This week, Futures is delighted to welcome back George Zebrowski and Charles Pellegrino with their thought-provoking story Proton. George is certainly no stranger to Futures, having appeared in the original run of stories back in 2000 as well as more recently with stories such as Sticky and Passersby. He teamed up with Charles in 2015 for Jiffy. Here they offer an insight into the creative process that produced their latest piece — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Proton

Charles Pellegrino and I have had a spirited discussion for many years now — producing to date a novel, The Killing Star (recently optioned for movies) and a short story, Oh, Miranda!, among others in progress — always surprising each other with provocative thought and disciplined writing, so much so that in the case of Proton we suspected, by 15 November 2016, that a few canny mathematicians might complete the more rigorous work of the story and publish it in Nature.

The idea of adding a twelfth space-time dimension to the eleven of ‘Brane theory’ popped up by analogy as Charles walked past a crumbling brick wall on the way to an off-Broadway comedy. After missing most of the play and discussing the geometry with me, it became possible to suspect that all of space and time could be seen, at its lowest quantum limits, as so intensely pixilated that even ‘spooky action at a distance’ seemed actually to work, a universe in which space-time dimensions become an absolute limit, perhaps as much so as the speed of light. We penned the story as might be visualized through a thought experiment with no mathematics. As for spooky action at a distance in a pixilated (super-memBrane) universe, we’re still betting that multiple people of a mathematical bent had the same insight at the same time and are still working out the equations.

Part of the inspiration for Proton, especially for our ending, came by way of Bertrand Russell’s final lines in his ABC of Relativity: “we know very little, and yet it is astonishing that we know so much, and still more astonishing that so little knowledge can give us so much power”. Here the implication for our technological prowess is that it may lead to revolutionary cosmic engineering.