The Eye of God: A Sigma Force Novel

NOTES FROM THE SCIENTIFIC RECORD

WHAT IS REALITY? It’s both the simplest question to answer — and the hardest. Over the ages, it has baffled both philosophers and physicists. In The Republic, Plato described the true world as nothing more than a flickering shadow on a cave wall. Oddly enough, millennia later, scientists have come full circle to a similar conclusion.

The very page this is written upon (or the e-reader in hand) is made mostly of nothing. Stare more deeply at what appears solid, and you discover a reality made up of masses of atoms. Tease apart those atoms, and you find a tiny hard nucleus of protons and neutrons, encircled by empty shells that hold a few orbiting electrons. But even those fundamental particles can be split tinier: into quarks, neutrinos, bosons, and so on. Venture deeper yet, and you enter a bizarre world occupied only by vibrating strings of energy, which perhaps may be the true source of the fire that casts Plato’s shivering shadows.

The same strangeness occurs if you stare outward, into the night sky, into a vastness beyond comprehension, a boundless void dotted by billions of galaxies. And even that enormity may just be one universe among many, expanding ever outward into a multiverse. And what of our own universe? The newest conjecture is that all that we experience — from the tiniest vibrating string of energy to that massive galaxy spinning around a maelstrom of reality-ripping black holes — may be nothing more than a hologram, a three-dimensional illusion that, in fact, we may all be living in a created simulation.

Could that be possible? Could Plato have been right all along: that we are blind to the true reality around us, that all we know is nothing more than the flickering shadow on a cave wall?

Turn this page (if it is a page) and discover the frightening truth.