Those pesky mirrors! What powers them?

We know that subatomic particles can be shifted around. Within the alternative realities of The Wheel, the rules are what Levi and other programmers decide they are, within limits, of course. If Levi wants to give someone blonde hair, that's certainly within the limits of reality. So is massive strength, or a sun emitting light at a different wavelength, or even creatures that we've never heard of. However, sometimes the rules of reality dictate what turns up in the realities.

Is it possible for a creature to fly? Of course. However, is it possible for that same creature to fly without wings? Not in any reality we're familiar with. However, put strong enough gravity on a world, and have that gravity stir up a strong enough magnetic field, and then populate that world with creatures that absorb iron from the planet's surface, and all you have to do is find a way to magnetize them. Reverse the polarity of the magnetism, and they can now fly.

Sound crazy? It's well known that our sun reverses its magnetic polarity every 11 years, more or less. During each 11 year cycle, solar storms build in intensity, as the lines of magnetism across the sun's surface become more and more jagged, until they begin to snap, causing solar flares. Then, when the violence is at its worst, Bam! The sun's magnetic poles switch place. Sunspots and solar flares become negligible for a few years, then it all starts over again. If that happened on a violently unstable world, where the core was ferocious, then every 11 years, our magnetic beings could fly, reaching greater and greater heights. Only when the poles reversed would they be grounded. Their whole society would have to be based on an eleven-year cycle to accommodate the collapse of their ability to levitate themselves and other objects when their gravitational field resets itself.

So, what reality are the mirrors based on?

On the MIT News blog (Dec. 5, 2013, MIT News Office • Massachusetts Institute of Technology • Cambridge, MA 02139-4307) we read that the "group showed that by creating two entangled black holes, then pulling them apart, they formed a wormhole — essentially a 'shortcut' through the universe — connecting the distant black holes."

The article goes on to say, "The theoretical results bolster the relatively new and exciting idea that the laws of gravity holding together the universe may not be fundamental, but arise from something else: quantum entanglement."

That's exciting enough on its own, but there are deeper implications in MIT's announcement. Not only do we now have entangled black holes, "shortcuts" through space, MIT also pulls holographic duality into the mix. It's a concept in string theory that all the information needed to create a three-dimensional view of any object is included in a two-dimensional hologram. Essentially, we can "derive a more complex dimension from the next lowest dimension."

Back to our mirrors. We step up to them, and they look like mirrors, and they even have the quality of existing in real space. Yet, they are held in place by energy (as is all matter — check any high school physics book), except we've linked the atoms in the mirror with those on a distant world. They are quantum entangled, meaning every atom forms a wormhole to another atom elsewhere in the universe. Now, all we need to make all this work is the technology to organize the atoms on each end into identical patterns, and our physical bodies slip through, each atom in its own black hole, to come out in the exact same order on the other side.

We can even power the mirrors through these quantum entangled black holes.

One more benefit of these amazing black holes? MIT's article tells us these entangled particles are "communicating across vast distances...at speeds faster than that of light." What does that give us? QuantumCom, as used by New Sabattical Rome in The Wheel.

The other unsettled question is how we can get the entangled particles all the way across the galaxy in order to make the mirrors and QuantumCom work. In The Wheel, the quantum entangled particles have to be manually placed in two different locations; however, MIT tells how the Firedevils are able to "skim" people, ideas, and things from our arm of the galaxy to their world thousands of light years away. It's known as the Schwinger effect. MIT describes it as "a concept in quantum theory that enables one to create particles out of nothing. More precisely, the effect, also called 'pair creation,' allows two particles to emerge from a vacuum, or soup of transient particles. ...One can, as Sonner (Julian Sonner, senior postdoc in MIT's Laboratory for Nuclear Science and Center for Theoretical Physics) puts it, 'catch a pair of particles' before they disappear back into the vacuum. Once extracted, these particles are considered entangled."

The essence of this is that the mirrors in The Wheel are indeed based on current science and the latest in scientific theory. Who might say whether we might be able to build something similar within a handful of decades? It's been happening on Star Trek for fifty years. Isn't it about time to bring it into the real world?