Cosmic strings

We know that the universe started from a hotter state and cooled. But different regions of the universe cooled at different rates. Bubbles of these cooler regions formed and spread across space. They intersected with other bubbles, and where they intersected, topological anomalies formed. Eventually, all of the regions of the universe had cooled, and the process stopped.

If you've ever seen a frozen lake, you've noticed the cracks in the ice. Those cracks form in a similar manner to what we call cosmic strings. The ice has gone through a phase transition from fluid to solid.

As an analogy, imagine water as molecules moving freely as a fluid, and then somewhere a crystal of ice forms. Other crystals of ice form, often as hexagons, and begin tiling the lake. Across the lake, a similar crystallization into ice has started and is tiling outward. Chances that these tiles line up when they meet are almost zero.

So there are phase imperfections in the universe. But what happens at these meeting points where the tiles, to use the lake analogy, don't match? The energy in between has essentially never cooled down because it can't phase transition in such a way to satisfy the disparate boundary conditions.

Now this energy is tremendous. And it is great enough to bend the nonlocal links the spin-two drive uses. But normally, there is not a lot of interaction between this cosmic energy and the links unless a link is used so often that it starts a phase transition of the space it travels through. The transition is slow and is slow to spread, but eventually it does, and if it meets the cosmic energy, a kind of instant phase change occurs, like water going from solid form to steam directly without passing through the liquid phase.

So this flash phase is energetic enough to realign the tiling of spacetime and, in the process, “bend” nonlocal links so that their endpoints no longer correspond and are either shifted or, in some cases, disconnected and reconnected to other endpoints in space.

While the energy is tremendous, the time it takes for readjustment is very small. The resultant power release for each link is not large. If the links realign one by one, then the process can go undetected.