---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Kris Straub Date: 16 October 2014 7:39 Subject: Fwd: Why On Earth Are You Forwarding This To Kristen Schaal To: Kristen Schaal <[REDACTED]> On 28 April 2013 10:47, MCQ wrote: > > I find your scientific and science-fictional naïvete continually frustrating, Straub. > > A few months ago, I went to a week-long silent meditation retreat. I ended up spending the entire time thinking about math, mainly graph theory and the structure of spacetime, and it wasn't long before I found myself with questions I couldn't answer. > > Luckily I had my phone, and thus, Wikipedia. > > Since you profess an interest, let me share some of the knowledge I've acquired: > > First off, because spacetime is a quantum system, any finite region of it, no matter how large, can only be in a finite number of possible states. This is why atoms have multiple electron shells and why we speak of "many" worlds, not "infinite" worlds. Only an infinite region of spacetime has infinite quantum states. While I suspect the universe IS infinite, relativity guarantees that any finite portion of it behaves the same way regardless, and that this freedom from non-local effects applies to quantum branching. > > Second, while quantum branches do interact, their interactions are imperceptible to anyone inside them, because they take the form of "interference". They combine in the manner of sound waves; if you add an mp3 of "Rock DJ" to an mp3 of "Come Into My World", you don't get Robbie Williams and Kylie Minogue singing a duet, you don't even get "Come Into My World (feat. Robbie Williams)", you just get the two songs playing at once. (If you invert the phase of "Rock DJ", you can add it to the mix again and the two versions of it will cancel out leaving just the Kylie Minogue song, but inverting the phase doesn't make Robbie Williams grow a goatee. The normal and inverted versions sound identical.) > > The basic conceit that similar branches are "near" each other in a way that would permit them to be networked together, whether via the transmission of matter, energy, or information, is fatally flawed, both as a theory designed to agree with actual physics and within itself as a coherent philosophical idea. It is rather like imagining there's some perfect geometric figure to be obtained by gluing together the five platonic solids, or that anyone who assembled the 26 letters of the alphabet into one symbol would end up with the one pictured on the last page of Dr. Soos's On Beyond Zebra. The idiocy of the notion is perhaps best illustrated in Warlords of Utopia, a Dr. Who novelization spinoff series novel about a war between every parallel universe where Rome never fell and every parallel universe where Hitler won the Second World War. If a set of alternate worlds can call each other up, why not alternate network configurations of that set of alternate worlds? Why not alternate network configurations of the set of alternate network configurations of the set of alternate worlds? I'm again reminded of Dr. Zeus, specifically The Cat in the Hat Comes Back, in which the titular Cat's attempts to clean up a stain instead multiply it beyond the limits of the book's vocabulary. > > Finally, time travel. Although even today many physicists do not accept it, there is a very real sense in which not only do particles bounce forward and backward in time, but sideways as well, as in the Feynman triangle diagram. In fact, particles frequently have histories which are blatant loops. > > However, the human-scale ramifications of this are not at all intuitive. We tend to think that if matter can go somewhere, information can as well, but this is not the case. All electrons are alike, and always will be. You can't find one going backward in time (as a positron, due to CPT symmetry) and write a message on it. No matter how a quantum state evolves, the total information contained within it cannot change, and this is why the universe must branch; for an information-preserving system to be capable of exhibiting entropy (and thus computation, and thus, equivalently, basically anything interesting), even temporarily, it has to be capable of "juggling" some of its bits, and this is impossible within a linear system of time. Indeed, what we call time on the human scale is more precisely the entropy gradient of the many-dimensional complex projective Hilbert space of possible universe states. The arrow of time is not found in the fundamental equations of physics, it is a human construction, like the direction "north". At the universe's "beginnings", "the past" is undefined, just as "uphill" is undefined on mountain peaks, and at the universe's "endings", "the future" is undefined, just as "downhill" is undefined on flood plains. In this outsider's view, time travel, even time travel via "closed timelike curves" is revealed to be unattainable in a way that is perhaps more intuitive: it would make the landscape into an impossible Escher print. > > As to the plot devices of science fiction stories that grasp in futility at the various mysteries of spacetime, I disagree both with how you characterize the problems and what you offer as solutions to them. Even by what little internal logic these stories possess, the real problem is not that the major conflict boils down to a cartoonish race to "the" beginning of time, or even the notion that someone could meaningfully get there "first" and say ABC 123 BLACKOUT PERIOD, the problem is that making all of spacetime the stage for a story that's basically about four or five people is a lazy premise, and in my opinion a tasteless one. You clearly have the insight to see both how irresistible and how unthinkable the scale of science fiction can be, yet from the way you write, the reader might never know it, much less see a glimpse of these truths through your work, and most perversely of all, you seem to have an aversion to developing your own perspectives by exposing yourself to the very genre you aim to contribute to. Science fiction, like science itself, is built on the shoulders of giants, and you're walking around on stilts. > > P.S. > i did like the bit where vanderbeam is immune to the broadcasted image of the spine of the cosmos AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT!!!!1 shit why did it fuck up the font, goddamn NASA~! WHO CALIBRATED THIS BITCH? http://castlezzt.net/~nadir/Sound/LUCY.mp3