“Please proceed, JieMin,” Chen Zumu said.
JieMin nodded – once, like a small bow – and collected his thoughts. Chen Zufu and Chen Zumu were content to wait.
“When I first arrived here, I began auditing classes in advanced mathematics and physics that were not available in Chagu. In the first two months, I audited a dozen or so classes. These were very advanced classes, at the edges of our knowledge in these fields.
“I do not work my way through these course in the normal way, as some other student might. Instead I listen and I watch and I let my mind integrate the material in its own way, at its own pace. That seems to be the best way for me.
“At some later time, some things I have heard or seen will fall into place, be ordered in a way they were not ordered before. For lack of a better term, I call these reorganizations in my mind integrations.
“A year ago, I had a major integration, and it opened a new vision to me. I saw all of physics laid out before me, but there was a large hole in the middle of it, like a picture in which the center has been cut out. My project for the last year has been to see if I could find out what was missing.”
JieMin stopped and looked back and forth between them.
“We understand, JieMin. Please go on.”
“Thank you, Chen Zumu.
“To find out what was in this hole, I had to first define its boundaries. I investigated all the other areas of physics that I had not yet looked into, filling in gaps here and there. When I felt I had filled all the areas I could, I began working on filling or bridging the hole. Working from the edges to the center.
“Yesterday, I bridged the hole. I have not filled it, but I know what is there. Some people have called the concept hyperspace. I think that term is technically incorrect on several levels, but we can call it that for now.”
“You discovered hyperspace, JieMin?”
“It is very much more than that, Chen Zufu.”
JieMin thought of how to explain it. He looked around, and his eye fixed on the teapot on the table between them. He lifted the lid off the teapot and set it on the table. Steam wafted up from the opening.
“Consider this teapot. We have the tea, and the steam. If I hide the teapot from you with a small curtain, can you still see the steam?”
“Yes, of course,” Paul said.
“And if you see the steam, can you infer the presence of the teapot behind the curtain?”
“Yes.”
“So it is with hyperspace.”
“Hyperspace is the steam, JieMin?” Paul asked.
“No, Chen Zufu. Conventional space-time – all of this–“ JieMin waved his hand around, at the tea room and, by implication, the universe beyond “– all of this is the steam.
“Hyperspace is the tea.”
Back On The Path
JieMin looked back and forth between Chen Zumu and Chen Zufu. Chen Zufu looked puzzled, but Chen Zumu looked shocked.
“JieMin, are you saying that hyperspace is real, and space-time is not?” she asked.
“Yes, Chen Zumu, in a way. Hyperspace can exist without space-time, as tea can exist without steam, but the opposite is not true. Without the tea, there is no steam. Without hyperspace, there is no space-time.
“I inferred the existence of hyperspace from an observation of what we know of conventional space-time, just as you, Chen Zufu, said you could infer the presence of the teapot by an observation of the steam.
“This actually explains a great deal. The physicist Niels Bohr, four hundred years ago, said that ‘Anyone not shocked by quantum mechanics has not yet understood it.’ Albert Einstein, the great physicist of the same period, never felt that quantum mechanics could be the end of the line in understanding reality. He never accepted that it was.
“Well, it turns out Einstein was right. Much of what makes physics so fuzzy at the edges is a failure to understand the existence of the hyperspace behind the curtain. Space-time is the way it is because hyperspace is there. When you get to the edges of conventional physics, you are bordering on space-time’s interaction with hyperspace – getting close to the surface of the tea – and that interaction is bound by the mathematics of hyperspace, not by the mathematics of space-time.
“I think some of the people on Janice Quant’s team must have been close to understanding this. Anthony Lake and Donald Shore surely were. The Lake-Shore Drive works because space-time isn’t real. It is just as easy for the colony transporter to be there as it is to be here, so why not have it be over there? And then it was over there.
“That is not possible by the rules of space-time. To hyperspace, it does not matter.”
“JieMin, have you replicated the Lake-Shore Drive?” Paul asked.
“No, Chen Zufu. I have merely discovered the reason why the Lake-Shore Drive could work. I have no idea how they accomplished it.
“I am much closer to understanding how one could step outside of space-time – opt for the rules of hyperspace instead – to go from one place to another, and then come back into space-time.”
“What would be the advantage of that, JieMin?” JuPing asked.
“There is still a limit to how fast one can travel, Chen Zumu, but the points of correspondence are much closer together in hyperspace than in conventional space-time, or seem to be anyway. One might travel at a large apparent multiple of the speed of light.”
“A hyperdrive?” Paul asked.
“So-called, Chen Zufu, but a misnomer on technical grounds. The implications of the word are
