Spirituality Novels – Expanding Universe

In writing six science fiction/spirituality novels I’ve given a lot of thought to how the universe may be constructed in order to provide plausible settings for my stories. The various religions and the spiritualists have said all along that there is life after death and that the afterlife realms seem just as solid to those beings who inhabit them as our world does to us. These other realms have in fact been described as being ‘as real as trees and grass’.

ANow science comes along and talks about parallel universes which may overlap with our universe or may be very close to it. The matter and energy in these other universes would not be observable to us but we could infer their existence by gravitational considerations.

It is established scientific fact that the universe is expanding but considering the total known mass in the universe it would be expected that this expansion should be slowing down due to gravity and possibly even reverse at some point to produce a contracting universe.

However the universe is known to be expanding at an INCREASING rate! How can this be possible? Well there are a number of theories but the prevailing view is that we have to postulate the existence of a whole lot of extra energy and matter that cannot be detected by electromagnetic means. Scientists call this other stuff ‘dark energy’ and ‘dark matter’ and they have to account for roughly 74% and 22% of the universe. This means that so called ‘normal matter’, the stuff like stars and galaxies that we can observe, is only 4% of what is out there!

So we have a situation where 96% of the universe is in a completely different realm to us! That sure sounds to me like a good place for the spirit world to reside.

Also consider that so called ‘normal matter’ is nearly all empty space. On the classical model of an electron as a small particle orbiting a larger nucleus think ‘an orange placed in the middle of a football field with a grain of sand flying around the perimeter’. This model while not representing reality is good enough to explain all of Chemistry. Also the relative size aspect is correct. An atom is nearly all empty space! The electron is really just a wave vibrating but we don’t know of what. More correctly it is a probability function smeared out across space. Similarly the nucleus of the atom is not made of solid particles either just more vibrating waves of energy.

So that is all we humans are as well; just vibrating waves of energy. Suddenly the ‘afterlife’ doesn’t seem so fanciful does it?