In my previous posts in this series we discussed several species that are part of the lore of Ragnarok Conspiracy. In this post, we are starting a new series ot three posts where we look at astrology or astrophysics.
The universe in Ragnarok Conspiracy doesn't excactly match the dominant model of cosmology, lamba-CDM, but thst doesn't mean it's not inspired by actual science. The lore is still very much both science-fiction and science-fiction.
In this introductionary post I'm going to give a short overview of the astrophysics of Ragnarok Conspiracy and we are going to look geeper into one third of the subject.
What the Ragnarok Conspiracy universe is NOT.
According to the dominant model of reality in current day cosmology we live in an expanding universe that started with a big bang. Space is what is called flat, most of the matter in the universe is so called dark matter, and dark energy makes the universe expand. Gravity is a bit of a problem because it doesn't quite fit with quantum physics, but according to general relativity its all about space-time curvature.
There are some alternate theories for gravity, of what MOdified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) seems to be the only one that is semi taken seriously by cosmologists, but there are also several fringe theories floating around on the internet, one interesting one that gives a much bigger role to electomagnatism.
The universe in Ragnarok Conspiracy adheres to none of these theories, but leans more on MOND and on the electromagnetic fringe model than on lambda-CDM. No big bang. No expanding universe. But conversely gravity and quantum physics play pretty nice.
An helicopter overview
The astrophysics of Ragnarok Conspiracy are too much to fit into a single blog post. Lets do a quick run-through though to get a quick and confusing view of the bigger picture before we zoom in to part of the details.
In Ragnarok Conspiracy there has been no big bang and there is no expansion in the universe. No dark matter or dark energy. Gravity is a quantum time field, and space is a 3d hyperbolic patchwork of flat-ish 3d branes bending and folding franticly within the 13 dimensional coordinate system of a space field. While space within the branes is dominated by the individual brane function, the finite sized and flat branes of space are linked together by electromagnetism into an infinate hyperbolic whole.
In this post we are going to have a look at time, gravity and hyperbolic space. In a second post I want to look at electromagnetism, and in the third and final post in this series I'm going to discuss the space branes.
Red-shift
We can't just do away with the big bang and expansion of the universe without adressing the two main smoking guns that quite convincingly point to a universe that originated with a big bang and is eternaly expanding. These two smoking guns are red-shift and the cosmic backgroud radiation. In the next post we will address cosmic background radiation, but in this post we need to look at red-shift.
So what is red-shift, and why does it point to an expanding universe?
Imagine you are standing on the side of the a road, and a car is racing towards you from a distance, passes you, and than drives away from you, all at a great velocity. Something interesing happens to the sound of the car, or more precicely to the pitch of the sound of the car. While the car drives towards you, the pitch of the sound is high , and as the cas passes you, the pitch drops and will stay low as the car moves away from you.
Now if instead of sound that moves at 1,235 km per hour and has frequencies inthe herz and kilo hertz range, we use light that moves at almost 300,000 km per second with frequencies in the hundreds of tera hertz, and instead of a car that moves at maybe 100 km an hour away from us, we have a distant astronomical objects moving at 10,000 km/second from us, we would see the same effect.
The effect is that for objects moving towards us, the wavelength shortens and so the frequency (of the light or the sound) increases, and for objects moving away, the wavelength lengtens and thus the frequency decreases.
If we look at visual light, violet has a wavelength of about 380 nanometers while on the other end of the visual light spectrum red light has about 700 nm. Thus an object moving away from us throug expanding space would result in a shift in colour of the light reaching us torards the red side of the light spectrum, hence redshift.
But this effect, the dopler effect isn't the only known cause of red-shift.
Gravitational or temporal red-shift
You may have heard that according to einsteins theory of relativity time will go really really slow close to a black hole. But this effect isn't limited to black holes. Time slows down near a mass, the bigger the mass and the closer you get to it, te more time slows down.
As light goes from a place with slower passing of time to a place with faster passing of time, we see a redshift just as we saw with the doppler effect. Same result differert cause.
Quantum fields and elemtary particles.
According to the standard model of particla physics, there are 17 quantum fields. One for each elementary particle. Quantum field theory looks at elementary particles as desturbances or waves in their repective fields.
One field that is currently missing in the standard model of particle physics is a field that relates to gravity. There is the idea of a graviton and of a gravitational field, but so far all attempts to unite a quantum theory of graphics with general relativity have failed.
What if: A quantum chrono-field
This isn't particle physics, this is lore, and lore in sci-fi is all about the what-ifs. So lets look at our what-if for the Ragnarok Conspiracy brings us.
In the visualization of gravity according to general relativity, often a false image is created about the importance of space curvature in the interpretation of gravity under general relativity. Yes, space curvature plays a role, but most of what we observe regarding to gravity is due to the curving of time.
Imagine that you are in your car and the road you are driving on experiences a temporal effect. Time ticks at normal speed in the middle between the driver seat and the passenger seat, but for your left two weels time ticks 2% faster while for your right two weels it ticks 2% slower. Each wheel is turning at the exact same speed but due to the differences in the passing of time, your car will divert to the right. Your path over the road will end up curved. It's a curvature of time, not of space.
So what if time, not gravity is actually the missing field? What if a chromoton, not a graviton is the missing particle?
As for redshift, the null level of a field can decay if it starts out at what is called a flase vacuum. So time for our second what-if: What if the chrono-field vacuum is slowly decaying? That could explain the redshift of far away galaxy without the doppler effect. No dopler effect, no big bang, no dark energy.
More
I know this post leaves a lot of loose ends. There will still be loose ends at the end of this series because this is lore, not physics, but in the next post we will bring in electomagnetism to explain away part of the loose ends without the no dark matter premise. In the third post we will explain away the cosmic background radiation an finish the puzzle of a universe that allows for the intergalactic portals that play a dominant role in the lore of Ragnarok Conspiracy.
I hope you enjoyed this piece of lore. here will be more on this topic soon. Like everything in the Ragnarok Conspiracy lore, everything in this post is shared under the OpenWorld Character Usage licence, so feel free to use it in your own world buikding.