Some of the detail in this chapter is of a technical nature, although I have been at pains to summarise it in plain English, as far as possible.

These were meetings I had been looking forward to for a long time. My past job as a science journalist had required me to read the published work of many people operating at the leading edge of science and, in fact, I had been lucky to interview a few of them for my articles. I knew that here on Alpha there were some of the finest brains of science contributing to the Heim University and scientific research facilities, which were in many ways unique. I couldn't wait to catch up with some of them.

Over a period of a bit more than two weeks, I met a good proportion of the people currently conducting scientific and technological research on Alpha. However, this chapter of story omits the personal details of these people who kindly shared information about their researches, and concentrates on the research itself. For the usual security reasons, many scientists I have met have asked me to preserve their anonymity, because they are either on sabbaticals from their Earth universities, or they have family on Earth. As ever, in my story, any names that I do mention are pseudonyms they have chosen for themselves.

My first point of contact was a catch-up with Bart Morgan, the 'IT guru' who kindly acted as our group tour guide on my first Alpha visit. Bart agreed to show me what his teams were currently working on and take me around to introduce me to many others in the science and technology Circles here. As with most people, I suspect, I had preconceptions about Information Technology people's activities - assuming that they would be a 'siloed' tight-knit groups, churning out computer code. What I saw was just the opposite. Almost without exception the 'IT people' were attached to the various technical and research Circles throughout the University and the settlements. There certainly were central servers, supporting Alpha's diverse activities, but they were manned by just a few technicians. Most applications were developed elsewhere, in conjunction with scientists, engineers and the like.

My journeys with Bart first took me back to the surface base observatory complex where I had spent two weeks working the previous December. We visited the optical and radio telescope arrays to review the latest results and had long discussions with Any Santos about what was new in her field of research. It was explained to me that the radio telescope can be pointed in a direction by thousands of actuators that deform the telescope’s reflective surface. By deforming the surface, the location of the telescope’s focal point changes, and the telescope can continuously focus on a particular part of the sky. We then went on to look at the low gravity laboratories and the hospital and medical research centre in the surface base and then on down to the medical research centres in Oldtown and Newtown, the metallurgical and polymer research facilities in the Factory dome, the biological and botanical laboratories in the Farm dome and many other small laboratories and facilities. Some of these areas I had worked in in early January or between June and August of 2017, but this time I concentrated my questions on the scientific research aspects of their activities.

On the pure physics side, I was astonished by the depth and breadth of research activities that I saw, or was told about. It seems that much of the work is involved in attempting to devise useable and useful applications from testable and falsifiable physics where theory-development is still closely linked to experimental test including, inter-alia, plasma physics, statistical mechanics, photonics, optics and acoustics, quantum optics, condensed matter physics, nuclear physics, and materials science where they were engineering synthetic materials such as ionogels and artificial neurons based on organic electrochemical transistors.

However, the more esoteric, and presently largely theoretical areas of enquiry into the most fundamental laws of nature, such as particle physics, quantum foundations, quantum gravity, and cosmology are not being neglected, even though short-term 'payback' from such endeavours is unlikely, but not impossible. The continuing dilemma they face is, of course, the fact that he standard model of particle physics is wrong or incomplete. It has no explanation for gravity, dark matter and the absence of antimatter in our universe.

We covered much ground and I collected an incredible amount of new information. However, to include it all in my story here would not be feasible, so I have confined my account to just a few of the outstanding things going on at present out here on Alpha.

One area of research I found most interesting was work being carried out on what are termed 'neural networks'. Bart's team, in conjunction with certain Earth-based colleagues, is exploring the possibility of using artificial neural networks to optimise information processing, using so called ‘memristors’. They hope to create a memory network within a random system of nanowires, which can be tuned to brain-like processing. The network junctions would act like computer transistors, but with the additional property of remembering that signals have travelled along that pathway before.

I was introduced to another field of research vital to the Heim worlds; that of advanced radiation shielding and mitigation. Heim scientists are attempting to make sure that structures and equipment can withstand the radiation, temperatures, and vacuum conditions which are part of space habitation and space travel. They are designing equipment that can absorb or reflect cosmic rays, solar winds or sudden radiation showers. In addition to the risks to organic matter, including humans, anything with electronic parts is extremely vulnerable, as just one stray particle could disrupt a system and lead to a catastrophic outcome. Amongst other things it could cut off control systems, communications, and distort measurements and science results. So, using advanced electronics and new metamaterials, the chips and other instruments are being designed to be hardened and shielded to make sure they will survive the cold, vacuum and radioactive conditions of space and recover if they are affected.

On an unrelated topic, I had not previously had the opportunity to fully discuss something which seemed to me to be of critical importance to the safety of the Heim settlements - that of meteoroid impact danger. This danger had apparently been a major source of concern in the early days of settlement but I was assured that today the risk was being managed. It seems that the 'sky' spanning arrays in the observatories, and other remote scanners, now ensured that large objects that could cause major damage or catastrophe would be detected well before they hit. We would then have the choice of deflecting them from their path using robotic hDrive tugs or, given enough time, simply nudging our asteroid out of its way, whichever was the easier. I must say, that knowledge helped me to sleep better at night.

Again, on that more esoteric level, I met a group of scientists who were trying to come to terms with the theory of loop quantum gravity; an endeavour to combine general relativity and quantum mechanics, which most scientists agree are two theories which, in their present form, cannot both be right as they contradict each other. They are struggling with this concept, which was succinctly summarised by Earth scientist and communicator, Carlo Rovelli, more-or-less as follows: The theory postulates 'atoms of space' - they are not in space, but they are space itself. There is no longer 'time' in which events occur, and no longer 'space' which contains the world. He says that the illusion of space and time which continues around us, is a blurred vision of the elementary processes wherein quanta of space and matter continually interact with each other. I have to confess; I struggle to get my mind around such concepts and I wonder if a 'normal' human brain can ever expect to do so. The only hope, I believe, is just to be able to describe and prove them mathematically and be satisfied with that, rather than struggling to visualise them.

In the same vein, I was introduced to some of the problems of thermodynamics, statistical mechanics and entropy, which still pose puzzles to be fully explained and understood. Again, I was directed to the words of Rovelli, to encapsulate the problem without mathematical complexity. He asked why does heat go from hot things to cold things, and not vice-versa? He explained that it is a crucial question, because it relates to the nature of time. In every case where heat exchange does not occur, or when the heat exchanged is negligible, we see that the future behaves exactly the same as the past. So, as time goes by, why does heat pass from hot things to cold? Apparently, it is sheer chance, not due to an absolute law - it only does so with a large degree of probability, according to Ludwig Boltzmann, in his statistical explanation of the second law of thermodynamics.

I really got further confused when I sat in as an observer in a science Circle discussing dark matter: clouds of ultralight subatomic particles predicted by theories that reach beyond the standard model of particle physics. It is thought that they could be swirling in clouds around rapidly spinning black holes but, apparently, it is almost impossible to detect these ultralight boson particles on Earth. However, they might be detected out on Alpha or Beta, and detectors were currently being designed.

They were also discussing the 'big bang' and so-called heavy 'right-handed' neutrinos as a candidate for dark matter. The discussion was about the hypothetical sterile neutrino. Apparently, unlike the electron, muon and tau neutrinos which have chirality - quantum left handedness - and interact with other particles through gravity and the weak nuclear force, these hypothetical particles seem only to interact with gravity and could possibly be right-handed. Like the other neutrinos, these would have mass but aren’t electrically charged. This mass apparently makes them a possible dark matter candidate.

Then the discussions turned to charge, parity, and time reversal symmetry (CPT Symmetry), or what they called the Lüders–Pauli theorem. My credibility was somewhat stretched when it was suggested that for CPT symmetry to be conserved, then the big bang would have had to create two parallel universes, with most of the matter in ours, and most of the antimatter in the other, adding that this anti-universe would be contracting backwards in time towards the big bang, rather than expanding away from it. They were saying that, in all probability, time isn’t an arrow imposed by some external observer. It just points in whichever direction it is that a particular universe expands or contracts. All very interesting - I think?

There was also much debate in other strange areas of theory, such as teleparallel gravity. It was explained to me that it was all about the idea that both the curvature and twistiness of space-time affected the motion of matter and energy. That didn't help much! They said that it may be an interesting candidate for a new theory of gravity. They went on to say that an important new insight was the idea that teleparallel gravity can be a consequence of string theory. If so then, apparently, string theory should be able to explain all laws of physics, and if teleparallel gravity is a better version of general relativity, and ultimately turns out to be correct, then you should be able to derive teleparallelism from the math of string theory. Fascinating, but something I will need to read up on in much greater depth if I am ever to hope to understand it.

Another group was actually looking into Star Trek kinds of warp drives. Well, not exactly like the ones depicted in that classic Sci-Fi series but as a theoretical means to control spacetime within a drive itself. Apparently, a hypothetical warp drive doesn’t make you travel faster than light or drag your destination towards you, it just contracts spacetime to make your path shorter. It can speed up or slow down a clock inside the drive. Other theories have been proposed including one that suggest that there are even more exotic possibilities such as that by rotating the spacetime inside a drive one may be able to produce a battery capable of holding huge amounts of energy. The group were of the opinion that faster-than-light travel remains a distant dream, but that warp technology itself would be revolutionary, in its own right.

It seems that the motivation behind this latter research is the desire to be able to somehow communicate with planets circling stars up to 10 parsecs away in 'real-time', or within a reasonable period of time. When I asked who or what they wished to communicate with, I was told that the Heim astronomers have reason to believe that they may have detected signs of advanced life on a number of exoplanets within this 32 light-years range. Even further away they have detected a possible still-intact planet in the habitable zone of the white dwarf WD1054–226, about 118 light years away which is another prospect for developed lifeforms.

They explained that, when an exoplanet passes through our line of sight to the star they orbit, the starlight gets filtered through their atmosphere. Because light carries energy that is proportional to its wavelength, it interacts with molecules it encounters on its path, making them swing and rotate, and because every molecule has a different structure, it will only move if it gets hit with the right energy. All that information is encoded in the light that reaches us, allowing us to read the chemical makeup of that atmosphere. They believe that they have detected certain molecules that could only have occurred if there were advanced civilisations on the target planet, the caveat being that it is all based on the assumption that life on other worlds would have developed in a way that was not unlike ours.

Privately, I thought that they obviously hadn't considered the 'elephant in the room', the thing that was so obvious that they were blind to it. Supposing that Earth really was the only place on which intelligent life had emerged, and that the signs of advanced civilisation that they were detecting were from worlds that had been settled by 'people' from Earth - the Neighbours. After all they have had thirty millennia or so to develop the means to cross 'over' or 'through' to distant stars, somehow avoiding the constraints of the speed of light. Thus, the signs of their civilisation would have had plenty of time to reach back here to our system by now. I didn't air my thoughts to them, but I wondered if I should mention the idea to members of the Contact Circle, when I next saw them.

One memorable discussion I listened to was on the subject of reality itself. Is something really there, if we are not looking at it. This troubled Einstein himself, who was reported to have said "I like to think that the moon is there, even if I'm not looking at it." Apparently, the problem is that quantum mechanics has pushed the boundaries of our understanding of reality at its tiniest. They were discussing a new class of experiment that is putting Einstein's conviction to the test, seeing if quantum weirdness stretches beyond the tiny world of quarks, atoms and qubits into the everyday world of tables, chairs and moons. The question is; is there a certain size or mass where quantum uncertainty stops and classical certainty kicks in? - in other words, is there a 'brick wall' between the quantum and classical worlds? Answering that question could take us into some kind of 'post quantum world', where the current rules of both the quantum and classical theories are shattered.

On the topic of the origins of life on Earth, and building on limited Earth-based research into meteorite material, Heim scientists are currently studying Type C asteroid samples to see if they can find further evidence of the materials that might have started life on Earth. Nucleobases like guanine and adenine - core components of DNA - had been detected in meteorites in the past but, until recently, not the other nucleobases known as pyrimidines. Earth researchers studying three carbon-rich meteorites: the Murchison meteorite in Australia, the Murray meteorite in Kentucky and the Tagish Lake meteorite in Canada, identified additional and previously undetected nucleobases, including cytosine and thymine, the other two bases found in the DNA molecule. That amounts to the detection of all primary DNA/RNA nucleobases in the same meteorite. One of their theories is that these compounds may have been generated by photochemical reactions on rocks floating in interstellar space, before being incorporated into asteroids as the solar system formed and then broken off in meteorites that hit Earth millennia ago.

Bart introduced me to a group who were studying the improbably-named time crystals, which were first theorised in 2012 by Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek and which may be the key to developing room temperature quantum computers. New Earth research, published in Nature Communications, details the creation of the first two-body time-crystal system. Dr Samuli Autti, from Lancaster University in the UK, is reported as saying “It turns out putting two of them together works beautifully, even if time crystals should not exist in the first place. And we already know they also exist at room temperature.” These Heim scientists told me that the two-level time crystal system is the basic building block of a quantum computer.

As on Earth, there were theoreticians on the Campuses who were proponents of string theory. They suggest that all particles contain kinds of 'strings' which vibrate like musical strings - different particles only being defined by differing vibrations. They are examining the proposition that everything in the universe can basically be reduced to simple variations in string vibrations. This, they suggest, may finally lead to the much sought after unified theory of physics to describe all the forces of nature and to demystify the quantum world.

These were the revolutionary research areas that caught my attention the most, but there is also a huge amount of valuable, productive and practical work being carried on throughout Alpha. Biological and botanical research is developing new strains of bacterial and plant life better equipped to survive and flourish in our new environment and there have been major advances in what could be loosely termed 'space medicine'.