After obtaining the observational data, Lu Zhou spent an entire day and night going through almost all of it, yet still found no trace of strangelets.
"From the memories of the Jialan Civilization, we can infer that the advanced civilization that possessed strangelets-let's call it the 'Void' civilization for now-had probably mastered some form of hyperspace technology that allowed matter and information to travel faster than light."
Closing the notebook in his hands, Lu Zhou rubbed his aching brow and muttered to himself in frustration.
"But how did they do it?"
Faster than light.
It sounded simple enough and was practically standard fare in science fiction blockbusters, but actually achieving it was harder than reaching the heavens.
Unlike controlled fusion, a technology physicists had proven feasible decades ago, moving objects faster than light was something even imaginative high-energy physicists could not figure out how to approach. They had even proven it theoretically impossible.
The theory behind this dated back to the end of the last century.
As early as 1992, Professor Stephen Hawking, who was often picked apart by amateur scholars, had mathematically proven that, in general relativity, if the topology of space changed within a bounded region, closed timelike curves would exist in the region of spacetime where that change occurred.
In plain English, wormholes violated causality in general relativity. (Interestingly, however, Einstein, the creator of relativity, supported wormhole theory and proposed that a wormhole was "a narrow tube of spacetime connecting distant regions of the universe." Clearly, even someone who was always right would never lack opponents, and countless similar examples existed. After all, scholarship served truth, not authority.)
According to the memories of the Jialan Civilization, their method of faster-than-light travel and communication relied on gravitational links between stellar systems-naturally occurring structures resembling hyperspace routes-to move between