Trivia / Xeelee Sequence

• Science Marches On: Virtually inevitable given Baxter's heavy reliance on speculative physics; for example, recent results from the Large Hadron Collider appear to have refuted at least the simplest variants of supersymmetry, rendering the science behind the Susy drive depicted in "The Quagma Datum" far more dubious.
  • On what refers to cosmology, the Great Attractor not only has turned out to be much less massive than what was thought when the novel was written, but there's also an even bigger mass concentration behind, it being the thing moving our galaxy towards it. Imaging has found a very massive galaxy cluster there, but with no traces of looped cosmic strings so far. Also, cosmic microwave background studies suggest the formation of structure in the universe was caused by density fluctuations left from cosmic inflation or even the Big Bang itself, with cosmic strings as the ones used by the Xeelee as building blocks having had (at best) a very limited role.