This ebook is for skeptical minds that are curious and inquiring. About my ebook, I, too, was a skeptic for a time after writing on particular topics. This ebook was not monolithic but grew in pieces that became unified in support of its earlier topics. Because of the controversial subject and the unwillingness of anyone to discuss the subject, my only feedback has been from talking to myself in the closet. Part of the reason for writing was to self-test my working hypothesis and to discuss my beliefs with myself. I think the effect is similar to the writing of an autobiography for self-evaluation or to teaching another to strengthen one's own understanding. I had difficulty believing that I could build a paradigm changing discussion from a simple minded perspective change and this was never the intent but I cannot find error in logic.
For some philosophers, time is an illusion, a mysterious and non-linear thing. But time is not a thing. Time was once described to me as nature's way of preventing everything from happening at once. From the Newtonian law of cause and effect (action and reaction) the universe exists as a chain or sequence of events which cause other events, forever, and time is just a measure to keep synchronized the events occurring in a neighborhood of spatial locations. If it is reasonable to think that the universe is filled with minute particles of aether, including the space between the subparticles of atoms, then one can further imagine that control of density and movement of the aether particles in an enclosed region might control the response time for cause and effect collisions, the universal gravitational constant, the atomic dimensions and, even, time itself. Perhaps we already know how to control the aether without knowing that we do. When driving a car and holding an arm out of the window, the "feel" of the wind is remarkably similar to the "feel" of forcing together of opposing poles of magnets; perhaps a magnetic field is an aether wind. An old adage is that nature abhors a vacuum; perhaps the presence of matter prevents aether from being uniformly distributed for a result of aether winds and gravity; perhaps the +/- fields of neutral atoms does not exactly balance for a net charge on a planet or other object in space.
If the Red Baron of World War I fame were asked to exceed the speed of sound in a dive he could have commented that the wind would suck him out of his socks and probably out of his cockpit. Later the cockpit became covered and the aircraft surface became smooth and a few folks with the right stuff dared to exceed the sound barrier. Conceptually, the velocity of light should not limit the speed of an object but, if an object is a collection of atoms which are a collection of subparticles which are electromagnetic vortices, then the atoms would become magnetically polarized, lose ionic and covalent bonding and decompose. This would not be a good thing for a pilot. An atom cannot have a velocity greater than its subparticles are capable of achieving. Perhaps someday someone will discover an effective deflection shield to isolate a vessel from the outside aether and permit velocity of a starship to warp 9 and greater. Although it is fun to speculate and to follow curiosity in research, science is limited to what we think we know as fact.
One of the facts of science fiction that should not be forgotten is why it exists as a literary tool. In earlier centuries when earth was largely unexplored, a writer could make social commentary by inventing or imagining a new continent like Erehwon (nowhere reversed) or an adventurer like Gulliver. Today, a writer, to create a new society with strange mores and to study the consequences of this culture and lifestyle, will have his story travel the universe and discover a new world with its new sentient lifeforms, new technology and new physics. If described in a plausible way, the reader can be led to accept the beings as people (even if puppet or cartoon) and the social consequences as realistic and to have emotions of empathy for the results of the events of the story. It is not necessary or even appropriate that the literary tool be expected to be a prediction of future science or technology or events of the universe. The science fiction writer has not failed if the science never becomes real; the purpose is to cause the reader to reassess his core beliefs, his values, his lifestyle and his place in the universe.
In one of the topics I remain a little skeptical, that propagation velocity is a function of amplitude. I have seen disparaging remarks referring to "tired" light, which is not the same thing. Argument by analogy with water waves is certainly not a proof, that gravity as the restoring force for large waves and surface tension with more force over a shorter range as the restoring force for small waves, but it does give encouragement to pursuing investigation. Although it has no relevance to special relativity, it does to the cosmology explaining the new view and to the dispute to the Hubble red shift as due entirely to the doppler shift of an expanding universe.
One of the mysterious topics accepted with enthusiasm in science fiction is for hyperdimensionality or parallel universes. I probably don't have the same perspective but I submit the following scenario to ponder. From legend, myth and magic, which often is based on a misunderstanding of technology, there is a story of Merlin, King Arthur and the Sword Excalibur in which the sword was imbedded in a stone by Merlin and only Arthur with the proper character was able to remove the sword. One of the tenets of science is that two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Another is that most of atomic and molecular structure is empty space and that it is the electrostatic forces, the coulomb forces and the nuclear forces that provide the collision barrier. What if the universe were multiplexed in the frequency/energy domain or the time domain as is signal information? We cannot know if the universe is continuous or quantized if all of the known universe were to exist at discrete and synchronized instants with another universe possible that is out of phase and invisible or if some technology might possible to alter the phase for the region of some object. Whether or not there might be cross-talk or intermodulation distortion would be a separate topic to consider. As an example, a motion picture or television is a sequence of time sampled images that appear a continuous motion because of the nerve response perception time. An animal with faster responses, such as a bat that can detect the individual cycle of a dragon fly wing, would probably detect individual images of the motion picture and the interval between the images. In the case of our universe of objects, if the forces between atomic particles were to exist for a picosecond or smaller time and to not exist for a longer time with all atoms in our region sychronized by some cosmic frequency, there is no way that we would be capable of detecting the situation, I think.
My style is not scholarly, both because I am not a scholar and because I have found so few scholars who do not already know everything worthwhile and who have not turned off to questioning beliefs. In my case, volumes could be written about what I don't know and many have already and some are centuries old. Questioning beliefs does not require abandoning them at a whim but the adventure in ideas can be rewarding, even if not converted. An elderly fisherman made a comment today on an unrelated topic that an open mind is good as long as it not so open that the brain falls out. I wouldn't want that to happen.
