He watched as the machine’s interpretation of the commands appeared on one of the small auxiliary screens built into the console, nodded his approval, then tapped a rapid series of numerals into the keyboard.
“Continue.”
The lower part of the display went blank and a few seconds later began filling again with new patterns of symbols. Clifford watched intently, his mind totally absorbed with trying to penetrate the hidden laws within which Nature had fashioned its strange inter-plays of space, time, energy and matter.
In the early 1990s, a German theoretical physicist by the name of Carl Maesanger had formulated the long-awaited mathematical theory of Unified Fields, combining into one interrelated set of equations the phenomena of the “strong” and “weak” nuclear forces, the electromagnetic force, and gravity. According to this theory, all these familiar fields could be expressed as projections into Einsteinian spacetime of a complex wave function propagating through a higher-order, six-dimensional continuum. Being German, Maesanger had chosen to call this continuum eine sechsrechtwinkelkoordinatenraumkomplex. The rest of the world preferred simply sk-space, which later became shortened to just k-space.
Maesanger’s universe, therefore, was inhabited by k-waves—compound oscillations made up of components that could vibrate about any of the six axes that defined the system. Each of these dimensional components was termed a “resonance mode,” and the properties of a given k-wave function were determined by the particular combination of resonances that came together to produce it.
The four low-order modes corresponded to the dimensions of relativistic spacetime, the corresponding k-functions being perceived at the observational level simply as extension; they defined the structure of the empty universe. Space and time were seen not merely as providing a passive stage upon which the various particles and forces could act out their appointed roles, but as objective, quantifiable realities in their own right. No longer could empty space be thought of as simply what was left after everything tangible had been removed.
Addition of the high-order modes implied components of vibration occurring at right angles to all the coordinates of normal spacetime. Any effects that followed from these higher modes were incapable, therefore, of occupying space in the universe accessible to man’s senses or instruments. They could impinge upon the observable universe only as dimensionless points, capable of interacting with each other in ways that depended on the particular k-functions involved; in other words, they appeared as the elementary particles.
The popular notion of a particle as a tiny, smooth ball of “something”—a model that, because of its reassuring familiarity, had been tenaciously clung to for decades despite the revelations of quantum wave mechanics—was finally put to rest for good. “Solidness” was at last recognized as being totally an illusion of the macroscopic world; even the measured radius of the proton was reduced to no more than a manifestation of the spatial probability distribution of a point k-function.
When high- and low-order resonances occurred together, they resulted in a class of entities that exhibited a reluctance to alter their state of rest or steady motion as perceived in normal space, so giving rise to the quantity called “mass.” A 5-D resonance produced a small amount of mass and could interact via the electromagnetic and weaker forces. A full 6-D resonance produced a large amount of mass and added the ability to interact via the strong nuclear force as well.
The final possibility was for high-order modes to exist by themselves, without there being any component of vibration in normal spacetime at all. This yielded point-centers of interaction that offered no resistance whatsoever to motion in spacetime and therefore always moved at the maximum speed observable—the speed of light. These were the massless particles—the familiar photon and neutrino and the hypothetical graviton.
In one sweeping, all-embracing scheme, Maesanger’s wave equations gave a common explanation for the bewildering morass of facts that had been catalogued by thousands of experimenters in a score of nations throughout the 1950s to the 1980s. They explained, for example, why it is that a particle that interacts strongly always interacts in all possible weaker ways as well, although the converse might not be true; clearly the 6-D resonance responsible for the strong nuclear force had, by definition, to include all possible lower modes as subsets of itself. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t be a 6-D resonance. This picture also explained why heavy particles always interact strongly.