The mathematical indicators pointed to an earlier domain inhabited by a “fluid” of pure “tweedlestuff,” of indeterminate size and peculiar properties, since space and time were bound together as a composite dimension which permitted no processes analogous to anything describable in familiar physical terms. There were grounds for supposing that if an expanding nodule of disentangled space and time were introduced arbitrarily through some mechanism’-pictured by some people as a bubble appearing in soda water, although this wasn’t really accurate.-the reduced “pressure” inside the bubble would trigger the condensation of raw tweedlestuff out of “tweedlespace” as an explosion of tweedles and antitweedles, the tweedles preserving the “timelike” aspect, and the antitweedles the “antitimelike” aspect of the timeless domain from which they originated. Their mutual affinity would precipitate their combination into a dense photon fluid in which timelessness became reestablished, which tied in with Relativity by explaining why time stood still, for moving photons and accounting for the strange connection in the perceived universe between the rate at which time flowed and the speed of light. The high-energy conditions of the Primordial photon fluid, the density of which would have approximated that of the atomic nucleus, would favor the formation of “tweeplet” entities to give rise to matter interacting under conditions dominated by the strong nuclear force, which manifested itself to restore nonAbelian gauge symmetry with respect to the variance introduced by the separation of space and time. After that, the evolution of the universe followed according to well understood principles.
The theories currently favored on Earth attributed the domination of matter, as opposed to antimatter, in the universe to a one-part-per-billion imbalance in ‘the reactions occurring in the earliest phase of the Bang, in which the energy available produced copious numbers of exotic particles not found in the present universe, whose decay patterns violated baryon-number conservation. In the present universe they appeared rarely, only as transient “virtual particles” and were responsible for the almost immeasurable, but measured, 1O°1-year mean lifetime of the proton.
It was believed virtual particles were virtual because the conditions of the present universe could not supply the energy necessary to sustain tweeplets. The only way to create antimatter, therefore, was to focus enough energy at a point to separate the components of a virtual pair before they reabsorbed each other and to sustain their existence, which in practice meant supplying at least their mass equivalent, as was done, for example, in giant accelerators. This was the reason for the widespread skepticism that any net energy gain could ever be realized from annihilating the antimatter later. At best it was felt to be an elaborate storage battery, and not a very efficient one at that; the power poured into the accelerator would be better applied directly to whatever the antimatter was wanted for.
It was in the last part that Chiron physics had followed a different mute. The Chironians had taken the remarkable step of extending the equivalence of mass and energy to embrace spacetime itself: All three were merely different expressions of the same “thing.” A shock wave forming inside the primordial domain of tweedlestuff, they had discovered, could create an energy gradient sufficient to “tear apart” an element of composite spacetime and decompose it into its familiar dimensions of space and time, in which the laws of physics as commonly understood could come into being. Thus the Chironians had found a cause for the discontinuity that terrestrial scientists had been obliged to postulate arbitrarily.
The subsequent expansion of space followed directly from the Chironian mass-energy-space equivalence relationship: The cooling photon fluid actually transformed into space as well as matter tweeplets, the ratio depending on the temperature and shifting from one favoring tweeplets to one favoring space as the universe cooled down. Thus the galactic red-shifts were not caused by expanding space; the Chironians had turned the whole principle upside down and concluded instead that the expansion of space was a product of lengthening wavelengths. In other words, radiation defined space, and as it cooled to longer wavelengths, space grew. Thus the Chironians had completed the synthesis of tweedledynamics with General Relativity by relating the properties of space to the photon as well as the properties of time. The “islands” of matter tweeplets left behind from the cooling photon fluid remained dominated internally by the strong force while gravitation became the dominant influence In the macroscopic realm created outside, and in many ways they continued to behave as microcosms of the domain from which they had originated.