Jim Beall
A new discovery has been announced! Many will postulate that great changes are imminent while others will downplay its significance. Some may even cast doubts on the whole matter.
Whatever the discovery may be, the following two things are inevitable:
1) Scientists will rush to their labs to confirm or debunk it, and
2) Science fiction writers will use it in stories.
Science fiction authors typically "wave their hands" and postulate non-existent technologies ("handwavium") such as faster-than-light space drives in their stories. Many of those authors will react to the new discovery by simply changing the names of their previous handwavium but otherwise write the same stories as before. Other writers will extrapolate from the discovery in ways that will eventually look silly in hindsight. Once in a while, however, authors will see implications that the scientific discoverers themselves did not, making the authors appear almost prescient.
On the other hand, sometimes inventors and scientists will do things that authors would never dare put into stories, proving once again that truth is stranger than fiction.
Electricity was the science fiction handwavium at the dawn of the twentieth century. It was invisible (except when it made sparks and started fires!), could be used to make muscles of even the dead twitch (galvanism), and led to a seemingly unending flow of real inventions that gave even the most outlandish fictional creations a measure of plausibility. Jules Verne's mighty submarine Nautilus (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, 1870) was powered by electricity. Other authors went much further with books about all-electric utopias. British novelist Marie Corelli (who until World War I outsold contemporaries Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, and H. G. Wells, combined) would even repeatedly cite "The Electric Principle of Christianity" in her break-out novel, A Romance of Two Worlds (1886).
Mary Shelley used alchemy—the handwavium of her age—to infuse life in her 1818 novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. When it was re-written for the stage and screen in 1927, the method became electricity, the handwavium of that age. The crystal retorts and bubbling beakers—long the centerpiece of any mad scientist's secret laboratory—had been pushed from center stage, replaced by tall, flickering coils imbued with mighty energies by lightning.
Electricity began as a luxury for the rich. In 1881, J. P. Morgan paid Edison to personally wire his New York City mansion and install a steam engine and dynamo in the backyard, making his the first private residence in the city to be illuminated by electricity for all to envy at night. However, just four years later—the same year Marie Corelli published her novel in Britain—engineers on this side of the Atlantic brought the 45th hydroelectric generator online. Three years later, the number had grown to two hundred and the number of fossil fuel electric power plants was even greater.
Thomas Edison, "The Wizard of Menlo Park" (featured in a wizard's cap and robes on the July 9, 1879 cover of the New York The Daily Graphic), did many things to market electricity. Among his stunts was one that probably no author could have ever gotten past an editor. In fact, those reading the story today might be forgiven if they thought it fiction, and preposterous fiction at that.
Specifically, on October 31, 1884 in New York City, Edison's company participated in an evening presidential campaign torchlight parade—except, unlike all the others that night, they did not carry torches. Instead, Edison Electric Lighting Company employees marched, 400-strong, each wearing a helmet topped by an incandescent bulb. See Figure 1
Caption: Figure 1. From the November 15, 1884 story in Scientific American. Source: the Thomas Edison Papers, http://edison.rutgers.edu/parade.htm
All the men marched holding a power cable, each plugged into the cable with electric wires running up one sleeve, out the collar, up the neck, and onto the bulb-helmet. The power for the cable came from the center of the formation: a complete horse-drawn, coal-fired, electric plant. A fire engine pumper followed close behind, along with water tank wagons and coal carts.
Consumers, too, had an "anything goes" attitude towards electricity that would give authors pause. This is perhaps best demonstrated in the perfectly preserved "Gilded Age" mansion "Maymont," in Richmond, Virginia. Completed for Mr. James Dooley and his wife Sallie in 1893, its twenty-two chandeliers (Figure 2) and thirty-six wall brackets (Figure 3) appear to contain both electric bulbs and wax candles. The bulbs were powered from a nearby electric trolley station (the house electric breaker is a bare copper knife switch in Mrs. Dooley's bedroom!). The candles were not wax, however, but gas jets supplied through internal tubes with gasoline vapor manufactured on-site in a hand-cranked rotating drum. Engineers (the author is one) greatly prize redundancy, but even they would draw the line at co-locating gasoline vapors and first generation electric wiring. Maymont is open for docent-led public tours, electric fixtures, air-gas drum, and all.
Figure 2. Source: author's collection.
(Maymont chandelier 2 --- jpg)
Figure 3. Source: author's collection.
(Maymont bracket --- jpg)
As the first power grids began to form and expand, more and more people began to enjoy the benefits of electricity. By 1915, the price of electricity had dropped to one-fifth what it had been in 1900. The introduction into everyday life of marvelously useful inventions like electric trolleys, cars, and elevators helped convince many that anything was indeed possible. In 1900, for example, about one-third of all cars on the road were electric, so Tom Swift and His Electric Runabout (1910) hardly raised an eyebrow, even though its combination of 100 miles per hour top speed and 400 mile racing range have yet to be matched over a century later. (Tesla advertises a top speed of 125 miles per hour but only a 245 miles range, and on the road at that.) Likewise, the title weapon in Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle a year later doubtless seemed an imminent next step. Although John Cover would pay homage to that "invention" in 1972 when he patented the TASER ("Thomas [A.] Swift's Electric Rifle"), the electricity pulse weapon used by the protagonist in that book also remains to be duplicated.
As electrical devices continued to proliferate into everyday life, electricity began to lose its mystery and, with it, the ability of authors to use it to suspend reader disbelief. Fortunately, not one, but two new discoveries had been announced—X-rays (1895) and nuclear radiation (1896)—that offered entirely fresh potential for handwavium.
Professor William Roentgen's discovery of X-rays (by using still-somewhat-mysterious electricity, induction coils, and a glass tube holding a vacuum) was quickly followed by the publication of X-ray photographs. Authors soon included rays of all sorts in their stories. H. G. Wells was probably the first to feature ray weapons, wielded by the invading Martians in his War of the Worlds (1897). Wells may have been the first, but he was hardly the last. Indeed, ray weapons still a remain science fiction staple in the form of disintegrators, annihilators, blue ray of death, macro beamers, zero-rayers, primary projectors, blasters, stunners, phasers, parallo-ray pistols, and many more.
In 1922, Dr. Charles Steinmetz would give destructive ray weapons a real-world plausibility boost. Though little known today outside the electrical engineering community, Steinmetz was surpassed perhaps only by Edison and Tesla as both scientist (he literally "wrote the book" on AC current math) and inventor (he held over two hundred patents). Due to his dwarfism, hunchback, and hip dysplasia, he might have appeared the very embodiment of the mad scientist cliché, yet he asked a young co-worker and his family to share his mansion so that he could have children under his roof. (He would even legally adopt his co-worker, making the children his grandkids.) Though barely four feet tall, his professional stature was so great (newspapers called him, "The Wizard of Schenectady") that one of Edison's first steps after founding General Electric in 1892 was to purchase the company that employed Steinmetz to acquire his existing patents and his services. Among those who came to visit him in Schenectady were Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla, and Lord Kelvin.
So it was no wonder that Dr. Steinmetz was able to assemble a considerable audience including dozens of newspaper reporters and other guests, including Edison himself, in his Schenectady laboratory for demonstrations. He had been working on lightning protection devices for electric towers and realized he had no good tool to observe lightning, let alone test proposed fixes (he would later invent "lightning arrestors"). What he did on March 2, 1922, was take large blocks of wood and blast them into splinters with his own, man-made lightning, as reported the next day by the New York Times under the headline, "Modern Jove Hurls Lightning At Will" (see Figure 4).
Figure 4. Source: New York Times free archives, March 3, 1922.
Rays were also put to use by Edgar Rice Burroughs in his Mars stories, the first of which was serialized in 1912 (Under the Moons of Mars). In the Mars series, though, rays were put to work not only as weapons, but also for flight (the "Eighth Ray" of the sun was stored in anti-gravity buoyancy tanks aboard air ships) and atmosphere generation (the "Ninth Ray" of the sun). E. E. "Doc" Smith may have been first to use "attractor beams" in 1928 (Skylark of Space). He would also use them in his 1931 Spacehounds of IPC, but call them "tractor beams" and added "pressor beams," as well.
Science began to catch up to ray weapon fiction in 1960 with the award of the initial laser patents. Within a year lasers were being sold and used. Almost as quickly, Frank Herbert's Dune (1965) featured "lasguns." Lasers would rapidly become real-world cutting beams, quite similar to some in earlier science fiction, and a laser weapons system was declared operational on the USS Ponce (AFSB(I) 15) in 2014. Additionally, in 2007, the U.S. military first demonstrated its Active Denial System (ADS) which can cause significant surface discomfort at ranges over a mile. The ADS performance characteristics are reminiscent of the pain projectors in Edmond Hamilton's 1928 Crashing Suns and, more recently, Gene Wolfe's convulsors in The Urth of the New Sun (1987). Many ADS demonstrations can be viewed on the internet, including one being installed in the Los Angeles Pinchness Detention Center in 2010. (http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/New-Laser-Weapon-Debuts-in-LA-County-Jail-101230974.html)
The second new discovery that would transform both science and science fiction was Henri Becqueril's 1896 identification of nuclear radiation. Building on his work and that of the incomparable Marie Curie (the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different fields of science), Ernest Rutherford demonstrated in 1902 how elements could emit new and invisible energies and change into other elements. A new and even more mysterious force had emerged onto the scientific scene, giving authors totally new handwavium.
Garret Putnam Serviss, the first U.S. professional science fiction writer, soon put atomic energy to work powering the spaceships in his A Columbus in Space (1909). George Griffith went darker in his The Lord of Labour (1911) by using "salts of helium and radium" ore to destroy steel (warship armor, for example) and other nefarious purposes. Edgar Rice Burroughs, not content with just swords and ray guns in his Mars battles, added guns firing bullets containing "radium" that would explode once the opaque coating on the projectile was scraped off and light allowed to reach its contents.
The power that could be obtained from harnessing the atom was described as virtually unlimited in science articles, so it is hardly surprising that authors went ahead and wrote it as the energy basis of everything from faster-than-light travel to galactic empires. Atomic rockets and spaceships became standard fare in science fiction. It seemed that one could justify writing almost anything, just as long as a story character quoted Einstein's famous equation, E = mc^2.
The World Set Free (1913) by H. G. Wells deserves special mention, because Wells saw early an implication in the science that was eerily prescient. That is, atomic weapon events would create and deposit elements that would continue to release energy over time, meaning that the danger would not end once an atomic bomb was done exploding. Thus, in his story, atomic bomb sites were tainted by lingering radioactive contamination that made the sites uninhabitable until all the residual elements had finished their nuclear decay. Also in his novel, Wells predicted that—once the full impacts of atomic bomb detonations were experienced—the Great Powers would band together and avoid future conflicts amongst themselves that would require their use. His view may have been more pastoral and "happily ever after" than the actuality of history since 1945, but the United Nations did happen and subsequent nuclear wars have not.
John W. Campbell took over as editor of Astounding in 1937 and significantly changed science fiction. Campbell, who had a degree in physics, used his position to reject stories with bogus science. His attention to scientific fidelity may have reached an acme of sorts with "Deadline," his early 1944 editor-author collaboration with Cleve Cartmill. In that short story, Campbell called upon his physics training and pre-war scientific journals to get enough right about Uranium-235 fission bomb development into the story that both men were subjected to investigations by the Counter Intelligence Corps.
Perhaps an even greater impact resulted from Campbell's demand that authors have scientists act like scientists, engineers act like engineers, and focus less on how gadgets worked and more on their implications. Many established writers—perhaps dependent on stock characters and cliché plots—found themselves unable to sell anything to Campbell (now the science fiction standard setter). Isaac Asimov wrote, "the carnage was as great as it had been in Hollywood a decade before, while silent movies had given way to the talkies" ("Introduction: The Father of Science Fiction," in Astounding: John W. Campbell Memorial Anthology (1973), edited by Harry Harrison).
Among those taking their places were Robert A. Heinlein (former naval officer with a Bachelor of Science in naval engineering) and Isaac Asimov (professor of biochemistry), soon followed by A. E. Van Vogt and many other young writers influenced by the stories Campbell was publishing.
Among Heinlein's early stories were "Blowups Happen" (under his real name) and "Solution Unsatisfactory" (as "Anson MacDonald") Both were written in 1940 for Campbell and Astounding, and both involve nuclear fission. The first got some of the (not yet invented) technology wrong, but it accurately presented the kinds of design and operator concerns involved. The second focused on weaponizing radioactive materials ("dusting" them on enemy territory) instead of bombs, but it precisely portrayed the tensions of the arms race still years away. Additionally, the use of radioactive isotopes in ways similar to what Heinlein wrote actually would be considered during the Manhattan Project (per a 1943 report during the Manhattan Project).
In 1940, A. E. Van Vogt would also make extensive use of atomic energy in his break-out novel, Slan. Unlike Heinlein, however, Van Vogt used the atom purely as a handwavium source of almost magic powers, much as others had a half-century before him. For example, the protagonist uses atomic energy to dissolve steel handcuffs, with the source an atomic generator concealed in a wedding ring! Even more remarkably, the protagonist makes one escape by flying his craft deep into a body of water but using a bow-mounted projector to break the bonds of all the megatons of water molecules along his flight path. Nonetheless, the novel remains a wonderful read with atomic energy being merely one of a virtual smorgasbord of dazzling handwaviums such as anti-gravity, neutronium-like steel, telepathy, planned mutations, space travel, paralyzing beams, monstrous cyclotrons, and more.
In Heinlein's short story "Green Hills of Earth" (1947), a spaceship operator ("Noisy" Rhysling) who had been radiation blinded during a nuclear accident years before and became a poet, saves his space liner from destruction during another nuclear failure at the cost of his own life. The story was almost as eerily prescient about a worst case nuclear power plant accident as H. G. Wells had been about atomic bombs in The World Set Free (1913). During the accident at Chernobyl (1986), several nuclear operators (almost certainly knowingly) incurred fatal radiation exposures—just as Heinlein's "Noisy" Rhysling did—attempting to stem the tragedy. The events at Fukushima Daiichi (2011) thankfully caused no fatalities, but plant operators continued to operate key mitigating steam-driven equipment—the Reactor Core Isolation Cooling System (RCIC)—in steamy high temperature compartments in total darkness for days after all site power (including batteries) was exhausted.
At the end of World War II, the United States found itself with the actuality of nuclear energy. It was no longer handwavium, but it had not come easily and certainly not cheaply. The two largest complexes involved more than one hundred thousand people working in over six hundred buildings on about three hundred square miles of land in Tennessee (Oak Ridge) and Washington (Hanford). The U.S. government was so confident that someone would invent something atomic of importance that a federal regulation (42 U.S. Code §2181) was published on August 1, 1946—less than a year after the war ended—requiring inventors to turn over any atomic weapon designs and report any other inventions that used nuclear material. The language as to the fate or final ownership of any such inventions remains unclear, but the language includes "just compensation" and possession of the special nuclear material that would likely be needed for experiments and testing is restricted. That regulation remains in force, potentially impacting both inventions by entrepreneurs and plots by science fiction writers, alike.
Film makers quickly recognized the handwavium opportunities of nuclear energy. In 1954, almost as soon as the post-war A-bomb testing became public, both giant mutant ants (Them!) and a fire-breathing mega-dinosaur (Godzilla) burst out of the depths of the desert and ocean atomic test sites, respectively, and onto the silver screens. The first flick would launch the careers of Fess Parker (Davy Crockett) and James Arness (Marshall Dillon of Gunsmoke fame); the second would create a media and merchandizing franchise that still endures sixty years later.
Many similar movies soon followed but, as ridiculous as those scripts were, what the U.S. and Soviet governments did was actually worse. At least in the movies, all involved were trying to leave the atomic bomb sites. In Operation Desert Rock (1951 - 1955), the U.S. government repeatedly detonated atomic bombs and then marched servicemen into the bomb sites. They carried instruments like radiation detectors and dosimeters, and turned back at radiation or exposure levels thought to be safe. All those in charge, however, either underestimated the health impacts from inhaling airborne radioactive particles or missed that exposure vector entirely, leading to significantly elevated cancer risks to between twelve and twenty-two thousand servicemen. Once the Soviets learned of Desert Rock, they replicated it in the Totskoye ("Snowball") nuclear exercise, but they used about twice the explosive yield of most of the American tests and exposed about forty-five thousand servicemen.
The public bomb testing and the heavily advertised push for peaceful uses of the atom soon changed the fiction landscape for nuclear power in the middle of the twentieth century just as inventions and the expansion of electric power had done for electricity as the century had begun. One immediate effect was that nuclear speculation pieces were no longer penned solely by science fiction authors. An early example can be found in this 1948 promotional material from the Association of American Railroads which wondered, "Will atomic energy power tomorrow's railroads?"
As we know now, the answer turned out to be, "no," but the possibility of a nuclear-powered locomotive was actually investigated as "Project X-12," a joint study by Babcock & Wilcox and the University of Utah. One reason for abandoning the project was that calculations revealed that the necessary shielding alone would weigh more than a non-nuclear locomotive.
A nuclear train engine was hardly the oddest speculation. That title might be better given to the March 1956 Mechanix Illustrated when it suggested a nuclear reactor powered dirigible.
Ford followed in 1958 with a concept car design called the Nucleon. The designers apparently based the dimensions on assumptions that nuclear generators would be miniaturized almost as much as A. E. Van Vogt had written eighteen years earlier in Slan, because they assumed that both a power reactor and its accompanying steam plant could be made to fit into a car's trunk. Even the specially designed nuclear plant in the U.S. Navy's super-secret NR-1 submarine (launched in 1969) would probably not have been small enough, and it used very highly enriched uranium fuel, cost twelve million dollars, and produced only sixty horsepower of propulsion. The scale model mock-up of the Nucleon is on display at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.
The French automobile answer to the Ford Nucleon was the 1958 Arbel. Instead of a reactor-steam plant engine, though, the Arbel was to be powered by a 40-KW nuclear thermal generator (a "genestatom") powered by cartridges of nuclear waste
The year 1954 also marked the reboot of the Tom Swift book series, with five titles featuring his son ("Junior") as the protagonist. Just as the awakening agent for Frankenstein's monster changed from alchemy (1818) to electricity (1927), the new Tom Swift series would feature "atomic" inventions, rather than the electric ones of four decades earlier.
The fifth was Tom Swift and His Atomic Earth Blaster. While not reaching the level of prescience achieved by H. G. Wells and Robert A. Heinlein, Los Alamos National Laboratory did some preliminary design work in the 1970s on devices similar to the one in that fictional tale, including taking out patents (Nos. 3,693,731 and 3,885,832). In fact, readers can compare the devices themselves, because the Tom Swift book contained a simplified sketch of the invention, just as the patent applications did fifteen years and more later.
Just two years later, however, Tom Swift and the Caves of Nuclear Fire took handwavium to a bizarre level with a nuclear-turbine tractor transporting an atomic drill which then tunneled down into African caves where apparently uranium was undergoing fusion and somehow becoming anti-matter. The science might have been nearly as flawed in Tom Swift and His Triphibian Atomicar (1962), but many (including this author) forgave everything in that title because they so very much wanted one, even if it did look like a flying Edsel. (See Figure 5. Source: author's collection.)
Figure 5. Source: author's collection.
Meanwhile, in the real-world, the Atomic Energy Commission and other federal agencies were also dealing with nuclear propulsion. In July 1946, even before the first speculation of the atomic train and dirigible, the New York Times ran a War Department announcement that the Army Air Forces was beginning work with Fairchild Engine and Aircraft Company of New York on using atomic energy on aircraft. Other news releases followed over time and soon concept art began to appear in magazines such as Air Progress Science and Mechanics, and even the RAF Flying Review. Reports that the USSR was flight testing an atomic-powered bomber of their own also made it into Aviation Week.
Scientists and engineers proceeded to develop two types of nuclear jet engine designs. In one, the jet gases were heated by contact with the reactor fuel (direct cycle) while the other had the jet gases flow through a heat exchanger heated by reactor coolant (indirect cycle). Both nuclear reactor types were designed, built, and tested. Versions of the direct cycle were brought critical, coupled to jet engines, and tested at thrust. The indirect cycle reactor was flight tested while critical for ruggedness checks, though never hooked up to the aircraft engines.
Eventually, after fifteen years and over one billion dollars of development, the entire program was cancelled 1961. Between atmospheric contamination concerns, ambient radiation levels, and—most importantly—the successful development of ICBMs to fulfill the original mission, there was no longer the will to continue devoting vast resources and monies on the projects. The direct cycle test engines are on public display in Arco, Idaho. The engines are enclosed by fences because—over fifty years after last operating—they still remain radioactive.
Figure 6. Source: author's collection.
The Soviet bomber that had sparked such press coverage turned out to be the conventionally powered Myasishchev M-50 ("Bounder"). It was regarded as a failure and the one prototype built can be viewed at the open air Monino Aviation Museum in Russia (Figure 7). The real Soviet nuclear jet engine program was also terminated—in 1969—just as the U.S. one had been eight years before.
Figure 7. Source: author's collection.
During those years, nuclear jets were not the only propulsion devices being researched. NASA, the AEC, Los Alamos, Livermore and others would work on nuclear rocket engines all through the 1950s (the first reactor engine was tested at 78 MW in 1959) and the 1960s (the last test operated at over 4000 MW) according to the NASA Historical Date Book, Volume II, Table 4-80. The nuclear rocket program was terminated in 1973.
Science fiction writers, however, had already moved on to fusion plants, anti-matter engines, warp drives, space gates, and more. Meanwhile, scientists have achieved brief fusion bursts, laboratories have made a few dozen nanograms of antimatter, and researchers have even teleported the quantum state of photons almost one hundred miles. Writing hard science fiction was becoming increasingly challenging.
Fortunately, the interplay between science professionals and professional science fiction writers was increasing dramatically. For example, Arthur C. Clarke wrote one of the earliest stories about solar sails entitled, "Sunjammer" (Boys Life), in 1964. It was a thrilling tale of sun-yacht racing (that this boy read and re-read to tatters at the time) complete with race maneuvers, escape capsules, and solar flares. One of the recent NASA projects on solar sails was named "Sunjammer" in honor of Clarke's story. The opening chapters of the highly acclaimed 1974 novel Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle feature the arrival of an alien vessel that had crossed an interstellar distance using a light sail. In 2010, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency launched the experimental spacecraft IKAROS (Interplanetary Kite-craft Accelerated by Radiation Of the Sun), which used a light sail to modify its trajectory as it crossed the interplanetary distance between Earth and Venus. The Principal Investigator for NASA's Near Earth Asteroid Scout solar sail mission currently scheduled for 2018 is Les Johnson, who has a MS in Physics and BS degrees in both Chemistry and Physics. Mr. Johnson has numerous peer-reviews publications to his credit and has authored a number of science books, but he is also a science fiction author whose latest work Rescue Mode (co-authored with Ben Bova) was published by Baen Books in June 2014.
This scientist-author-reader cycle may be one of John Campbell's enduring legacies. Consider that Campbell serialized Hal Clement's—real name Harry Clement Stubbs, World War II pilot with a BS in Astronomy and a MS in chemistry—famous Mission of Gravity in 1953 in Astounding. That story involved interactions between humans and small, unexpected, intelligent beings that had evolved under very high gravity (up to 700g). That same theme was revisited in 1980 by Dr. Robert L. Forward in his award-winning first novel, Dragon's Egg. In that story, intelligent beings the size of sesame seeds have evolved on the surface of a neutron star, and interact with human space travelers. Dr. Forward, a physicist whose doctoral theses was entitled "Detectors for Dynamic Gravitational Fields," once described the novel as "a textbook on neutron star physics disguised as a novel." Dr. Forward also recounted that in the 1960s he had written a letter to Hal Clement suggesting a novel about tiny creatures living on the Sun. (The older author declined.) Note that this was precisely when Dr. Forward began, wrote, and defended his gravity thesis, suggesting that he been influenced by Hal Clement's earlier book. Additionally, Niven and Pournelle visited Dr. Forward in 1973, who then advised them on light sails for Mote in God's Eye. How many future scientists were influenced in turn by that book?
Finally, one of the most enduring memes in science fiction is faster-than-light (FTL) travel. After all, if a story is to take place outside our solar system then some such transportation method is required unless one includes the very long passages of time that relatavistic speeds would mandate. Once Mars and the other planets of our solar system were more or less confirmed not to harbor civilizations, almost any story involving aliens also required FTL travel. Early works (e.g., E. E. "Doc" Smith's Skylark series) tended to use brute force along the lines of lots of power means lots of acceleration which leads to speeds faster than light. Einstein's papers on relativity changed the way authors approached the problem, resulting in a great many stories with handwavium references to hyperspace, warp, and gates.
Wormholes have always offered undeniable possibilities because Einstein himself agreed that general relativity suggested they were mathematically possible. The solution is called an Einstein-Rosen Bridge (or Lorentzian wormhole, or Schwarzschild wormhole). As a propulsion method, however, the math is not promising as it also suggests any such wormhole would close faster than light could traverse it. Furthermore, simply the need for a black hole causes many problems. Nonetheless, the "blessing" of general relativity has led to wormholes being used extensively in science fiction as a means of traveling to distant locations in shorter times than allowed by relativity in normal space.
Authors with science pedigrees have used especially creative handwavium FTL methods in their stories. For example, gravity expert Dr. Forward had his Dragon's Egg aliens perfect a gravity warping drive. David Brin—BS in astrophysics, MS in applied physics, and PHD in space science—used not one but several different ones in his 1983 Hugo and Nebula winning Startide Rising, including hyperspace, overdrive jumps, transfer points, and even a psi-based "denial of reality" drive. The first part of Brin's novel was published in Analog as "The Tides of Kithrup" in 1981, ten years and two editors after Campbell passed away.
The FTL "landscape" changed in 1994 when theoretical physicist Dr. Miguel Alcubierre published his paper, "The Warp Drive: Hyper-fast travel within general relativity," in the science journal Classical and Quantum Gravity. Briefly, an Alcubierre type drive would propagate a wave that contracted space ahead of a volume ("warp bubble") while expanding it astern, carrying the contents of the warp bubble along at FTL speeds without the contents of the warp bubble itself ever exceeding lightspeed locally. Subsequent analyses and theoretical studies may have actually reduced some of the perhaps insuperable problems. These include refinements to warp bubble geometry (making it a warp "ring") that vastly lowered energy requirements; the 1997 experimental quantification of the Casimir Effect (hinting at a possible energy source); and updated proposals of conformal gravity (which would eliminate the Alcubierre drive need for "exotic matter").
Perhaps one of the first science fiction authors to utilize the new discoveries was David Drake in With the Lightnings (1998). In that book, the first of a series (ten books and counting!), FTL is achieved by a drive that creates a warp bubble allowing ships to maneuver by the equivalent of sails in the Casimir radiation. Intriguingly, during warp travel, visible but immaterial alien figures often appear and wander through passageways and hull bulkheads, alike. Some of the FTL-related quantum field theory equations contain "ghosts" ("gauge ghosts," or "Faddeev–Popov ghosts" such as the ones in the Schwinger–Dyson equations). The chemistry analogues of such "ghosts" are catalysts, in that both are added to produce results but are not part of the final products, hence, they "disappear." In private correspondence with the author, Drake disavowed basing those story phenomena on insights from quantum field theory equations, citing his degree in Latin as evidence. Thus, if such visual artifacts do appear in reality, it will have been from prescience rather than analytical inspiration. Sadly, some of the more recent conformal gravity adjustments to those equations may eliminate the need for "ghosts."
Another author to address the Alcubierre drive potentials was Dr. Travis Taylor. Unlike Drake's far future setting, Taylor set his Warp Speed (2006) in the present day and took head-on the hard science challenges of fictionalizing an Alcubierre drive (by name). In fact, he has stated that much of his motivation came from that, as a reader, he perceived a lack of hard science in current science fiction. Like Isaac Asimov, Robert Forward, and Les Johnson, Taylor used his engineering and scientific credentials (BEE, three Masters, and two PHDs) as both springboard and underpinning for his fiction. The Casimir effect force has been hypothesized in the scientific literature to be a possible energy source for nano-machines. Central to Taylor's story is creating exactly such machines, and doing so in a reader-accessible way. Where the science stops and the handwavium begins is not always apparent.
In closing, scientists triumphantly demonstrated in 2013 a compact integrated silicon chip that could measure Casimir force. Travis Taylor's protagonist had used even smaller devices to power his Alcubierre drive seven years earlier. His character shared his middle name with that of Robert Anson Heinlein, in tribute to one of the first authors developed by John Campbell and perhaps the one most widely read. Campbell's scientist-author-reader cycle continues.
Copyright © 2015 Jim Beall
Jim Beall (BS-Math, MBA, PE) has been a nuclear engineer for over forty years, a war gamer for over fifty, and an avid reader of science fiction for even longer. His experience in nuclear engineering and power systems began as a naval officer. Experience after the USN includes design, construction, inspection, enforcement, and assessment with a nuclear utility, an architect engineering firm, and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (USNRC).