My stories usually begin when I've read about some physics news that piques my interest. So, the narrative is generated from an explication and extrapolation of a science article. However, once I start, sometimes I have to go out and search for a possible physical effect to provide a solution to a problem that the narrative creates.
As I was writing the second novella in The Einstein Nexus, I found myself creating an area (I usually call them bubbles of time, since their effect is sphere shaped) of shifting time which became a danger, because unlike the former bubbles, this one didn't dissipate but grew. It turns out that if two time singularities are created at the same time in close proximity they will warp spacetime just like masses and orbit each other and continue to ever shift time. Who knew? Okay, got a problem to work through.
One obvious solution to stopping this disaster is to separate the time singularities. Separate, they will dissipate. Now the problem as I
imagine it is getting into the bubble of ever-shifting time and being able to operate in it and cause the singularities to spiral away from each other without being affected by it. So, I need some more physics (highly speculative physics I admit).Well, a few years ago I spent quite a bit of time developing a wormhole drive, and that drive required the creation of negative mass-energy, and negative mass-energy repels both negative and positive mass-energy. (Yes, you could create a perpetual motion machine with it which I think is unrealistic, but you can always postulate some reason why that's not possible). But since I had used such a negative mass-energy generator before and the universe survived, I thought I would use it again. (If you're curious about wormholes and such go to my page, The Art and Science of the Future Chron Universe and scroll down to the wormhole entries).
Okay, once I get to the time singularities I can throw some negative mass-energy at them, they separate, disaster averted. But as I said above, how do you travel in the time-shifting bubble without being affected? More extrapolation needed. Now, in a series of books I call the Time Series I developed the science of Quantum Temporal Dynamics which like most field theories has particles, time particles.
In QTD the particle of time is called a chron and you have a chron+ which caused time to tick faster and chron- which cause time to tick slower (you can see the Standard Model with chron particles here). Now, I already knew (from my novels) that if you use the old wormhole generator to create a bubble within a bubble of negative mass-energy (and spin them up so they thin out, of course), you can enhance the effect of one or the other of the chron particles within that space. So, if I'm traveling through a general region of time that is shifting into the past I can create a restricted region in which I can offset that shift. I can function like normal, or as normal as you can function in such a strange environment.
So, I've “solved” the physics problems of where the narrative has taken me. How it all works out, I'll probably find out in the third novella which I am writing now.
If you go here, you can read the previews of both novellas or purchase them.
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