Apocalypse

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I often get asked by readers just how much of the science incorporated within my novels is ‘real’. The simple answer is that all of the science within my novels is real, but some of it is stretched to embrace the extreme events that are part and parcel of thriller fiction.

As described in Apocalypse, we really do see back in time the further away we look, the speed of light does have a finite velocity and an endeavour like Project Watchman is entirely within the physical and technological capabilities of the United States’ intelligence community. Their KH-11 ‘Keyhole’ satellites are also real, and are rumoured to have optics more than capable of clearly photographing newspaper articles from orbit. Modern supercomputers could indeed crunch data sufficiently to provide a virtual replay of events from around the globe: only the storage of so many years of data might prove problematic. Quantum computers, just over our technological horizon, may resolve that issue.

The only science that I have adjusted for the sake of the plot in Apocalypse is the black hole itself. In reality it would take a black hole with the mass of hundreds of suns to produce the time-dilation described in the novel: an object this massive would swallow our entire planet almost instantaneously. Time-dilation, however, is real, as is the ability of objects to travel through time via extreme velocities. If one were able to stand alongside the event horizon of a sufficiently massive black hole, then time would indeed be dilated in the manner described. Although a low-mass black hole could probably be suspended in a tokomak just like Joaquin Abell’s, the gravitational field of such an object would not be likewise contained: it would continue to affect its surroundings both inside and outside of the chamber.

At the time of writing, physicists working with the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN labs in Geneva have observed what they believe to be the fabled Higgs boson, the elementary particle responsible for mass in our universe. This discovery paves the way for a greater understanding of our universe, and potentially brings the subject matter in Apocalypse one step closer to reality.

Dean Crawford, 2012