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just for you grady.. ;) the 'preface' from my 767-page sci-fi novel that was, incidentally, just passed over my an agent in new york who had the manuscript for 4 months to assess. damn..but anyway, sounds like we share a passion for physics..that was my original scholarship..anyway, here it is..sorry for the length and the formatting..it's a little screwy copied out of word, guys. maybe only grady will find it interesting..i dunno..

Preface

This is an excursion through arguably the most absorbing and hotly debated topic in the sciences of fundamental physics and cosmology, beginning with the question of ‘why is there something, rather than nothing’? In the context of a story, which follows the lives of its characters, the reader will experience a fictional, yet fairly comprehensive examination of the boldest prediction in science today – the existence of parallel universes.
Why have so many of the greatest minds of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries felt so compelled to reach the conclusion that we are in fact ‘not alone’? In an even more bizarre twist…‘we are the other people out there…’
The curiosity that this story generates brings us all to bear on the question of just what is the ‘nature of reality’ and how every single one of us must ultimately reconcile the even greater mystery between ‘faith and reason’. Do we simply exist by chance, as some would argue, or are we in fact the fortunate recipients of a loving, benevolent God with the omnipotent capacity to form infinitely satisfying and personal relationships with his creation? Whichever the case may be, one thing is certain…mankind thirsts for this answer.
Recorded history has traced our path on this journey for truth. Millenniums past, we stared towards the heavens and considered our position in the vast cosmos. For thousands of years, we believed that the Earth was the center of ‘all that is’ – the universe. Only in recent centuries has man evolved the tools to discover that this belief was, in fact, false. Other worlds were soon seen through the lens of Galileo’s mighty telescope, as it was quickly determined that perhaps it was in actuality the ‘Sun’ that should be the center of all things…at least until we saw deeper…
As humanity continued to probe the ‘world of the very large’, even more of these suns were discovered. This forced the unsettling conclusion that most all of the tiny ‘points of light’ in the night sky that we call ‘stars’…were simply other suns. It was uncovered that we live in a galaxy populated with literally billions of suns, which we call stars. Imagine the shock and disorientation when we discovered that not only was the sun, which we orbit not only as common as the ordinary sand grain, but in addition lacks any special prominence whatsoever in our own ‘spiral home’ that we call the Milky Way.
Our little solar system is nothing but a miniscule speck far out on a single spoke of a giant wheel. In the interim, as new tools and technology continued to grow, so did the apparent size and age of the visible universe. Its age today has been closely approximated to 13.8 billion years. Its size…? Well, we can see literally billions of galaxies, filled with billions of common little stars such as our own…
As our minds continued to whirl from these revelations, other men asked a completely different question. Now that we’d begun to conceptualize just ‘how big’ the universe is and how truly ‘insignificant’ we are…we began to wonder. In reality, just how ‘small’ can small be? When we begin to consider the limit of the macro scales of the world, by fascinating necessity we must ultimately consider the same limits at the micro scales of existence.
Arguably, the two greatest innovations in physics of our generation are the inventions of General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. No two other theories explain so much of the nature of reality as we experience it. Combined, this pair of explanations describes the universe across a staggering 40 orders of magnitude. Interestingly, as things become infinitely small or infinitely large a new theoretical description is required. Unfortunately, these two theories don’t play well together…
Current revolutions in resolving this dilemma have suggested new approaches to solving this fundamental ‘behavior problem’ by changing the way in which we’ve traditionally viewed reality, in particular on the smallest scales. The language involved has required a continual evolution in the science of mathematics - traditionally the words, formulas and equations that most elegantly define the fundamental properties of the universe. Simpler notions of time and space are no longer adequate to the task as we begin to probe the fantastic worlds of ‘extra-dimensional geometry’ and ‘imaginary time’.
In an effort to combine the ideas contained within General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, new theories have emerged and been given names such as Supersymmetry, Super Gravity, String Theory, Superstring Theory, M-Theory and others. From these novel ways of explaining the nature of reality, one very startling implication borrowed from the Uncertainty Principle in Quantum Mechanics continues to arise - parallel universes should exist…
For over two millennia, fundamental physics has been based on the ‘round ball’ concept - technically the geometric point particle. This idea and electromagnetism put Man on the moon, created computers and all of the other conveniences of modern technologies. But these same balls bounced us straight into a conflict between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.
Heisenberg’s bizarre quantum uncertainty introduced a dumbfounding ‘fuzziness’ into physics. Contemporary theories, built currently through the often unpopular strategy of purely mathematical reasoning, seek to replace ‘point’ particles with ‘string’ particles in which every unique, different particle in nature corresponds to nothing more than simply different vibration frequencies.
By definition, the use of point particles as the basic building-block of matter, compresses everything down to an infinitely-small size, infinitely-hot temperature, which becomes an obstacle. The use of a string softens out the mathematically problematic ‘infinities’ into something finite…the resultant size and temperature is still unfathomably small and inconceivably hot, but not infinite.
Vibrating strings cause the whole of spacetime itself to become fuzzy. The combination of puzzling ‘relativistic and quantum effects’, which occur at both the macro and microscopic limits of reality, causes the strengths of the four fundamental forces of nature to suddenly vary. It does appear, however, that they should unify at some extremely high energy.
There are two ways to probe high energies. One of them is the original, primordial experiment - the birth of the universe – while the other is to increase the energies of particle accelerators. The Large Hadron Collider accelerator, which is scheduled to be completed in about five years, could provide hungrily-awaited experimental evidence…but will it be powerful enough? Where does the next frontier lie…?
In particular, in All That Is Seen And Unseen, two persons encounter a phenomenon, which causes a ‘transition effect’ to occur that transports them from their own familiar place and time to another ‘near parallel’ if somewhat anachronistic world. Faced with this frightening and ghostly ‘similar yet different’ reality, they begin to face the issues that a confrontation with such mystery would be expected to engender. Faced with no other alternative but to go forward with their lives, no choice remains but to attempt to cope…while they begin to ask questions and look for answers.
This manuscript assumes a reader’s above average interest or background in some of the most difficult to grasp and challenging aspects of the natural sciences. A large proportion of the writing has included integration of the broad history and foundations of modern physics. Every effort was made to remove specific references to mathematical formulae, with the exception of Newton’s historic gravitational inverse square law and Einstein’s famous equation, which states the equivalency of matter and energy as perhaps the sole exceptions.
The story, thus, is grounded in real science - not science fiction. However, to date there is no verifiable evidence available that can bear out real scenarios that could produce actual ‘communication’ with parallel universes; certainly no amount of thoughtful research on my part over the past three years was able to yield an exhaustive or satisfactory explanation for the passage of just such an event. So, ultimately, the following 140,000 words do indeed represent a work of fiction. I hope it makes you wonder…and I hope you enjoy the journey.
Ryan Vestal