Use the Force, Steve

Anyway, I hopped from page to page to page, making notes, saving bookmarks, and within a few hours I had this premise: man (Steve Keeley) is injured and wakes up with strange, new mental abilities (thank you, Stephen King). Man thinks he is hallucinating. Perhaps going crazy. But in reality he's sensing (in a completely new way) the constituent elements of existence, how all matter and energy in the universe influence each other. Except there's no way for him to know this. At least not until he meets a particle physicist.

I purchased several books based on my Internet research, each of which are credited at the end of my novel. But the most important one I read was The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question? That book, written by Leon Lederman with Dick Teresi, combines a history of experimental physics with an explanation of modern research (up to 1993, when the book was published). Lederman discusses the purpose of particle accelerators and makes a case for building the Superconducting Super Collider, which ultimately was abandoned after fourteen miles of the fifty-four mile tunnel were dug. He also explains the concept of the Higgs field and the importance of its carrier particle, the Higgs boson. He named this particle "the God Particle" because of its importance to the Standard Model, which is a quantum field theory that describes the fundamental particles that make up matter and energy. The Higgs boson, however, hasn't been observed yet, and finding it (or not finding it) is part of why the SSC was going to be built. Lederman helped me understand accelerators well enough that I figured I could set part of a book there. Later I found a novel, Einstein's Bridge by John Cramer, that was set in an alternate reality in which the SSC really was built. The combination of these two sources, along with a little artistic license, helped me develop the fictional NTSSC.

I was in love with the term "God Particle" because it sounded like the perfect title for a book about spirituality and science. But I had a little problem--the theoretical Higgs field doesn't have anything to do with metaphysics. Lederman's term was in reality nothing more than a catchy name, but luckily for me many people assumed otherwise, and I found lots of links to sites that discussed metaphysics and/or weird ideas interpolated from the outcome of real physics. One idea that particularly intrigued me was how the universe itself might be an organism of some kind, or a kind of giant computer, or perhaps even self aware.

There are many different versions of these ideas of interconnectedness. In The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Unierse, Lynne McTaggart apparently explores the concept of a "cobweb of energy exchange" that links everything in the universe. I haven't read this book (I didn't even realize it existed until after I wrote my own book), but I did read essays on the Internet that discuss similar ideas. Another popular notion is that the physical world is somehow created by consciousness--that our own sentience is connected to a greater self-aware universe. I've seen a book on Amazon that discusses this idea, The Self Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World, but I haven't read that one, either.

Armed with these metaphysical suggestions, I decided that Steve Keeley was able to detect the way real particles interacted with each other, that he could calculate the effects of these interactions and be able to make predictions based on his results. Determinism is the idea that all processes are predetermined by definite causes, that if you have perfect information about the state of any entity, you can predict its future states. In my story, Steve can detect the exact states of all particles around him, so he's able to guess how they might behave sometime later. He also begins to understand how he could perhaps use energy already in the environment to alter the states of certain particles, and thus affect entities without physically touching them. After a while, I realized I was writing an idea that was pretty similar to the Force, as in "Use the Force, Luke." My nod to George Lucas occurs in Chapter Six.

As far as I understand it, all of Steve's abilities are complete science fiction. But what isn't necessarily fiction is the idea of everything being interconnected. Every particle in the universe influences the particles around it in some small way, which in turn influence their surrounding particles, and so forth. I discussed this idea with a friend, L. Scott Rubin, and he dubbed the idea the "Universal Relational Database." Which isn't surprising since relational databases are what his job is about.

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