Could Localised Variations in Physics Occur?

[Write Stuff]

Hi

I'd be grateful for views / thoughts on whether there was potentially a particular event, change, set of circumstances etc which could cause localised variations in the laws of physics (as we understand them).

For example, you could be traveling somewhere, when you unexpectedly chance upon an area where gravity has weakened, with the obvious ensuing consequences because of the aforementioned alteration.

Many thanks in advance. :)

 

[anorlunda]

I'm not sure if it is still true today, but in recent history if you traveled to Illinois, pi became 3.25, and your car tires might go thump thump when you drive down the road.

 

[PeroK]

Hi

I'd be grateful for views / thoughts on whether there was potentially a particular event, change, set of circumstances etc which could cause localised variations in the laws of physics (as we understand them).

For example, you could be traveling somewhere, when you unexpectedly chance upon an area where gravity has weakened, with the obvious ensuing consequences because of the aforementioned alteration.

Many thanks in advance. :)

There is no evidence generally that the laws of physics change over space or time. This is not taken for granted but is an assumption called the cosmological principle.

 

[Rive]

localised variations in the laws of physics (as we understand them)

In real physics, no proof for such thing. Uniformity seems to work really well, and actually by the testimony of remote photons it seems to be a really sturdy law.

Of course, with the 'as we understand them' caveat you can always cook up satisfying technobabble for a story

 

[mfb]

It's very difficult to put any variation into a coherent framework. Let's use the example of gravity being weaker in a volume - what defines that volume? Are the borders fixed in a specific reference frame, and what makes that reference frame special? Do the borders expand together with the universe or not? How does this region affect the expansion? What happens at the border, e.g. for the force between an object inside and outside?
It's very challenging to answer all these questions in a way that doesn't lead to contradictions somewhere. That's not limited to this example, it applies to every change in physics that depends on the location.

 

[Melbourne Guy]

It's very difficult to put any variation into a coherent framework.

True, but there are numerous stories where such variations play their part and readers just soak up what would glaring inconsistencies if they a) stopped to really think about it; b) had the education to spot the problems you note, @mfb. Indeed, Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep has this concept as the core premise to drive the narrative.

@Write Stuff, given that we probably have not exposed the entirety of physics, you can craft such situations and even make them sound reasonable. Weaker gravity (or perhaps that's negative gravity), for example, might occur in the presence of a white hole. They theoretically can exist but we've not spotted any yet! Or, you could use dark energy to create regions where spacetime is drifting like eddies in a river and strange local effects occur.

Whatever you dream up, it will have to be 'beyond our physics' because as others have noted here, there is no evidence of such effects occurring - or theories to make them occur - in our universe. (Apart, maybe, from false vacuum decay, that's a fun / scary one to think about, but as it propagates at the speed of light, unless you have FTL ships and some way to 'repair' the situation, it's a dead end for stories because [spoiler alert] "everyone dies"!)

 

[Jarvis323]

Hi

I'd be grateful for views / thoughts on whether there was potentially a particular event, change, set of circumstances etc which could cause localised variations in the laws of physics (as we understand them).

For example, you could be traveling somewhere, when you unexpectedly chance upon an area where gravity has weakened, with the obvious ensuing consequences because of the aforementioned alteration.

Many thanks in advance. :)

You might find inspiration from Lisa Randall's research.

She talks about some relevant ideas in this video, mainly near last 2-3 minutes.

 

[Write Stuff]

Many thanks for the replies, they're appreciated, and plenty to think about!

 

[Lren Zvsm]

Hi

I'd be grateful for views / thoughts on whether there was potentially a particular event, change, set of circumstances etc which could cause localised variations in the laws of physics (as we understand them).

For example, you could be traveling somewhere, when you unexpectedly chance upon an area where gravity has weakened, with the obvious ensuing consequences because of the aforementioned alteration.

Many thanks in advance. :)

When it comes to handwavium, I prefer the imaginary scientist/scientific revolution. Unlike variations in physical laws across space and time, scientific revolutions that make new things possible have actually happened in the past. Look at what E=mc^2 has done to warfare and the prospects for our species survival.

Jumping back into the world of science fiction, I think it's a better aid to the reader's suspension of disbelief to invoke, for example, "Dr. Wu-Esperanza's theory of gravity", which allows for "localizable mass fluctuation" in a properly equipped space vehicle. Pick the names of your imaginary scientists and imaginary theories according to your own personal tastes. :-)

 

[Melbourne Guy]

Pick the names of your imaginary scientists and imaginary theories according to your own personal tastes. :-)

Off topic, but I've a spreadsheet with over 200,000 first and family names that are randomly combined to generate the former for my stories, @Lren Zvsm. It makes for some fun character names...and it's way easier than doing it manually. And for the theories, I often grab terms from physics journals, they are replete with obscure terms that sound impressively sci-fi

 

[Jarvis323]

I'd be grateful for views / thoughts on whether there was potentially a particular event, change, set of circumstances etc which could cause localised variations in the laws of physics (as we understand them).

Maybe a meteor shower of a new kind of exotic matter rains down on the planet. It could be like dark matter (with positive or negative mass) that doesn't interact with normal matter except through gravitational fields. Maybe you could invent some kind of superdense pockets of such matter that upon traversal through certain kinds or normal matter on the planet, cause micro-gravothermal collapse, generating tiny primordial black holes. And the black holes and dark matter pockets together could create chaotic dynamic distortions of space-time that ripple out from the origin in waves or cause tiny wormholes or space-time vortices that emenate from them.

Or maybe instead of a shower of exotic matter, the exotic matter could be bubbling up from the Earth where it had been trapped, like strange invisible fumeroles or something.

The locally localized gravity idea proposed by Lisa Randall and her student is about branes and supergravity and string theory. It is so complex and abstract that it is hard to write into something that sounds coherent and grounded to a layperson. And I'm guessing the localized gravity they are exploring is pertaining to much larger scales than a planetary scale. But I guess you could go that route still and talk about branes and extra dimensions and how they are warped. But the question is what triggers it, and why is it warped here and not there? You still need some kind of exotic matter, or something like that, I think.

 

[Write Stuff]

Again, thank you for the replies, appreciated and very useful.