In previous posts, here and here, I mentioned that I was slowly and painfully making my way through Michio Kaku’s Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the 10th Dimension (1994).  Dr. Kaku, a brilliant futurist and theoretical physicist who’s CV would embarrass the fictional Sheldon Cooper (Big Bang Theory), has produced a series of best selling books on physics that represent a genuine attempt to bring physics to a level comprehensible to mere humans.  Hyperspace is a fascinating, if a little math heavy, and, although it contains cultural references that are now a little dated, the conceptual physics involved in his explanations of hyperspace and the multiverse are both timeless and essential to a rational understanding of humanity’s place in the Cosmos.

Lisa Randall’s Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions (2005), to me is more readable than Hyperspace, mostly because Dr. Randall segregated the lion’s share of the explanatory math to an appendix appropriately called “Math Notes”.  Sure, the main text includes some math, but what would physics be without math.  Dr. Randall is a physicist specializing in particle physics, string theory, and cosmology.  As such she offers an interesting perspective from Dr. Kaku on the multidimensional universe.  Unfortunately, I read Hyperspace first and the two books cover much of the same territory in regards to the development of multidimensional physics theory.  If I had the option to do it over again (perhaps in some other dimension) I would read Warped Passages first.  That would have made the math much easier to deal with.

So, what did I get out of reading these books?  The most important thing is an understanding of how physicists do what they do, to get access to inside stories of these brilliant minds as people, and to get an appreciation of the Quixotic search for the theory of everything.   The second, and most important to me as a writer, is to gain a solid appreciation of the science behind the multiverse and multiple dimensions, and how science fiction writers contribute to the science.  Both Dr. Kaku and Dr. Randall credit science fiction with first breaching the boundaries of physics before theoretical and experimental physics described what was once considered fantasy.

So, with all that being said, is it any wonder that I am a dyed-in-the-wool Whovian?  I mean, travelling at will through time and space in a blue police box that is bigger on the inside?  Who could resist that, especially viewed through the filter of theoretical physics?  Doctor Who provides a cosmology without boundaries, something that physics demands.  But that’s okay, because in my world and my writing, the only boundaries are the imagination of the reader.

© Copyright 2018 by Kevin Fraleigh