I've always thought that sci-fi offers a platform to build mind-blowing stories—as fantasy does. What makes it even better is...sci-fi makes the impossible very much possible.

Modern science is a vast wonderland that exceeds one's wildest imagination. I took it upon myself to explore its wilder side, put my own creative spin on it and convey that to the world. Some very real science is embedded in Komoreby, starting with its peculiar premise. Here's a glimpse down the rabbit hole for anyone who wants to know more!

What's in this:

1. Large Hadron Collider (LHC)
2. Quantum physics
3. Time travel
4. Parallel universes
5. String theory
6. Extra dimensions
7. Simulation Hypothesis
8. Aliens
9. Futurism
10. Neuroscience
11. Climate change & sustainability

Note: There may be spoilers, so read the story first before venturing beyond this point.

LARGE HADRON COLLIDER (LHC)

The story's Colossal Ring Collider (CRC) is a gigantic particle collider that features primarily in Chapter 3.

It's a larger version of the very real Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which is located at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva.

You might not have heard of it, but the internet you use right now was invented at CERN!

A particle collider accelerates proton or ion beams in a massive ring at almost the speed of light and collides them at the center of big detectors. By doing this, scientists study the building blocks of matter at the smallest of scales. It helps them unravel the mysteries of the universe.

What sort of mysteries? For example, everything we see makes up only 5% of the universe. Dark matter accounts for 27%, but we don't know what that is. So maybe we'd discover dark matter particles. Parallel universes? Extra dimensions? The LHC is out to find them!

This machine is the largest scientific facility on Earth—with a 27km ring that stretches out beyond Geneva a hundred meters underground! One of its main detectors, the CMS, is four stories high, and it resides in a subterranean cavern. Built with the collaboration of 10,000 scientists from around the world, it has a price tag of a whopping $4.75 billion and draws power from two countries to run.

This insanely intricate machine has complex electrical, ventilation and cooling systems. It has the world's biggest cryogenic system and pumps tons of liquid helium to maintain its 9,600 electromagnets at a temperature of absolute zero—colder than outer space! 

It's also the world's biggest racetrack, with beams whizzing 11,245 laps around the ring and creating 1 billion collisions per second. Each beam contains 3,000 bunches of particles, and each bunch has 100 billion particles!

You might already know some of this from the story—though the story's collider is bigger, with a tunnel that is 80km long. That's not that far off, since CERN is planning to build the Future Circular Collider, which is 100km!

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QUANTUM PHYSICS

For a moment, she dwelled on how insular fields of science were interconnected like a seamless fabric. It was the world of cells and biology, until you zoom in far enough, and then you enter the realm of physics, where it's a game of chess between fundamental particles and forces.

This is a quote from Chapter 15, when Evanna contemplates the workings of the universe.

Quantum physics is the science of matter and energy on the atomic and subatomic level. The subatomic world is mind-boggling and does not meet our expectations of reality.

But first things first! We see ugly diagrams of atoms with spheres and lines—those are not accurate representations of this stuff. Atoms are tiny, and their nuclei are even tinier. If we scale everything up so that an atom can sit on your palm, then a tennis ball would be as large as the Earth. And if we enlarge the atom to the size of a big building, its nucleus would be the size of a peanut.

https://youtu.be/FfWtIaDtfYk

The nucleus contains protons and neutrons. What if we break those down? A proton is made up of quarks—those can't be broken down far as we know. That's why we call a quark an elementary particle.

There are only a handful of elementary particles that make up everything we know. What about forces? There are only four fundamental "forces" in the universe. We call these "force-carrying" particles bosons. Together, these particles and their interactions make up our reality—that game of chess Evanna speaks of!

Some of the weird behavior of subatomic particles would be superposition (Inoue's words in Chapter 8). A rock is a rock and an ocean wave is a wave—they can't be the same. But particles act like waves too! That's what that double-slit experiment is about. So particles can be in two places/states at once!

To envision this better, Inoue tells Evanna the Schrodinger's cat experiment. You put a cat inside a box with something that has a 50% chance of killing the cat. If we apply the behavior of subatomic particles here, the cat is both alive and death inside the box at the same time—until you open the box and look at it, at which point it assumes one state. This collapse of the waveform and the particle assuming one state upon observation is the Copenhagen interpretation. To observe something, you shoot it with light, and when it comes to things that are so small, it's like you hitting an ant with a baseball.

What we're dealing with in the story is the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics. This interpretation suggests that all the possible states diverge into different universes. So going back to the cat experiment, it's like in one universe, the cat is alive, and in the other, it's dead. That means there could be copies of us in other universes—one where I haven't written Komoreby or another where I've made it a horror story or maybe I'm chilling with dinosaurs in yet another.

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TIME TRAVEL

Did Inoue's words on time in Chapter 8 pique your interest? Here's some more cool info about time.

Though we have an intuitive understanding of time and how it works, the way it actually works may be baffling. There are no definitive answers as to why it seems to flow and why the arrow of time is always one way. Time is not rigid—it changes depending on relative speed and proximity to mass, which means that "past", "present" and "future" are subjective.

Einstein's theory of relativity predicts some weird phenomena. It shows us that space and time are not disparate things, but linked. So it's actually spacetime. The time that elapses for someone who is stationary is not the same as that for someone who is moving in space. Time ticks slower for the person in motion. The faster you go, the more drastic the difference. If you ride your bike close to the speed of light for an hour, years would've passed for those around you! That means you've traveled into the future!

If we don't take time dilation into consideration when planning, say, a voyage into space, there's going to be major confusion. For example, a ship that journeys to Alpha Centauri might get there in five years, but that is the time which elapsed for us on Earth. The ship is in motion, which means that those onboard might experience just a 3-year journey. You can calculate time dilation to know the exact numbers. There's another variable to this other than speed. That's gravity.

Most of us know gravity as a "force", but it's not! It's actually the distortion of spacetime around objects with mass. Higher the mass, bigger the distortion. This is why the gravity of the moon is less than that of the Earth—the moon is way smaller. And time is also distorted. The time on the ground floor of a skyscraper would be slower than that on the penthouse, since the former is closer to Earth. As Inoue explains to Evanna in Chapter 8, if you hang around a black hole for an hour, where gravity is very high, and come back to Earth, 50 years might've passed here. Again, that's how you can travel to the future!

And in Chapter 20, Evanna brings out a good point on how Einstein's brilliance has made our lives easier. That's GPS. The satellites around Earth are farther away from the planet, which means their clocks would tick faster. If we don't account for this difference, our GPS simply won't work.

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PARALLEL UNIVERSES

There are a few speculated types of parallel universes. They could be like universe bubbles that exist beyond the observable universe.

Maybe they could be what Brian Greene, an amazing theoretical physicist, calls "branes". Universes could exist on membranes that might collide.

Maybe it's a bit of everything. Some universes might have different laws of physics altogether—an idea explored by Stephen Baxter in his novel Raft, in which the gravity in the story universe is a billion times higher than our universe (this means there are small worldlets there rather than big planets).

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STRING THEORY

There's so much we don't know about the universe, and the holy grail of physics is to find the theory of everything—one theory that would explain how the universe works.

Right now, we have Einstein's theory of relativity for the larger universe, and quantum mechanics for the small. But they don't fit together. There's something missing in the picture.

Why is gravity so weak? As Ed Morken tells Evanna in the story, gravity is the weakest of the "forces" and a fridge magnet would have more electromagnetic force than the gravity of Earth. Maybe it partially exists on a different dimension (which is something the LHC hopes to solve). Is there a quantum of gravity (the hypothetical graviton)? The equations of the large don't apply to the small.

The theory of everything would unify the large and the small (like one ring to rule them all). And the string theory is a prime candidate for just that.

The string theory suggests that those pesky subatomic particles are not point-like, but rather, like strings. Particles are excitations of the "fields" in the cosmos. Remember those fundamental forces? So a photon (light particle) is an excitation of the electromagnetic field. The mass and charge of the particle, or string, would depend on how it vibrates (I named chapter 18 "vibrating string" not just due to the vibration of Evanna's heart strings, but also as a play on this theory). I have written a short story that plays with this idea—you can find it in my flash fic book!

For the equations to work though, string theory requires the existence of extra dimensions! There are versions of the string theory, so depending on the version, the number of dimensions could be 10 or more!

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EXTRA DIMENSIONS

We currently function in 3 spatial dimensions, so it's hard for us to imagine what extra dimensions would be like. The story brings out Carl Sagan's explanation.

If we were 2D beings living on a 2D plane, we would have a hard time understanding the 3rd dimension. And if a sphere were to crash through our plane, we would only perceive a line expanding and contracting, but not the full picture.

https://youtu.be/MGv8MMi8QO0

One speculation is that these dimensions could be curled up in very small scales. From a distance, a wire would look flat, but up close, you would see it's 3D.

Similarly, there could be extra dimensions hidden away, and they could take the shapes of Calabi-Yau manifolds (refer to the Prologue). The following is a 2D representation of a Calabi-Yau manifold.

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SIMULATION HYPOTHESIS

This is Evanna's crazy theory in Chapter 22, and it's actually a fun speculation, even among scientists. The way we tend to play video games, our reality could be a simulation (most likely simulated by us in the future). Evanna uses her gaming experience to expand this theory when she explains it to Shane.

She also explains how such an elaborate simulation can be done. It might be possible when we level up in the Kardashev scale, which is a rough scale for how advanced a civilization is, based on their energy use.

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ALIENS

In Chapter 10, Evanna says she'd like to find aliens! It might sound absurd at first and might bring to mind UFO theories, but there's science behind the search for aliens.

It's estimated that there could be 300 million potentially habitable planets in our galaxy alone, and there are 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe! And "habitable" here takes into consideration what it takes for Earth-like life to exist. There could be lifeforms that defy our wildest imagination—remember Evanna's thought exercise on "stellar civilizations"?

The Drake equation helps us to figure out how many technological civilizations could be there, though there are so many variables. The Fermi Paradox is about why we haven't found the aliens yet, and there are many great solutions offered to this paradox which you can find on the internet. Maybe the aliens leave us alone like how we leave ants alone—not worth their time. Maybe civilizations go extinct before they could reach a certain level of technological advancement (Great Filters).

As for how to find aliens, SETI Institute is dedicated to keeping eyes and ears out for aliens who might be trying to communicate with us! SETI stands for "Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence".

Signs of artificial megastructures such as Dyson swarms could also suggest advanced alien civilizations, though these are yet to be found. If the light output of a star is mysteriously less, that might be due to a Dyson swarm surrounding it. More on that in the next segment. Harvard University actually offers a free course on how to find aliens (which I signed up for). You get to learn what to look for when searching for habitable planets, basic biochemistry to figure out potential alien biology and more.

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FUTURISM

In the story, the infrastructure company Helion, owned by Enrico Solheim, has come up with a skyhook and a vactrain concept called ZipTube. These are all in the horizon in our own reality!

The Hyperloop is a vactrain concept by Elon Musk. When it comes to orbital infrastructure that could help us get to space without wasting rocket fuel and energy, the skyhook is considered to be the most feasible. The skyhook consists of tethers in orbit that could hook spacecraft and propel them out to space.

Driverless cars are already a reality—we have them in operation in one or two cities! Equorea, Evanna's favorite car, is inspired by one of the fascinating new car designs—Mercedes VISION AVTR. This futuristic car really does not have a steering wheel, and it can move sideways!

Komoreby has some nice architecture. I've made use of organic shapes for the city's buildings, with lots of greenery. Solar and wind power is big in this eco-city, and there are hydroponic urban farms, which have been proposed in our own world.

Evanna brings out the Kardashev scale in Chapter 24 and futuristic concepts are smattered throughout the story, including space engineering!

As mentioned before, the Kardashev scale is a rough scale of technological advancement based on energy use. A Type I civilization would utilize energy at planetary scale—making use of the home star's energy that falls on the planet. Just a fraction of the sun's energy that falls on Earth in any given moment could meet all our energy needs! Since we're currently using fossil fuels, we're not even a Type I yet.

A Type II is a stellar civilization that utilizes almost all of the energy output of its home star. This is done by constructing Dyson spheres, or more accurately, Dyson swarms. A Dyson swarm is composed of many structures that encompass a star. The sun is so big that a million Earths could fit into it—so this is something we might be able to do way into the future!

A Type III is a civilization that uses the energy of its entire home galaxy! It's hard for us to imagine what that sort of civilization might be like.

https://youtu.be/rhFK5_Nx9xY

To come up with a theory to explain the inexplicable events in her life, Evanna thinks of the Matrioshka brain, which is a massive computer powered by a Dyson swarm. It might just have the computational power necessary to run a simulation akin to what's speculated by the Simulation Hypothesis.

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NEUROSCIENCE

There's a neuroscience experiment in Komoreby that I inserted there for very many reasons, including plot and character building. It's a real experiment! Here's a bit more on that, though I will not elaborate on everything, since I want to see what readers make of it.

This experiment is conducted at Harvard University and other institutions in their basic neuroscience programs. It makes use of a small device to tap into the electrical signal that a cockroach leg sends to its brain. One reason cockroaches are the insects of choice is because they can grow back legs. Two pins are stuck into the femur and coxa to pick up the signal.

Evanna initially associates this experiment with dissections, since she thinks the cockroach would be killed or mutilated alive. Shane volunteers in order to conduct it the way it's actually done at Harvard University. The cockroach, which is cold-blooded, is put under general anesthesia by using cold water.

This is a nod in the direction of responsible handling of small animals in science, which has made significant progress in the past years. Animal dissections were more prevalent in schools in the past—including Sri Lanka in my mom's time. These have been banned on ethical grounds, discomfort caused to some students and also because of the message they might convey to young people about animals.

Hence, at Harvard University, the very first thing they impress upon students before conducting this particular experiment is that animals must be treated with respect—and that the cockroach must be anesthetized so it won't feel pain. Yep, the cockroach. I mean, I hate them too, but the very fact that we tap into their leg to study how nerves and brains work suggests they feel pain, yes? And how do I know this? I took that course too (on Edx).

There's another cockroach experiment that does not involve surgery—"cyborg cockroach", which you will find in the show Mind Field. These experiments still spark ethics debates, however: "They encourage amateurs to operate invasively on living organisms" and "encourage thinking of complex living organisms as mere machines or tools." (Michael Allen Fox, a professor of philosophy at Queen's University in Kingston).

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CLIMATE CHANGE & SUSTAINABILITY

The theme of sustainability is built into the story—from the eco-city's design to eco-friendly transportation such as the vactrain, skyhood and electric cars.

Anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change would lead us to the next mass extinction if left unaddressed. As NASA, UN and other scientific bodies have found out, the global temperature rise must be kept below 2 degrees Celsius to avoid catastrophic effects that would cause eco-systems to collapse, intense heatwaves, food insecurity and the death and displacement of millions of people.

The most pressing problem here is the use of fossil fuels, but transitioning the world away from it is costly and slow. In the story world, the city of Komoreby has already taken steps in the right direction in this regard. How does burning fossil fuels lead to climate change?

Fossil fuels are natural fuels such as coal or gas, formed in the geological past from the remains of living organisms. Therefore, these are obviously finite resources (unlike renewable energy like solar power). When they burn, carbon from fossil fuels combine with oxygen to form carbon dioxide, which is a greenhouse gas (traps heat in the atmosphere and warms the planet).

Another problem that aggravates this is deforestation. Forests are the lungs of the world—they breathe in carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen. But they are getting destroyed at an alarming rate. The main cause of deforestation is animal agriculture. Forests are cleared to make pasture land to breed farm animals and also for their feed crops. In fact, as much as 90% of Amazon destruction is due to cattle ranching, as well as soy-farming to feed billions of farm animals.

Growing food to feed animals and then using those animals as food is an extremely inefficient way of obtaining protein. This is a massive wastage of energy, land and grain, on top of aggravating the problem of greenhouse gas emissions.

To put that into perspective, it takes a 1000 liters of water to produce 1 liter of cow's milk or one beef sausage, while a plant-based alternative would use 90% less water. How do I know these numbers? I worked remotely for an environmental nonprofit based in Melbourne!

Here's a stunning video that puts everything in a nutshell with real numbers and scientific research:

https://youtu.be/F1Hq8eVOMHs

Professor Edgar Hertwich, writing for a UN report: "Animal products cause more damage than [producing] construction minerals such as sand or cement, plastics or metals. Biomass and crops for animals are as damaging as [burning] fossil fuels."

40% of the world's grain is fed to farm animals when they could feed people. This is why Phillip Wollen states in his speech: "Every morsel of meat we eat is slapping the tear-stained face of a starving child." This grain that is fed to farm animals in the US alone could feed 800 million people (Cornell University).

To make matters worse, ruminants such as cows produce methane, which is almost 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. Animal agriculture accounts for more greenhouse gas emissions than all the cars, trucks, planes, ships and global transportation combined!

As Evanna brings out in Chapter 22, where she offers a glimpse into her motivations for living plant-based, only 4% of all mammals are wild, the rest being humans (36%) and farm animals (60%)! And a mind-boggling 70% of all birds on Earth are farmed poultry, whereas those that are living in the wild are just 30%! Large swathes of the planet are put aside to breed these animals, and if we let nature reclaim these lands, we could grow forests to tackle the climate change problem.

Oxford University: "A global switch to diets that rely less on meat and more on fruit and vegetables could save up to 8 million lives by 2050, reduce greenhouse gas emissions by two thirds, and lead to healthcare-related savings. It could also avoid climate-related damages of $1.5 trillion (US)."

This is why UN scientists and prominent environmental bodies urge the world to drastically reduce meat consumption. Scientists have proposed flexitarian diets such as the Eat-LANCET plan to encourage people to eat a plant-centric diet, which seems more doable to most than going fully plant-based. Giants like Unilever and forward-thinking individuals like Bill Gates are also funding plant-based alternatives to bring about this transformation. With alternatives that look and taste the same as traditional animal products, and plant-based recipes all over the internet for any dish imaginable, it's getting increasingly easy in today's world to make a huge difference.

Even though eating more plant-based is the most important (and effective) action we as individuals can do to avert the climate crisis, most works do not portray this or champion this cause. Evanna is about to change that!

The following is a university in Malaysia celebrating plant-based food—an event that I was happy to have been part of!

https://youtu.be/8SlVBGwLEHA