The Wheft

Speculations from four Big Unsovled Problems in physics

I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things. The hardest thing is to make something really true and sometimes truer than true.
         Ernest Hemingway

Wheft.  (n) (nautical) A kind of streamer or flag used either as a signal, or at the masthead for ornament or to indicate the direction of the wind to aid in steering.
         Webster’s online dictionary

Verisimilitude is the appearance of being true or real.  It's a fundamental feature of realistic fiction.  It applies to characters, plot, setting, and all other elements of the ficttional world. It's what Hemingway was talking about in the above quote 

I can't stand watching shows on cable TV that claim to discover evidence about things like space aliens or bigfoot. Understand, I don't have anything against these shows, and I'm willing to concede that things like space aliens or bigfoot could very well exist. I just don't  find the shows or their purpotted evidence credible. When they insist that a bulrry photograph or a single, unsubstantiated eyewitness report is evidence, it just makes me change channels.

On the other hand, I enjoy Star trek in all its incarnations, even though I know that the faster-than-tight drives featured in the Star Trek universe are just pseudo-science jibber-jabber.

The difference between the two is something called the wiling suspension of disbelief.  Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the first to use the phrase in 1817 when he said that in his poetry he tried to infuse

a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure...that willing suspension of disbelief
Coleridge, Samuel Taylorn, "from Biographia Literaria, Chapter XIV".

The idea is even older.  For example, in Book II of Acadmica in CE57, Cicero  mentions adsensionis retentio, or "holding back of assent."  Both Coleridge and Ciciero were writing about poetry with a supernatural element, but the concept applies more broadly to all fiction. 

The idea is that when a reader starts a piece of fiction, they begin with a willing suspension of disbelief.  Readers know that what they are reading is fiction, which by definition means that it's not real.  The Coleridge quote is important, because it implicitly places the burden on the author to infuse their work with "sufficent human interest and a semblance of truth" to support that "willing suspension of disbelielf." 

Verismimilitude is how authors reinforce that initial willing suspension of disbelief.

I can enjoy Star Trek because, while I know warp drives are impossible, I'm willing to believe in them for the sake of the story and the characters.  All those UFO and bigfoot shows on the Discovery Channel, though? They present themselves as factual, so I watch them with the same skeptical eye, the scientific eye, I use when viewing evidence.  There's no "suspension of disbelief," and the presentation reinforces that it's supposed to be factual.  It's worth noting that Mr. Gene, my partnner, enjoys those Discovery Channel shows, but he's watching them as fiction.  My problem is I can't believe they are intended as fiction, so I can't watch them.

That willing suspension of disbelief can be fragile.  It's based on both the "human interest" and "a semblance of truth."  If fictional story breaks either of those too severely, it can break that willing suspension and, thus, break the fictional dream playing in the readers' minds.  A famous example is in Star Wars, where, at one point, Han says he made the Kessel run in "twelve parsecs."  That sounds real fast, right?  Except that a parsec is a measure of distance, not speed.  It's like saying I made the "Oklahoma CIty" run in "twelve miles" when the real distance from Tulsa is more like ninety miles.  It's nonsense.  It's a glaring error, and an example of using a "sciency-sounding" word in a way that makes no sense.  And, no, Lucas didn't "fix" his mistake later by implying Han knew a shortcut. It's an obvious mistake and, while it doesn't ruin Star Wars for me, it certainly makes me cringe.

On the other hand, the faster-than-light drives in both Star Trek and Star Wars provide, if you squint hard enough and want to believe, a sufficient semblance of truth to keep you connected with the story. In Star Trek, there even a flag, the word "warp" in warp drive, that signals that the drive is different, warped.  it works to give that semblance of reality.  Unless, of course, the screewriters get too specific do something stupid like saying a parsec is a measure of velocity.

I tend to have a personal problem with verisimilitude when it comes to fantasy, especially when things like magicians or fairies lurk in our everyday, real world.  Heinlein wrote Magic, Inc. and related stories, but the underlying basis was, if you squnted hard enough, the general wierdness and various mysteries of quantum mechanics.  He never explicitly mentions the quantum world, but it's implicit.  In addition, the commercializaiton of magic in his fictional universe is entirely credible, which helps. 

Recently, I've been thinking about writing a slipstream story, set in part in our modern world, but with fantasy elements that include something like "the veil" that separates the real and unreal as well as adepts who are simllar to magicians.  But, I kept running into that verismimiltude problem.  If I don't believe those things are possible, I'm going to have a hard time making my readers believe in them.  But then I encountered an emerging theory in physics about, of all things, dark matter.  It's brand new, less than a year old, and could fizzle out.  But, if you squint hard enough, it might give me a pseudo-scientific basis for the things I need for my story. 

Basically, what I want is some kind of signal flag to stick in my story to mark the boundary between the real world and the slipstream world.  That's where the wheft of the titile comes in.  I admit, I'm borrowing from my friend Raven and her awesome new novel Rain, where magic floats in the weft, a term she borrowed from weaving.  I like the sound of both words, but I like the idea of a signal flag, too.  Anyway, both weft and wheft have a nice, surreal sound to them, so it's a good choice for a surreal, slipstream story.

The fundamental idea of this essay is to hypothesize a universe--or even universes--of invisible matter and/or energy occuping the same space-time we occupy. The wheft is the what I'm calling the hypothetical boundary--or boundaries--between this invisible universe and our visible one. This basic hypothesis, absent any other feature, is at least not inconsistent with current physics.

Most ot the rest of this newsletter is about dark matter, that new, emerging theory, and four BIg Unsolved Problems in physics.  The idea is to include some of the theories about these problems as a demonstration that the above fundamental idea is not inconsistent with physics as we currently understand it. If you're not interested in sciency-stuff, you should probably skip to the last section on the wheft, a free-wheeling romp of imagination about things an author might do with the ideas that underpin that new theory.  The basic concepts, being based on sound principles, should be viable even if the theory itself fizzles.

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         The first kind is the one we’re familiar with, the matter that we can touch and feel.  We’ve been studying that matter as long as we’ve existed. Whether it’s Plato’s forms, or Einstein’s space-time continuum, or Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, we’ve been studying it and measuring it forever.  Physicists have developed a detailed model, the Standard Model, that describes this kind of matter with enormous accuracy, down to hundreds of decimal places.  It’s the most-tested and most accurate model ever created by science. Well, that and General Relativity, which we’ll get to later.

         Anyway, that’s one kind of matter, a kind we understand in detail. 

         What’s the evidence for two kinds of matter?

         Back in 1933, Fritz Zwicky started to observe something unusual about the rotation of galaxies.  He could measure the speed of galactic rotation and roughly calculate the mass of the galaxies.  His calculations showed that the rotation was so fast that the galaxies should fly apart, that there wasn’t enough mass to hold them together. 

         Zwicky was a meticulous scientist, so no one argued with his measurements. However, he was also a snarky kind of guy, and no one liked talking to him.  The easiest thing to do was to just ignore him, his snark, and his puzzling observations, which is what happened for the next forty years or so.

         Eventually, however, it became obvious he was onto something, especially thanks to Vera Rubin’s work in the 1970s.  It eventually became clear that a halo of invisible matter surrounded almost all galaxies, and this invisible matter was the extra mass needed to hold them together.  We know this matter exists because we can observe its gravitational effects.  It’s what’s holding galaxies together despite their rapid spin.  Detailed measurements of the cosmic background radiation provided even more, if indirect, confirmation of this invisible halo.

         We call this invisible matter “dark” because we can’t see it directly. In particular, it doesn’t interact with photons. 

         Whatever it is, we know from its gravitational effects how much of it there must be.  The answer is a lot. There’s about six times as much dark matter as regular matter in the Universe. 

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         Getting back to regular matter and the Standard Model, it’s natural to think there must be an unknown component of that model, a particle or maybe a field, that accounts for dark matter.  Perhaps dark matter arises from something similar to, say, the Higgs Boson which accounts for the mass of ordinary matter.

         There’s something called “supersymmetry” which gives candidates, WIMPS and Axions for example, for such a particle or field. Physicists have been looking at candidates for a couple of decades with increasingly sensitive experiments.  They have found exactly nothing.  Well, not quite nothing. They’ve managed to restrict range of possible places to look. It’s pretty narrow at this point. It's bad enough that some physicists are starting to think this is a dead end.

         There’s an emerging theory that supposes an entire “dark universe” that coexists with the one of our senses, the one of the Standard Model.  This theory hypothesizes that this “dark universe” has its own version of a “Standard Model.” The dark universe and our universe interact primarily, or maybe only, through gravity. 

         Einstein teaches us that gravity involves the shape of space-time, so the dark universe would share the same space-time continuum as us. But, if this new idea is right, the dark universe might have different laws of physics.  Different laws of physics mean that anything is possible in this universe, a universe that’s right here, occupying the same space-time that we occupy.  It might even have had its own equivalent of the Big Bang, but not contemporaneous with ours, whatever “contemporaneous” might mean in this context. 

         This idea is brand new, having only been proposed in the last year or so.  It’s intriguing, especially in light of the failure to find evidence consistent with the Standard Model for dark matter.  In fact, the primary evidence for the theory is the failure of these experiments.  Not the only evidence, though.  It might also explain some problems related to the earliest nanoseconds of our universe.  The jury’s out on that, and it’s right to be skeptical about a radical new theory like this one.

         In any case, finding out the nature of dark matter is a Big Open Problem in physics.

         I’ll relate this back to fantasy worlds and the idea of a “wheft” later, but next I want to mention the Big Bang and dark energy.

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         All the way back in 1929, Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe is expanding.  No one paid much attention at first.  Hubble wrote Einstein a letter about the expansion and its relation to Einstein’s proposed “cosmological constant.”  Einstein ignored him at first.  But the evidence eventually became clear, and Einstein apologized and took the cosmological constant out of his theory of general relativity.  He even said it was the worst mistake he ever made.

         If the universe is getting bigger, then it must have been smaller in the past. Running the clock backwards is what led to the hypothesis of the Big Bang.  This, too, was controversial, until 1964 when Penzio and Wilson discovered the microwave background radiation, an echo of the Big Bang.

         Everyone figured one of three things were possible after the Big Bang.  One possibility would be that the expansion would go on forever, slowed down by gravity but never reversed.  Another was that gravity would eventually slow down the expansion and reverse it.  The reversal could then result in another Big Bang, in an eternal cycle.  That was an appealing conjecture, so most scientists supposed it was probably true, although there was no data to support it. A third possibility was that the expansion and mass would exactly match up and the expansion would stop but not contract. That balancing of pencil-on-its point seemed highly unlikely.

         Eventually, astronomers were able to gather data to decide which of the three hypotheses were correct.  To their amazement, they discovered that none of them was right.  Instead, they found that the expansion of the universe initially slowed as expected, but then, about five billion years ago, it started to speed up.

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         Speeding up the expansion of space-time has to use energy. We have some ideas about what the source of that energy might be from quantum mechanics, but we don’t know for sure.  We’re kind of in the dark. Hence the name “dark energy.”  It’s also called “dark energy” just for symmetry with the other Big Unknown Thing I mentioned above, dark matter.  In any case, finding the source of dark energy is a second Big Open Problem in Physics. 

         A natural question is, how much energy does it take to account for the observed acceleration? Knowing the rate of expansion and an estimate of amount of matter in the universe, we can deduce the approximate energy requirements via Newton’s F=ma.  It turns out it’s a lot of energy because there’s a lot of mass.

         Remember Einstein’s E=mc²?  That says energy and mass are the same thing.  That means we can calculate the totality of the mass and energy in the universe, taking into account regular matter, dark matter, and dark energy.

         The two kinds of matter, regular matter and dark matter, only constitute about 27% of the universe.  The remaining 73% of the universe consists of dark energy.  Like a said, that’s a lot.

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         It gets worse.

         It turns out that astronomers have two ways to measure how fast the universe’s expansion is accelerating.  They are largely based on looking at different time frames, and astronomers have lots of data to give them confidence in each of the two ways.

         The problem is that the two methods give different answers.

         This is called the “Hubble tension,” and is a third Major Open Problem in Physics.  New data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JSWT for short) confirms the disagreement between the two methods, the tension. Yet, they can’t both be right.

         Our best guess about what gives rise to dark energy is that it’s a characteristic of space-time itself.  The acceleration in the expansion then kind of makes sense.  As the universe expands, there’s more space-time, and thus, whatever it is about space-time that generates dark energy, there’s more of it and thus more dark energy. 

         But, there’s more pesky data.  The same data from JSWT that verified the tension also seems to imply the acceleration is now slowing down.  It that’s right, the “more space-time-means-more-dark-energy” idea must be wrong. 

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         The Standard Model, that hyper-accurate model that makes the modern world of electronics possible, is based on something called quantum mechanics.  Gravity, on the other hand, has to do with the shape of space-time and comes from general relativity.  General relativity is just as accurate and well-verified as the General Model. Global positioning systems work because they have built-in corrections deduced from relativity, for example.

         Early attempts at combining gravity and quantum mechanics resulted in nonsense results. We understand relativity and hence gravity at large scales, like satellites orbiting the earth or light from distant stars.  We understand quantum mechanics at atomic and sub-atomic scales. At atomic scales, speed-of-light delays usually don’t matter.

         Except, of course, when they do.  In black holes, for example.  Or in the early nanoseconds of the Big Bang.

         Uniting relativity and quantum mechanics in a single set of equations is a fourth Big Unsolved Problem for physicists. Einstein spent the last forty years of his life searching for just such a unified field theory and failed.  String theory and loop quantum gravity are two promising attempts, both requiring multiple dimensions to work.  If either of these are the right equations, we live in a universe consisting of twelve or maybe thirteen dimensions, with all but four wrapped up so small we can’t see them. 

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         Finally, let’s close the loop back to the notion of a parallel, magical universe. 

         What follows is free-wheeling speculation.  There is no science or theory or data behind it or any of the speculations in the rest of this essay.  It’s all just letting imagination run wild on the ways a fiction author might employ some of these ideas in a fictional universe.  The fictional universe might have a passing similarity to the one we live in, just like the Star Trek universe.  Or the Hobbit universe, for that matter.  The purpose here is to use some of the above ideas to spit-ball more fictional universes, to exploit the Big Open Problems but not solve them.

         The Big Open Problems are an opening for our imagination, a signal flag to stimulate thinking about what might be possible.  They wave a flag I’ve called the wheft, both for the metaphor and because I like the sound of it.  Just to review, the premise for the new theory about dark matter is that it involves a whole universe of dark matter particles, similar to but different from those of visiible matter, that share the same space-time we occupy, but don't interact with photons.  That makes this dark matter invisible. They do intearct with visible matter via gravity--that's how we know dark matter must exist--but not in any other way that we can observe, at least so far.  The shorthand version is that there's a dark universe occupyuing the same space-time we occupy, but with potentially different and unknown physics.

         With that said, here we go!

         The characteristics of such a fictional universe could fit nicely with some of the Big Unsovled Problems in physics. Since they’re unsolved, there’s lots of room for fiction authors to exploit them in novel ways.

         First, and foremost, there’s the notion of a “dark universe” that co-occupies space-time with our visible universe.  If it has its own laws of physics, well, that’s certainly magical. We know it interacts with our visible universe via gravity, but not with photons.  But, maybe, it interacts in other ways we can’t measure.

         Another thing we don’t understand is how consciousness arises. In fact, we don’t even have a good definition of what consciousness is.  There’s lots of research into machine learning and artificial intelligence, but the implications for human consciousness and free will remain unresolved at best. Why not, for fictional purposes, suppose that consciousness arises at the boundary between the dark universe and the observable universe?

         We know that the dark universe and the observable universe interact. We see that interaction in the stars.  If consciousness arises on the boundary between the two, then consciousness itself could be another kind of interaction.  I know, this is all speculation, but it’s called speculative fiction, after all. This gives another premise for stories.

         If the dark universe has different laws of physics, well, that’s so much the better for fictional purposes.  We have zero observations right now on what those laws might be, so let your imaginations run free. Just be consistent. 

         How about the wheft in the title of this essay? Suppose some people have deeper insight into the dark universe than others, and these talented magicians can perceive a signal, a wheft, from that universe.  That could be used to create the veil so common to many fantasy stories.

         How about travel to the dark universe?  Well, relativity allows for the existence of wormholes, openings in space-time to other parts of the universe.  Under our laws of physics, these wormholes are both unstable and require ginormous amounts of energy to open.  Worse, travelling through them in our universe probably shreds normal matter.  But…if the dark universe had different laws of physics, it might have different rules for wormholes. 

         Maybe something like wormholes between the dark universe and the observable are possible.

         Faster-than-light travel is impossible in our universe.  How about the dark universe? Is it possible there? Probably not, since that limit is part of the shape-of-space-time stuff from general relativity, but, again, speculation.  Wormhole to the dark universe, zip along faster than light, then wormhole back to the observable universe.

         Maybe the arrow of time is different in the dark universe.  Now we’ve got time travel.

         The same wormhole-to-the-dark-universe idea would permit invisible spirits from the dark universe moving around space-time right next to us.  But those savants in our universe, the fictional ones we’ve imagined with the supposed special sensitivity to the dark universe, could sense them. 

         Maybe consciousness passes to the dark universe on our death. 

         The possibilities for this thing I’ve called the wheft are endless.  They make pseudo-science sense out of most fantasy memes.  They are a framework to unify many themes, to say nothing of many legends.

         Please, do not think I’m proposing that my idea of the wheft explains legends!  This is supposed to be a fun exercise for authors of speculative fiction.  It’s not a candidate for an episode of Expedition Unknown.  I mean, I kind of like Josh Gates, but, really, don’t go there. God forbid.

         Run with it. Free your imagination.  Have fun but don’t take it seriously.  Tell me how you’d use these ideas.