Now I know you already think I’m crazy, but hang on for a
minute. Because I have a few words that I think you might find interesting.
The first one is
“fields.”
Specifically, the electromagnetic fields of protons and
electrons. They’re why we perceive matter as solid, even though the average
atom is mostly empty space.
The not-empty part is a nucleus of protons and neutrons with
some number of electrons wandering around at various distances and
configurations that can be predicted via quantum mechanics. The number of electrons depends on the number
of protons in the nucleus and the ionic state of the atom.
Molecules are atoms linked together with more empty space
between, but they can also merge the fields of their individual atoms to create
even stronger fields.
If you’ve ever tried to stick two “North” ends of bar magnets
together (or ridden a mag-lev train), you have an idea of what I’m talking
about. The closer together you get the magnets, the stronger the fields become.
What happens when you can negate the EM field of matter? You
walk through walls and sink though floors, unless you can also negate a
gravitational field and fly. Magic.
The second word is “Phase.”
When light bounces off a surface, the wave (light is both
waves and particle streams), the phase of the wave is shifted by 180
degrees. Now, if you mix two waves of
opposite phases, they cancel each other. From this we get noise-canceling headphones
and the possibility of invisibility.
But wait, there’s more.
If you expand the thought to quantum phases, you can end up
with the multiverse – different realities that could exist alongside ours, but
instead of having possible electron spins of Up and Down, their quantum phase
has electron spins of Left and Right.
What happens when two universes occupying the same space but
with different quantum phases experience quantum phase drift? Maybe we start
seeing things that aren’t really there. Almost like ghosts.
The third word is “entanglement”
Say you have a pair of big particles, like electrons (or
even as big as microdiamonds, according to some people), that interact and are
then separated.
Now the electrons have a description that is indefinite in
terms of stuff like position, momentum, spin, and even polarization; when they
interact they adopt opposite spins. Until you look at one to determine its
spin, you don’t know what it is. And if you change the spin of an electron that
is entangled, you can change the spin of the electron it interacted with, even
if that other electron is at the other end of the universe. Magic.
Those are only three of the words that link modern physics
to magic. If you want to know some of the others, I’m teaching an online
workshop in August through FF&P that explains the concepts without going
into the math.
Footnote: The math is weird; it doesn’t use numbers because
pretty much nobody knows what the numbers are. Einstein, in his general
relativity derivation, divided by zero at least once, which was found by
someone else. And he still came up with his famous equation relating energy to
mass.
In closing, I want to leave you with a few more words, these
from Sir Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction writer (which is a bit like
calling Einstein the patent clerk). This is Clarke’s Third Law, written as a
footnote to Clarke’s Second Law in the essay “Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure
of Imagination” in the collection Profiles
of the Future (added, I believe, in the 1973 edition): “Any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic.”Val Roberts Bio
I was born in Boise and received my first paycheck for
writing at the age of twelve, for winning a father’s day essay contest. I spent
nine years as a Boise State undergraduate before eking out a chemistry degree,
but I ended up with enough credits for a PhD…spread across six wildly disparate
majors. Now I’m a mild-mannered technical writer for a software company by day.
By night, I write science-fiction romance or space opera with sex, depending on
your point of view. I still live in Boise, with a Spooky Man as crazy as I am
and a small pack of cats and dogs. My second novel, The Valmont Contingency, is
coming out from Carina Press October 1, 2012. Links:
Website Twitter: @valmroberts
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