Hello, friends, and welcome back to the A to Z Challenge.  For this year’s challenge, I’ve been telling you more about the universe of Tomorrow News Network, my upcoming Sci-Fi Adventure series.  In today’s post, I is for:

INVERTED SPACE

On ancient Earth, there were three great revolutions in physics.  First came Isaac Newton and his laws of classical mechanics.  Then came Albert Einstein with his theories of special and general relativity.  And lastly, near the end of the 21st Century, Dr. Harold Strickland published his theory of inverted space.

In the simplest possible terms, inverted space is a place where the laws of physics are reversed.  It’s a universe of anti-physics, if you will.  Dr. Strickland believed that in order for our universe to exist as it does with the laws of physics that it has, then an equal and opposite universe must also exist to create balance.

One might expect such a radical and bold theory to spark debate and controversy among the scientific community.  It did not.  Few took any notice of Strickland’s work at the time.  It wasn’t until many years after Strickland’s death that he received the recognition and credit he deserved.  What changed?  The discovery of faster-than-light technology.

You see in our universe, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light; in inverted space, nothing can travel slower than light.  Of course, jumping into inverted space is dangerous.  The laws of physics are reversed, after all.  The attractive forces that hold atoms and molecules together become repulsive forces.  Molecular and atomic decoherence can occur within seconds!

But a quick jump in and out of inverted space is relatively safe, and a sequence of quick, carefully calculated “inversions” can allow a spacecraft to cross the vast distances of the galaxy.

It’s also worth noting that in inverted space, time runs backwards instead of forwards.  This troubled Dr. Strickland, yet it was an unavoidable consequence of his math.  If you were to jump through inverted space and then jump back to your starting location, would you not arrive before you departed?  Would this not violate causality and create a time travel paradox?

As it turned out, nature has its own ways of preventing paradoxes, even if Dr. Strickland couldn’t find them in his math.  When you push two magnets together, either positive to positive or negative to negative, the magnets resist.  They repel each other, and the harder you try to push them together, the harder they push back.

Something similar occurs in inverted space.  If you jump through inverted space and then attempt to jump back to your original location, your spacecraft will be deflected off course.  Your past and present selves seem to repel each other, like magnets, and so this is known as the chronomagnetic effect.

Nothing in the theory of inverted space predicted this chronomagnetic effect would exist, and nothing about the theory of inverted space can help explain why it occurs.  So while inversion theory is more advanced than relativity theory or classical mechanics, it still does not provide a complete picture of how the universe works.

For a complete picture of how the universe works, you’d have to learn about chronotheory, the science of time travel.  And next time on Tomorrow News Network: A to Z, we’ll talk about the people who use chronotheory to bring you tomorrow’s news today.