Well, Neil Gaiman has just finished his first draft of Odd and the Frost Giants—and I’ve just finished my first draft (sort of—I’m just filling in some last-minute bits) of the John Assaraf-Murray Smith book, The Answer. Neil’s is a 14,000-word novelette about giants and such; mine is a 98,000-word nonfiction tome on quantum physics, neuroscience and how to build your dream business. (So I guess you could say, there are elements of fantasy in both.) I’m not sure when his is coming out; mine’s coming out in May.

I just went over a passage comparing the last pages of C.S. Lewis’s The Last Battle (the final book in the Narnia series) to findings of quantum science. Speaking of Aslan’s Country (the book’s version of heaven), the character says, “The further in you go, the bigger everything gets. The inside is larger than the outside.”

And according to quantum science, this turns out to be a fairly apt description of the universe: the smaller the level you tap, the greater the power there. (Which is why a nuclear bomb makes a bigger bang than dynamite.) Go way deeper (smaller) than nuclear, and you reach the Zero Point Field, which has an energy density of 10-to-the-94th-power ergs per cubic centimeter. That’s ten thousand billion, billion, billion, billion times more energy in a single cc of “empty space” than you have in all the matter in the known universe. (Imagine what you’d have in a quart.)

Now this is fun stuff to write about.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 26th, 2007 at 7:55 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.