Re: Was Sauron's form fixed? (was: The Voice of Sauron)

[Lots of really good discussion in this thread. Not lots of free time
in my schedule. Blast. But I'll reply to the bit that's actually
related to my job...]

Quoth "Christopher Kreuzer" <spamgard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> in article
<UMcZe.114792$G8.89718@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
> It reminds me of those arguments in physics, philosophy and geometry.
....
> The physics argument is to do with 'string theory' where fundamental
> particles are manifestations of the objects called strings. We only
> see part of the string, with the rest of it hidden in these other,
> extremely small, folded up dimensions.

You're reasonably close here. Reasonably. :)

The "small extra dimensions" idea is actually independent of string
theory (and in fact predates it by a good 40 years!). The idea is
certainly that we would not be able to observe the details of what
happens inside the small extra dimensions, but given that they're
"small", I don't know if the Vala analogy is that strong.

I might be more inclined to accept a "brane world" picture, which
might be familiar to anyone who has read /Flatland/: we live on some
surface inside a larger universe with more dimensions than we can see.
(That "surface" for us would be three-dimensional; in /Flatland/ it
was two-dimensional.) Some types of objects would be able to move in
the larger space, and could potentially come down and intersect our
surface (think of the sphere who visited Flatland: its inhabitants
perceived him as a circle that could grow and shrink, because the size
of the circle would depend on how close to his "equator" Flatland
was). From this perspective, the "sharpness" of the Ainur would be
their presence in the infinitely thin surface of our world; their
"majesty" (or whatever the term was) would be their extent into the
larger, higher-dimensional universe.


But if we're going for physics analogies, the ideas in this thread
actually sound more like pure quantum mechanics to me. Compare the
Valar to a wavefunction, which is related to the probability that a
particle is in any particular position. When you make an observation
of the particle's position, its wave function "collapses" to the point
where you saw it. But if you then don't observe it for a while, the
wave function spreads out over more and more space. When you observe
it again, bam, it collapses to a single position again.

So to stretch this analogy to the breaking point, imagine that when an
Ainu takes a physical form or otherwise "acts" at a point, he
collapses his "wavefunction" to that position. (Perhaps broad-scale
actions like shaping a mountain would only collapse the wavefunction
to a region the size of the mountain.) So long as the Ainu wore that
body or kept acting, his wavefunction would remain localized at that
site. But once the Ainu relaxed his focus on that position (by giving
up the body, for example), his wavefunction and hence his "potential
presence" would gradually begin to spread out again. He couldn't move
faster than the wavefunction spread, and once he focused on a new
location, his wavefunction would collapse down again.

A bit nutty, but it's an interesting idea. :)

Steuard Jensen
.

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