It hit me just after I woke up today. My books, like most sci-fi or fantasy books, have a lot of non-scientific things going on. Whether it’s the many alien races or Universal Power in the Dave Brewster Series, or traveling the universe through a portal inside a Heartstone in the Heartstone Series, the reader has to accept the alternate view of reality in order to keep going forward.

What coalesced in my mind this morning was that the truth is usually stranger than fiction. Following the latest trends in quantum physics and cosmology is my hobby. That’s weird too, I know, but bear with me a minute.

According to physics, matter is almost entirely empty. If you could enlarge a typical atom to the size of a tennis court, the nucleus (which holds virtually all the mass and material) would be the size of a grain of sugar in the center. Therefore, matter is really open space. The couch I am sitting on is almost entirely not there.

On the other hand, according to quantum physics, the vacuum of empty space (the entire universe less the galaxies and their stars and nebulae) is not empty at all. It is a seething caldron of massless particles (or strings) that pop in and out of existence continually. Therefore, emptiness is really fun of stuff.

Now perhaps the empty space in an atom is also a seething caldron. In any event, empty is full, and full is empty. And that’s science! I wish I’d come up with that theme for one of my books!