«
»

 


 
If you’ve read a lot of my work you know that I do sometimes try to keep up with the latest Big Thinks in cosmology — starting, as a matter of policy, writing about the steady-state universe with Jack Williamson way back when. That novel was The Reefs of Space, and Jack used the idea to create parts of the Everything where new matter and new space were being created before your very eyes. Great stuff, I can say with little vanity, because those settings were almost all Jack’s.

But that was then. This is now, and I have to say I have met my match. It is called M Theory and cosmologists say that for the first time they have a Theory of Everything which explains much of what Everything is all about. What’s more, it does this without producing useless infinities as the answers to all the equations that might produce testable predictions.

But as to using M Theory to provide the background science for a science-fiction novel, oh, spare me. One of the predictions that M Theory makes is that there isn’t just one universe, even not just a million universes, but 10 to the 500th power universes, and,. guys, I just can’t count that high. My newest novel, All the Lives He Led, which (hint) is just out, doesn’t move one skillionth of a millimeter off the surface of the Earth, and the one I’ve barely begun (about 75 pages of rough draft so far, completion date God knows when), hasn’t yet told me if any of it will get Off Earth at all.

So, sorry, Stephen Hawking. I admire you intensely and treasure the one time I heard you lecture, back at Fermilab years ago, but you’ve gone way too far for me to follow right now. But do send me a postcard when you get there.

This entry was posted on April 28, 2011 at 12:30 am under Books, Science, Writing. Tagged , , , , . Both comments and pings are currently closed.

4 Comments

  1. Grego says:

    Fred, perhaps you could take a page from Rudy Rucker and dive into or across or through one or more of those universes, whether or not it takes you off Earth. Send us some ryarcth-mail when you get there!

    April 28, 2011, 1:33 am

  2. Cliff Winnig says:

    Well, the good news is that M Theory hasn’t been proven. That bad news is that most of the competing theories are even weirder. :-)

    April 28, 2011, 7:14 pm

  3. John H says:

    As exciting as M-theory is, I can’t help but think of Life, the Universe and Everything – that the end result will somehow be 42 while nobody will have a clue what the actual question is…

    It would be neat, though, to have a single theoretical model that can explain and actually predict everything we know about the universe, and that could lead us to discover things we can’t even imagine today.

    April 29, 2011, 11:05 am

  4. JJ Brannon says:

    A friend of mine developed F-theory.

    I’m not kidding.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-theory

    JJB

    April 29, 2011, 3:58 pm