Ghostly Engines -- an op-ed

"Murder on Cabot's Landing" 

Op-Ed from the Pasargadae Post
25 Ventôse, 3184
Pasargadae, New Arizona
Immaculate Concourse of Planets
Reprinted by permission

Ghostly Engines
© 3184 Pasargadae post
part of our continuing series on the history of technology

Today, humans routinely journey through this corner of the galaxy in ghostships. Almost no living soul remembers the time before 2970 when Gregor I rediscovered the secret of interstellar travel. Even fewer know the history of the time over a thousand years ago when everyone lived on one planet, Old Home Earth, and thought faster-than-light travel was impossible.

In 2082, August Daignot proclaimed all physics problems solved. He tried to freeze the world forever in a grand Theory of Everything, a theory that finally unified quantum mechanics and general relativity. No one had heard of an obscure woman physicist, a Frisian named Mareike Baarda, who couldn’t even obtain a position in a university. But in just a year, she would publish five papers that dwarfed even Einstein’s 1905 Annus Mirabilis.

The Theory of Everything (TOE) relied on complex and obscure mathematics. Daignot was fond of saying that he was one of no more than a dozen people in all of history who could understand it. Even today, the few people interested in such things number only in the hundreds.

In order to make the TOE equations balance, mathematicians included something called “ghost condensates.” These got their name in the previous century because everyone supposed that they didn’t represent physical reality—they were just mathematical “ghosts” needed to balance certain equations. There was even a “no ghost” theorem that purported to prove they couldn’t “really” exist except in the abstract.

There was certainly good reason to believe the ghost condensates were merely abstract, albeit essential, conveniences. After all, if these ghost condensates did really exist, they would violate both relativity and common sense. They’d violate relativity because they seemed to permit faster-than-light exchange of information. Worse, they’d violate common sense because they were acausal—their state in the present seemed to depend on initial conditions in the future.

No one but a fool would contemplate that something so absurd as ghost condensates could be part of reality.

Of course, the same was true of black holes, predicted by relativity and rejected as impossible by everyone. Until they weren’t.

Baarda’s genius was to suppose the condensates were real. Her detractors sneered that she believed in “ghosts.” She accepted and even adopted the insult, giving it and her wide fame. Her five papers explored the theoretical consequences of these very real ghosts, trolling through accepted icons like Bell’s Inequality and the Casimir effect and shredding conventional explanations. Within a year, her mentor Gregor Hoekstra showed how the ghost condensates might be used to construct a faster-than-light engine which he called a ghost drive. A year after that, Baarda was appointed to the Lucasian Chair in physics at Cambridge, the same chair Newton had held. Five years after that, Baarda and Hoekstra shared the Nobel Prize in Physics, the ancient world's highest scientific honor.

It took another twenty years for engineering to catch up, but by 2112 the first ghostship arrived in our own Immaculate Concourse. Before long, humans had permanent settlements on all six of the habitable planets in the Concourse, and the path to today’s Empire of Humanity was set.

We owe star travel and everything else to one woman’s persistent belief in ghosts.