Shuttlers is an interreality space opera, built around a Multiverse, alternate realities, and an organisation dedicated to policing inter-dimensional travel. I am not a physicist. I am not, by training, any kind of scientist at all. I studied chemistry briefly at university before computers took over my life entirely. So how does someone like me write science fiction with any confidence?
I may not be a scientist by training, but I am by disposition.
And by the way, even scientists aren’t sure about the Multiverse or what it means. All I’m doing is repeating their speculations.
Rules Matter More Than Accuracy
What I’ve learned, mostly through trial and error and extensive reading, is that readers of science fiction generally aren’t checking your work against a physics textbook; they’re checking it against itself. As long as the rules of your world remain internally consistent, the actual scientific plausibility matters far less than people assume. A Shuttler can move between realities however the story needs, provided that the mechanism behaves the same way every time it’s used.
Worldbuilding Comes From Logic, Not Lectures
I didn’t research multiverse theory before starting Shuttlers. Instead, I asked simple, story-driven questions. If people could move between realities, what would it cost them? Who would want to stop it, and why? The science-fiction elements grew out of narrative logic rather than technical research, and I think the book is more readable for it.
Where I Do Need to Be Careful
That said, I’m not careless about it. If I’m using a real scientific concept as a jumping-off point, I’ll do enough research to avoid anything glaringly wrong; the kind of error that would pull a knowledgeable reader straight out of the story. But I’m aiming for internal coherence and emotional truth, not a peer-reviewed paper.
This does not mean I didn’t do any research. After all, I had to know what the consensus was among theoretical quantum physicists.
What I discovered
I spent several days looking into how various scientists interpret the six extra dimensions that are apparently necessary for such things as String Theory. Actually, they are necessary for the five different variants of String Theory (Type I, Type IIA, Type IIB, Heterotic SO(32) (HO), and Heterotic E₈ × E₈ (HE)). Don’t ask me to explain!
M-Theory goes on to show that the other five are all versions of each other, but requires yet another dimension on top of the rest, making a total of eleven, including time.
F-Theory then adds yet another dimension to make certain calculations easier (!). And don’t get me started on Bosonic String Theory, which requires a total of 26 dimensions!
At this point, I decided to stop researching before my brain boiled inside my skull!
What It All Meant
One thing I did discover was that there was quite an interesting split among the physicists studying all this.
On the one hand, some argue that the extra dimensions were simply compactified (their word, not mine) to lengths far beyond anything we can measure, down, in fact, to the Planck length, the shortest possible unit of measurement in physics. It’s about 1.6 x 10-35 metres. Beyond allowing the strings to ‘vibrate’ in multiple dimensions, they have no meaning.
Others consider that each extra dimension represents an expansion in the possible levels and types of reality, creating first a multiverse, then a metaverse, a megaverse, an exaverse, etc., until we reach the Bulk, which is supposedly 10- or 11-dimensional. With each added dimension, we add another infinity of possible realities, squaring and cubing the numbers along the way.
The thing is, regardless of what you believe, with all these extra dimensions, calculations become so complicated that not even the best supercomputers in the world can make sense of the numbers. Everything is just guesstimates and assumptions.
But it does make for interesting speculation to drive a story.
Now, having brought your brains up to a similar temperature to mine, I’ll leave this as it lies.
Why I Think This Actually Works in My Favour
Not being a scientist means I’m not tempted to over-explain the mechanics at the expense of the story. Some science fiction gets so caught up in justifying its own technology that it forgets to be about people. I don’t have that temptation, mostly because I couldn’t sustain the technical explanation even if I wanted to. I’m forced to keep the focus on Justin, Pol, and what’s actually at stake for them, which, I suspect, is exactly where it belongs.
So: I’m not a scientist, never claimed to be one, and the Multiverse seems to be getting along just fine without my credentials.