This wild universe

The universe is a strange and fascinating place, about which we continue -- in fits and starts, two steps forward and (hopefully only) one step back -- to learn. Consider a few recent items:

Remember Toon Town?

"Much like characters on a television show would not know that their seemingly 3-D world exists only on a 2-D screen, we could be clueless that our 3-D space is just an illusion. The information about everything in our universe could actually be encoded in tiny packets in two dimensions."

A newly begun experiment will, just maybe, ascertain that we're all toons. See (from the University of Chicago, one of my alma maters), "Do we live in a 2-D hologram? New Fermilab experiment will test the nature of the universe."

A knotty bit of string theory

String theory is a discipline within physics that set out (among its modest aspirations) to unify the nuclear strong force, the nuclear weak force, and the electromagnetic force with gravity. For decades, having failed to come up with any testable hypotheses, string theorists have struggled to show their subject is anything more than fun with numbers. They're trying yet again. See "M-Theory Repositions: Now You Can Thank Us For Quantum Mechanics Too."

The red queen of cosmology and astrophysics

 Charles Dodgson -- aka Lewis Carroll -- was a very clever guy. I could give many examples, but today I'm thinking of the Red Queen's race in Through the Looking Glass:

"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else — if you run very fast for a long time, as we've been doing."

"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

 Why think about Alice's adventures?

Wanted: quantum scientist

We have quantum mechanics -- lots of them -- and they are extremely good at what they do. A bazillion transistors, lasers, and solar cells leave no room for doubt.

(Warning: I haven't cluttered this post with links, because practically every phrase in it could be a link to an article defining some esoterica. Wikipedia is your friend. The eye-crossing graphic nearby is from the double-slit-experiment article at Wikipedia.)  

And Roman engineers built extremely good roads, bridges, and aqueducts without any clue about material science.

Trope-ing the light fantastic (FTL)

Nothing goes faster than light, right? Relativity theory settled that, surely.

Okay, that's orthodoxy. But quantum mechanics is also orthodoxy, and physics has yet to reconcile relativity with QM. So there's something basic we don't understand. (I'll look at string theory, the brave new hope for reconciliation, in another post. It isn't pretty.)

Must SF prove relativity wrong to use FTL as anything other than a trope? In my opinion, no. It's sufficient to rely (implicitly or explicitly) on issues with and ambiguities in accepted theory. To name a couple:

Maybe the speed of light, even if we can't exceed it, isn't a constant. Check out Faster than the Speed of Light by physicist Jaoa Magueijo. Variable light speed does away with the kludge to Big Bang theory that is cosmic inflation. And some of Magueijo's variable-light-speed theories envision faster light speed in the vicinity of cosmic strings. (These aren't the strings of string theory. The terminology is unfortunate.)

And string theory -- despite its lack of concrete success -- is mainstream physics. String theory envisions extra dimensions beyond the 4-D space-time continuum of relativity. Maybe the 4-D universe we experience is afloat in up to (in the predominant theory) 11 dimensions. As long as string theory remains mainstream physics, it's hard to see why science fiction can't use some sort of subspace, hyperspace, or extra-dimensional (see [membrane theory) shortcut with the net effect in this universe of faster-than-light travel.