Research into space-time had continued at a low level after the failure of physicists to devise a method of synthesizing sufficient quantities of antimatter to meet commercial demand in the 27th century. The promise of unlimited energy that was so cruelly postponed by the disaster in the early 22nd century at the National Fusion Laboratory in the Pacifica state of Baja California, although pursued like a missing holy grail, appeared to have finally been realized in 2902. The stunning discovery by the Italian scientist Moriture T. Salutamus in that year, that energy, matter, and space could be interconverted under suitable conditions, made the promise of limitless power seem finally within man's grasp.
The key insight that led to the discovery was the realization that refraction of gravity waves by matter depended in part on the existence of two orthogonal gravity field components in massive particles that are asymmetrical in amplitude. This creates a miniscule gravitational quadrupole moment. Such gravity fields bore the same relationship with space as electromagnetism did with charged particles.
Scientists had suspected for centuries that space and matter were equivalent, and such interconversions were predicted by the so-called ``Theory of Everything'' but even the scientists were surprised at the large amount of energy that could be extracted by unraveling empty space. It was estimated that a single cubic millimeter of space was equivalent to several hundred tons of high explosive; the unfortunate graduate student who performed the first measurement, expecting a much smaller amount, was suitably memorialized when the now-famous Salinas Constant was named after him posthumously.
Only much later did physicists discover that even larger quantities of energy could be extracted from ``superspace'', the configuration space of geometry and matter. In the early 36th century, a process for extracting energy from universal physical parameters such as Planck's constant promised to provide almost infinite quantities of energy, the only cost being that as the value of Planck's constant throughout the universe slowly decreased, subtle but worrisome changes were observed in the fabric of the space-time continuum.
Attempts to engineer novel energy sources were also not without risks. In 3575, an experimental conjugate top quark/hadron phase storage ring designed to create an entropy-free environment for long-term storage of teleportation signals exploded, sending a shower of negative entropy into the environment. For several minutes, the entire universe was transformed into a vast number of chaotic subdomains in which time moved in random directions. This unfortunate accident, however, ultimately led to the construction of the first practical time machine, completed in the year -12,344.
Not to be outdone, mathematicians devised a method of extracting the colossal quantities of energy stored in prime numbers. However, this technology was shortly thereafter banned in the Treaty of Tirgu Carbunesti of 4414 after it was realized that such a device would eventually change the value of '1' to '0.9999999' throughout the cosmos, creating havoc with the ability of less-advanced societies to perform simple counting tasks. Mathematicians, however, professed unconcern, stating that the technology was in any case only hypothetical and that construction of a functional device, widely understood among mathematicians to be impossible with the information given, had accordingly been left as an `exercise for the reader' in the original paper.