Victor Grippi – The Atomic Writer

Is it just me or does this storyline suck?

What’s up with the latest installment in the boy wizard series? I mean, come on, have we become so love-struck with Harry Potter and everything Hogwarts that we’ve become blind to poor filmmaking and storytelling? It seems anything Potter, no matter how poorly done is accepted wholesale, without the normal critique that accompanies all other ventures. To be specific, if one were to analyze the latest installment: The Half Blood Prince, on any scale of movie making revelry, I’d have it give it a C-.

Yes, below average is the mark I give the half blood prince which can be traced to both deficiencies in the source material and in screenplay adaptation; plot holes that keep bothering me in the overall storyline. For instance, where is the omnipotent Harry Potter we saw in the last installment, The Order of the Phoenix? And even in the Goblet of Fire, we saw a strong powerful Harry Potter who could do battle with the dark forces as he learns to flex his magical muscles. Tremendous lightning bolts of magic being repelled and thrown back to defeat his enemy. In The Half Blood Prince we watch in vain as Harry tries to zap Professor Snape, after he and fellow Death Eaters have committed their dastardly deed. Snape casually deflects Harry’s powerball with one hand and then zaps Harry back causing him to fall to the ground. WTF! This unfortunately is the big battle scene in the movie. It’s almost an afterthought, a sort of, okay let’s add in some magic ball throwing just to spice it up. Alright, to be fair I will mention the excursion into Voldemort’s secret cave hideout where on an inner cave island Harry and Dumbledore do battle with what look like emancipated Holocaust survivors only to orb back to the castle at Hogwarts with no reason or explanation. It was nothing but simple spice and icing added to the half baked cinematic cake they’re shoving down our visual palettes.

Where is the Atomic Writer going in this post? There is a method to my madness, as is usually the case, so please bear with me. What we have here reminds me of episodic television. Each episode follows a formula where the protagonist becomes entwined in seemingly inescapable danger only to find a way out of the mess and rescue the damsel in distress in time to break for the top of the hour sales pitch. The Harry Potter series is just the same. Come on, if these people were anything close to realistic wizards with the capability to perform magic and such, why not just grab Harry and orb off to the dark one and finish business. Why, in The Half Blood Prince does Snape, whose cover is now blown, just zap Harry, tie him up and fly off to Voldemort; because they need to get at least two more movies out of it. It’s all about money. MONEY, MONEY, MONEY!

Well, Mr. Atomic Writer, you H.P. fans are now barking, you just don’t like the story. I love the story, but on each installment I am getting more and more disappointed. Where is the creativity of the first three movies, the sense of wonder and awe that J.K. Rowling instilled in the concept of a school of magic and all the associated trimmings that have since become worn out novelty. The storyline should have been over after the Prisoner of Azkaban when Harry who believes it was Sirius Black who caused his parents death, finds out at the end the truth. This should be the end, all done, it’s a wrap… But wait, the author didn’t just want to write a trilogy, heavens no, she needed to write at least seven installments. Why? MONEY…

Let’s be honest, if these wizards truly had magical powers then why is Harry allowed to live? If he is the chosen one, who could kick the evil ones butt, then why keep beating around the bush, with near escapes and cliff hangers leaving us on the edge of our seats waiting for the next installment? Answer: to keep us coming back for more.

J.K. Rowling, Warner Bros, and the system need to keep working, keep collecting paychecks. It’s sad but true. They need, like the rest of us, to keep eating. But in the process they are insulting our intelligence by artificial constructs and cheap parlor tricks that keep Harry, Hogwarts, and their friends, running in circles. Why not reinvent some of the original magic that went into the original books? Why stretch out the storyline to the point where our intelligence is continually rendered moot in order to watch more magic ball throwing, broomstick competition, and now in the half blood prince, childish kissing and love potions that try to further develop a character that by now is not half baked, but well over cooked.

Remember, never stop looking up at the night sky and asking…what if?

Victor Grippi
The Atomic Writer

Hello Readers,

Today marks the day all national television stations stop broadcasting analog signals. Just over an hour ago analog signals that have been broadcast as the standard for over sixty years have been switched off and replaced by a digital broadcast signal. Like the vinyl record, cassette tape, and vacuum tube amplifier, the move to digital is not without cost. What is the significance of this change? Aren’t digital recordings more sharp, crisp, and interference free?

First, let’s touch on some basic electronic terminology to help me explain to you what this difference is all about. An analog signal can be represented by a sine wave that continual changes it’s amplitude, or voltage, as the signal moves through time. The signal starts at zero then rises to a positive peak where it then falls in voltage back down to zero. Once at zero the voltage swings negative and continues to a negative peak, usually at the same voltage level as the positive peak. The following diagram illustrates a varying sinusoidal wave. The vertical or Y axis represents voltage, while the horizontal or X axis represents time:

The above picture shows an analog signal that varies in amplitude over time and is typical of the type of signal that TV used to broadcast. The red arrows indicate points in time where the analog signal is to be sampled. The process is known and sample and hold and electronic circuits exist to carry this out. Basically, at each red arrow point, voltage is measured and then stored as a value represented by a digital number. Later these numbers can be reconverted back to analog if needed. In digital TV’s the digital signal is used to turn on and off the picture elements or pixels that make up the picture we see.

The following diagram illustrates sample and hold:

If we look at the red line moving in 90 degree blocks throughout the above signal, we see what is basically a digital signal. This becomes the signal that is now being broadcast by TV stations. The area between the sample points become artifacts that are forever lost.

What gives vacuum tube amplifiers and vinyl records that buzz or hum that people miss from earlier days are just these artifacts that are lost during the sample and hold digitizing process. When the signal is converted back to analog, like in the case of an audio signal, for TV or for an mp3 or CD player, the lost artifacts are unknown and therefore the only option is to
average out the signal and approximate what might have been in the signal at that point in time.

The same is true for video. The video MPEG (Motion Picture Expert Group) standards use a block averaging algorithm to blur neighboring pixels whenever the signal quality degrades or drops out during playback or transmission. The attempt is made to make it seem like everything is normal and we have all seen those times when our digital cable, or satellite video picture becomes blocky and pixelated in large blurry patches. This is the MPEG algorithm trying to approximate what it thinks the picture should have looked like.

Analog signals are more natural and capture more of the nuance found in naturally occurring speech and vision. The human eye needs approximately 24 frames per second in order to overcome persistence of vision. The human ear is only sensitive up to 40KHZ. That’s 40,000 cycles, or an analog signal whose voltage peaks positive and negative 40,000 times a second. CD quality audio, for example uses a sample and hold rate of 44 KHZ so that we hear the highest quality sound possible. But this is a sanitized sound. A sound that has been artificially massaged in order to improve it.

This brings up a point that The Atomic Writer would like to explore. As science improves the reproduction quality of audio and video, how will it change us? What is lost in the electrical artifacts that we remove? What, if anything will take their place? Digital technology makes it very easy to supplant subliminal messages into the extra spaces in digital transmissions. I’ll stop at just the mere mention of this since my point is to not be paranoid, only to call it like it is. We already have high definition TV and radio, that attempts to fill these spaces with extra bandwidth to provide clearer, crisper, cleaner, sharper, more realistic images. But the human senses can only detect a fraction of the full electromagnetic spectrum. What have we’ve been missing in the sights and sounds that impinge us? Or have we missed it?

Perhaps our eyes, ears, and physical bodies do pick up frequencies outside the detectable range? Perhaps the buzz and hum of a classic rock recording or live performance is detected by the human body. An illicit internal response that mimics the natural sound of nature. A sight and sound more attune with the human experience. Not the artificial rendering of a machine.

Ah, I’ve hit the central theme of this post. Should machines render the world we hear and see? Will we change as humans and become more machine like in our thoughts and minds? Aren’t we providing our reality to machines in their natural language? Will reality one day be dictated by machines? And if so, will we know the difference?

Remember, never stop looking up at the night sky and asking…what if.

Victor Grippi
The Atomic Writer

This post is based a book due to be released in May 2009, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe, by Robert Lanza and Bob Berman, and also an article that appeared in the MAy 2009 issue of Discover magazine.

A Biocentric view of the universe holds that what we perceive as real, the universe and everything in it, is based on our ability to cognitively make the observation in the first place. Are space and time physical objects that would exist even if life did not? This view reminds me of the old adage, if a tree falls in the woods, but no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? I suppose one way to test this would be to leave an audio recording device next to the tree and then exit the woods. After the event one would only have to analyze the recording for the sound of the tree. Is the recording device alive? But more importantly is the act of making the observation the critical point?

Take another popular example, the two slit photon test. Here a beam of light (photons) is directed towards two slits made on one side of a box. If you observe the subatomic particle, the photon appears to pass through one slit or the other, by the reflection it makes on the inside of the opposite side of the box. However, if no one observes the particle, it exhibits the behavior of a wave that can inhabit all possibilities, including passing through both slits simultaneously.

Quantum mechanics is the physicist’s best model for describing the subatomic world. It also makes some of the best arguments that conscious perception is integral to the workings of the universe. Quantum theory tells us that a unobserved particle, like an electron or a photon, exists in a blurry unpredictable state with no well defined location or frequency until the moment it is observed. This is the famous Heisenberg uncertainty principal. Physicists describe the unobserved condition as a wave function. Wave functions are mathematical equations that attempt to predict the location and/or motion (frequency) of the particle at a precise moment in time. When an observation is made, by hitting it with a photon in order to see it, it is said to have collapsed the wave function. The act of making the observation has caused the particle to change. We can only know its location or its frequency, but never both at the same time. Experimenters suggest that mere knowledge in the experimenter’s mind is sufficient to collapse the wave function and convert possibility to reality.

Another theory in quantum mechanics deals quantum entanglement. Einstein called this behavior, “spooky action at a distance”, and told Roger Penrose he thought it was only a mere calculation error. Entanglement deals with two particles that share the same wave function. If we measure one particle and thus collapse its wave function, the other one collapses simultaneously. If one photon is observed to have vertical polarization, its waves all moving in one plane, the act of observation causes the other photon to instantly collapse into a horizontal polarity. This has been tested using one way mirrors where the particles were split and separated by many miles. Nicolas Gisin tested this at the University of Geneva in 1997.

Before these experiments most scientists believed in an independent universe where physical states exist in some absolute sense before they are measured. This has now been proven to not be the case.

What is time? The passage of time can be thought of like frames in a motion picture. The change from one frame to the next can be cognitively resolved to the passage of time. But is time object that exists in a past, present and future form? The past exists in the electrical stimuli of our brain cells. The future has not been reduced to the collapse of the multitudes of wave functions that make up our perceivable world. We are left with only the present. Time exists in the snapshots of wave functions we choose to collapse that make up the reality of the present in which we live. What else could it be? We observe time as a delta from one moment to the next regardless of what another person experiences on the other side of the world. Time is as personal as the way we brush our teeth. When we learn of another persons sequence of events that occurred during a span known as time, we splice their experience into our own. Time is then rendered to no more than the total summation of the internal reel running inside our minds.

What is space? Is it an object that is constantly expanding from the origin point known as the big bang? Most of us still think like Issac Newton, that space is an object or container that can be picked up and taken to the laboratory. But isn’t space really just our way of interpreting how an object should look once we collapse its wave function?

Our notions of space are false.

1. Distances between objects mutate depending on conditions like gravity and velocity, as described by Einstein’s theory of relativity. Translation: There is no absolute distance between anything and anything else.

2. Empty space, as described by quantum mechanics, is in fact not empty and but full of potential particles and fields.

3. Quantum theory also doubts that distance objects are actually separated by great distances. Entanglement has been proven to show that particles can act in unison rendering great distances mute.

Science tries to explain the physical universe, by making an investigated assumption based on the wrong initial starting point. By inclination and training these scientists are obsessed with mathematical descriptions of the world. Biocentrism should help unlock the mysteries of the universe be providing another investigated tool. By allowing the observer into the equation new avenues of insight can be realized. New thinking machines can be developed that experience the world as we do, and will certainly provide solutions that are more organic to the reality we see playing on the projector inside our minds. Perhaps a unified field theory, Einsteins dream, may finally be realized by merging physical observation with consciousness as science continues to collapse our reality into theories that are discarded just as fast. Take string theory as an example.

To answer my original question: Is the audio recorder to be considered alive in order to meet the criteria for collapsing the wave function of the fell tree? The answer is of course no. However, if no one listens to the recording of the tree that fell in the woods, would the recording make a sound. However, if I make a recording of the recording of the fallen tree… And on, and on, and on.

Remember, never stop looking up at the night sky and asking…what if.

Victor Grippi
The Atomic Writer

Hello Readers,

It’s been awhile since my last post here on the AtomicWriter, but I assure you I’m alive and well. I’ve been busy writing my third novel, as well as my first screenplay. So writing on the blog was put on the back burner. More on these great projects in a later post.

I wanted to share my thoughts on two excellent shows I watched this weekend. The first, on Friday, was the series finale for Battlestar Gallactica and then the movie Knowing staring Nicolas Cage. Both these shows revealed a premise or controlling idea that resonates with the premise in both my novels, The Ninth Cube and The Butterfly Virus. The premise that humanity has restarted time and time again and how humans are not the product of pure randomness.

Let’s explore this concept in detail. In Battlestar, we learn in the finale that Cara 1 (Starbuck) held the secret to the location of the real Earth. After finding herself crashed and dead on the first Earth, we find out she holds the coordinates used in the FTL to jump to Earth. These coordinates were contained in a musical piece she played with her father as a child. Now the importance of this is in the idea of determinism versus randomness, the theme of both the TV show and the movie. Cara 1 (Starbuck) was sent back (as an angel) to the fleet to lead them to Earth by a predetermined intelligence that watches over us and protects us without direct intervention. Some my call this entity God, big G or little g, and some may call it an alien intelligence. I’ll leave this up to your own personal views.

We also learn in Battlestar how pivotal Gaius Baltar was to humanities salvation. He gave up the defense access codes on Caprica, that lead to its destruction by the Cylons, but this allowed the fresh start for humanity to be realized. What seemed like an act of treason actually lead to the restart on Earth. We see model Six and Gaius as angels who have witnessed this cycle time and time again. Humanity gains intelligence, develops technology that eventually leads to destruction on a global scale. The model Six Cylon appeared to him like an angel who helped guide him through this process. Whenever humanity reaches the brink of extinction, this intelligence sends beings (angels) to intervene.

The show then uses the young female hybrid as the michronial “Eve”, who became our common ancestor here on Earth. The theme of a restart for humanity based on an ever improving design makes me think how we may all be experiments in a grand test operated by the intelligence that created us.

In the movie Knowing the controlling idea is that we are not the product of randomness. We see that determinism is rejected by the Nicolas Cage character who after his wife’s death, backstory, believes we are the product of randomness, and that science can explain everything. When the paper with the predictions shows up, he changes and believes in a grand order or scheme of things. The fact that someone could predict exactly the dates of disasters, leads him to believe again in determination. An intelligence that can see the future and intervene when humanity reaches the brink of destruction.

I absolutely recommend this movie and when you see the aliens rise up to enter their ship, you will see the resemblance to angels. The metaphor here is the same as in Battlestar. Ascended beings sent down to help humanity survive. When his son and the girl are dropped off on a pristine earth, we see the tree of knowledge in the background. A direct reference to the Garden of Eden and Adam and Eve. A restart for humanity.

The Atomic Writer, has written about the same themes. In The Ninth Cube, we have a similar restart for humanity and a direct reference to Adam and Eve in the garden. I don’t want to give away the ending of the book, but if you read it, you’ll understand.

In The Butterfly Virus: A Thriller, again the controlling idea of a restart for humanity takes a different form but the message is the same. Again I do not intend to spoil the book, but would strongly advise reading it, especially if you’ve read this post this far. You must be fascinated with this topic.

In closing, the theme or controlling idea we see in media today is a direct outcropping of the warning writers are trying to convey to their readers. As technology becomes more and more integrated in our lives, will we someday create an artificial intelligence capable of turning on us like a rabid pit bull? Will we be at the mercy of technology to the degree that we can’t live without it? But what happens if technology is suddenly rendered mute? Could humanity survive in a primitive state once again, or will we perish like dust in the wind.

One solution is to never loose sight of our roots. To always be able to be self sustaining and self sufficient, live off the land, feed ourselves, clothe ourselves, and fully take care of ourselves without technology. We belong to the last generation, on this planet, who grew up with little or no high technology. Some of us still remember how to live without a GPS map speaking to us on the road, or a constant electronic communication device tweeting our every move to our social media list of drones. Can you remember how to look up a phone number in the yellow pages? When was the last time you picked up a newspaper? Don’t like ink on your fingers, you say?

I realize I’m writing this on my notebook computer with a browser tab opened to Facebook, and that my books are available electronically on the Amazon kindle, and I have a twitter account. I’ve spent many years writing computer software for a living. I’m very integrated with technology. But if all of this just went away one day, I could survive. I would keep moving forward and not dwell on the fact that these “conveniences” are no longer available. In time, we as ever inquisitive humans would develop technology and in time we would be right back in the same place.

The better solution is to learn how to live with technology, and how to live with each other to the benefit of all of humanity. There would be no reason to restart humanity, no reason for angels to intervene and save us, if we don’t need saving in the first place. A sort of preventive determinism we control. After all, god, or the alien intelligence watching over us, had to have its start. Perhaps we are the ancients, the beings who will leave our small speck of an island and venture into the vastness of the universe to seed new worlds and watch over our children. Perhaps we on this Earth, on this evolutionary line, will be the ones rescuing our descendants millennium from now in our spaceships as we pluck out the next Adam and Eve, planting them on the next Earth.

“So say we all!” — Admiral Adama – Battlestar Gallactica

Remember, never stop looking up at the night sky and asking….what if.”

Victor Grippi
The AtomicWriter

Hello Readers,

Just a reminder that The Ninth Cube is being paired with Stephen Hawking’s A Briefer History of Time on Amazon during the month of November. You can buy both books at a discount.

Check it out!

Have you ever read Plato’s Allegory of the Cave?

Here is my version of the story:

Suppose a group of people are chained to a large rock inside a deep cave. The rock faces the end of the cave, and the people chained to this rock can only see the back wall of the cave. They have been chained there since childhood. Given these circumstances, reality for these people are the shadows and sounds they experience that are reflected off the cave wall.

Suppose one day a member of the chained group is set free and allowed to walk behind the large rock. Once on the other side this person realizes that the shadows come from a large fire burning in a fire pit, and from people that walk between the fire and the rock. The sounds are from these free people that walk in and out of the cave. Wouldn’t this person be unable to describe or identify the fire and the other people? To him, reality is the shadows and sounds from the cave wall. These new entities would seem alien, mystical, magical, or even demonic in origin.

Further suppose that this freed person is then taken outside the cave where he experiences the shining sun and trees and everything that exists outside the cave. Would he not be able to accept these things? Could he categorize and rationalize these new objects after spending his life tied to a rock inside the cave?

Now suppose this person is brought back to the cave and the rock where his friends have been tied to all their lives. Once there he tries to explain the origin of the shadows and the sounds and tries to convince them that the cave wall is not real but in fact an illusion. How do you think the other people will respond. Wouldn’t they think he was crazy, delusional, possessed; that his eyes have somehow been corrupted? Remember, all their lives the only reality they have known existed in the images and sounds reflected off the back of the cave. They would think he has been taken somewhere unknown and corrupted.

When he attempts to free another bound person, wouldn’t they try to kill him?

The moral of this story is that we are only able to comprehend and categorize that which falls within the boundaries of our limited viewpoint on the world. What we believe is real is limited by the degree to which we can perceive it.

The only way to expand our perception of reality is by experiencing new things, by reading stories of new possible realities that exist right on the other side of the rock of our lives. An entire universe of people, places, and things may exist right in front of our noses but we remain unable to perceive it because we refuse to accept the possibility that it exists at all.

Reading is one of the best ways to expand your mind and experience the countless possibilities in our world. To be more specific, books classified as speculative fiction take reality as we know it today, and expand upon it. This genre takes technology and makes one more step into the unknown. These books ask the big what if questions: what if we create an artificial black hole, what if it is actually a wormhole, what if we can time travel through it, what if it leads to another dimension.

Books like Stephen Hawking’s A Briefer History of Time, and Victor Grippi’s The Ninth Cube ask these questions and more. Hawking’s book is non-fiction and presents the current state of technology and physics theory, while The Ninth Cube takes these as premise and speculates on what the future may be when these theories become reality.

Fiction writers are like puppet masters who create shadows on the wall. All too often these do become reality.

Remember, never stop looking up at the night sky and asking, what if…

Victor Grippi
The Atomic Writer

Related to discovering and measuring Hawking Radiation will be the validation that time travel, in one form or the other, will eventually be possible. Arguments such as, why are we not being visited currently by travelers from the past, is not a valid argument against the possibility of time travel. What if travelers from the past can only return to the point in time when time travel is perfected and reduced to practice. Let’s say that in the year 2020 the first wormhole is opened and sustained. This would then mark time 0. Carl Sagan expressed this very idea in an interview he did for the Nova PBS channel.

Carl Sagan, the astronomer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, and legendary popularizer of science, gave this interview during the making of “Time Travel.” True to form, he discusses arcane aspects of the field—from how you define time to what it might look like inside a wormhole—with flair and a refreshing dash of humor. Sagan was David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences and director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies at Cornell University when he died in 1996.

Here is the link to that interview:

Carl was taken way too soon from us, and I personally owe alot of my interest in science to this great man.

-Victor Grippi
The Atomic Writer

Hello Again,

An interesting question was presented to me on whether Hawking Radiation exists. In, The Ninth Cube, there is a solution to Hawking Radiation, as related to the creation of MBH’s or micro black holes in the laboratory. Dr. Daniel Lamb finds an error in his solution and this sets the story in motion.

But do we even know if this is a real issue? If we are to ever find and/or create a black hole and attempt to traverse it, will we need to solve Hawking Radiation first? But noone has ever seen or measured Hawking Radiation.

NASA has just launched the GLAST satellite that is a fully equipped gamma ray observatory. This instrument may be able to give us the first evidence of an evaporating black hole and confirm Dr. Hawking’s theories. NASA’s GLAST launched on June 11, 2008.

Here is the latest news on the mission:
June 27, 2008
NASA GLAST Burst Monitor Powers Up Successfully
NASA’s GLAST Burst Monitor (GBM) Instrument Operations Center in Huntsville, Ala., the focal point for observing gamma ray bursts, was alive with energy as scientists gathered to witness instrument activation the evening of June 25. The GBM team linked in with GLAST mission operations at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., by teleconference and studied a big screen projecting spacecraft information live.

Here are the mission objectives for GLAST:

Mission Objectives
Explore the most extreme environments in the Universe, where nature harnesses energies far beyond anything possible on Earth.
Search for signs of new laws of physics and what composes the mysterious Dark Matter.
Explain how black holes accelerate immense jets of material to nearly light speed.
Help crack the mysteries of the stupendously powerful explosions known as gamma-ray bursts.
Answer long-standing questions across a broad range of topics, including solar flares, pulsars and the origin of cosmic rays.

Could this investigation validate the science of The Ninth Cube? Could, The Ninth Cube, someday be re-classified as non-fiction? Only time will tell….stay tuned…

The Ninth Cube is currently available in Kindle Edition on Amazon. Look for it in paperback this summer!

Hello Technothriller Fans,

We continue our discussion of Hawking Radiation and its importance in possible wormhole travel. As we noted last time, matter will loop, and blue shift, around the event horizon of a black hole, and create a virtual particle that will annihilate any opposite charged matter that tries to approach it. Thus making it quite difficult to pass anything through the black hole (or input end of a wormhole).

But let’s back up a bit and look at some classical theory on black holes and the phonenmon of Hawking Radiation. In, The Ninth Cube, Dr. Daniel Lamb’s phD thesis at Cambridge was a mathematical solution to Hawking Radiation and led to the creation of artificial black holes in his laboratory. We will cover the technology of the CLA (Casimer Laser Accelerator ) in a later posting, and how this miniature device can be used to create black holes. (so stay tuned)

But how about some text-a-pedia background on BH’s and Hawking Radiation:

Black holes are sites of immense gravitational attraction into which surrounding matter is drawn by gravitational forces. Classically, the gravitation is so powerful that nothing, not even radiation can escape from the black hole. It is yet unknown how gravity can be incorporated into quantum mechanics, but nevertheless far from the black hole the gravitational effects can be weak enough that calculations can be reliably performed in the framework of quantum field theory in curved spacetime. Hawking showed that quantum effects allow black holes to emit exact black body radiation, which is the average thermal radiation emitted by an idealized thermal source known as a black body. The radiation is as if it is emitted by a black body with a temperature that is inversely proportional to the black hole’s mass.

Physical insight on the process may be gained by imagining that particle-antiparticle radiation is emitted from just beyond the event horizon. This radiation does not come directly from the black hole itself, but rather is a result of virtual particles being “boosted” by the black hole’s gravitation into becoming real particles.

A more precise, but still much simplified view of the process is that vacuum fluctuations cause a particle-antiparticle pair to appear close to the event horizon of a black hole. One of the pair falls into the black hole whilst the other escapes. In order to preserve total energy, the particle that fell into the black hole must have had a negative energy (with respect to an observer far away from the black hole). By this process the black hole loses mass, and to an outside observer it would appear that the black hole has just emitted a particle.

In, The Ninth Cube, Daniel and his team take advantage of vacuum flucuations to elicit a boost in negative energy needed to sustain the black hole horizon. Later they realize it can also be used to “steer” the direction of the resulting wormhole, and use it to navigate where the white hole end of the wormhole is located. It’s like controlling the worm as it digs its hole.

I don’t want to give too much away, at this point, but it’s some really cool technology they use in the book.

The Ninth Cube is available on Amazon

Hello Technothriller Fans, this is the first blog entry for the Atomic Writer. Here I will discuss the technology of “The Ninth Cube”, my debut novel, and how it relates to our everyday lives.

If you enjoy reading Michael Crichton and are interested in the science of Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan, Michio Kaku or Brian Greene then you are going to enjoy “The Ninth Cube”.

My first topic is Hawking Radiation. This is the effect that happens to matter when it approaches the event horizon of a black hole. Photons from light will be drawn into the black hole and will become blue shifted at the event horizon as particles circulate at the boundary and interact with matter causing anililation of the matter.

Solving Hawking Radiation is crucial if black hole or vis-i-vis, wormhole technology is ever to be realized.

Another issue is negative energy – this will be covered in a later entry, but I wanted to mention it so you can start thinking in terms of positive and negative energy.

What other obstacles need to be solved with black holes?

I also just finished my first screenplay and have won the annual Script Frenzy!