Chapter 1
Einstein had been wrong. Not that he was far off; the universe did seem compelled to obey the rules according to the paradigm of relativity. And according to every experiment that was ever designed—beyond atomic physics—nature behaved just as relativity predicted. Space travel, to any great extent, appeared to be a practical impossibility because of the vast distance between heavenly bodies. The speed of light was the universal speed limit, and even if crafts were designed that could approach this speed in outer space, it would still take eons of time to move about from heavenly body to heavenly body (though it wouldn't seem to take so long to the space travelers themselves). Therefore, this was of no practical use to either governments, or corporations. And even if it were possible to design such crafts, the amount of energy required and the costs would be literally astronomical. So, governments played around with the moon, Mars, Venus, some comets, and asteroids, but nothing of much use or interest was gained by it.
It really was nothing more than a mathematical technicality, something very few people could comprehend to any degree, whatsoever, and fewer still could see the beauty in it. With human minds, and everything else in the universe, designed to experience reality in three dimensions, it is startling that it was ever discovered. Computers, however, had been employed to simply analyze logic and math itself; to take mathematic suppositions and see if anything intriguing would come up from it. It wasn’t that these machines were capable of free thought. They were just doing as they were commanded; throwing out or changing one rule or principal at a time and seeing what would happen. Very little had come from this and some of the brilliant yet skeptical minds wondered what could possibly be discovered by machines designed to work by a system of logic, questioning the system of logic itself. Nevertheless, the fruitless computations went on. The next step in the skeptic’s line of reasoning was that if something new, unusual, or intriguing was discovered in the calculations, how would the computers be able to assign it as such, flag it, and bring to the humans in charge an understanding of what was discovered? If the computers were using the logic they were designed to use, everything would simply make logical sense to them.
Contrary to the skeptics’ logically beautiful line of reasoning, computers, while logical, are not philosophical, nor do they see beauty in anything; they simply do as they are told, and that’s just what they did. The mathematics, of course, was unfathomable to comprehend by nearly everyone. Those who supposedly did understand the math relied heavily on the computers. But the bottom line was this: Anything traveling in the three dimensional universe, i.e. traveling in a straight line, is limited by not being able to exceed the velocity of light.
However, space was found not to be three dimensional at all. The fourth dimension had been discovered mathematically, as incomprehensible as this was. And, if traveling according to the mathematical paradigm of this fourth dimension, everything in the universe was exponentially closer together. The way that it was described to the average budding intellectual on the street was this: if you were able to look at the three dimensional universe from the perspective of the fourth dimension, the three-dimensional world would look like a sine wave with high peaks and valleys, but with extremely rapid frequency. So high was the frequency, that it was as though the three-dimensional universe was tightly folded up. Traveling in the three-dimensional world would be a-kin to having to climb up a steep mountain, traveling a much farther distance than the actual height because of the numerous and lengthy switchbacks. But, when traveling according to the fourth dimension, it would be like cutting straight across these switchbacks, and thus decreasing the length of the journey immensely. Of course, those in the know say that this analogy is not entirely correct, but for all practical purposes this is how everyone visualized it.
The actual length from the earth to the furthest reaches of the known universe was calculated to be approximately twenty light years, when traveling via this ‘fourth dimension.’ In theory, this made the entire universe accessible for space travel within an individual’s life time. Now, going back to Einstein, all of the great theorists wondered if the laws of relativity held up when traveling via the fourth dimension, as they did when traveling exclusively via the third dimension. Initial results of experiments were encouraging, but there were always discrepancies. Two camps ensued: those that held that relativity had failed relative to the fourth dimension, and those that held that the fourth dimension was incompletely understood, or slightly miscalculated.
