I’m happy to welcome author Thomas White. Today, Thomas shares interesting facts about the protagonist of his new release, The Edison Enigma.
Ten Interesting Facts about my Protagonist
Imagine if you will, a single point in time where the planet’s primary energy source is determined. Now, imagine that you have the ability to time travel and you go back and change that point in time. You have just altered history. That is exactly what Dr. Tom Edison, a modern-day physicist discovers when he unlocks the secrets of time travel. The Edison Enigma examines the possibility of the world living in an altered reality and how Dr. Tom Edison can go back in time and correct this egregious wrong.
Who is Dr. Tom Edison?
Dr. Tom Edison, no relation, is a modern day physicist who discovers the secret to time travel. He quickly learns that he was not the first to do so. Someone went back to 1904 and altered the original time line of the planet. He travels back to 1904 with the intention of correcting this wrong only to find himself the victim of fate.
What is Tom’s private life like?
Tom is a loner. He lives in Chicago and runs the Barrington Scientific Research Center. He is consumed by his work and has very little time for outside activities. He has a small group of friends outside of work although we never get to meet any of them. Mostly, he works, watches late night TV and goes to an occasional dinner. Sounds boring, I know.
Why is Tom so consumed with time travel?
The basic idea of going back in time, or forward for that matter, intrigues Tom for many reasons. In today’s world of ‘alternative facts’, knowing the truth is a very difficult thing. Being able to travel to the past would allow us the opportunity to investigate moments in history and correctly understand them. Who was on the grassy knoll? Did George Washington chop down the cherry tree. How did Hitler come to power. Bringing up that name introduces another whole aspect of the past. Can it be changed and more significantly, should it be changed? You stop Hitler from coming to power, you stop the holocaust. But in doing that you save 6 million people. How would that alter history? Quite a dilemma! Travel into the future would be seemingly so much more beneficial. Knowing the wrong paths to take could help us build a stronger and safer future for the world. But that in itself presents the same issues. Can we change the future and if we could, should we?
Is there always a paradox in every time travel story.
I have to say, yes. There have been some fine time travel stories but they always have a glitch. The wonderful movie, Somewhere In Time with Chris Reeves and Jane Alexander for example. (If you haven’t seen this, do it tonight!) Without going into great detail, ask yourself about the watch. Where did it originate? In any event, in The Edison Enigma I have tried to limit them and believe there is only one. I would appreciate a heads up if you find any. (No, I’m not going to tell you what it is.)
What adjustments does Tom experience living in 1904?
Mostly, Tom is surprised by how manageable life in 1904 is. Other than the modern conveniences of technology and the internet, it is a rather comfortable life. His imagination had it much more rustic. Many of the buildings from 1904 still exist in Chicago and Washington DC is he has a sense of connection with his own time.
Does Tom have a romantic side?
Being a workaholic in his own time, Tom found very little time for dating or personal involvements. However, once he goes back to 1904, fate takes him in a very different direction. He suddenly finds himself on an evening stroll with a very beautiful woman, something he would have never considered doing in his own time. He changes a great deal while in the past and it opens up a side of himself he had lost.
How concerned is Tom about altering the past?
Initially, Tom’s time travel theory was that the past is much more durable than people think. He doesn’t believe that you can alter the past, or create a butterfly effect. He believes that fate controls the destiny of things. But that is the one flaw in his theory and it opens an ugly can of worms. He is careful not to bring something to the past that wouldn’t have existed so for money he finds gold coins minted in 1903. He is able to trade them for cash. He wears a vintage suit and then buys more clothing once he has arrived. In his mind, he is not altering the past, he is correcting it and allowing the world to follow its original time line. There are no parallel universes in this story. The planet has one path and it was altered in 1904. Tom has to correct that error and put the world back on its intended time line.
What are the pitfalls of time travel?
The biggest pitfall of time travel is greed. Who wouldn’t want to invest $10,000 in Microsoft in 1977? Lottery numbers? One little jump to next week and you have them all. Back To The Future uses a sports almanac to get rich. But these are all single people gathering wealth for themselves and not really world changing events. What if big business had access? What about the past would they change to build their empire into the trillions of dollars? Maybe alter the world’s energy source to fit your commodities? Corner the food market? Own the internet? It would be a very dangerous tool in the wrong hands.
What is the biggest conundrum about Tom going into the past and changing it?
Dr. Lori Peletier, Tom’s partner on the time travel project, asks some very pertinent questions. If Tom goes into the past and corrects it, will the Time Machine even be here for him to return? Understanding that if Tom is successful, the present that he left will no longer exist. It will be a different present. Which brings up the question, would he have even been born and if he hadn’t been born how would he have discovered time travel in order to go back and change the past? Tom’s theory is simple, he does exist, so going into the past will not alter his condition. He will continue to exist. Anything he does in the past now becomes part of the past and will also exist moving forward. Coming back to an altered future however? Only time will tell.
What’s your favorite part of the novel?
Answering as the author, not the protagonist, the ending is my favorite part. So often the reader is left to imagine what happens to the main characters once the story is told. In my final chapter I have the pleasure of telling everyone what happened to each character. I find it very satisfying and touching at the same time.
Blurb
Dr. Tom Edison, a Chicago physicist, manages to successfully transport an object through time. Almost immediately following this success Dr. Edison is shut out of the facility and told by benefactor Raphael Barrington, to take a vacation. He is contacted by Don Rivendell, a grizzled old man with a secret. Rivendell explains to Tom that he is not the first person to discover time travel. Someone else went back and changed history by saving a young girl from dying in an internal combustion engine explosion.
Dr. Edison is tasked with going back and fixing history. He travels back to 1904 to find the younger version of Rivendell and stop him from saving the girl.
Excerpt
Tom, Lori, and Jerzy entered the lab and stood on the landing, looking over the commotion. There was a hustle and bustle of frenetic activity as lab personnel moved from station to station, checking data, preparing modules, and entering critical information.
“Every time I come in here, I expect to see tables with bubbling test tubes and old, toothless women sweeping the floor,” Jerzy said.
Lori laughed. “Well, it would be hard to explain what bubbling test tubes have to do with this project, but I get your drift. We are kinda like Dr. Frankenstein with this whole thing.” Tom vaulted down the stairs and skipped to the control area on the opposite side of the room. He high-fived everyone he passed and crossed to an older, balding man with a semi-circle of gray hair around the fringe of his scalp. A short gray mustache covered most of his upper lip. The man had a slow gait caused mainly by forty straight hours on his feet. Tom hugged him.
“Bruce! This is it! I feel like tap dancing!”
“Well, I’ve put up with worse from you. We’re just running the final check-down now; almost complete. The data you just sent down is perfect.” Bruce had a New Jersey accent highlighted by a Yiddish lilt that caused his mustache to bounce when he spoke.
The retrofitting of the building was designed specifically for this project. Constructed like a sports arena with a high domed ceiling, the lab was ten thousand square feet open from wall to wall. Three levels encircled the room starting at the floor. Each subsequent level rose above the one below and contained a series of computer stations lined up like the NASA control room, collating, interpreting, or generating data. The entire room was connected, hardwired, and air-gapped to The Quint’s central motherboard. The Quint was the fastest and most potent AI computer known to man and contained the most significant elements of learned behavior and artificial intelligence. More significantly, it could determine and pinpoint a specific moment in time.
In the main staging area, in the center of the room, was the masterpiece of the entire project – The Time Tube. The Time Tube was a four-story, transparent tube made from indestructible acrylic conducive to energy absorption. As energy swirled through the Time Tube, it created the power needed for time travel. It stood 18’ tall with an eight-foot diameter. A raised platform ran halfway around and had six steps that led up to a full-size door allowing access to the Tube.
The lab’s roof was six stories high and supported a series of lighting instruments, air conditioning units, and safety mechanisms. Among the other things that lived in the ceiling was a series of tubing that wrapped around the room like a tornado and converged from the roof to the lab’s centerpiece. This series of tubing was called the Cyclone. Air was pushed through the Cyclone at incredible speeds, producing centrifugal force. That energy transitioned to Euler acceleration, creating a variation in the angular velocity. Theoretically, this opens a window in time and allows the object to pass through.
After years of research, study, and failed experimentation, Tom finally understood that time is, in fact, parallel, meaning that time moves through us rather than us moving through time. In essence, time is an ever-evolving moment. We move from one plane to the next as we move forever forward. The wonder is that it is infinite, never-ending, so we will never reach the edge of time as time continues to build moment next to moment. Once Tom accepted that theory, the means of moving through time began to evolve.
With enough energy, we can freeze ourselves in a moment, thus staying still as time moves on. The challenge became moving through thousands of moments to move back in time, or more accurately, let a specific moment of the past catch up to you. It had taken Tom and his crew almost five years to reach this point. They believed they could generate enough energy to move back and forth within their time sphere to moments that have happened or will happen and return to their own designated moment and survive.
One of the most daunting challenges the team had to overcome when sending something through time was having the entire entity arrive in the same moment. Any portion of an entity that arrived a millisecond later than any other part of that entity would be split in two by the paradox of time. Using an optical lattice clock allowed the team to calculate to a precise moment. When coordinated with The Quint, the top or bottom, front or back, the side to side of any entity would arrive at the same exact moment in time so as not to be split apart.
Subsequently, above the main control area, against the back wall, was the read-out of an optical lattice clock, accurate to one second every 400 million years. It was this technology that allowed Tom and his staff the ability to pinpoint a single moment in time. The optical lattice clock uses laser beams instead of atoms to calculate the second. The light from the laser excites the strontium atoms and increases the accuracy of determination of time.
With The Quint’s exceptional calculation ability, Tom could capture moments within a zeptosecond, one trillionth of a billionth of a second, targeting specific areas of history or periods of time, with phenomenal accuracy. Projecting these moments into the future would allow them to move forward in time as well. Theoretically, at least.
That theory would be tested this afternoon.
Buy Links
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Author Bio
Thomas White began his career as an actor. Several years later he found himself as an Artistic Director for a theatre in Los Angeles and the winner of several Drama-Logue and Critics awards for directing. As Tom’s career grew, he directed and co-produced the world tour of “The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Coming Out Of Their Shells”. The show toured for over two years, was translated into seven different languages and seen by close to a million children. Tom served as President and Creative Director for Maiden Lane Entertainment for 24 years and worked on many large-scale corporate event productions that included Harley Davidson, Microsoft, Medtronic Diabetes, and dozens of others. The Edison Enigma is Tom’s third novel following up Justice Rules which was nominated as a finalist in the Pacific Northwest Writers Association 2010 Literary contest, and The Siren’s Scream.
Joanne Guidoccio 