Null Infinity: Book 1

© Luca Oleastri | Dreamstime.com

This is a book release post.

Null Infinity: Book 1 is the first story in my new universe, Forgotten Earth. The Forgotten Earth Universe is set in the near future but with far future discoveries.

One thread of my work is the development of technology from scientific breakthroughs and the benefits and problems that it brings.

The primary science in Null Infinity is the discovery of spacetime bubbles. These are voids in spacetime that naturally occur. But it's discovered that they can also be created by a huge concentration of energy at the sub-microscopic level. They naturally travel at the speed of the Hubble constant, but their velocity can be changed according to the amount of energy used in their creation (the Hubble constant becomes variable).

The story follows Harry Stimson and Lauren Cauley, two young scientists, as they and their mentor Dr. Zee explore the physics of spacetime bubbles.

Eventually, the spacetime bubble could provide a safe, cheap way to access and traverse space at enormous speeds. In a world struggling with deglobalization and depopulation such a technology could allow space resources to alleviate many of the problems the world faces.

Unfortunately, the spacetime bubble has some dangerous side effects such as the devastating energy-shedding event which the military wants to turn into a weapon, the society threatening disappearance regions, and the life threatening azoic (inanimate) regions.

The development and taming of this technology leads Harry and Lauren on adventures such as imprisonment on a secret military base, the first encounter with a disappearance region during field tests in south Georgia, the first encounter with an azoic region in Africa, and also importantly, love, loss and marriage.

The physics in the story is more speculative than I usually write. It includes string theory like compactified dimensions (Calabi-Yau manifolds) which blowup to be spacetime bubbles and large extra-dimensions (think of the movie Interstellar) which graft onto our spacetime to create disappearance and azoic regions. Harry creates a compact gravitational wave detector using superfluid Helium. Also included is AI developed by scanning a human brain (see The Age of Em by Robin Hanson), and pulse power lasers whose peak power is several thousand times that of the entire world (these actually exist although somewhat less powerful).

Null Infinity: Book 1 is scheduled to be released in paperback September 20, 2024 and in ebook December, 2024.

I conceived this as a series of books and I have already finished the second book which brings in another highly speculative physics, brane theory. But the use of this extra-dimensional theory (specifically the Randall-Sundrum model) provided a nice framework for superluminal velocities without violating relativity. It also introduces Harry and Lauren's family which will figure in the third book of the series which I'll discuss some other time.

Null Infinity: Book 1 in paperback should be up on Amazon and other bookstores.

Hard Science Fiction - Old School.