Eifelheim

Physics Notes

The model that Sharon develops for the multiverse was slapped together and given a coat of paint many years ago for the novella “Eifelheim” (Analog, Nov., 1986) from which the “Now” portions of this book derive. Mohsen Janatpour, who now teaches at San Mateo State in California, was most helpful in this and Janatpour Space was, and is, named in his honor.

Recently, variable light speed (VLS) theories have become a hot topic among cosmologists. One prominent advocate is João Magueijo, whose gossipy book Faster Than the Speed of Light is a good introduction, as well as an entertaining narrative of how physics actually gets done. I was pleased to read in his book that he considered the “Kaluza-Klein” approach that Mohsen and I came up with back in the 1980s, though unsurprised to see him reject it. I decided to keep it, just because.

In all fairness, the decline in light speed has not happened over historical times, but only in the aftermath of the Big Bang. It has been proposed as a way of getting around the kludge of inflaton fields, which were made up simply to make the Big Bang model work. A mysterious force, the inflaton, invoked simply to save the appearances of the theory and afterward allowed to disappear from the universe would never have passed muster with Buridan, and Will Ockham would have howled about the needless multiplication of entities. VLS theories nicely resolve the problem using inherent feedback loops that homeostatically fine tune the universe. No new entities are needed.

When we last spoke, Mohsen and I discussed also the quantization of the red shift. Some physicists see it; others don’t. Same data. One explanation for a quantized red shift is that time is quantized just as space is supposed to be. Since I had already invented the fictional chronon for the original “Eifelheim,” this new redshift question fits right in. If it’s true, we may have to revise the universe, again.