On writing “what if”
Writing speculative fiction means asking wonderfully strange what if questions.
For example, a few of the questions that popped into my head after completing a beginner’s course on quantum mechanics:
What if time only happens to particles with mass?
The probability of the wave function assumes time. Waves are massless. When interacting with mass, waves turn into particles because they become fixed in time. How come no one has thought of this? Hmm, they probably have but found it too silly to mention. Could a wave-based civilisation be living on Earth right now, and show us a perspective where time doesn’t matter? How would consciousness arise in a massless creature? How would they communicate with us? What would we have in common?
What if mass could be freely converted into energy, and vice-versa?
Maybe that’s what dark energy is all about, continuously converting mass into energy and pushing everything in the universe apart … wait … maybe we could find a way of harnessing this? What if dark energy doesn’t interact with matter, but only with antimatter? We could use antimatter to collect dark energy. Where would we collect it from? Probably from inside a black hole. Or maybe that’s a bit far-fetched? The only thing in common between black holes and dark energy is that they’re both dark, and we know quite little about them.
What if we could align the charge of all subatomic particles to create a different sort of magnet?
This alignment could lead to materials with enhanced strength and unprecedent magnetic power. Where would we use the new super-magnet? Certainly in new types of transportation, medical and electronic devices. We could also create new powerful magnetic fields and use it for protection, for example terraforming new planets or building giant force-shields to protect against invaders.
Got the idea? The “what if” possibilities are endless, and work across different sciences, and other topics. We start by questioning the way things work, and imagining alternatives. And where science doesn’t understand how things work yet (eg unifying quantum mechanics and general relativity), we make things up. More excitingly, some of these ideas might one day turn into stories.
