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"It's hard to tell stories about critters that are not human. John W. Campbell tried it, in "Twilight," and everybody says it's a wonderful story, and nobody ever reads it twice."
- Jerry Pournelle
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| Waveform Hypothesis | ||
The "waveform" hypothesis is a literary device that Backbeat: A Novel of Physics uses to explore the relationship between quantum physics and the human condition.
One of the novel's main characters is a doctoral student at Royal Holloway College in the 1980's when string theory was just beginning to emerge as a viable candidate for a Theory of Everything (TOE). With that said, doctoral student Justin Bishop devised the "waveform" hypothesis based on the common theory that all energy has a wave nature and that matter is a derivative. If we have a wave nature at our root, be it the Planck scale or the more imaginable atomic and molecular scale, then does that nature have a bearing on our lives?
The "waveform" hypothesis contends that the wave nature we imagine in the quantum world is expressed in our nature, our actions, and our impact on the future. What we do today creates a waveform that will affect other waveforms, either constructively or destructively, for better or worse. No different or profound, I suppose, than "what goes around, comes around." Yet, if this were really true, what changes might we cause with a simple change of frequency? The possibilities are infinite.
| Technovelgy from Backbeat - A Novel of Physics,
by J. Frederick Arment. Published by Blue Hot Books in 2004 Additional resources -
|
Current textbook theory splits the universe into two scales: the tiny quantum world and the macro world in which the laws of Einstein and Newton rule. At what point the jump between worlds is made is not clear. Physicists themselves are a bit fuzzy on the matter. They have come up with a compromise called the Copenhagen Interpretation, which includes a hypothesis called Complementarity. The "waveform" hypothesis is just that, a hypothesis. Trouble is, the scientific method is of little help in proving or disproving whether the quantum world can teach us about our nature. To predict and experiment at the quantum scale is difficult, if not impossible. To predict and experiment at the human scale, with the problems associated with measuring the resulting exponential chaos, is definitely impossible!
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