![]() It showed a compensated view of hyperspace, vastly magnified. The avatar Amorphia stood - arms crossed, thin, black-gloved hands grasping at bony elbows - gaze fastened intently upon the screen on the far side of the lounge. Rocks, moons, planets, Orbitals, even Rings and Spheres, hardly show at all. Black holes show as thin and twisting waterspouts from clouds to sea supernovae as long lightning flashes in the overcast. ![]() The Grid and the plain of real space are curved, rather like the ocean and the cloud would be round a planet, but less so. ![]() The small, sharp lights on the undersurface of the cloud cover are stars the waves on the sea are the irregularities of the Grid on which a ship traveling in hyperspace finds traction with its engine fields, while that sparkle is its source of energy. That is the view a ship has in hyperspace as it flies like a microscopic insect, free between the energy grid and real space. Add to the cloud many sharp and tiny lights, scattered on the base of the inky overcast like glinting eyes: singly, in pairs, or in larger groups, each positioned far, far away from any other set. Now imagine a smooth blanket of cloud above the ocean, a shell of black velvet suspended high above the water and also extending to the horizon, but keep the sparkle of the sea despite the lack of sun. It stretches to the clear curved limit of every angle of horizon, the sun burning on a billion tiny wavelets. Imagine a vast and glittering ocean seen from a great height. And like I said at the start, none of it exists anyway, does it?)Īnyway, that's more than enough of me pontificating. (I know it's all nonsense, but you've got to admit it's impressive nonsense. some form of meta-space? Where fragments of them are captured eventually by the attraction of another doughnut, and fall in towards its Cosmic Centre with the debris of lots of other dissipated universes, to be reborn as something quite different again? Who knows. And there are larger ones outside it, where the universes live longer, and maybe there are universes that aren't on doughnuts at all, and never fall back in, and just dissipate out into. Or at least it does if it's on that doughnut the doughnut is itself hollow, filled with smaller ones where the universes don't live so long. It goes over the top of the doughnut, reaches its furthest extent on the outside edge of the doughnut, and then starts the long, contracting, collapsing journey back in towards the Cosmic Centre again, to be reborn. That hole is the Cosmic Centre, the singularity, the great initiating fireball, the place the universes come from and it didn't exist just in the instant our universe came into being it exists all the time, and it's exploding all the time, like some Cosmic car engine, producing universes like exhaust smoke.Īs each universe comes into being, detonating and spreading and expanding, it - or rather the single circle we are using to describe it - goes gradually up the inner slope of our doughnut, like a widening ripple from a stone flung in a pond. A doughnut with only a very tiny hole in the middle. So forget about the onion think of a doughnut. Now comes the difficult bit switch to seven dimensions and even our four dimensional universe can be described as a circle. (This is why there are two types of hyperspace mentioned in the stories infraspace within our hypersphere, and ultraspace without.) now we really are talking about immortality. ![]() And of course, if you could get through the Energy Grid, to a younger universe, and then repeat the process. Between each universe there is something called the Energy Grid (I said this was all fake) I have no idea what this is, but it's what the Culture starships run on. And we are not the very outer-most skin of that expanding onion, either there are older, larger universes beyond ours, too. Within our universe, our hypersphere, there are whole layers of younger, smaller hyperspheres. In the Culture stories, the idea is that - when you imagine the hypersphere which is our expanding universe - rather than thinking of a growing hollow sphere (like a inflating beach-ball, for example), think of an onion.Īn expanding onion, certainly, but an onion, nevertheless. We accept that the three dimensions of space we live in are curved, that space-time describes a hypersphere, just as the two dimensions of length and width on the surface of a totally smooth planet curve in a third dimension to produce a three-dimensional sphere. Even if you can accept all the above, featuring a humanoid species that seems to exhibit no real greed, paranoia, stupidity, fanaticism or bigotry, wait till you read this. Presenting Tunnel- A Ray of Hope NFT on Matic Blackchain.Lastly, something of the totally fake cosmology that underpins the shakily credible stardrives mentioned in the Culture stories.
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