The Alice Encounter [signed jhc] by John Gribbin [OUT OF PRINT]

THERE IS ABOUT 10 TIMES MORE DARK MATTER (DM, also known here as Alice matter) than bright stuff in our Galaxy.

The DM is spread out in a roughly uniform sphere (a spherical distribution of Alice stars), with our flattened disk Galaxy embedded in it. The “Alice matter”, is a kind of mirror image shadow stuff; the term “looking glass matter” has been used by some scientists. Alice matter can be turned into ordinary matter (and vice versa) by sending it through a loop of Alice string, a naturally occurring cosmic phenomenon.

Aliens in the DM world, more advanced than we are, have discovered the trace of 10 per cent “normal” matter in “their” universe, and have come to investigate it.

Our disk is a perturbation that they are puzzled about.

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John Gribbin was born in 1946 in Maidstone, Kent.  He studied physics at the University of Sussex and went on to complete an MSc in astronomy at the same University before moving to the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, to work for his PhD.

After working for the journals Nature and New Scientist, he has concentrated chiefly on writing books. These include In Search of Schrödinger's Cat, In Search of the Double Helix and In Search of the Big Bang.  A biography of Stephen Hawking (co-written with Michael White) spent 12 weeks on the Sunday Times hardback best-seller list—only prevented from hitting the top spot by Hawking’s own A Brief History of Time. His books have received awards both in the UK and the US. His other biographical subjects include Richard Feynman, Galileo, Buddy Holly and most recently James Lovelock.

Since 1993, Gribbin has been a Visiting Fellow in Astronomy at the University of Sussex, chiefly working on the problem of determining the age of the Universe.