Re: Getting out of this world?
- From: "nuny@xxxxxxx" <Alien8752@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 5 Oct 2008 22:20:09 -0700 (PDT)
On Oct 5, 4:03 am, Tina_H...@xxxxxxxxxxx (Tina Hall) wrote:
N...@xxxxxxx <Alien8...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Tina_H...@xxxxxxxxxxx (Tina Hall) wrote:
N...@xxxxxxx <Alien8...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The model _my_ backbrain first came up with is this; we can
assume there's a force that would always push people from this
world to that one, but there's some sort of natural
'insulation' in the way, and we have to find a way to
accidentally poke a (hopefully temporary) hole in that
insulation.
It's an interesting idea, but it sounds like something made up,It is, and it isn't.
not something based on a real theory.
What phyics is it based on, then?
Cosmogony and what should have been called meta-physics, but wasn't.
Metaphysics now refers (at least popularly) to mostly psychobabble.
The actual meaning of a word using those roots would be 'that which
includes all of known physics as a subset, but also other things not
dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio'. :>)
There are all sorts of hypothetical (don't 'rise to the level' of
theory) other worlds/Universes/strange places theoretical
physicists talk about, but since we don't observe them we _assume_
there are barriers. Some we can associate with other known
barriers like the speed-of-light or trying to move through a
dimension one's body has no extension into. Others we can't and
just have to take the word of the mathematically inclined...
Well, assuming there's elseplace is part of the idea. Since it isn't
here, there's naturally something in between, but I very much assume
that's nothing, or at least nothing 3D+time like. Might as well say
there's a barrier between reality and dreams, that doesn't make much
sense either, because the other isn't part of this, our, reality.
What kinds of places?
No, how to get there.
Try to be patient with my engineering-mindset-backbrain. It has to
characterize both origin and destination before imagining a bridge.
Well, earlier I mentioned the Anthropic Principle. In short, it is
an extension of what I consider to be a religion-influenced
subspecies of Quantum Mechanics; it says the Universe is the way
it is because if it were some other way, we couldn't exist in it
in order to observe it, and Universes must have conscious
observers in order to exist.
That makes no sense. The tree doesn't wait for someone to come round
to watch it fall in a storm. And there were billions of years where
no folks were around to watch stars and planets shape. So, idea
disproven.
As I said, I strongly suspect it's religion-driven. Your objection
leads 'naturally' to the assumption of an omniscient, eternal observer
maintaining the Universe until we showed up. Being as I'm an atheist
(actually rabid anti-theist) I object to that on the same grounds as
you. As far as I'm concerned, any given electron is as valid an
observer (to the limit of what it can observe) as any human.
And this is really digressing rather a lot from how to get there.
Patience.
Anyway, some theoretical physicists think that it is possible
for other Universes to form with just barely different constants;
just different enough that say elements heavier than iron can't
form, meaning life could exist but it and its environment would
be radically different from ours.
There's two problems with this:
1. It's trying to put the destination into a theory, not the way to
get there. Which doesn't work with a destination that's put into
theory 'magic makes it the way I want, and my backbrain works out
how it actually makes sense'. In other words, the destination is a
place you can't put into real theories. The thing that needs a
theory is how to leave the real world, to then end up there.
Patience.
2. Why do you assume the other universe is lacking something
(something heavier than iron), instead of ours (we have nothing
heavier than <insert whichever is the right thing - hey, how about
magic>)?
I _don't_ assume those situations are mutually exclusive. Yes, other
Universes _will_ be missing frinst iron, but nobody said ours isn't
missing many possible features of other Universes including whatever
drives magic. In fact I'd be willing to bet on it.
Does that unacceptably 'reduce' magic to a physically-explainable
process, even if it doesn't happen here? Maybe, but does that make it
any less 'magical'? Are rainbows any less beautiful because Sir Isaac
Newton found some math to explain how they work? I don't think so.
Where would these other Universes form? In the fifth-dimensional
matrix that this Universe expanded into after the Big Bang.
That's tied to the real world, though. Whether there's such a thing
or made up.
Only in that it's _speculated_ to exist. There's no evidence for it.
Some say there cannot _be_ any, or at least none we'll ever be able to
build instruments to detect.
This, Cosmogony (the study of the creation of Universes), is
the only theory (as far as I know) that gives any hope at all
that your request can be fulfilled.
But it talks about the destination, not something funny happening
here and now due to an experiment or a construct. While the
destination isn't to be squeezed into here and now rules or
theories.
Patience.
Actually it isn't even theory; we have only one Universe to
observe, but some abstruse mathematics predicts that our
Universe's Big Bang was a much larger version of the sort of QM
'fuzziness' going on in this Universe at very small scales. You
know about 'virtual' particles and how they pop into and out of
existence very quickly, too quickly to be observed individually)?
No. (I can imagine it, but haven't heard about it.)
About how they form as particle-antiparticle pairs so all their
quantum numbers (spin,charge, and so on) balance to zero, and how
they follow brief, eventually intersecting paths then annihilate
so that their brief existence doesn't _really_ cost any energy?
No. (I can imagine it, but haven't heard about it.)
So visualize a more-than-four dimensional space. That space is,
like ours, not a smooth continuum at 'very small scales' but
rather is 'foamy'- particle-antiparticle pairs pop into and out
of existence constantly, but unlike our piddly little
three-dimensional spacetime, this larger continuum also hosts
entire Universe-AntiUniverse pairs that Big Bang into existence,
evolve into star- and galaxy- and eventually life-filled
spacetimes in their own rights, then eventually collapse back
toward each other and annihilate back into the background 'foam'
of the higher-dimensional space.
That would tie it to the real world and fill it with planets and
stuff.
If it's that sort. Some will be, some won't, and there's no way to
predict which are which.
But, you object, Universes last a _loooong_ time,
No, I wouldn't.
I object that it doesn't talk about getting people somewhere else
entirely. It tries to define the other place by here and now
theories, which automatically has it not apply as the destination.
Patience. My backbrain does not think in straight lines; it has to
sidle around a problem and look at it from different angles before
picking a solution.
I said I don't want to speculate about that, and I don't want it
defined, either. That would just get in the way of writing about it
and finding things out that way, because it puts constraints on it.
External constraints (something someone else decided).
Except the only constraints are that it gets someone out of this
world (your post title) to a place rather distinctly unlike this
world, and there's no telling beforehand (or even afterward for those
that didn't go) what the other place is like. You also objected that I
wanted you to define the other place, but I was satisfied getting you
to tell me what it _isn't_ like.
Others will have other values...
The thing is that it may be possible that there are no values
because there are no equivalent constants, but something else
entirely.
Sure, why not? Cosmogony _assumes_ that what's different about these
other Universe is the values of the known constants, but are they all
there can be? I can imagine that there are other things that can vary
from Universe to Universe; suppose there's a 'Magical Coupling
Constant' that determines how easy it is for magical interactions to
occur, in a very rough analogy to the Electromagnetic Coupling
Constants that allow light and radio and such to work here?
Suppose that in _our_ Universe, that constant is very close to zero
so that magic isn't _quite_ impossible, but requires very unusual
circumstances? Suppose your story's target world is entirely like this
Universe except the Magical Coupling Constant is much larger, and
magic is almost impossible _not_ to do?
Hence it really doesn't matter what the other constants' values are,
they could all even be zero. Your travelers could establish a small
bubble of our sort of spacetime to live in when they get there just by
_wanting_ to live, and their bodies tell local spacetime what to do to
let them live. As far as the locals are concerned, it's just another
damned custom-built anomaly.
Suppose there are 'superconstants' that determine the specific
pattern of constants Universes will have, depending on some condition
we cannot know about that exists at the moment they experience their
Big Bang. That sort of thing could create Universes without such
'fundamentals' as dimensions themselves, much less chemical elements.
We could never visit them but that doesn't mean they don't exist; we
just have nothing we can label 'physics' to describe them with.
That's pretty much where standard Cosmology ends; there's an
assumption that we can _never_ access any of the other Universes
because we're separated by literally incomprehensibly large
distances measured across dimensions we cannot hope to access.
The thing is that I don't imagine any distance across any known
dimension. With the ME (the already written story, not the planned
one), getting there or from there to here is impossible because of
the difference in the makeup; their atoms (or subatomic stuff) have
magic, ours haven't, so they can't exist in the other place. Even
though folks from there can watch our place (linking to the spots in
atoms that on our world don't have the magic bit, sort of sitting in
the 'hole').
Mmmmm'kaaayyy.
With the to be written story[*], that naturally has to drop out
because the idea is to get people to the destination. And a place
where you can't even rely on things falling to the ground must
realistically be too different to sustain people from here.
OTOH, do you also assume that you _must_ assume that things won't
fall to the ground? IOW is it optional? Or does it depend on
_something_, but your travelers don't know what that something is, at
least not right off the bat?
Therefore, you can forget anything assumed here; it's somewhere else
entirely that doesn't fit into our physics laws at all. But as it's
Fantasyland, I've got magic to explain anything. Just not the way to
get there, because we don't have magic here.
Without a real theory, I'll have to resort to alien space bat magic.
Nah. Physics is powerful stuff, even when you go beyond its ordinary
limits.
[*] Let's call it Nodeworld. Some idea I had yesterday or sosuggested that it may be a weird spot where not only people from our
world sometimes end up in - an idea based on being resigned to
having to use alien space bat magic instead of something that's
actually possible.
How does that help? We need a method of accessing those
in-between- the-Universes dimensions.
No, we need a method of accessing a way to leave this universe and
all its rules.
That's what I've been trying to say explicitly; the physics we
commonly use to describe this world are not all the physics than can
be used; we simply don't use a whole bunch of what's possible because
what it describes is never seen. Do you fundamentally object to the
other place having its _own_ set of rules? Even if those rules have
nothing, or nearly nothing to do with ours except that they _are_
rules?
I've maybe got one but it involves a rather large chunk of unknown
physics. How do you feel about faster-than- light travel?
So far no one has come up with an explanation for why it shouldn't
be possible.
Standard physics says it's flat impossible for several reasons
involving frinst the fact that it can equal traveling back in time
That's the bit that doesn't make sense.
I could draw diagrams and stuff but it'd take forever (not literally
but your eyes would glaze over before I got done). For the moment
please just trust me that faster-than-light travel can put you
somewhere in your past.
making it possible to kill your own grandfather (the Grandfather
Paradox,
It is my opinion that if time travel were real, you wouldn't be able
to do anything to alter history; you'd either cause it to be the way
it did already happen, or make no change at all. Simply because it
already happened. You could of course try to kill your grandfather,
but as he wasn't killed, all your attempts would just result in
something else. (I think the movie with the Twelve Monkeys red
herring is based on that, can't recall whether it was called that or
something else.)
Yeah, that was the deal in the movie. Your opinion is not
particularly relevant except in that it prevents you from writing
about anything involving time travel. Except possibly as a "that's
what they thought they were doing but it really was bridging between
Universes" sort of thing, eh?
you'd need infinite energy just to reach the speed of light, never
mind exceed it.
I don't really know what's so special about the speed of light.
Diagrams, glazed eyes, trust me.
Suppose somebody working for a large aerospace company has been
fooling with a method of rotating objects partially out of this
spacetime in hopes it will allow them to sidestep the infinite
energy constraint on FTL travel.
That's an option. For what the character wants to do, only what he
believes matters, after all. And I expect some scientist does
believe in what you mention above.
What they don't know is that it also realigns large stretches of
the volume of the higher-dimensional space I described above,
Why not realign stretches of the real world?
It may have say in early testing, producing blatantly unacceptable
side-effects. Afterward they were careful not to set the dials just
there, even though they still produced side-effects which just weren't
as blatant.
forming temporary bridges from this Universe to others.
That's a nice idea. :)
It's where I was trying to get to.
I don't understand the 'rotating objects out of this spacetime',
though. Mainly the 'rotating'; it's obviously not just turning them
around, so on what axis are they rotated? (I can imagine the
process, but lack the axis.)
That's where the 'higher' dimensions come in. Can you imagine a two-
dimensional space (roughly like a sheet of paper; look up "Flatland"),
in which 2D people can move in two directions but not in the direction
of the thickness of the paper? Imagine rotating one of them on any
axis that passes along a direction contained in the paper; most of
them would stick out of the paper, one side 'above', the other side
'below'. The remainder would look, to others who didn't rotate, like a
linear cross-section of the rotated individual.
In our space you have more options. You can do a rotation that makes
you look to the rest of us like a line, or you could be 'rotated'
around a _planar axis_ so that others would see a 2D cross-section. In
either case much of your mass is no longer in this Universe in the
sense that it takes much less energy to accelerate you; even if the
scientist isn't trying for FTL it'd have obvious military and
commercial applications.
Can't visualize it? Diagrams, glazed eyes, blah blah blah.
Seriously, look up _Flatland_ which is an 1884 science-fiction book
written by a schoolteacher who wanted to introduce the idea of
perceiving dimensions to his students (and also satirize Victorian
culture). It's part of rasfs's shared background, and reading it will
help a lot of this stuff click into place for you. There have even
been films made of it (though I can't vouch for them not having seen
them) and as you prefer pictorial explanations they might be better
for your backbrain's needs.
The bridges can only form between fairly similar Universes though;
they have to have the same number of space and time dimensions
frinst, but the constant's values only have to ballpark equate to
each other.
I don't want the other place defined, though. (Not that I can
imagine something solid in a fourth space dimension - I wouldn't
know where to put it, but I want to kick the real existing physics
out.)
That's the best part; you _can't_ define it in familiar terms,
except to specify _how_ it's indefinable. As I explain above, it has
different constants, maybe even different number of dimensions (this
the responsible scientist will maybe mention in a short exposition to
say a senator who holds the funding purse strings). The travelers,
being non-scientists, will only know it sure as hell ain't Kansas.
That means your unwilling travelers can't find themselves in a
<splat> situation, but they might not be able to use a compass
because the iron in their blood is all there is in that entire
Universe.
I'd prefer elsewhere's <unknown matter> to be all there is in _this_
entire universe, if something came the other way.
Sure, why not?
How to get working magic in that other Universe is your
problem; I just found you a way there.
Magic isn't a problem. It's physical laws trying to restrict it, if
they were to apply, that is a problem.
Well, we (think we) know that magic doesn't work at all here, and it
does work there, so the physical interpretation is that there must be
some specific difference that allows it there and prevents it here.
But if we're just looking at it wrong, that in that place it's simply
another physical interaction like electromagnetism or gravity, but the
coupling constant is so small here that it's almost never seen, then
it isn't _allowed_ there, it's _required_ the way gravity is required
here.
No problem except we'd never figure that out unless a scientist (one
mentally equipped to stay sane long enough to think about what they
see there) got to investigate both places.
If you don't like the dimension-twisting thingy there's always
wormholes that don't quite go where their builders think they do.
I like dimension-twisting. With an idea about the axis (and how the
experiment is done - what would be built to do it), and what effect
would then displace the actual people, I could start writing.
The axis is any dimensional subset of the three observed spatial
dimensions- a line, a plane, maybe a circle or spiraled line or planar
thingy like flat spiral macaroni (though it seems to me that would
hurt, maybe fatally).
Wormholes don't sound like something someone could build here.
No, they don't; too damn energy-hungry. Dimension-twisting, if it's
possible, ordinarily I'd say would be equally energy-hungry because
we're basically talking about deforming spacetime, just in a way not
normally associated with gravitational effects. My backbrain says
"however...."
Wormholes eat lots of energy basically because you have to pile lots
of simulated mass on top of even more in order to poke a hole in that
rubber sheet you said you didn't like the looks of.
There's another way to store lots of energy in a small space, by
using a resonance effect, like the resonant cavities you may remember
from your retraining. Years ago (this part is real; look it up) a
fairly famous scientist, Robert L. Forward, invented a device that
sort of duplicated gravitationally what antennas do for
electromagnetism. You may remember that cavities and antennas are
special cases of discontinuities in transmission line theory, and (the
following is not-so-far real) there may be a gravitational equivalent
of transmission line theory. Your scientist could have built a
gravitational-wave resonator system that stores energy in the form of
an _alternating_ gravitational field rather than a static field like
what leads to wormholes. He's not quite completed his theory though,
and instead of being perfectly sealed the thing intermittently leaks a
spacetime distortion that manifests as a traveling twist in spacetime
that, instead of looking like a laser beam, tends to break up into
self-contained 'bubbles' of twisted spacetime that occasionally snatch
people up and then 'leak' away from our Universe and zip off through
that fifth-dimensional nowhere, eventually impacting on and
dissipating into the other place, dumping the people in "what the
f*ck-"Land.
What would the hardware look like? Forward's very simple gear was
some five-or-so-pound weights attached by flexible arms to rotating
shafts. The arms had piezoelectric drivers, so the weights could be
wigwagged back and forth very quickly at a precise fraction of the
rotation speed, and this generated variations in the local spacetime
metric (IOW, gravitational waves) easily detectable several dozen
yards away.
(BTW some people will tell you that what he generated wasn't
'really' gravitational waves according to accepted theory, and they're
right. However I'll remind you that the gravitational waves accepted
theory predicts have not been seen.)
So the hardware will look lnothing like any scientific hardware
you're likely to have ever seen; as dense as possible masses moving
very quickly along programmable paths, all focused on a small space.
Ever seen "The Golden Compass" movie? Notice the ubiquitous
gyroscope-thingies rotating on more than one axis? Kinda like that
only the rotors would be somewhat bigger, made of say Osmiridium alloy
(densest non-radioactive metals I know of), and be rotating much
faster. Many of them in a complicated, precise geometrical array that
_might_ look like some sort of magical sigil when looked at from some
particular vantage (I'm visualizing a catwalk with the scientist
lecturing the senator, who looks down and gets shivers).The array
would take up most of say a medium-sized warehouse.
See, for wormholes to work they have to reach outside the
four-dimensional spacetime continuum into at least one higher
dimension through which to reach their destination. But, when we
say "fifth dimension", what we mean is "one dimension higher than
those our Universe takes up", and how do we know there aren't
more, or that the higher dimension our wormhole reaches through
isn't the one separating our Universe from another one?
I don't know where to put those dimensions. 'Higher', and 'fifth'
(or other number) as in 'more than three plus time'.
Exactly correct. Can't visualize that? Neither can I, nor as far as
I know can anyone else. All you can do is the Flatland analogy. In
more popular fiction, our collective inability to visualize in more
than three dimensions goes at least back to H. P. Lovecraft. He did a
lot with suggestions of spacetimes just a little different from ours,
but different enough to induce raving insanity when glimpsed.
However wormhole technology will very likely be very bulky and
energy-hungry, more so than some dimension-twisting proof of
concept device. Wormhole tech will also likely first be tried at
the very least in high Earth orbit if not farther away from
Earth; somebody trying to open a wormhole from downtown Manhattan
to say Mars strikes me as less realistic than just the concept of
wormholes. ;>)
:)
Thanks. There are some useful sounding ideas up there, if we could
cut out the real phyics from having anything to do with the
destination.
If you're willing to amend that to "cut out what's accepted in this
Universe as 'all of phsyics' ", you might be good to go.
Mark L. Fergerson
.
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