WORLD
BRANE
Book 2
D.W.
PATTERSON
Copyright ©
2025 D.W. Patterson
All rights
reserved.
First
Printing – September 2025
Future Chron
Publishing
Cover –
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No part of
this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without
permission, except in the case of brief quotations for the purpose of
review. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and
events are products of the author's imagination and should not be
construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events and people,
living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Hard
Science Fiction – Old School
Human
Generated Content
To Sarah
“One man's 'magic', is
another man's engineering.”
― Robert A. Heinlein
PREFACE
Humanity
had discovered that across the large, extra-dimension known to
physicists as the bulk, there lay other universes, other worlds,
other branes. They had learned to travel there using the boundary
drive which created a cocoon-like void (or bubble) in spacetime in
which a ship could be carried. Motion was created by the
pressure-like gradient between the bubble and spacetime and with
direction and speed controlled by warping the bubble with an energy
source, like a powerful laser.
But something had gone wrong,
ships had been lost in the bulk and now there was a danger that the
settlements founded throughout all those universes would be cutoff
and isolated. Something had to be done.
The essential problem was time,
frozen time spheroids which like a submerged reef, could sometimes
trap an unwary ship and sometimes destroy it. To solve the problem
humanity would have to learn what was causing it, and if it were a
natural occurrence or human created.
CHAPTER
1
Mark
Dreyer had been working on the problem of the frozen time spheroids
for months now. Mark, a physics professor at Pacific Tech, with the
help of Dr. Ed Balmer, had come up with a method of dissipating the
spheroids when in normal spacetime.
The
method involved the use of the spin-two generator, which was a form
of wormhole generator, as an intense plasma generator. According to
the equations of wormhole generation, which Mark taught to his
students as follows:
“These
are the equations of a wormhole generator,” Mark said. “They come
out of the solution of a particular configuration of spacetime which
is called the Mach metric, after the nineteenth century physicist
Ernst Mach. They describe the geometry of a wormhole, a path through
alternate physical dimensions that can be used to bridge distances in
our universe.
“Now
look at the solutions of the field equation, what I call the Mach
equation.
“As
a physical analogy, think of it this way, say you have some bathroom
scales. Now those scales are only accurate when you are standing
still on them. If you start jumping up and down, they will read
either more or less depending on how fast you jump. And the response
time of the scales. This is how the first term in the equation works.
“This
first term reduces or increases the mass according to the driving
frequency as long as the mass is accelerating, in our case the sphere
of the generator is spinning so it has angular momentum, remembering
always that a change in direction is also an acceleration. All this
is experimental fact.
“However
useful this term of the Mach equation may be for accelerating a mass
it is not actually the effect we want to use, that is in the second
term of the equation.
“Note
that the second term is divided by the square of the mass density.
Also note that it has a second derivative with respect to time, and a
minus sign. All this means that if we ramp up the power of the
generator fast enough the second term will dominate the first term
and create a negative or exotic mass according to the Mach equation.
And that is just what is needed to open and hold open the throat of a
wormhole.
“By
the way, the twentieth century physicists Kip Thorne and Mike Morris
first wrote the metric of a wormhole and postulated the need for
negative mass to hold the throat open.
“But
there is one problem, or in our case, one advantage with using this
term. As you can see the mass starts out positive, or ordinary mass,
goes through zero and becomes exotic, or negative mass. You have to
be careful to drive it quick enough through zero to avoid the
equation becoming singular.
“If
not you can create an infinite mass and a black hole. A small black
hole develops and then immediately dissipates. As you know, small
black holes less than the size of the Sun will radiate away their
mass rather quickly as Hawking radiation. The smaller the hole the
faster it radiates. And that creates an intense plasma which can be
directed by magnetic and electrical fields against a target, in this
case, a frozen time spheroid.
“The
spheroid is pierced and the internal time rate, which is almost zero,
and external rate must equalize.
“Any
questions?”
A
student in back raised their hand.
“Yes.”
said Mark.
“But
the wormhole generator and therefore the modern spin-two drive
operated on the Mach principle, correct?”
“That
is true,” said Mark. “I think I know where you are going and you
are right. The Mach principle, which states that the inertia of an
object depends on all the other masses in the universe, is not valid
in the bulk because there are no natural masses there.”
“So,
how do we get the spin-two drive to work in the bulk?” the student
asked.
“I've
been working on that for some months and the answer to your question
is, we don't, at least not yet.”
The
class ended and Mark was off to a lunch date.
