Continued

"Ah, you seem to be leading me. Quite all right though, the last thing of a professor to die is the will to pontificate. You can still hear them in most drafty universities whispering on ."

"Where was I, oh yes..."

Yip continued on for several hours. They had settled into a certain rhythm and the rule was Yip talked and Chuck listened.

What he heard this time was different. This wasn't a story in the typical sense but rather a recipe for space travel. Space, you see, has 5 dimensions, four for distances and one for time. The four we are all aware of and a fifth which is best understood as a radius. In a very real sense the space we are familiar with is stretched out on the surface of a sphere. Now we see why Yip began talking about inter-planetary travel with ancient drams of intra-planetary travel. In much the same way that one can fall from one point on the earth to any other one call fall from one point in space to any other.

Can you imagine! Early man certainly did and Chuck imagined himself on Earth looking at the stars as once they had looked across the ocean.

"But how do you fall out of space?" he asked, then quickly covered his mouth at the interruption.

"Heh. I will tell you." then Yip smiled.
"And maybe you will understand where many balk and cry"

It is true. The sphere that all of space that we know and see is wrapped around isn't very big. In fact, it is quite smaller then even an atom. Do not ask how, as Chuck invariably did, just accept this, every point in space is theoretically much closer to every other point then you could possibly imagine. Still, it is common knowledge that traveling to the country outside the city requires traversing a distance much larger then is wanted. So, how then can one take the true shortest path?

"Black holes" he said and then paused for effect.

"Only in a black hole where space curves in on itself to an infinitesimal point can two separate locations 'tunnel' through the fourth dimension of space. Only you wouldn't want to fall into a black hole, even if it did shorten the distance considerably!"

Scientists, he continued, eventually solved this through Quantum Mechanics. Specifically Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle which states that you can never know both the speed and position of a particle. Black holes, if they are infinitesimally small, provide a way of knowing the position of a particle perfectly! This means the speed is infinitely large which is impossible.