So, now I know two Korean words: kamsahamnida (which means, thank you) and bo.

  Sibyl is another word worth mentioning. I didn’t make it up, it comes from ancient Greece. Sibyls were women who provided prophecies (presumably for a fee). I guess back in those days, everyone wanted their palms read, Greek style. One Sibyl who lived in Erythrae (about 70 kilometers northwest of Athens), wrote her predictions on a set of leaves. The leaves could then be arranged so that the first letter of each prediction formed a word or phrase, providing proof to the customer of the Sibyl’s mystical talent!

  Hmm. What do you get if you rearrange the first letter of each chapter in this book? Probably gibberish, but if it spells out “the Sibyl of Erythrae foresees chaos”, I’ll be a believer.

  Let’s move on to distance scales, one of the themes in this story. The scale of our universe is unquestionably vast. But words like vast, grand, or even incalculable and limitless, don’t convey just how big this universe really is. Even zoom-out style video visualizations are tough to absorb because you lose track of your starting point. For this story, I decided that watching whole galaxies zip by a window hour after hour like fenceposts along a highway gave the best feel for the incredible scale of space that surrounds us. I hope it gave you that sense too.

  Science fiction usually sticks to adventures inside the Milky Way galaxy. But not always. Have you read Tau Zero by Poul Anderson? It’s written almost like a documentary, but it’s the only story I’ve ever read that provides a plausible method to traverse the whole universe. How? Build a ship that can approach the speed of light, and, for you, time will slow down. As you accelerate, time dilation opens up the whole universe, even if everyone you ever knew back home—and Earth itself—are long dead.

  In Quantum Space (Book 1 of this series), I started using the Greek letter tau as a measure of spatial compression. The same letter was used in Tau Zero, where it’s a measure of the ratio between clock ticks aboard a very fast ship and clock ticks outside. The ratio approaches zero, as the ship approaches light speed.

  Back to the science in this story. I have three more topics to expand upon: probability in the quantum world, something from nothing, and the cosmology of the multiverse. Heavy stuff! But I’ll try to keep it light.

  You’ve probably heard that fundamental particles like quarks and electrons are quantum, which means they exist as discrete packets. And while a world made from tiny building blocks is easy to grasp, nature doesn’t let us off that easy. Every quantum particle is also a wave. I won’t go into why this is true because I’ve mentioned the quantum particle/wave duality in other books. You can find good descriptions on the internet, like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hk3fgjHNQ2Q

  Let’s take it a step further. A quantum particle is not only a wave, but its position in three-dimensional space is described by a probability field. A good example of a field is the tip of a magnet. Hold another magnet nearby and you can feel the fields they create, even though you can’t see them. When I was a child, magnets felt like pure magic.

  A quantum field is just as real as a magnetic field, and just as marvelous. It’s the mathematical probability of finding a quantum particle at a particular location. For example, a 50% chance that the particle will show up at nearby point A, and a 0.01% chance it will be found way over at distant point B. Because it’s also a wave, we don’t know exactly where the particle will be until we measure it. But we do know the probabilities where it might be. Erwin Schrödinger won the Nobel Prize for his equation that computes location and momentum probabilities for any quantum particle. Here it is:

  Physicists use this equation all the time. You couldn’t design a nuclear power plant or a Geiger counter without it.

  So, does that mean that reality itself is random? If the fundamental particles that make up everything can’t be pinned down except by a roll of the dice, does that mean nothing in life is deterministic?

  You decide. But in 1964, John Bell devised a robust quantum experiment to distinguish between random and deterministic. Early experiments in the 1980s were inconclusive, but Bell’s Test was finally resolved in 2015 by Alain Aspect and others. Their conclusion: quantum particles are inherently unpredictable. Reality at its core is truly random. There are critics, though, who to this day say nature might harbor an undiscovered property that explains why something that appears to be random is actually quite different.

  I took that idea and ran with it. Sci-fi allows us to play upon the mysteries in science, which can be a whole lot of fun.

  Next up: something from nothing. This is the idea that our universe and the Big Bang that created it, is not dependent on an underlying engine. Nothing initiated the Big Bang; it simply sprang from nowhere. Strange as it sounds, this nearly magical genesis is entirely possible. Theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss wrote a whole book about it (A Universe From Nothing). I read it three times trying to understand it, and Krauss is a good writer. The concept itself was the issue (for me). What is nothing? It’s not just empty space. To make sense, nothing must be truly nothing. No space, no time, but also no rules. It’s what Aristotle called First Cause.

  Krauss describes matter and spacetime emerging from nothing as necessary conditions of a quantum fluctuation. Nothingness, Krauss says, is unstable. It cannot remain nothing. But suggesting that nothing suddenly blossoms into a volume of space containing matter requires underlying rules—quantum fluctuations, for example. Time itself is a rule. Without time, you can’t have an event, which a fluctuation most definitely is.

  Aristotle concluded—correctly, I think—that there can be no First Cause. Some portion of reality is, and must be, eternal. Aristotle labeled the eternal part, God, which I think is a handwaving copout (manufacturing a fantasy to explain the genesis of reality doesn’t sit well with me). But I do agree that at least some sliver of reality must be eternal. Time itself would then be eternal, and an engine of creation (however primitive) would allow a Big Bang to create a universe, or many universes. We either accept an eternal engine, or we have to go with the something-from-nothing scenario, which (for me) is even harder to reconcile.

  Finally, I wanted to talk about the latest thinking among cosmologists. Cosmologists are theoretical physicists and astronomers who specialize in questions like, how did we get here? You’d be hard pressed to find a cosmologist who didn’t agree on two things: the Big Bang started our universe, and in the earliest microsecond of existence, a strange phenomenon we call inflation exploded the universe’s size from a quantum dot to an energetic soup the size of a solar system.

  Cosmologists then describe (in fair detail) how matter coalesced from energy, when the first atoms formed, when the universe first became transparent to light, and on to the first stars and galaxies. There’s loads of evidence for the Big Bang and inflation theories, primarily because big telescopes not only look into deep space, they’re looking backwards in time. We can see the first light. It’s out there if you look far enough. It tells us what the universe was like 13.8 billion years ago.

  Today, cosmology is a rapidly changing field. Cosmologists continue to study the first few microseconds of the Big Bang, but they also work on theories for how the bang got its start. There are lots of competing theories that adjust as new information comes in from our most advanced telescopes.

  I like to compare developments in cosmology to the science of DNA. In the 19th century, no one knew about DNA, but Charles Darwin showed that species evolved, and Gregor Mendel exposed the mechanism: a gene passed from parent to child. It took another hundred years to discover the shape of DNA (Francis Crick, James Watson, and Rosalind Franklin, in 1953), and its AGCT base pairs (Fred Sanger, in the 1970s). Jump ahead another forty years, and Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier invented genetic scissors called CRISPR capable of snipping out a DNA section and replacing it with something else. Incredible progress of an extremely complicated science, but it took 150 years before geneticists could claim a full understanding of DNA.

  Cosmology feels similar. The expansion of our universe was discovered in 1924 by Edwin Hubble which led to the Big Bang theory. By the 1950s, Big Bang had been accepted by most astronomers (beating out the earlier static universe model). A multiverse theory (multiple Big Bangs) was first described by Hugh Everett in 1956, including what Everett called the “universal wave function”, the mother of all quantum wave functions, derived from Schrödinger’s equation.

  In 1979, Roger Penrose pointed out that the universe we see is both homogeneous (smooth in regard to matter) and isotropic (looks the same in every direction). He calculated an extremely low probability of this happening if initial conditions were random, thus giving rise to the anthropic principle which says that our universe must be fine-tuned for life. If it were not, we wouldn’t be here to observe it.

  In 1981, inflation entered the picture (proposed by Alan Guth) and by the 2010s, many cosmologists had resurrected Everett’s multiverse idea, even if they weren’t in complete agreement.

  Now in 2023, cosmology feels like it’s at the Crick/Watson/Franklin phase—that is, about midway through a 150-year process that resembles the discovery path for DNA. We now have several incredible telescopes capable of peering back to the origins of our universe, and the cosmic microwave background mapped by the WMAP and Planck missions have provided a wealth of evidence for the Big Bang, inflation, and hints of a multiverse.

  The most recent cosmology theories now explore reality on a much larger stage, in part to avoid Penrose’s conclusion that we are somehow special. Cosmologists today ask, “Can we define models and find evidence that we live in one ordinary universe out of many?” The answer so far: yes we can.

  In 2006, Laura Mersini-Houghton, Richard Holman, and Tomo Takahashi established a mathematical framework that describes a quantum landscape capable of generating Big Bangs. They made a reasonable assumption that, at its birth, our universe was a quantum-sized particle. Then, they used Everett’s universal wave function to compute the probabilities of its existence in various states. Mathematically, it turns out, our universe may be pretty ordinary. Not exotic, not special, not specially crafted to support life. One of many, and commonly produced.

  Which brings me to Laura Mersini-Houghton’s astonishing book published in 2022, Before the Big Bang: The Origin of Our Universe from the Multiverse. I couldn’t put it down, not even the second time I read it. Mersini-Houghton is a PhD theoretical physicist and a professor at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. She collaborated directly with big names in physics, like Roger Penrose, Michio Kaku, and Stephen Hawking, and now she provides us with a rational explanation of nothing less than the basis of reality. She describes a foundational quantum landscape that gave birth to our Big Bang and describes the quantum mechanism whereby a vast collection of universes routinely spring into existence over an eternity of time.

  This is not sci-fi. It’s real cosmology, in fact, the latest in scientific thinking. Better still, there are tantalizing hints from recent data collected by the Planck survey of the cosmic microwave background radiation that Mersini-Houghton’s view of reality is correct.

  Her theory begins with a quantum landscape of peaks and valleys representing every possible way Hugh Everett’s wave function of the universe could produce a physical universe. Each peak or valley is a discrete point of vacuum energy—potential energy in physics terms, the same energy contained in a glass of orange juice sitting on the edge of a counter. Push it just a little, and you’ll have an explosion of orange juice across your kitchen floor (your own personal Big Bang).

  This theoretical landscape has a ridiculous number of peaks and valleys (1 followed by 600 zeros), each with a different potential energy waiting to be triggered. Picture undulating dots extending off into the distance.

  What triggers a single dot to blossom into a new universe? Probability. The flip of a coin. The same random chance that tells us whether a photon passes through one slit or another (in the famous two-slit experiment) or whether an orbiting electron will be found at point A or B.

  But not every point in this bizarre landscape has an equal chance to be the site of a new universe. Some places (peaks) are highly unlikely to convert their potential energy into space and matter. Others (stable valleys) have a far greater chance. But with 10600 options, this landscape has plenty of high valleys—stable pockets with a large potential energy. Those are the ones that produce a universe like ours, which neatly explains Roger Penrose’s concern that a high energy universe like ours is extremely unlikely to occur. Mersini-Houghton’s landscape shows that it can and will occur many times over.

  The landscape of a universal wave function is first described in Chapter 18 by Sprig, then mentioned again by Nala in Chapters 21 and 31. I gave it a name: the Chaos Field. And while my fictional story can take us there, the real world equivalent would likely be far more abstract and only physical at a quantum level.

  Yet, Laura Mersini-Houghton’s theory may be more than a mathematical explanation of how universes could be produced from random quantum fluctuations of a universal wave function landscape. If her theory is correct, it pulls back the curtain on a new form of reality that we may never see with our eyes but is just as real as any star or planet.

  The big question: how can we find out if this quantum landscape is real? As it turns out, Mersini-Houghton and her collaborators have figured out several ways to experimentally test for it.

  If the landscape converts potential energy into a quantum particle (called an inflaton, which then kicks off inflation to create a new universe) then, like any quantum particle, it could be entangled (a quantum property commonly found in photons). Mersini-Houghton theorizes that we might find evidence of that primordial entanglement in the earliest snapshot of our baby universe: the cosmic microwave background, or CMB. In fact, she made seven predictions of “anomalies” that could only exist if our universe is part of a multiverse, and she believes they have already found six of them. As she says in her book, “In less than a decade, six of our seven predictions had significant if not definitive proof to support them. Our seventh prediction, which involves the motion of galaxies relative to the expansion of the universe (known as ‘dark flow’), remains an open question.” So, while there’s still some debate, there’s a fair chance that at least part of the landscape theory is correct.

  If you’d like to hear it from Laura Mersini-Houghton herself, watch this video How to Find a Multiverse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAL1-vzMvmA&t=18s

  How was that? Deep stuff? Good. That was my goal. My brain is still spinning from everything I’ve learned while writing this story. Cutting edge science never ceases to amaze me!

  I’d love to stay in touch (Amazon doesn’t give authors information about readers). Please go to http://douglasphillipsbooks.com and add your name to my email list. I’ll keep you informed about upcoming books, and I promise I won’t fill your inbox with junk. Also, at my website are pictures related to the stories and color versions of each book illustration.

  I hoped you enjoyed this fifth book in the Quantum Series. If you did, please consider writing a short review. It doesn’t matter if there are already a thousand reviews, yours will be unique, and future readers pay more attention to the most recent reviews anyway. For information on how to leave a review, go to http://douglasphillipsbooks.com/contact.

  Thanks for reading!

  Douglas Phillips

  Acknowledgments

  If you’re a writer, I highly recommend joining an authors circle. It’s a place (physical or online) where you gather with peers and exchange chapters (or whole books) for critique. The process is a bit intimidating at first, but the right group can provide needed feedback without deflating every hope and dream you’ve constructed for yourself since childhood. CritiqueCircle.com is one of those groups. This time I owe thanks to Darren Cook, Kathryn Hoff, and Landon Knauss for your valuable feedback. I really enjoyed reading your own stories, and I hope we’ll do it again in the near future.

  Thanks to Terry Grindstaff for correcting my misplaced commas and other mistakes. Proofreading takes a lot of concentration. I really admire your grit and your enthusiasm for the task!

  The colorful cover for this book came from Dane Low, who is quite the artist and a great collaborator for crafting an eye-catching design that tells its own story in a single glance. Thanks Dane!

  A big thank you to a great team of Beta readers: Calvin Clark, Nancy Bisson, Bill Gill, Jay Moskowitz, Jeff Cantwell, Juliana Greco, Jim Shurts, Keith Lavender, Rick Spencer, John Stephens, William Lea, and Marlene Phillips. I forced these fine people to read the book in two parts (divided at the end of Chapter 20, right at a major cliffhanger). The split Beta made things easier for me but harder for them, yet they provided excellent insight that only comes when a variety of viewpoints are considered. I had fun during Beta, I hope everyone else did too.

  And finally, thanks to you for reading! I’m thrilled to have an audience for my style of science fiction. If you enjoyed this book, please take a few minutes to leave a review on Amazon or Goodreads. Independent authors—those of us not associated with the high-price New York publishing firms—flourish or flounder based on reviews from readers like you.

  From the Author

  Quantum Series

  Quantum Incident —Prologue

  Quantum Space —Book 1

  Quantum Void —Book 2

  Quantum Time —Book 3

  Quantum Entangled —Book 4

  Quantum Chaos —Book 5

  And more…

  Phenomena

  Lost at L3

  For these and other works by Douglas Phillips, please visit http://douglasphillipsbooks.com. While you’re there, sign up to the mailing list to stay informed on new books in the works and upcoming events.