All CERN experiments and accelerators are primarily operated by women. CERN is joining in the celebrations of International Women’s Day with a special feature:
Another packed week, including receipt of 500 copies of Volume One
in twelve boxes, employing two new people to help me with various other
projects and the creation of a whole new Time Crystal product,
a Lifetime’s subscription to Time Crystal.
The initial motivation for this was to have a prize
to be auctioned to raise money for the Maureen Milgram Forrest Fund,
which will be established to give an annual award to the individual
or organisation which has made the most innovative or creative contribution
which enables women to achieve their full potential.
The initial idea was that subscribers would receive a free copy of every new volume of TC. However I then thought that such a product might be of more general interest to those who wish to show their support and also receive extra bonuses. The final details are available at (www.timecrystal.co.uk/store/lifetime.php).
The Game
I did manage to find almost a whole day last weekend to develop the
game, which was mostly spent in developing the registration procedure,
which is the minimum I have to have in place by April 5. I would
also like to have the first round of the game ready too, since if there
is nothing to do then people will feel a little let down. Once the UK
National Science and Engineering Week is over I should have a little
more time to work on that towards the end of March.
Promoting the Book
I am acutely aware that I should now be busy sending out review copies of Volume 1 to the media. So far I have sent out one copy. It’s shocking. There are two reasons. One is that I haven’t got much time. The other is that I just don’t like promoting myself. It’s one reason I wanted to be a writer, so I could hide away and work in secret silence while others got on shouting at each other. But sadly authors have to promote themselves and self-published authors even more so.
Thus if any reader of this newsletter would like to suggest the name and address of a reviewer who might like Time Crystal, on whatever continent, I’d be very happy to send them a free copy. Send your suggestion to wyken@timecrystal.co.uk.
Also if you wish to help in any other way I’d love to hear from you!
Alt Fiction
Talking about promoting, I got a message from Catherine Clarke, Vice Chair of the Alt Fiction steering group asking if they could put a link from their website to the podcasts I did years ago about one of the Conferences. Of course I said I would be delighted! Just need to check on the location of these as I naturally want Time Crystal to be included somewhere in the link. It was recorded in April 2008 and I can no longer find the file I used to generate the MP3, so I downloaded it and moved it to the TC website, so people would at least be aware of the location. But I will ask her to link to the post pages rather than directly to the MP3 files, as that might give me more visibility. The pages in question are:
I also offered to run a podcasting workshop for her at the next Alt Fiction event. Never miss an opportunity to promote yourself must be my watchword henceforth.
Time Crystal Forum
While looking for a picture of Francesco’s nose (see below) I stumbled across the discovery that people are starting to register on the Time Crystal Forum. The idea of this was that people could role play a specific character and send me ideas about what their character should do in future episodes, but for months there was absolutely no response so I never check it. Now I find that in the past 18 days, 9 real people have registered. I’m gob-smacked ( a horrible but in this case only slightly exagerated adjective ).
I will really have to start doing something with that site! Any
volunteers to help? I’ve got lots of ideas, just not enough time.
Volume 2 Episode 04
This week I talk about Episode 4, which takes place in the CERN Medical Centre. I have to admit I have never been inside the place, so the descriptions are pure inventions, but I’ve stood outside the door several times.
Apart from moving the plot forward, this episode is also the first mention of cosmic monopole in Volume 2. While writing this work I have to be conscious of how a new reader, who perhaps stumbles across this book in a shop or starts subscribing on iTunes, without being familiar with Volume 1, is going to cope. I don’t want to explain the monopole in detail but new readers and listeners will need at least a basic explanation of what it is, so I’ve condensed the information in a short speech from Francesco Romani.
The description of Francesco’s nose grew out of a chance remark which entered as I was writing the Episode. Sofie noticed Francesco’s nose was all it said, but this was later elaborated into a paragraph since I felt the reader would want to see it too, so now we see this magnificent object through Sofie’s eyes. But I suspect that the root of this comes from the storyboarding software I used to use to help me visualise scenes. This was FrameForge 3D studio, software I have talked about extensively before.
Here is a picture from FrameForge, but in my imagination Francesco doesn’t look much like that any more. He has bloated out into obesity. I have now left the images behind and let my imagination take over. That has blown Francesco’s nose up to something magnificent.
In this Episode the roots are laid down for a fundamental disagreement which will run throughout the rest of the story, based on the question: What do we do next? This not only reflects what would probably happen in real life when you get such strong characters as Brigit and Francesco together but also helps to maintain conflict in the plot. A fundamental rule of writing is that fraction leads to good fiction and okay leads to decay.
Francesco wants to do experiments on crystal but Brigit wants to sort out the basics of life and Sofie is particularly concerned about sorting out the toilets. As a firefighter she is naturally concerned with survival and after her experience with Marianne she has little hesitation in raising this distasteful but essential subject, whereas Francesco’s mind in on the greater potential danger posed by crystal radioactivity and finds this talk of toilets very embarrassing.
I’m hoping to win the 3 One-Hour Training Sessions she is offering for auction at the party on Monday to celebrate Maureen Milgram Forrest. I’m also busy right now writing a book entitled
Why I Treasure Maureen Milgram Forrest
We are hoping to sell it to raise some money to establish an award to be given each year to the person or organisation in Leicester who has made the most innovative or creative contribution which enables women to achieve their full potential.
I must have spent, oh, I would guess at least fifteen minutes this
week on the Time Crystal Game. Maybe even twenty. So that’s only another
four or five days to go. Get it finished in no time! I’m afraid that
working on various projects in Leicester is still taking most of my
time, time which I should be putting into promoting the forthcoming
Volume One. However I have taken one tiny step forward by submitting
it to the People’s Book Prize.
It’s not on there yet, of course, and they may not accept it, but
at least I’ve made a bit of an effort. Also I have decided that instead
of going to Geneva this spring I will try to find somebody local who
can help me with the research. That will save me all the hastle of travelling
and if I find somebody bilingual they will do a better job than I could.
The money I save from flights and hotels can go to pay their wages.
So if you know anyone who lives in or near Geneva who wants to spend
a few hours a month doing research, visiting places, talking to people
and solving problems then please ask them to contact wyken@timecrystal.co.uk.
Volume 2 Episode 03
This week I’m talking about Volume 2 Episode 3. It has two parts, one introducing Sam’s situation as the Argolath carries the Cosmic Egg to Marshall Gallrage, the other in which Catriona descends the first part of the Time Tunnel.
Originally the scenes were the other way round, with Catriona coming first, but the Episode ended with Sam standing and looking for Catriona and it made more sense for that scene to come first, even though Sam does not actually see Catriona until the next Episode.
I recorded the Episode and I was fairly happy with Catriona’s scene
but I was very unhappy with Sam’s. It started out as a narrative
describing the Argolath’s journey from the moment it left Commader Bogmon
in Volume 1 Episode 24 to the time it met Gallrage and the subsequent
second theft of the Cosmic Egg. This opening simply didn’t strike me as
sufficiently engaging. There was no dialogue, no characterisation, just
narrative description with lots of detail about conditions in the mines
which, although interesting, was hardly very important in the plot, since
we will soon be leaving the mines behind.
Here is the original start to this section:
The Argolath ran vertically down the roughly hewn shaft carrying the Universe
in its massive jaws. In the deepening gloom Sam saw dislodged stones
falling past the ant’s glowing white skin. The wall soon firmed to solid
granite, feldspars sparkling with the occasional glowing violet amethyst
and red blushing garnet beneath the Argolath’s pincered feet.
They emerged into a much larger horizontal tunnel. Long trains
of wagons were rumbling along metal rails, hauled by large cockroach-like
animals with small Argolaths riding on their backs. The tunnel was lit
by large gauze-walled oil lamps. Entroilians in armour guarded the junctions.
One challenged the Argolath in a language Sam did not understand, looking
curiously at the Universe. The Argolath held out a piece of paper which
the guard read and, reluctantly it seemed to Sam, pushed a signal’s
lever. One of the trains stopped. Sam’s Argolath jumped on board the
cockroach. The signal changed, the cockroach scuttled forward and the
rock-laden train hurried through a maze of tunnels which sometimes broadened
out into a workshop, a foundry, a forge or a storeroom. Other trains
passed, carrying rails and armour, ropes and metal girders, piles of
nuts, bolts and cogwheels.
Eventually Sam’s Argolath spoke to the driver and the train slowed. He
jumped down and waited for the train to pass, then began to walk along
the tunnel. He took a side passage at the end of which an Entroilian
guarded the entrance to a vertical shaft. The Argolath showed him the
paper, which he slowly read in the smoking lamplight, then pulled on
a rope hanging beside the shaft. A bell tinkled somewhere high overhead.
Something began clattering down and a wooden platform appeared. The
Argolath stepped on it, the guard rang twice and the platform began
to rise slowly upwards. Even before it reached the top Sam smelt the
smoky dampness of the mine being replaced by cool, clean, fresh air.
After a long ascent the platform finally creaked to a halt and
the Argolath hurried out along a short unlit tunnel and emerged into
a small rough-hewn cave where two richly armoured Entroilians were outlined
against the deep pink sky. When they heard the Argolath they began to
make gentle high-pitched whistling noises. The Argolath joined them
in the cave mouth high up on the mountainside and Sam saw the late evening
sky splashing a rosy glow across the distant ocean beyond the temple
hill. The city was spread out far below him and to his surprise he noticed
it was in total darkness.
I chopped out that whole
section and started the story in the cave, with the guards waiting for
Gallrage. Even getting this right took several days. I had to describe
Sam’s situation, Entroilans, Argolaths, the Cosmic Egg etc etc and yet
not let all these details hold up the story. Clearly these facts are
very important for the plot, far more important than the state of the
mines, so I’m sure those days were not wasted.
Writing the opening of this Episode was like polishing a stone to produce a gem. I wrote about 300 words in a session which, given my current shortage of time, lasted about 2 hours. The next time I came back to it I began to read the previous session’s work aloud and almost immediately began to change it. Sometimes it was a small change, sometimes it was abandoning whole chunks of text. The hardest part, as always, was finding the right place to start. The benefit of reading aloud is that I can hear the bits that don’t work, hear the scratches on the stone, and begin to polish them away.
So, over the sessions, I removed more and more irritating imperfections
and gradually made the rough edges of the text fit together until I could
not hear the joins, so that I could not tell that originally these
sentences and paragraphs had been chopped up and hacked about and slowly
glued back together. So finally the reader does not even notice the
surface at all, does not hear the individual words and phrases, but
instead he sees the living characters and watches them move and think.
He gets lost in the story, he sees the inner part of the stone, he understands
the deeper meaning beneath that laboriously polished surface.
I continue to work on the printed version of Volume 1. I received a proof copy back from the printers and it’s a good job I did as the bar code was half the size it should have been. One of my achievements in producing my earlier self-published book, Global Vision, was in writing the software to produce the bar code myself. I was very proud of that. In fact it unified my first two books, as I used HyperCard on an Apple Mac to write the software, and that system was the subject of my very first book.
Anyway I’ve long since stopped using Macintoshes and actually threw my old Mac away last summer, but luckily you can get barcodes off the Internet free. I use
Sadly I had used the wrong magnification when I produced the artwork so I’ve had to do it again. However I think the book looks pretty good, so I should be getting the copies in a week or so.
Between now and April 5 (publication date) I need to complete the software which will allow readers to use the 16 digit code number inside their book to register for a free on-line crystal. That registration should not be too difficult, but I also need to have a game ready so readers can begin to play with their crystal. I’ve got several ideas for that, I just must find the time to write the software.
Also following the caustic reader’s comment which I reported in this newsletter
last week I’m doing a bit of restyling of the web site at the same time.
Writing and Podcast Volume 2
Editing Volume 2 consists of the following steps:
chopping up and re-arranging pre-existing Episodes so they are in 3000 word chunks – the size of a 20 minute episode
reading and revising the text
recording and again revising the text, often extensively
This isn’t too difficult, and I had hoped to be able to complete 2
Episodes each week so that I could get on with writing Volume 3. This
is in a far more sketchy state and I fear it will take a lot more work,
but I can’t do that until I know what’s happened in Volume 2.
But the real world is catching up with me. This is the busiest time
of year for my day job, as we approach the UK National
Science and Engineering Week. On top of that I’m trying to help
keep LeicestHERday ticking over during their transition period. All
of this is really taking a huge amount of my time.
However I have definitely decided to have 2 weeks devoted strictly
to writing and promoting Time Crystal at the start of April, so that
will be good.
Episode 2
Episode 2 start with Alex seeing Catriona and helping to guide her
into the Time Tunnel. We saw the same action, and the same dialogue,
from Catriona’s point of view at the end of Volume 1. It’s repeated
here partly to let new readers know how Catriona got into the tunnel,
and partly to give the reader a more complete picture of the action.
Seeing the same action from two points of view can be used for many
different reasons. Here it’s to give a more complete picture. Because
Volume 1 ended as Catriona flew into the little dip in the concrete
(and the story ended there as a hook to make the reader want
to read more) we never actually saw what happened as she reached the
dip, so here we see what happened.
The rest of the first scene follows Alex as he visits the sports centre. Like everything else I describe in this story, the sports centre exists. It’s called the Complexe sportif de Maisonnex. There is more information about it (in French) here:
This part of the story has an interesting history. On one of my early research trips to CERN I came upon the Cafe de la Douane which stood on the main road not far from the sports centre and beside the BP garage. It was named after the customs post which stood on the Franco-Swiss border not far away.
The exterior was paint was peeling, but the inside was full of character, wooden panels lined with Swiss memorabilia, and the owner was an interesting character too, a little lady without a smile who was just about keeping the place ticking over after the opening of the border and the closure of the customs house had deprived her of almost all her customers.
This was the original setting for the scene which now takes place in the sports centre. Sadly this little cafe closed a couple of years ago and was pulled down, so I had to re-write the scene. Such are the problems of trying to accurately describe an event in the future (Crystal Day is 5 April 2012). This scene ends without a real cliff-hanger, but at least we see Alex remember the BP garage, so there is forward momentum there.
The second scene in Episode 2 follows Catriona after she arrives in the tunnel entrance. At first she thinks the white rocky funnel surrounding her is the tunnel, but as she flies down she realises that she has not yet reached the real tunnel.
The cliff-hanger at the end of this scene is Catty realising that
she has shrunk and that as she descends the tunnel she is likely to
shrink some more. So the reader is left asking the question what will
she do and what will happen if she decides to enter the tunnel?
It’s a thrill when a new volume starts, the start of a whole new journey that you know will take you six months to complete, but the embarkation and departure requires a lot of work, packing your bags, writing postcards to friends telling them the journey has begun, taking photos as you steam out of port.
The first Episode of Volume 2 was published on Podiobooks this week, at
http://www.podiobooks.com/title/time-crystal-2/
I will continue to create pdfs (link given below) but I’ve decide to drop the e-books for Volume 2 to save a bit of time. I guess that if anyone was actually reading them they will complain? I should set things up so I know how many people are downloading these free copies, but I have never got round to it.
Because the volume has changed I’ve had to change the links to the pdfs and podcasts in this newsletter, and that has required changing the software that converts my text into a mailable format. That makes me nervous, knowing the disaster of a couple of weeks ago. I just hope this one turns out OK!
Feedback
I had the following feedback on the time crystal website:
dude, sorry man, you’re playing amateur hour here. this website – all this extra crap you’ve got – it’s all just amateurish at best. it looks it. feels it.
$1000 is no way anywhere near enough. you need to get some professionals involved.
what you’re trying to do is build a community when it all boils down to it. and that takes marketing dollars, and, above all, the community need to be something that appeals.
dude, if you want to really take this off, you need to employ some realyl people and develop a professional product here. graphic artists. web designers. game developers. all you’ve got is a blog and a forum and a few badly voiced podcasts.
if you think this is ever going to be big, you’re kidding yourself. how many hits you get a day? 100 page views. nothin’. it’s prob. mostly search spiders. how many posts you got in forum from other than yourself? 1? how many comments on average does each blog post attract? 0.2?
not good enuf my man. the reason is twofold. you’re not putting enough marketing dollar in (i’m talking in the tens of thousands here) and the product you have is amateurish.
dude – do it properly or not at all.
cossie
It’s always interesting to receive feedback, and I get almost none. Of course Cossie is right to say that to raise your head above the overwhelming volume of published information you need to spend a lot of money on marketing, or spend a lot of time social networking, neither of which I do.
I just hope and believe that, if I go on for long enough, this effort will one day be recognised and valued. But I’m very willing to accept help from any quarter. Unfortunately Cossie did not offer much constructive advice, apart from spend more money.
Such is the life of the (amateur) author-publisher.
Printing Problems
I uploaded the cover and body of Volume One to the printer (QNS in Newcastle upon Tyne) on 4 February, carefully following the format laid out on their web site. On 12 February they contacted me to say that I had done it wrong. When I challenged this they admitted that their specification was in fact in error, and that the printable area was larger than specified. This means I now have to reformat both the pages and the cover. It also means that, because the pages will be larger, there will be fewer of them. As far as I can see this should bring the price down! That’s good, except that I’ve already paid them in advance (so they owe me money) and also I’ve got to spend time re-formatting the work.
They are offering a good price, so I can’t get too cross, but I hope the low price is not a reflection of the quality of the work.
In fact this revamp of the book turned out to be a good thing, as it allowed me time to re-think not just the page size but also the contents. So, during this revision I added two pages showing some of the Time Crystal Store products and moved the book code and other material from the back to the front of the book. Podcasting has taught me that putting important information at the end of a work is a waste of time, since people stop listening as soon as the story is over.
I also produced this logo, based on the Red Crystal, an emblem of the Red Cross which is seldom used. Details at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emblems_of_the_International_Red_Cross_and_Red_Crescent_Movement
Here is my logo, which I now use as a break within an Episode to show change of scene or flashback.
Volume 2 Episode 01
The opening of Volume 2 is difficult because I want it to be a self-contained book so readers who have not read or listened to Volume 1 should be able to follow the story. I don’t want to have a Preface or Foreword or Preamble giving the Story So Far. I think just seems too amateurish. No, the challenge is how to weave the backstory into the opening few chapters so that the reader can pick up the story without too much effort, without knowing they are learning. It all has to seem natural.
Of course this challenge will get harder and harder with each passing volume as the backstory gets longer and longer. But who said that writing should be easy? It isn’t!
Did Catriona O’Brien really see a man fly across the night sky, shoot her father and then get caught by a giant bee on her eighth birthday? Six years later she accompanies her mother, Irish Ambassador Brigit, on a visit to CERN in Switzerland and eccentric Chinese-Irish scientist Michael Zhang tells her he was there on the night her father died.
But before she can ask him more, Michael reveals that a cosmic monopole has been trapped by one of the powerful magnetic field inside the ATLAS detector and been transformed into a black hole. Michael and Catriona’s doting step-father Sam try to stop the black hole hitting the Earth but it absorbs them. They find themselves outside the Universe on a planet populated by giant bee-like creatures and Sam finally realises Catriona was telling the truth!
Meanwhile time stops everywhere in the Universe except near fragments of mysterious blue crystal. Thus begins an adventure which will take Catriona on a journey back through time to the Big Bang and beyond as she attempts to save the Earth from being frozen in time. This is the first volume of Wyken Seagrave’s epic sci-fi-fantasy-romance revealing nothing less than the place of humanity within the whole history of the Universe.
The work is published as a free podcast on Podiobooks and iTunes. You can also buy the work as a printed book. Every copy includes a unique code which gives you one free crystal in the Time Crystal Game.
The book’s details are:
Time Crystal Volume One
by Wyken Seagrave
Published by Penny Press Ltd
Publication date: 5 April 2010
ISBN: 978-1-871281-13-2
When Irish school teacher Sam Fitzpatrick and CERN scientist Michael Zhang are absorbed by a black hole, they find themselves outside the Universe on a planet populated by gigantic insect-like Entroilians and Argolaths. The Universe is merely part of their elaborate lifecycle. Michael breaks the crystal machinery surrounding it and fragments fall into the Universe where time stops everywhere except near these crystals.
Sam can talk to people who hold crystal, and the insects think they can fix the machinery and restart time, so he tells his step-daughter Catriona O’Brien to collect all the fragments and bring them down the time tunnel. But handsome Hungarian entrepreneur Alex Karolyi knows that firefighter George Gabor will not allow crystals to be removed from CERN. When George tries to catch them Alex flees and Catriona tries to fly into the Time Tunnel.
So begins an epic adventure that will take Catriona on a journey back through the whole history of the Universe. Time Crystal is a timeless adventure-romance including domains both great and small you have never experienced before. Few works of fiction have ever encompassed such a range of ideas and environments, such sheer imaginative scale.
Volume 2 follows the adventures of Catriona and the other characters as they attempt to cope with a Universe frozen in time. Catriona’s main aim is take her crystal down the Time Tunnel and help Sam and Michael to restart time, but other characters have other ideas about what should happen.
This volume is now being published as free weekly podcasts on iTunes and Podibooks.
Last week, as you may be aware, this newsletter was a bit of a mess. The text had fallen out of its box and was sloshing about on the floor. I will delve into the horrible details to show you the sort of things the self-publishing author has to get his hands dirty with, as well as writing.
Previously I had used Microsoft Access to create the text of the newsletter, which I then formatted by using some code I had written to wrap the adverts and index around it. Then I copied this HTML (if you don’t know what HTML is don’t worry, it’s just one more problem I have to deal with) into Dreamweaver where I tidied it up, added links then copied and pasted it into the newsletter server on the web.
Well last week I thought I could save myself a bit of trouble by missing out the Access stage and just editing the whole thing in Dreamweaver. And, as I said, the result was a mess. I don’t know what and I don’t have time to figure it out, so I’ve gone back to the original system, which seems to work fine.
Time
Talking about shortage of time, I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to pick up the networking links of Maureen Milgram Forrest who is leaving LeicestHERday and preparing a celebration party for her. That in addition to helping to plan a Science Festival in Leicester and preparing Volume One of Time Crystal for publication. It’s been a bit of a nightmare, and there’s no end in sight until the middle of March.
I repeat my advice to anyone considering writing: if at all
possible DON’T do it. Do something easy, like climbing Everest. At least
you’d have a guide and a team around to help! And as for trying
to do this and do two other jobs at the same time: NO WAY!
Future of Art & Science
Because of the above shortage of time I have regretfully decided
not to continue recording the Art & Science of Time Crystal.
I cannot guarantee to find the four or more hours needed to record and
edit the podcast. However this Newsletter will continue (hopefully without
any further disasters) so hopefully more people will begin to subscribe.
Volume 1
Episode 26, published this week, is the last in Volume 1. Volume 2,
which will commence on Feb 10, will be available on PodioBooks and iTunes.
Plans are well in hand to get Volume 1 printed by 5 April, Crystal Day!
I have now found a printer in the UK (where I am based) who
is able to print Volume One for a good price, and I have sent
him full payment in advance. I have been working on the cover,
and I’m keeping the arm and hand holding a crystal but decided the background
should be an image of the bubble rather than the mountains which I had
before.
This change means I will need to update the book record in the Neilsen Book Database, which is UK bookshops (including Amazon) pick up their information. It’s a bit of a pain because as far as I can remember I also need to add it to Bowker Link, the publisher database for the US, in order for American booksellers to get the information too.
It’s all just one more job for the self-published author to deal with. As I work through all these jobs I am reminded again that publishers really do earn the money they take out of the price of a book before the author gets his cut. However comparing the range of skills involved between the three parties (authors, publishers and booksellers) I would say that the rewards are in inverse proportion to the amount of skill required to do the job. A bookseller gets the biggest cut, but how much skill does it require to run a shop? The author needs the most skill but gets the smallest cut.
But at least if you use a regular publisher you get paid something. This way I’m doing all this work with absolutely no guarantee of any return. There’s devotion for you!
References
I used Bryce to
produce the front cover image, and used Adobe
Photoshop to add text to the image to create the final artwork I
sent to the printer. The arm was actually cut off one of the figures
provided free by DAZ
Studio (I believe it was Victoria). The bubble and the crystal were
created using Bryce materials.
Time Crystal Episode 26
This week I issue the final Episode of Volume 1. This is another small
landmark scratched onto the map of the development of this story. Next
week will be a bit of a test: how many people will start downloading
Volume 2?
You will be able to subscribe to Volume 2 from Podiobooks and from
iTunes. At this time I don’t have the URL links, but I will add them
to next week’s newsletter.
In Episode 26 the doctor is shocked as two of the crystal fragments
fuse and Sofie is also shocked as the Time Bubble disappears. Meanwhile
George arrives in the ATLAS cavern and attempts to catch Alex and Catriona.
This week’s edition will be the last of the Art & Science, due
to the above-mentioned shortage of time. From now on the text will be
published here and on my blog.
As we reach the end of Volume 1 I think it might be worth-while to
review what has been revealed about the scenario of the story so far,
and examine how much of it is fantasy and how much might be true.
I’ve already talked a lot about the cosmic monopole and negative
energy strings, so I’ll just repeat that neither of these is an
established fact but there are reasons to think they might be true,
or they might not. Science is, after all, a process of inventing ideas
and then doing experiments to test your theories. It’s a creative
process, which is one reason people love doing it. But at the moment
we can’t test either of these theories so they remain thought-provoking
speculation.
Black holes too are not established fact, since we have never created
or found one, but most physicists would be astonished if they don’t
exist, and there is very strong evidence that big ones exist at the
centres of galaxies (including our own). Tiny little ones, such as the
one envisioned in this story, are a bit more speculative, however. I
talked in a previous episode about the chance of anyone surviving falling
into one.
The scenario of this story is that the Universe is just one of many
similar objects which exist in a larger place, as yet undefined, populated
by giant bee-like Entroilians and other creatures. The Universe forms
part of their lifecycle. The queen lays eggs, some of them grow into
Cosmic Eggs and the Entroilians wait to see if life forms inside them
and evolves to be sufficiently intelligent to enter a black hole, at
which point they emerge from the cosmic egg and some of them begin to
grow into new Entroilians. This is what has happened to Michael Zhang,
only he also swallowed a great deal of the cosmic egg and so bears unusual
features which the Entroilians believe fulfil ancient prophesies of
a great new king.
The cosmic egg itself is merely a machine. Time is a sort of rain which
falls down upon it from a network of crystal pipes. Michael breaks this
machine to stop the Earth being absorbed into the black hole and time
stops everywhere in the Universe. Fragments of the pipes fall into the
cosmic egg, each one taking a little bubble of time with it.
I hardly need to say that all of this is entirely speculative. However
science has no idea what lies outside the Universe. Some cosmologist
would say that ‘outside the Universe’ has no meaning, since
the Universe is everything there is. However others would argue that
there might be many Universes, and there could indeed be a larger containing
entity. Since we cannot ever get outside our own Universe we will probably
never know which of these arguments is correct.
The scenario painted here is therefore entirely speculative and I make
no pretence that it might be true. And yet, you never know.
It is with regret that I end the Art & Science of Time Crystal.
I hope that listeners found it interesting and useful, and will want
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While browsing through the CERN COURIER this week I came upon some startling news.
The CERN COURIER is an International Journal of High Energy Physics produced by the UK’s Institute of Physics (IOP) and published (and distributed) free in the UK. I first came across this excellent publication in a van in CERN, where everyone seems to read it. Further information at cerncourier.com
Anyway the news I discovered was that the ATLAS Visitor Centre is finished and open to visitors! I should have known this, of course (it opened in February 2009), but it was slightly worrying that I had not actually ever seen the inside of the real version of the place where Catriona first sees Alex in Time Crystal. I’ve seen the plans but I wish I had seen photos of the place before I wrote Episode 3, where I referred to it as the Observation Room. I’ve now changed that to Visitor Centre, which is how it will appear in the printed book. I could have perhaps added a bit more detail had I seen or or even better been there, although that’s probably not easy to arrange.
Only those visitors to CERN who register with the visitor service (and VIPs such as Ambassador O’Brien and her family) are able to see the Visitor Centre, although the Microcosm just over the road underneath the Reception Building is open and freely available. Book a visit at http://outreach.web.cern.ch/outreach/visits/. Sadly my experience is that you need to book well in advance or take your chance of going on a backup list in case one of the registered visitors drops out. Visits are free, but my experience is that you don’t get the choice of which facility you visit, so you might be taken to one of the other detectors. However, in my opinion a visit is well worth while, even if you don’t see the actual place where Catriona fell in love. There is also a 3D film of ATLAS in a cinema upstairs.
You can see a video of the opening ceremony at http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1164774/ In the video Peter Jenni explains a little bit of the history of the Visitor Centre, and in reality it’s quite long a complicated. At one stage they had plans for a covered walkway leading from the Globe of Innovation to the ATLAS control building, but that seems to have been dropped. Over the years I’ve included that tunnel among other ideas. It has been a constant problem trying to describe a facility before it was actually built! Now it’s all there and I really need to go over and have a look around, but I won’t be able to do that before the book is printed. Never mind. In the end I didn’t describe the room in detail. All I said was:
Other visitors were playing with computer terminals or looking through a window into the Control Room…and that turns out to be exactly what they do, except the window is actually a glass wall, a correction I’ve now made to the text. Later on in Episode 3 I say…they all clustered around the young man Alex who was now sitting before a computer...
Unfortunately you can’t actually go down and visit the ATLAS cavern any more. Nobody can go in there while the beams are running and even when they are not they won’t allow visitors, probably because of the work that is going on but perhaps also because of residual radio-activity in some of the equipment. This is an issue I didn’t mention in Time Crystal, and I’m not really sure how dangerous it would be to go in there.
But from the Visitor Centre you can look through a glass wall into the ATLAS Control Room, and that would be worth doing, especially at times like they had in November and December of 2009 when the beams started running again and they reached total collision energies of 1.18 Tev (tera-electron-volts), a world record man-made particle collision energy. They are aiming to reach 14 Tev eventually.
The LHC magnets and all the detectors are now on standby, which means that they are still cooled to almost absolute zero but the beams are not running. Normally during the winter they shut everything down to save money because the price of electricty (which they buy from France) goes up, but they are so far behind with this experiment that they want to keep going. The are planning to restart the beams early in 2010 but have not yet published a date.
Turns out the lady who designed the Visitor Centre (which is the role that Marianne takes in the story, although that is not explicitly stated in the current version of the text) is called Juliette Davenne.
Time Crystal Episode 25
This week’s Episode has two scenes. The first begins with a quiet, reflective period in which Catriona tried to come to terms with what Sam told her in the last Episode. Alex arrives but is reluctant to go down an unknown tunnel without first trying to assess the risks, and Catriona makes a desperate to persuade him to help her rescue Sam. The scene ends in a cliff-hanger.
In the second scene Danny arrives in the Medical Centre and is shocked to learn about the death of the baby. We begin to learn about the character of the doctor and consider what should happen to Marianne. The practical aspects of how to survive in a Universe in which time does not function will be an on-going theme of the story.
The scene ends as George finds out that Alex has found more crystal. The reader might guess what will happen next.
This week I repeat the correspondence between myself and Evo Terra which was featured in this newsletter last week.
Due to lack of time I am not going to be able to continue to record the Art & Science of Time Crystal podcasts, so in future this newsletter and the Time Crystal website will be the principal routes by which I explore this aspect of the story. I consider it very important that the science behind the story is available to interested readers, but I’m afraid that recording and editing the audio just takes too much time. I am currently working hard to help keep the LeicesHERday charity running during a period of dramatic transition, and sadly that has to take priority.
The Art & Science Podcasts will end next week, when Volume 1 is completed.
ATLAS Visitor Centre
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