Teleporting Breakthrough as Scientists Transport Light Particles.

Scientist Noriyuki Lee and his team at the University of Tokyo have teleported the information associated with a packet of light, as Clara Moskowitz from livescience.com explains:

"Lee and his team accomplished this by linking a packet of light to one half of a pair of entangled particles. They then destroyed the light and the particle it was linked to, leaving only the lone particle of the entangled pair. The remaining particle retains the link with its entangled partner, though, including information about the light, which enabled the researchers to rebuild the light in the exact configuration at the other location."

Read the full article here.

I mention this because quantum entanglement is, of course, one of those odd quirks of nature utilised by the Unmer in SEA OF GHOSTS – as several readers have been quick to notice and point out to me. One school of Unmer sorcery involves the actual transference of matter, but more commonly the information associated with matter (feelings, perceptions), across gulfs of space.

One of the things I love about writing fantasy is that you can bend reality to suit the world you want to create. In the novel, a treasure hunter postulates that Unmer sorcery is only possible if Space itself is redefined. As a writer, it's easy enough for me to do exactly that if the story requires it. So, in SEA OF GHOSTS Space becomes a measure of both the distance and the difference over time between any two particles (Space is waveform), which is handy because it means that all sorts of Unmer magic is suddenly possible – if there's no difference between two things, there is no space between them (giving us quantum entanglement, the transmission of perceptions between people, and perhaps even the summoning of demons or other god-like creatures from strange realms). Very handy indeed.

However, in the book I have tried my very best to ground this definition, so that it isn't so far removed from what we as readers actually know about our own cosmos. Otherwise it simply becomes too implausible. It therefore seemed important to me that the character who comes up with this theory uses it to understand not just sorcery, but the workings of his own universe (and by association, our universe). So readers will, I hope, recognise his references to black holes, cosmic inflation, the theories of Sir Roger Penrose, the formation of singularities, and so on. The latter was a particularly useful aspect of this character's definition, because it means that the heat death of the universe forms a singularity, since when isolated bits of matter stop fluctuating they suddenly occupy the same space. Kaboom. Hopefully, all of this is enough to make the reader think, Ok, I can just about buy that.

It is all pre-Einstein, of course, which – thankfully – allows me to get away with a lot. Gravitons? What Gravitons? X and Y bosons? Sorry, buddy, I'm writing Fantasy, not SF. Physics only has to act as the springboard from which we jump into the pool – which is all the more important, it seems to me, if that pool contains dragons.