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The Wheft

Wheft.  (n) (nautical)A kind of streamer or flag used either as a signal, or at the masthead for ornament or to indicate the direction of the wind to aid in steering.
         

Webster’s online dictionary

Verisimilitude is the appearance of being true or real.  It’s a fundamental feature of realistic fiction.  It applies to characters, plot, setting, and all other elements of the ficttional world. It’s what Hemingway was talking about when he said

 I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things. The hardest thing is to make something really true and sometimes truer than true.

Ernest Hemingway

Anyone reading fiction knows it’s not real, but, for the sake of the story, the reader starts out willing to believe what’s one the page. It’s up the author to endow the fictional world with the appearance of reality, to nurture the readers’ willingness to believe. This means giving the reader sufficient reasons, if they squint and don’t think too much about it, to continue to believe.

Fiction will sometimes include a signal to the readers that things are different in the fictional world. An example of this is when the clock strikes thirteen in the first line of Orwell’s novel 1984. Science fiction often includes words that, at least on the surface, makes the fictional world plausible. We know, for example, that the faster-than-light spacecraft in Star Trek are impossible, but they are called warp drives. The word warp is a signal that they they alter space-time in new ways, making the faster-than-light travel possible. It’s a subtle but effective signal.

When fiction involves supernatural elements, this signal sometimes includes a dream-like veil that separates the real and supernatural worlds of the story. However, I’ve always had a problem believing in this kind of fictional world. After all, the real world doesn’t include such a veil except in dreams.

For me, the problem with supernatural elements in most fantasy stories is that they require I abandon physical aspects of the real world that I know are valid without giving me an even semi-plausible explanation. Even if I squint really, really hard and really, really want to believe, I still can’t accept that a spiderbite can give you superpowers. The same is true for a veil marking a supposedly real, but dream-like, world filled with wierd stuff.

Morden physics, however, is full of weird stuff. Stuff like spooky action at a distance (quantum entanglement), or wormholes (space-time tunnels), or invisible stuff (dark matter and dark energy). In this essay, I’m going to use the word wheft as a signal for a particular kind of supernatural fictional world that is grounded in way that permits this kind of weird stuff and more. I think it could even make it plausible that dreams are real, at least, if you squint hard enough, don’t think too much about it, and want to believe for the sake of a story.

The basic idea of this essay is to hypothesize a universe–or even universes–of invisible matter and/or energy occuping the same space-time we occupy. The wheft is the what I’m calling the hypothetical boundary–or boundaries–between this invisible universe and our visible one.

In order to ground this hypothesis, I first give some history on “the willing suspension of disbelief,” then discuss some unsolved problems in physics, including some speculation, by real physicists, about possible solutions. The point of the science discussion is that physicists need to figure out ways to account for wierd, invisible stuff, and they are creative in doing so. If you’re not interested in the scientific discussion, you can just skip to the final section where there is free-wheeling speculation on the kinds of ways an author might deploy this wheft as a signal.

Willing suspension of disbelief

Two Kinds of Matter

Dark Matter

The Big Bang

Dark Energy

The Hubble Tension

Relativity and Quantum Mechanics

The Wheft

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