is the engine that propels all of our many creative endeavors.
It is a gift from an organ that compulsively asks 'How?' ,
'Why?', 'Where?' and 'What if..?' The human brain is relentlessly
inventive. It constantly searches for patterns from the data
its receives. Lacking data from the outside world, it will
patiently bide its time by creating its own stimulation. Nowhere
is this insatiable pattern searching more in evidence, and
more volatile, than in the roller coaster journeys we take
while asleep. Our waking state also benefits from this activity
by sensitizing us to possibilities that we might not have
anticipated. The structure of the benzene molecule was the
product of a dream that the Chemist Kekule in which he saw
a snake biting its tail and forming a ring. The principles
of relativity were discovered when Albert Einstein imagined
what the world would look like if you could ride on a light
beam. The concept of the 'bubble chamber' was developed by
Glaser while watching the suds form in a beer stein. These
examples don't mean that unrestrained imagination always results
in new ideas in physics, but surely a playful approach to
understanding nature, together with the right technical background,
can work wonders from time to time!
Science fiction
authors have for decades created universes in which a bewildering
variety of answers have been proposed to the dilemma of traveling
to the distant stars and beyond. Surprisingly, these answers
have followed an almost evolutionary sequence that runs nearly
parallel to developments in 20th century physics. Of course,
some authors have been more in touch than others with the
reality and limitations of the physical world, but then again,
we all understand that science fiction is only meant to be
a plausible image of a future world. It is not supposed to
be a slavishly literal extension of our present scientific
knowledge. Of greater consequence to nearly al SF stories
is how humans heroically resolve the old conflicts of the
human 'condition' but in the context of new environments.
The environments often mirrored the political conflicts of
their times with fierce, interplanetary battles dominating
the SF of the 1930's and 40's.
It is easy to
understand how SF got such a bad literary reputation in reading
some of the stories that made it into print during the early
1940's. Hostile aliens from Mars and Venus fought interminable
battles with earthlings. Earthlings traveled interplanetary
space in ships shaped like missiles, footballs or dirigibles,
powered by 'rocket tubes'. Nearly all the planets in the solar
system were occupied by implacable and often belligerent aliens,
or occasionally aliens would enter our solar system from distant
worlds with colorful names like 'Boron' or 'Talpite'. Stories
were often shallow, with little character development, serving
only as frameworks for presenting some bizarre technical gimmick.
The physical
principles underlying science fiction writing during this
period were a complicated pastiche of ideas derived at least
in spirit from the sweeping developments then occurring in
relativity theory and atomic physics made during this time.
Most of these developments were only partly understood by
the authors of that time, which is probably why SF stories
often hinged on outright errors even in some of the most elementary
aspects of the physical world. For instance, believing that
the Bohr atom in vogue during the early 20's with its planetary
electrons was literally a microcosmic solar system. Our solar
system was in turn simply an atom in a much larger universe.
Several authors imagined people taking journeys to these other
worlds within the atom by using machines that either shrank
or enlarged their bodies by suitable scales as in S.P. Meek's
Submicroscopic (1931), or G. Peyton's short story The Man
from the Atom(1926). In the later instance, probably the earliest
story of this kind, one Prof. Martyn builds a machine that
subtracts or adds atoms to the human body until it has grown
or shrunk to the desired size.
Between 1924
and 1927, the physicists Heisenberg, Schroedinger and Dirac
had all but written the last pages of the modern theory of
atomic structure based on quantum mechanics. The Bohr-Sommerfield
'planetary' atom though conceptually simple was, nevertheless,
invalid so that there was no longer a basis for thinking that
electrons were miniature planets by this time. Yet SF based
on this curious principle of 'worlds within worlds' persisted
even as late as 1949 in Stan Raycraft's Pillars of Delight
and in He Who Shrank.
With the establishment
of the principles of quantum mechanics there came a minor
resurgence of interest in the tantalizing properties of the
atomic world. In James Blish's story Nor Iron Bars(1956).
By some unknown, accidental means, the 'Haertel Overdrive'
endowed the ship 'Flyway II' with negative mass. The ship
was promptly ejected from normal space and took up residence
within an atom. Presumably, this was the only place in the
universe where negative mass could exist. In many ways this
idea resembles the old Aristotlean notion that matter has
an innate sense of its proper place in the universe, and like
a stone falling to the ground, will seek out its natural resting-place.
The ship could not logically exist in our universe, so it
found a place where it could. The captain also sets foot on
the surface of an electron described as "... a swirling,
opalescent substance...covered with fine detail and rills
rather like mercury...Its boundary trailing off into space
indistinctly [since] the electron never knows exactly where
it is..." The electron was clearly assumed to have a
finite size, though in deference to quantum mechanics, there
was a haziness about its boundary.
The passengers
of Flyway II, meanwhile, were having difficulties of their
own, experiencing telepathic effects also forbidden in the
real universe. The author raises the possibility that telepathy
and quantum mechanics might be related in some unknown manner.
This idea that psychic phenomena are in some way a consequence
of the quantum world also appears in Colin Kapp's Lambda I
(1962). In this short story, a passenger ship travels directly
through the earth in something called Tau-space. The idea
is that if you vibrate a mass just right, it can be made to
pass directly through any matter including the entire earth.
Unavoidably because of the inhomogeneities in the strata that
it passes through, upon arrival at its destination, a tauship
re- materializes in some harmonic vibration of the proper
mode and must be 'kicked' into the correct oscillatory mode
for recovery. Evidently, mode slips can also be triggered
by extreme emotional or psychic states, and like Lambda I,
cause the ship arrive in the unrecoverable 'omega' state.
An earlier short story The World Beyond by Guy Archette in
1947 describes the principle behind this vibratory model for
matter as "Everything is made up of atoms, and there
are spaces within the atom fully as vast as those between
the planets in the solar system. The spaces ... may be occupied
by the components of a hundred other atoms, each possessing
a different vibration rate, and each vibration rate constitutes
another world." It is difficult to believe that Colin
Kapp and Guy Archette were not drinking from the same tap
in inventing this unusual world view!
James Blish's
second attempt at utilizing quantum effects to drive spacecraft
appears in his epic novel Cities in Flight(1958) which is
based on a collection of novelas written between 1950 and
1957. As the story unfolds, we learn that during the first
decades of the 21st century, western scientists had discovered
the 'Dillon-Wagoner gravitron polarity generator' which immediatly
became known to the engineers as a 'spindizzy'. The basic
operating principle as described in Earthman Come Home(1950)
is that all rotating bodies produce magnetic fields whose
strength is proportional to their rate of spin, their mass,
and the constant of gravity. What a spindizzy does is to alter
the magnetic moment of every atom within its field thereby
changing the constant of gravity. Cities in Flight is one
of the few stories I've read that actually gives an equation,
identified as the fictitious Blackett-Dirac Equation, claiming
to show how 'G' can be altered by changing a particle's spin,
to wit : G-squared = 8 P c /U where P is the magnetic moment
of the body, c is the speed of light, and U is the angular
momentum! Evidently, by increasing U for every particle in
a body, the constant of gravity is reduced, ergo the name
spindizzy. A space drive based on this principle, for reasons
not made clear by the author, has no practical upper limit
to its speed, and can break the light speed barrier by drawing
less than a few watts of power. Entire earth cities were soon
equipped with spindizzies and set-out to colonize the galaxy.
The story contains several amusing anachronisms. For example,
although much of the action of the novel takes place between
3000 and 4000 AD, the engineers are still using slide rules!
Another story
mentioning an association between magnetic phenomena and gravity
is found in George O. Smith's Meddler's Moon(1947). The so-
called 'Hedgerly Effect' proved that there is a relationship
between magnetism and gravity which led to the electromagnetic
control of gravity. Artificial control of gravity fields allows
the gravitational mass of any particle to be altered at will.
This does away with rockets that have to throw lots of reaction
mass out their tails, since mass approaches infinity near
the speed of light. Since mass can now be controlled, it can
be reduced so that travel near the speed of light is possible.
Although interplanetary
travel by conventional rockets was the mainstay of most SF
during the 1930's and 40's, traveling through space to the
distant stars has long been known to entail lengthy journeys
and posed a whole host of other problems: Problems that were
generally so challenging that SF authors tended to stay away
from interstellar travel during much of this time. The most
straightforward way to shorten the travel time is simply to
increase the velocity of your rocket. Sometimes, exotic new
rocket fuels were invoked like 'mercuron' in Robert Willes'
Orbit XXIII-H(1938), capable of producing exhaust velocities
of 65 km/sec. For long journeys to mars and beyond, the crew
would take various combinations of sleeping drugs.
With the coming
of the Atomic Age these pure, brute force methods were upgraded
by invoking the mysterious deus ex machina of 'atomic motors'.
Velocities up to and including light speed could now be reached
as in Richard Tooker's Moon of Arcturus(1935) but without
the travelers experiencing any time dilation effects. The
spaceship 'Meteor III' powered by the energy of "disrupting
carbon atoms" takes 26 years to travel to Arcturus with
its 18-man crew. This is a remarkable story since much of
the work on atomic energy, specifically the fission mechanism,
was not readily accessible to the popular press. The mysterious
concept of 'atomic drive' also appears in A.E van Vogt's 1940
classic Slan, but is not described other than to note that
it is based on anti-gravity propulsion. Anti-gravity is an
illusive principle in SF, a catch-all for achieving nearly
unlimited velocity by mysteriously canceling the force of
gravity. Murray Leinster's First Contact(1945) also refers
to a spaceship which can travel at 'speeds incredible multiples
of the speed of light' to take pictures of a supernova explosion.
In general,
rockets blasted off from earth under constant accelerations
of 1- 2 gravities; the maximum that humans could comfortably
endure for long periods of time. The arithmetic of constant
acceleration is compelling when applied to space travel. At
'1 G' boost, the travelers feel exactly like they are standing
on the earth, yet the ship will achieve 50 percent of the
speed of light in about 6 months after having traveled 0.1
light year! A trip to mars at this acceleration would take
about one month with a terminal velocity of 10 percent of
c. If you were willing to endure 2-Gs, you would get to mars
in 10 days with a terminal velocity of 6 percent of light
speed. Inertialess drives as they came to be known were often
introduced to achieve even higher accelerations. If you had
an 'acceleration compensator' that allowed the ship to move
at 1000-Gs but canceled all but 1-G for the humans, even faster
trips could be made.
For many years
'souped-up' rockets violated natures prohibition on material
bodies traveling faster than light (FTL). Some stories took
great relish in how badly they could break this speed limit.
Edward E. Smith's Grey Lensman(1939) describes how spaceships
travel at speeds of 60 parsecs/hour ( 2 million times c )
in interstellar space and up to 100,000 parsecs/hour ( 3 billion
times c) in the more rarefied intergalactic space by using
'cosmic energy'. These ships used the inertialess drive developed
by Bergenhlom and which opened up commerce throughout the
Galaxy. The sequel to this story Second Stage Lensman also
mentions a race called the Medonians who installed an 'inertia-neutalizer'
on their home world and moved it to Lundmark's Nebula, also
known as The Second Galaxy. Robert Heinlein's Methusala's
Children(1941) describes a "spacedrive that uses light
pressure under conditions of no inertia to travel just under
the speed of light.
Other mechanisms
were also advocated such as the one found in Rog Phillip's
short story Starship from Venus(1948). A mysterious starship
from Venus lands on earth and earthlings soon learn the secret
of interplanetary travel. We learn that electrons and protons
have opposite inertia. By shooting protons out of one end
of the ship and electrons out the other, the net impulse is
magically in the forward direction at 1/3 the velocity of
light.
Rogue Ship by
A.E van Vogt tells the tale of the 'Hope of Man' and its crew
who were boosted to nearly the speed of light in order to
take advantage of the time dilation effect promised by Lorentz-Fitzgerald
Contraction Theory. The ship was supposed to eject reaction
mass at near light speed so that it gained mass, which according
to the "strange physics" in this story, multiplied
the effectiveness of the reaction mass so that "...a
thimble full of mass could give almost infinite reaction power".
The expected effect never materialized and the Hope of Man
wound-up taking ... decades to reach ... There was also the
claim that at the speed of light, mass becomes infinite but
the volume of a particle vanishes so that matter ceases to
be subject inertia. Both stories claims are of course invalid,
but the stories themselves are entertaining. Another story
that bases its propulsion on an imaginary twist to relativity
theory is Ross Rocklynne's The Moth(1939). A 'reverse contraction'
device shrinks a ship by collapsing electron orbits, this
is necessary because "...if you decrease the length of
a ship to zero, it automatically assumes the speed of light...".
To gain any speed without acceleration, "...you just
shorten its length commensurate with the speed you want."
Poul Anderson's
novel To Outlive Eternity(1967), followed the edicts of special
relativity with some fidelity, and explored a very important
limitation to relativistic travel: where do you get the reaction
mass to continuously accelerate the ship? The answer is that
instead of bringing it with you, you scoop it up the interstellar
medium as you go! This story followed the exploits of a hapless
crew in an interstellar ramjet ship whose deceleration mechanism
had failed. Their only solution was to drive the ship ever
faster to within a stones throw of the speed of light. At
these speeds the time dilation effect would allow them to
outlive the collapse of the universe. They continuously picked
up speed by first passing through dense interstellar clouds
in the Milky Way, then upon leaving the galaxy, heading for
other galaxies, which they would pass through in a matter
of minutes. Eventually, they managed to avoid the recollapse
of the universe. Artistic license enters the story with a
vengeance when, during the universe's reexpansion at nearly
the speed of light, the crew coasted along with developing
galaxies and solar systems at nearly zero relative velocity,
until they found a suitable earth-like planet to colonize.
The first test
flight of an FTL ship using a hydrogen drive is described
in Walt Sheldon's 1950 short story The Eyes are Watching in
which no one really knew what would happen when a ship surpassed
the speed of light. Some of the scientists are acknowledged
to have their doubts that this velocity barrier could be broken,
and even speculate that " you might warp over into another
dimension". An earlier story by George O. Smith Pattern
for Conquest(1946) refers to something called the 'superdrive'
which allows space ships to accelerate to very nearly the
speed of light, but understandably enough, the details are
not presented. In the same story, we also hear of 'tractor'
and 'pressor' beams which can be used to 'tear the guts' out
of an enemy ship. This technology is based on something called
the 'space constant adaptor' and is described in Murray Leinster's
Adaptor and in The Ethical Equations(1945). An earlier story
Redevelopment written by Wesley Long and published in 1944
talks about a round trip to Sirius in 6 months using 'gravitic
generators' and particles called alphons which are used to
propel the ship past the light speed barrier. This mechanism,
by the way, was also termed 'superdrive'. P. Schuyler Miller's
short story Gleeps(1943) refers to 'warpships' which are used
in interstellar and possibly inter-universe travel. Generally,
the development of FTL technology is seen as prohibitively
difficult. Usually, humans stumble upon its secrets accidentally,
or a super civilization gives this knowledge to us. This generosity
is not always without major misgivings.
Rendevois in
Space by Guy Archett in 1949 described the discovery of an
alien spaceship beyond the orbit of Saturn capable of interstellar
travel. But the aliens who own it refuse to tell the earthlings
the secret of how it works. Earthlings are still too warlike
to be allowed to learn of such a powerful technology. This
notion that giving earthlings the secret of interstellar travel
would be disastrous for galactic civilization is also found
in Robert Moore Williams Star Base X(1944). In this story,
aliens known as Ahrneds ( rymes with 'airheads'? ) refuse
to give up this secret because they realize the inevitability
of interstellar war once the aggressive and competitive earthlings
get out among the stars. Homo Sol(1940) by Isaac Asimov also
describes how a galactic federation of civilizations invited
earth to join after humans had discovered the secret of interstellar
travel and arrived at Alpha Centauri with the intent of colonizing
its fifth planet. Human inventiveness actually had outdone
the rest of the galaxy by developing an improvement on 'hyperatomic'
drive that was superior to anything that the Federation had.
Operating principle: Unknown. In a short time, humans had
also managed to transform many benign devices used by the
Federation into astonishingly lethal weapons!
Then came a
fascination with the properties of anti-matter. John Bridger's
I'm a Stranger Here Myself(1950) refers to a method for FTL
travel called "multi-phase travel" which is based
on transforming terrene matter into contra-terrene matter,
what we now call simply matter and anti-matter. For some reason,
anti-matter is claimed to travel faster than light. But again,
this is not a trick that earthlings discovered, instead they
learned it from a benevolent galactic supercivilization whose
emissaries visited us. Then again, even some super civilizations
are not omniscient.
Michael McCollum's
Life Probe (1983) and Procyon's Promise (1985), for example,
have earth visited by a ship from a very old civilization
called The Makers. After millions of years the Makers had
given up trying to develop a FTL drive, even though they had
developed several independent theories that showed FTL drives
were, nevertheless, physically possible to build. They turned
to making contact with other civilizations in the galaxy that
might have stumbled on the right engineering ideas. Thousands
of automated 'slow boats' driven by fusion engines, powered
by 'I-mass' Hawking Singularities, and traveling at sub-light
speed, were dispatched into the galaxy in search of more cleverer
civilizations to tell them the secret of FTL travel. One of
these 'Probes' wound up in our solar system and becomes the
center of interplanetary intrigue. Eventually, earthlings
take up this quest, and find the pieces to a derelict FTL
ship in the Procyon system. They discover that the Makers
had already learned the secret to FTL travel centuries before
the Probe entered the solar system, and had abandoned their
home world. This idea that FTL travel is already known to
some other civilization can also be found in Nomad written
by Wesley Long in 1944.
There may also
be a technical problem with developing FTL travel. Asimov's
Paradoxical Escape(1945) describes the search for the secrets
of interstellar travel in which a mechanical brain is fed
everything we know about astronomy, physics and something
called 'space warp theory'. The 'Brain' eventually figures
out the secret, unfortunately such trips would be fatal to
humans. This is why previous attempts by other mechanical
brains had failed. Since a robot cannot create anything harmful
to humans, previous robots literally fried themselves rather
than break this 'First Law of Robotics'.
A new entry
into propulsion technology appeared in 1986 and is found in
Arthur C Clarke's The Songs of the Distant Earth. Once again,
FTL travel is assumed to be impossible, and is flatly disavowed
by Clark in the books preface as fantasy not science fiction.
However, a virtually unlimited energy supply for sub-light
travel is tapped in the quantum fluctuation of space at the
Planck scale. In the 36th century, the ship 'Magellan' draws
its boost energy directly from the energy of 'empty' space
so that it no longer needs to carry reaction mass with it.
Interstellar travel faster than 20% of light speed is acknowledged
to be dangerous because the stray atoms the ship encounters
act like miniature hydrogen bombs as they strike the ship.
Each ship is equipped with an ablative 100 kiloton cap of
ice on its forward edge. Conveniently, not even the ships
captain or its crew members really know how the quantum drive
works, but such delightfully cryptic explanations as "fluctuations
in the geometrodynamical structure of 11 dimensional superspace"
can be found in the novel. A similar tale of tapping the energies
inherent in space is found in William Lawrence Hamilton's
Planet of Duplicates(1945). This energy is in the more prosaic
form of the exhalations of matter and energy from all the
stars in the Milky Way.
Several stories
such as Gordon Dickson's Mission to Universe(1965) and Poul
Anderson's Door to Anywhere(1966) are hard to classify since
they attempt to use the vagaries of quantum mechanics and
antiquated cosmologies to find shortcuts through space involving
'Phase shifting' or a modification of Hoyle's Steady State
cosmology in 'jumpgates'. Jumpgate technology as explained
in Door to Anywhere is highly suspect. A similar access way
to distant worlds can also be found in Oliver Saari's The
Door(1941) in which a gateway is found among the ruins of
an ancient city in the Sahara Desert. Stepping through, the
traveler is shifted to the surface of a planet in a binary
star system. Unfortunately, the origin and function of this
gate are not as important to the story as the search for it.
Phase shifting
is described in Mission to Universe at least in interesting
terms that sound plausible if you don't think about them to
deeply . Heisenberg's uncertainty principle states you can
never know both a particles position and velocity with absolute
precision. In phase shifting, the velocity of a ship is measured
precisely so that the ships wave function spreads out over
interstellar distances. By some magical process, the ship's
wave function is encouraged to 'peak up' at some target position
several light years distant. When the wave function collapses,
the ship then shifts and takes up residence at the target
position without having moved through space. The implication
is that the mere knowledge of the ships precise velocity,
as determined by the shipboard computer, is enough to change
its wave function, much like the act of observing an electron
automatically places the electron in a definite state, were
before it could have been anywhere.
Among the technological
innovations by the superrace known only as the Puppet Masters
were 'stepping disks' and 'transfer booths' as described in
the 1970 novel Ringworld. These were, evidently, teleportation
devices of some kind. The related technology of matter transmission
is also used and described in the stories by Alexander Blade
such as The Vanishing Spaceman(1947). Clifford Simak's Way
Station(1964) utilizes a galaxy- wide network of 'transfer
booths' also developed by a mysterious supercivilization.
The operating principles are not described, but resemble teleportation
(materialization) chambers. The extensive references to 'telepathic'
aliens and the manipulation of aspects of the physical world
entirely unsuspected by humans, resembles magic in all but
direct citation. George O. Smith in Special Delivery(1945)
describes how matter transmitters scan matter atom by atom
and then disassembled the body, storing its raw atoms in a
'matter bank'. matter itself isn't transmitted, but the information
and energy released in the disassembly is beamed to a second
station which uses the raw materials in its matter bank to
re-create the body atom by atom. A.E. van Vogt's The Mixed
Men(1945) also refers to matter transmission, this time in
two distinct modes. Earth is the center of a 3 billion solar
system empire where ultrawave radio provides instantaneous
communication. People move about either by electronic image
transmission followed by reconstruction from local organic
material, or conversion of the body into a flow of electrons
transmitted through space and then rebuilt at the destination.
An interesting
twist on teleportation devices is found in Robert Abernathy's
The Canal Builders(1945). Although 'teleports' are the standard
means for moving around in the solar system, a thrill-seeking
earthling builds a space ship to travel through space to mars,
just to be unconventional. The trip takes two weeks, and upon
arriving he discovers the ruins of a long dead civilization
at the spot where an earth city should have stood. It turns
out that in the 'interspace' that teleportation operates,
there is also a timeshift involved. Rocket travel lands you
on mars in 'now plus two weeks' but teleportation takes you
to mars in 'now minus 2000 years'. The ruins were those of
the earth colony built 2000 years ago!
Since matter-transmission
and teleportation are more the stuff of ESP and ghost stories
with no obvious physical mechanism or science behind it, we
will not pursue this avenue further. In The Sins of our Fathers(1976)
written by Stanley Schmidt something called a paratachyonic
drive can boost the ship to any velocity faster than light
without expending much energy, but travel within a few percent
of the speed of light using this 'Rao-Chang Drive' requires
the expenditure of enormous quantities of energy. No one knows
how the drive works because the operating principle was discovered
accidentally. The younger generations of physicists are, furthermore,
not interested in overhauling physics in order to accommodate
it! It is not clear from the SF technology in the story whether
the ship is converted into 'tachyon matter' in ordinary space,
or whether the ship enters some other continuum where tachyon
physics is valid.
Although FTL
travel might be impossible, and travel to other stars difficult
or out of the question, some authors over the years have proposed
staying right where we are in space. Time travel or travel
to parallel universes have been in recent years become viable
alternatives to what has always appeared to be the inevitability
of interstellar travel. These modes of travel violate no principles
in relativity since they take place in a completely different
arena than ordinary space-time. Time travel based on 'the
fifth to tenth dimensions' is referred to in Rescue into the
Past by Ralph Milne Farley(1940). From time to time, there
have also appeared a variety of even more spectacular stories
that aggressively push at the very meaning of Reality. As
early as 1915 in A Drop in Infinity written by Gerald Grogan,
a scientist named Hubble-Bubble creates a machine based on
electricity that projects a person into the 4th dimension.
According to Dr. Hubble-Bubble, certain waves run along the
4th dimension which is somehow counteracted by other waves
that run the other way, and that we perceive as electricity.
By tuning the chamber, the electrical field inside lets you
experience these other dimensions. The traveler can then visit
what can only be called parallel earths. These worlds mysteriously
coexist with ours, spatially like the rungs on a single, but
infinite, ladder. This idea that the proper application of
electrical fields might open a magical, inter-dimensional
gateway re-appears almost word for word in Charles Recour's
1949 short story The Swordsman of Pira, in which we hear that
"if an object were suddenly thrust into a strong electric
field, it would be rotated through a warped space into a fourth
dimension" Space is warped by strong electrical fields
so that a human can use this to travel into other parallel
'timestreams'.
This 'parallel
earth' idea is also explored in George Scheer Jr's Another
Dimension(1935) where a spaceship sent to Mars is caught in
a 'whorl in space' that hurtles the ship into another dimension.
There they discover another earth and solar system at the
same location as ours, but not at all like the earth they
left behind.
Interesting
stories have also been developed around the idea that although
FTL corporeal travel may be prohibited, the psyche may travel
at what ever velocity it chooses. Certain mixtures of psychotropic
drugs such as morphine or belladonna could send a voyager's
psyche into higher dimensions as in Stanton Coblentz's Beyond
the Universe(1934). This story describes a journey into a
higher dimension to space that seemed to have taken years
and centuries, but in fact the traveler had actually been
in a coma for 6 months. During his journey he watched as the
universe shrank to a point and directly experienced the 'nothingness
at the boundary to space'. A similar story of psychic travel
occurs in Charles Eric Maine's Timeliner(1955), in which the
psyche of a physicist is propelled our of normal space-time
into a 'hyperspace' where time becomes one of the spatial
dimensions. In a process termed 'psycho-temporal parasitism'
he timetravels into the future entering the mind of one human
after another.
It has also
been proposed that it may be easier to get massless particles
like photons, neutrinos or 'exotics' to give us images or
messages from other times and worlds. Donald Bern's Three
Wise Men of Space(1940) described beings who communicate with
rays that travel faster than light since they possess a knowledge
far beyond that of Einstein. Light rays are used in Richard
O'Lewis' Adam's Eve to obtain images through the fourth dimension
of past ages, including an image of Eve starving in the Garden
of Eden! Edmund Hamilton in his short story The Star Kings(1947)
describes earthlings from 200,000 years in the future who
communicate with 20th century earthlings via thought waves,
which are the only things that can pass through time because
they are not material objects. Interstellar travel in this
future age is by means of 'sub-spectrum' rays of the 'minus
30th octave' which are produced in atomic turbines. Also in
that age, the relativistic increase of mass with velocity
has been circumvented so that 'star-ships' equipped with artificial
mass (inertia) control can travel 1000's of times the velocity
of light. A recent entry into this genera is James P. Hogan's
Thrice Upon a Time(1980).
To Follow Knowledge(1942)
by Frank Belknap Long portrays the universe as a superposition
of time frames; one for each body in motion. If you moved
at the speed of light, everything stands still, but at FTL
speeds even time begins to undo itself. All events take place
in a 5 or 6-dimensional time track that connects the 'nows'
of every frame of reference moving in space. Even the use
of mental powers to 'warp space-time' and return to the past
has been considered, and can be read about in the 1943 story
Shock by Lewis Padgett.
So you see,
science fiction is filled with clever ideas about faster than
light travel. If physics and understanding the cosmos were
only a matter of cobbling the right words together, we should
have been building these kinds of ships buy now. But the frustrating
thing is that we have gained considerable experience in the
last 100 years boosting matter to 99.999...% the speed of
light. In no experiment devised so far have we found anything
that defeats Einstein's special relativity, and its injunction
that the speed of light is the maximum speed limit for energy
and information, or any other 'thing' that has zero rest mass.
You may have heard about the weird quantum' tricks' that have
been uncovered that seem to defy special relativity, but when
you look closely at them, you discover that again special
relativity is not violated, even in the case of so-called
'quantum teleportation'. Also, you cannot get something for
nothing. Any proposal to 'warp space' so that a ship can step
across vast distances without traveling the distance in between,
nearly always requires as much energy as actually boosting
the ship to near-light speed, to set up the conditions in
the first place.
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