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The Cosmic Codex

The Cosmic Codex

Von: Brian Scott Pauls
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Living in a science fiction universe...

www.thecosmiccodex.comBrian Scott Pauls Kunst Science Fiction
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  • “Probability Amplitudes”: Picking up where we left off

    “Probability Amplitudes”: Picking up where we left off
    Aug 20 2026
    Do you or someone you know need professional tech guidance for your author, coaching, or independent publishing business? If so, check out our sponsor Cloudessy, providing fractional Chief Technology Officer services. Simplify your tech stack, prevent launch failures, and build systems that actually support growth.https://marketing.cloudessy.com/30-minute-tech-stack-update/Nearly half the matter in the universe is missingThe ledger of particle physics doesn’t balance.Physics tells us the Big Bang should have created matter and antimatter in precisely equal amounts—which should have mutually annihilated on contact, leaving nothing in the universe but radiation. Yet, here we are, asking why.Here’s what really happened. For approximately every billion matter-antimatter annihilations, one particle of matter survived. This matter made the stars, planets, nebulae, and us.Physicists call this the “baryon asymmetry problem,” and it’s one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of science. The ratio of surviving matter particles to photons is about six in ten billion—but we can’t explain why.Science fiction has been playing with antimatter for nearly a century, but mostly as fuel and firepower. Jack Williamson's "Seetee" series puts antimatter asteroids in the Belt and sets engineers to taming them as fuel for spacecraft and power plants. E. E. Smith weaponizes antimatter as the "negasphere," a bomb of “negative matter,” in Gray Lensman. While some authors have written stories skirting the central mystery of baryon asymmetry, none seem to have tackled it directly.One quick reminder—Cloudessy, my consulting business providing fractional Chief Technology Officer services, is now a sponsor of this newsletter. If you or someone you know needs professional tech guidance for your author, coaching, or independent publishing business, check out the ad at the end of this post. Thank you!Maybe the antimatter is just hidingThe simplest solution to the baryon asymmetry problem is to deny it exists. Perhaps the universe is balanced—the antimatter is simply somewhere else. This was a respectable scientific position for much of the twentieth century. Antimatter atoms would form antimatter planets, stars, and galaxies. From a distance, we wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Light emitted by an antimatter atom is identical to light emitted by a matter atom.Larry Niven’s 1967 story “Flatlander” is an sf treatment of this idea. Beowulf Shaeffer investigates a rogue planet inbound from intergalactic space—an object so strange and lethal the mystery of its true nature drives the plot. Of course, it’s made of antimatter. This planet is a relic from the universe’s missing half, preserved for billions of years only because it stayed in the void between galaxies, where there was nothing to touch.Thanks for reading The Cosmic Codex! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.The “hiding” hypothesis hasn’t aged well. If any substantial region of the universe were made of antimatter, gamma radiation from the annihilation of gas particles would light up its boundary with neighboring matter regions. Astronomers have looked. The sky shows no such signs, out to distances comparable to the entire observable universe. Experiments like the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS-02) aboard the International Space Station have hunted—so far without confirmed success—for even a single heavy anti-nucleus (such as one atom of antihelium) that could only have come from an antimatter star.Sakharov’s recipeSomething, very early on, treated matter and antimatter differently.In 1967, the Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov worked out exactly what that “something” would require. To cook a matter surplus from balanced ingredients, the universe must satisfy three conditions.* A way for baryon number to change: Some process must be able to create matter without creating an equal amount of antimatter.* Violations of two symmetries called C and CP: the laws of physics must, at some level, distinguish between particles and their mirror-image antiparticles.* A departure from thermal equilibrium: a moment of rapid, one-way change—such as the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang—when reactions couldn’t run backward and erase the surplus as fast as it accumulated.It turns out our universe does satisfy these conditions—just not enough. The second condition made headlines when CP violation showed up in the laboratory. Physicists first caught nature favoring matter over antimatter in the decays of kaons in 1964, then in B mesons at the turn of the century. In 2025, the LHCb experiment at CERN added a long-sought piece: the first observation of CP violation in baryons—the family of particles that includes the protons and neutrons we’re made of—measuring a small but unmistakable difference in how a particle called the beauty-lambda and its antiparticle decay.But when we add up all the CP...
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    14 Min.
  • Where is all the antimatter?

    Where is all the antimatter?
    Aug 14 2026
    Do you or someone you know need professional tech guidance for your author, coaching, or independent publishing business? If so, check out our sponsor Cloudessy, providing fractional Chief Technology Officer services. Simplify your tech stack, prevent launch failures, and build systems that actually support growth.https://marketing.cloudessy.com/30-minute-tech-stack-update/Nearly half the matter in the universe is missingThe ledger of particle physics doesn’t balance.Physics tells us the Big Bang should have created matter and antimatter in precisely equal amounts—which should have mutually annihilated on contact, leaving nothing in the universe but radiation. Yet, here we are, asking why.Here’s what really happened. For approximately every billion matter-antimatter annihilations, one particle of matter survived. This matter made the stars, planets, nebulae, and us.Physicists call this the “baryon asymmetry problem,” and it’s one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of science. The ratio of surviving matter particles to photons is about six in ten billion—but we can’t explain why.Science fiction has been playing with antimatter for nearly a century, but mostly as fuel and firepower. Jack Williamson's "Seetee" series puts antimatter asteroids in the Belt and sets engineers to taming them as fuel for spacecraft and power plants. E. E. Smith weaponizes antimatter as the "negasphere," a bomb of “negative matter,” in Gray Lensman. While some authors have written stories skirting the central mystery of baryon asymmetry, none seem to have tackled it directly.One quick reminder—Cloudessy, my consulting business providing fractional Chief Technology Officer services, is now a sponsor of this newsletter. If you or someone you know needs professional tech guidance for your author, coaching, or independent publishing business, check out the ad at the end of this post. Thank you!Maybe the antimatter is just hidingThe simplest solution to the baryon asymmetry problem is to deny it exists. Perhaps the universe is balanced—the antimatter is simply somewhere else. This was a respectable scientific position for much of the twentieth century. Antimatter atoms would form antimatter planets, stars, and galaxies. From a distance, we wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Light emitted by an antimatter atom is identical to light emitted by a matter atom.Larry Niven’s 1967 story “Flatlander” is an sf treatment of this idea. Beowulf Shaeffer investigates a rogue planet inbound from intergalactic space—an object so strange and lethal the mystery of its true nature drives the plot. Of course, it’s made of antimatter. This planet is a relic from the universe’s missing half, preserved for billions of years only because it stayed in the void between galaxies, where there was nothing to touch.Thanks for reading The Cosmic Codex! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.The “hiding” hypothesis hasn’t aged well. If any substantial region of the universe were made of antimatter, gamma radiation from the annihilation of gas particles would light up its boundary with neighboring matter regions. Astronomers have looked. The sky shows no such signs, out to distances comparable to the entire observable universe. Experiments like the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS-02) aboard the International Space Station have hunted—so far without confirmed success—for even a single heavy anti-nucleus (such as one atom of antihelium) that could only have come from an antimatter star.Sakharov’s recipeSomething, very early on, treated matter and antimatter differently.In 1967, the Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov worked out exactly what that “something” would require. To cook a matter surplus from balanced ingredients, the universe must satisfy three conditions.* A way for baryon number to change: Some process must be able to create matter without creating an equal amount of antimatter.* Violations of two symmetries called C and CP: the laws of physics must, at some level, distinguish between particles and their mirror-image antiparticles.* A departure from thermal equilibrium: a moment of rapid, one-way change—such as the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang—when reactions couldn’t run backward and erase the surplus as fast as it accumulated.It turns out our universe does satisfy these conditions—just not enough. The second condition made headlines when CP violation showed up in the laboratory. Physicists first caught nature favoring matter over antimatter in the decays of kaons in 1964, then in B mesons at the turn of the century. In 2025, the LHCb experiment at CERN added a long-sought piece: the first observation of CP violation in baryons—the family of particles that includes the protons and neutrons we’re made of—measuring a small but unmistakable difference in how a particle called the beauty-lambda and its antiparticle decay.But when we add up all the CP...
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    13 Min.
  • A critique of "The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith," by Josephine Saxton

    A critique of "The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith," by Josephine Saxton
    Aug 7 2026
    Do you or someone you know need professional tech guidance for your author, coaching, or independent publishing business? If so, check out our sponsor Cloudessy, providing fractional Chief Technology Officer services. Simplify your tech stack, prevent launch failures, and build systems that actually support growth.https://marketing.cloudessy.com/30-minute-tech-stack-update/Text of original article:In 2023, Josephine Saxton won the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award, which elevates the work of deserving, but lesser known, science fiction and fantasy writers.When Saxton’s The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith hit bookstore shelves in 1969, it did in fact carry the imprint name “Doubleday Science Fiction.”It’s not science fiction. Not by today’s standards, at least. If this book were published in 2026, the publisher would almost certainly label it “magical realism.”Ostensibly, what we have here is a post-apocalyptic narrative. A boy (but no dog, sorry) makes his way through the countryside of a nearly deserted England.So far so good. And at first the world seems very post-apocalyptic indeed. In the first few pages we learn the boy is traveling alone and on foot. The environs through which he walks are very quiet. So quiet, in fact, that the song of a bird causes him to cry with joy.“This morning he had seen a bird, and it had been singing, and the sound had excited him until he had tears running down his face, and he had been very happy. It was a long time since he had heard anything at all, except the sounds that he himself made.”What sort of apocalypse is this, that leaves a country so barren even sound is all but extinguished?We might think a boy stranded in such a situation would be seeking help—perhaps an adult who could offer food and shelter. But the opposite is true.“…if he ever saw another human being, and sometimes he did, he would avoid contact, and he knew that this was right, for in this way, trouble was avoided.”What do we have here? A plague? Perhaps a zombie plague? George Romero’s original Night of the Living Dead came out just a year before this book.Soon the boy hears a sound he attributes to some sort of animal—perhaps a rabbit. At least we know there are animals (other than the occasional bird) left in this strange world! But Saxton quickly minimizes even this slight consolation:“…it might be a rabbit although he knew this was a remote possibility, as he had only had one rabbit in his whole life.”Thanks for reading The Cosmic Codex! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.In any case, the “rabbit” turns out to be a newborn baby girl, umbilical cord still attached to her dead mother. Here we get some insight into the boy’s response to mortality.“Death and the dead must at all costs be avoided,” he thinks, and backs away “full of shock and distress.”Then Saxton throws us a curve ball.“The boy was fourteen years old. He had been walking alone now for ten years…”Wait…this kid has been walking through a nearly silent world, avoiding people whenever possible, since he was four years old?Subsequent events increase our perplexity. Against his better judgement, based on “rules” he’s learned (apparently at the age of three and four) from someone, the boy chooses to rescue the baby—even though he has no idea how to care for her.He carries her to an empty town, finding a grocery store with an automatic door (that still functions after a decade) and shelves still stocked with soda water and condensed milk.Later, he locates a bathhouse with functioning toilets and a pool still filled with chlorinated water heated to “a temperature of about eighty-three degrees Farenheit.” Eventually he discovers an indoor shopping mall (also fully stocked) where the heat and even a coffee machine still work.This is a very odd apocalypse.That’s because we aren’t reading a science fiction novel. We’ve been hoodwinked by Doubleday’s late-60s marketing department. Instead of a literal end-of-civilization scenario, this apocalypse is a stand-in for something else.The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith is about the differences between boys and girls on the one hand, and women and men on the other. The empty world, seemingly devoid (or nearly so) of adults is more a representation of how the grown-up world is largely invisible to children, who are primarily the inhabitants of their own needs, desires, and imaginations.Thanks for reading The Cosmic Codex! This post is public so feel free to share it.This is symbolized by a monument the boy finds in the empty village.“...he came upon a statue of a man on horseback, with an inscription beneath it. The inscription thus:“’To the memory of those brave men of the town of Thingy, who gave their lives in the First World War.’”Here it’s important to understand the meaning of the word “thingy” in British English:“a person or thing whose name one has forgotten, does not ...
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    9 Min.
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