Split Second (Split Second, #1)

by Douglas E. Richards

Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. But today is a gift. That’s why they call it the present. —Unknown

SPLIT SECOND: What’s Real, and What Isn’t

Idiocracy (or Are We Getting Dumber?):

This is a real movie, with the premise I outlined in the novel. I found this movie amusing, but be warned that it isn’t for every taste, and many might find it offensive.

for those who are interested, I would recommend Googling fertility and intelligence, dysgenics, and the Idiocracy effect.

From my research (and, as always, my analysis is not infallible, so I encourage readers to come to their own conclusions) it appears that studies do show an inverse correlation between education and fertility, such that the more educated you are, the fewer children you will have, on average. A 1991 study, for example, conducted by the US Census Bureau, found that high school dropouts averaged 2.5 children, whereas college graduates averaged only 1.56 children.

Karan Singh, a former minister of population in India, famously said, “Development is the best contraceptive.”

While there is some correlation between educational attainment and intelligence, IQ isn’t entirely determined by genes, and there are other complicating factors, so the higher reproductive rates among the less wealthy and less educated translate into a fairly small reduction of species intelligence (and again, this is quite controversial and still under discussion). Even so, over centuries and millennium, this could have a very noticeable effect.

Critics of this analysis point to something called the Flynn effect, which is the observation that average IQs have actually been slowly rising since 1930, most likel...

The block universe is a real concept that falls out of relativity, and one to which many scientists (including Einstein) subscribe.

I find Zeno’s paradoxes a lot of fun, and I encourage you to Google them. I included the one about the two arrows frozen in time, although I’m not sure how clearly I was able to get across the point of this in the limited space I allowed myself for this task.

My favorite of these paradoxes is called Achilles and the Tortoise. Imagine a tortoise is given a large head start in a race. Well, before Achilles can catch the slow critter, he has to travel half the distance they are separated. But while he’s traveling half, the tortoise is also moving ahead. So now he again must travel half the remaining distance before he can catch the reptile. But again, in the time this takes, the tortoise will have moved forward a small amount. By the time he travels half the remaining distance again, which continues to shorten, the tortoise moves forward again. And so on, forever. In this way, thousands of years ago, Zeno presented a logical argument that Achilles should ...

Time Travel: Feynman diagrams are real. They do model antimatter as going backward in time, and are exceedingly useful. Richard Feynman was a remarkable man, and this is just one of his many contributions to science.

The chronology protection conjecture is an actual concept. The idea of retrocausality is real, and certain experiments with entangled particles in quantum physics suggest that an observation made now can change something that happened in the past.

Earth’s Movement: The paragraph detailing the Earth’s various movements through space (rotation, revolution, etc.) is accurate, at least according to Scientific American. We really are moving through the universe at 242 miles per second.

The Star Trek Transporter: Alas, many, if not most scientists believe that Captain Kirk is destroyed and recreated each time he “travels” through the transporter.

considered addressing some of the philosophical implications of this in the novel, but finally decided against it. Here is one example: Basically, the cells in your body are dying and being replaced all the time. It isn’t clear if 100% of your cells are replaced during your lifetime, or how long this might take if they are, but a common, albeit controversial figure often cited is seven years (if you Google, “does the human body replace itself every seven years” you will find any number of articles on this subject). But just to illustrate the philosophical point, let’s imagine that this is true, that all of the cells in your body are replaced after seven years. So are you the same you that you were seven years ago?

Octa-nitro-cubane: This explosive is real, although the hyphens are not. I added these for ease of reading,

Here is a link to a short documentary about the facility: Science Channel Short Documentary on Cheyenne Mountain

Palomar Mountain is real.