The Yin & Yang of an Electrical Conductor

By Jose Scaramanga

EXCERPTS FROM REVIEW BY John Staughton for Self Publishing Review (SPR)

A wild, mind-bending tale, The Yin and Yang of an Electrical Conductor proposes a fascinating world where one can have a chat with an eminent scholar from the Age of Reason, or a holy man from thousands of years ago. While the title of the novel might sound like it belongs to a daunting textbook, this is actually a wildly imaginative sci-fi novella that eliminates the boundaries of space and time in search of existential truth, and shares a good bit of knowledge about physics along the way….

If you have been looking for a whimsical refresher course in the nature of the universe and the workings of physics, this book will certainly deliver some valuable lessons.

Despite the relative brevity of the book, if you want to fully immerse yourself in this story, a good amount of side research will be necessary, provided you aren't already a physics buff, so the novel does require some advanced knowledge, though it can certainly be enjoyed on its own terms. There are many moments that are reminiscent of Pirsig, who so masterfully blended philosophic musings, simple speech, and practical, physical realities in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance….

Scaramanga has an imagination most authors can only dream of, and he put in clear research effort to lend authenticity and credibility to his science fiction storytelling. With discussions ranging from population dynamics and the speed of light to the anthropocentric theory of the universe, this book is an invigorating and mind-expanding trip, and one that is definitely worth the effort. 

****

EXCERPTS FROM REVIEW BY Paige Lovitt for Reader Views 

"The Yin & Yang of an Electrical Conductor" by Jose Scaramanga weaves scientific theories into an absorbing speculative sci-fi novella alive with characters and a storyline that will both engross readers and stimulate contemplation long after the book is finished….

In each interaction, lively discussions revolving around science, especially physics, ensue. Each "teacher" that the narrator encounters has something to share from their perspectives, which makes for some lively discussions.

The book truly made my mind whirl. In spite of being novella-sized, it is not a fast read because there are many layers to this story. So many forgotten scientific terms reemerged into my existence. Not having had a science class in twenty-five years had me Googling some terms and names to refresh my memory, including wave particle duality; Newtonian Law; velocity-spatial distribution of time; the speed of light; Minkowski space time; Michelson-Morley experiment; Max Planck and Andre Ampere who features heavily in the story. Fresh out of Physics in college would have been an advantage for reading this, but I must admit, I enjoyed refreshing my brain. I feel much smarter now and less intimidated about sitting at lunch with my colleagues who are physics professors!

Jose Scaramanga has a gift for being able to create scenes in his story that will enable the reader to feel like they are seeing the story rather than reading it. In fact, I will remember "The Yin & Yang of an Electrical Conductor" as a movie, rather than a book. In spite of the heavy scientific jargon, the scenes are well described and the characters incredibly unique and enjoyable. The author does a great job of blending science into a science fiction story. I also am really intrigued how the author manages to tie physics in with the philosophy of Yin and Yang. Readers who are fans of both science and science fiction, especially stories with humor, will really appreciate this creative work of fiction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: M. Upamanyu
• Release date: Oct 7, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386809807

Jose Scaramanga

Jose has been in the English writing field for more than 35 years as a children’s sci-fi short story writer, editor, photojournalist, and technical writer for major media clients, software clients, and multilateral agencies. You may contact him at: [e-mail]

Book preview

[1]  The First Neanderthals, Turn Pastors

We are in the Neolithic age, full of steamy jungles, dinosaurs, and woolly mammoths; interspersed here and there with a sprinkling of free-roaming Neanderthals. It is still an age of roars and hisses of the most violent form and so the question of language, far less of intelligible conversation, does not arise.

It is a crimson, late evening. The starlit heavens above are just about making their presence felt in the dying last rays of the setting sun. The gathering darkness of night on Earth is assuming a deeper shade of black than the blackest blackness we can ever conjure up. As time ticks by deeper into the next Neolithic night, the celestial phenomena above finally explodes into a resplendence we civilized have all but lost to conjecture.

Just then, two Neanderthals, some kind of stone-tipped spears in hand, emerge from a cave and perch themselves on a large rock on the moss-laden rocky outcrop in front of the cave. They did this the previous evening, on the evening before that, and on innumerable evenings before that.

One of the two Neanderthals, who seems certainly the older, is pointing to the sky and trying to explain something to the other by drawing on a bald patch of earth that has been laid bare off grass and foliage. Then, out of the dark cave, emerge a few more Neanderthals. They too look at the sky, then at the older Neanderthal, and then at the picture he has drawn.

The event, every evening, is so enthralling that it becomes a ritual as time goes by; continuing even after the older Neanderthal is no more. His successor, the younger of the two, is wiser. He spends a considerable part of his later life in etching the drawing permanently on the rock wall inside the cave they live in.

Unfortunately, for me, while I don’t have to write down any conversation yet, I am now left with the even more onerous task of interpreting what that pictograph might mean and then convert it into usable terms for modern ingestion.

After spending a few sleepless nights on what the first Neanderthals might have been trying to tell us through that cave pictograph, it seems I have finally deciphered what it is all about. To say the least, it seems pretty sophisticated sounding to me. Of course, it is equally true that the sophistication stems from the fact that I now use a language to express it; a language that has itself reached the pinnacle of sophisticated expression driven from a suite somewhere in downtown Manhattan.

Be that as it may, let me come back to my sophisticated interpretation of what the first Neanderthals had been trying to express through that pictograph. It is pretty simple, actually. They were only suggesting that ‘observers on all inertial frames assign perpetual rest to their own frame of reference and the sum of all motion to the balance of all inertial frames in a system of coordinates’.

Bah, my reader is likely to say. Is it simply the birth of the geocentric view and nothing more I took so much time to drive down to?

Indeed, I am guilty of writing a whole lot of paragraphs simply picturing the birth of the original geocentric view - the pure and unlettered view of a bunch of observers who are still at the beginning of their journey into what we term civilization.

Nevertheless, we well know that this geocentric view persisted for the greater part of human history. It even got into the church, until finally Nicholas Copernicus and Galileo Galilei came and upset the applecart, presumably forever after. The church tried and failed to stem the tide that mathematics and geometry unleashed. As time marched on, the etching of the first Neanderthals on the cave wall was forgotten as just the slight of our own perception.

Hey, but wait a minute! Is this all there is to the death of the geocentric view? I wonder aloud.

Did we tell the free-roaming lions on the grasslands in Africa, the stray dogs roaming the streets of Sao Paulo, the inertial frame you and I live on, and the insignificant electrons circling an atom somewhere that they all had to follow the heliocentric and not the geocentric view for all their calculations post the 17th century on earth?

"I think I have found it at long last!

This seems to be that weak thread in our logical reasoning that I have been searching for all these years, and never once realizing that I am sitting right atop it, I mutter to myself.

In our hurry to posterity, we quite forgot to tell every single frame and every observer on every such frame that they were to switch to the heliocentric view post the 17th Century on Earth, rather than assuming, as the first Neanderthals did, that they were perpetually at rest at the center of the universe.  Simply put, while we demolished the poor church for its belief, we didn’t quite change the rules in everyone else’s books.

We probably never realized that knowing the heliocentric view as the correct view, and bringing it to fruition in everyone’s calculations in how every single thing does physics were two different ball games altogether.

But let me ‘not’ go all the way, all at once.

Let us start with ourselves and try shaking off the geocentric view and try start living the heliocentric one for just that one trillionth of a second?

Unfortunately, however much you may try, you can’t wish the damn thing away. The geocentric view must stick to us as it stuck to the first Neanderthals; nay, even to the first dinosaurs and woolly mammoths too.  A million years later, you still find the sun rise in the East while you read the morning newspaper in the calm stability of your living room. You still find yourself at perpetual rest as you see a less resplendent sky swirl around you every night with clockwork precision from your bedroom window, with you, none else, as the center of the universe. Whether you like it or not, you just can’t wish this view away. It is stuck to us for eternity as ordained by the Holy Ghost and the Holy Father.

The depth and significance of our geocentric fixation is better understood if we were to imagine a world that was lived the heliocentric way. We would have to imagine ourselves standing on our balconies every morning, hands clenched firmly to the railing, while we felt all the ‘whirrs’ and ‘girrs’ as the earth rotated unevenly on its axis.

That would not