Entry 69. The first imaginary revolution

The words – but not necessarily the people who spoke them – are immortalized.

Unlike “Watson, come here, I need you,” or “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” you’d have to look it up to learn that it was Sara Wilde and David Shorting who made the mental breakthrough that led to the foundation of imaginary physics.

They were working in a lab at the company that became ImagCorp, struggling to find a way to move starships faster than light so that you wouldn’t need intergenerational space arks to travel from Earth to far-distant stars.

Ironically, the genius moment came when Shorting said, “I give up.”

Yes – “I give up,” David said. “I can’t imagine a practical way to travel faster than light.”

And then came the spark.

“That's it – we need imagination!” Sara Wilde said – although few people recognize Sara Wilde as the name of the person who said those famous words. Even I had to look it up.

Because – as people had been saying for centuries – the power of the imagination is unlimited. The key was developing an engine that tapped that power. Once that mental barrier was passed, it did not take very long for them to build that engine fueled by computers with imagination.

“The power of the imagination is unlimited” became the first and central tenet of imaginary physics. And unlimited it is. It’s not just the once-unimaginable reality of traveling between stars in a matter of hours (or days, at least) – imaginary power allows us to perform an incredible variety of operations.

But we can’t conjure something from nothing – meal machines, for example, need a wad of ImagPro protein supplement to create a meal. Hence the second tenet: Matter still can’t be created or destroyed.

And despite what Einstein said, time doesn’t accelerate or decelerate at faster-than-light speeds, and despite what a multitude of writers speculated, you can’t move forward or backward through time because all that really exists is this moment. Thus the third tenet of imaginary physics: What’s done is done.

Although it does indeed have those limitations at least, imaginary power is what enabled us to settle and develop Sirius 4 in a matter of decades. It’s what made this life, and this story, possible.

Entry 70