On earth, there are ten-trillion-trillion atoms per cubic metre. Here, in the space between galactic filaments, there's about ten atoms per cubic metre. There’s as close to nothing as it gets. Even us just being here wildly skews the average density for millions of lightyears around. We find ourselves in a void, in the scientific sense of the word, bracketed by galactic superclusters so distant that we have no way of knowing what they look like, only seeing what they looked like millions of years ago.
It is here that we can test the project with as close to control results as possible. We’ve retreated a lightyear from the drop sight and the Prism will have already begun its calculations. We have to stasis ourselves for eighty-six years. A blink in the eye of the universe, but it's conceivable that colleagues or competitors will create a faster version of the Prism in that time which will get results quicker than ours, rendering this test obsolete. Such is the nature of science.
The Prism calculates everything. What has happened, what is happening, and what will happen. It does this by taking a screenshot of everything. Every atom in the universe, where it is and what it’s doing, and predicts what it will do next, and what after that, and so on, in a cascade that runs all ways in time. If the universe is deterministic, then this calculation will be absolutely accurate. If it is probabilistic, as the majority of evidence suggests it will be, it will be largely useless.
So why do it? Proof. We write take all the theory we like, but it all comes down to what we can prove. It is more important, therefore, to prove ourselves wrong than it is to prove ourselves right.
Paddy Dobson
27th August 2023