The Big Idea

Faith Awakened  is Grace Bridges's novel that puts her unique twist on a virtual world. I asked her how her work compares with The Matrix , which is probably the most widely-known story universe featuring virtual reality. She first made it clear to me that she came up with her story idea long before the Matrix ever came out, then she added: "The Matrix has Neo in the dream world and then he is woken up to reality, where he mostly remains. In Faith Awakened, both stories are told in parallel, alternating and do not meet until the end.  In the Matrix, the crux of the matter is when Neo takes the red pill, wakes up in the pod and is 'birthed' into the real world. In Faith Awakened, the turning point is when they ENTER virtual reality. My overarching concept is that God would be even more real to the people inside virtual reality; the spiritual world comes closer perhaps due to a certain level of sensory deprivation. The suits are sensory, but it can't re...

The Standard Model of Physics, according to my enthusiastic but amateur understanding, describes all the components of the universe in terms of fundamental particles. Every physical thing and every carrier of energy consist of particles. Matter is built of atoms composed of electrons (a fundamental particle) and neutrons and protons, which are themselves built of quarks, which are smaller fundamental particles. We see light as a beam but on the smallest scale light is composed of individual particles called photons. Likewise more esoteric   (I mean harder to observe) particles are conceived of as in effect bouncing back and forth among neutrons and protons in the nucleus of an atom, holding it together and giving it radioactive decay properties—through particles that account for the strong and weak nuclear forces. Why anyone ever called the Higgs Boson the “God particle” is a bit ridiculous. The Higgs Boson is considered to be the smallest fundamental bit of the Higgs Field t...