"“But how does that change things?” Yalda wondered. “If I see red light and violet light at the same time . . . then the slower, red light must have left the sun earlier.”
“Right. So how does that affect what you see?”
Yalda struggled to picture it. “Where the sun is in the sky depends on which way the world is facing when the light arrives, not when it left. The red light left earlier, but that makes no difference – we just see whatever reaches us at the time we're looking. So we see all the sun's colours in the same place, not spread out in a trail.”
Vito's rear eyes widened with approval. “That wasn't too difficult, was it?”
Yalda was encouraged, but she was still far from confident that everything made sense. “And the stars? Why are they so different?”
“The stars are really moving,” Vito reminded her. “Not just rising and setting with the turning of the world. Between the time when the red light we're seeing now left a star, and the time when the violet light we're seeing now followed it, the star will have moved far enough for us to see the different colours coming from different directions. When we look at the sun, the violet light and the red light follow the same road, even though the red light begins the journey earlier. When we look at a star, the violet light's coming to us from a different place, along a different path than the red.”
Yalda turned this over in her mind. “If the stars are really moving,” she said, “then why don't we see them move?” The coloured worms were all pinned to the rigid black sky, sharing, but never exceeding, the illusory motion that came from the world's shifting gaze. Why didn't they advance along their own trails, wriggling out of their constellations into fresh new patterns every night?"
4 out of 5
http://www.gregegan.net/ORTHOGONAL/E1/ClockworkRocketExcerpt.html
Monday, June 20, 2011
Friday, May 27, 2011
The Science of the Story An Interview With - Greg Egan
" You are currently in the middle of writing the Orthogonal trilogy. What prompted you to begin such a project and what do you hope to gain from such an endeavor?
A few years ago I started thinking about what it might be like to live in a universe that was different from our own in one very simple but profound way: instead of having a fourth dimension, time, that was set apart from the three dimensions of space, you had four dimensions that were completely interchangeable. In this universe, at the deepest level, "the future" and "the past" would be directions no different from "north" and "south" — and just as those compass points take their meaning from a particular object, the Earth, whose axis could as easily be pointing any way at all in space, in this hypothetical universe "the future" and "the past" would always be the future and past of a particular physical object, such as a cluster of stars and planets, rather than a property of the universe itself.
Of course the instinctive response to this is to say that without time, nothing can change, so nothing can happen — the whole universe will be a kind of frozen snapshot. But that turns out not to be true at all. In such a universe, you can still have a "history" laid out across space that, from the inside, would look very much like the passage of time appears to us.
Now, if you make that one simple change, what follows? What would the physics and the chemistry be like, in this new framework? Before I started writing I put a lot of work into fleshing out those details, so I could predict exactly how light would behave, how matter would behave, and what kinds of technology would or wouldn't be possible. The result is a combination of novelty and consistency that really appeals to me: there are a lot of very strange aspects to this universe, but they're not just an arbitrary collection of weird phenomena, they all flow directly from a single premise. "
4 out of 5
http://www.diamondbookdistributors.com/default.asp?t=1&m=1&c=53&s=656&ai=108976
A few years ago I started thinking about what it might be like to live in a universe that was different from our own in one very simple but profound way: instead of having a fourth dimension, time, that was set apart from the three dimensions of space, you had four dimensions that were completely interchangeable. In this universe, at the deepest level, "the future" and "the past" would be directions no different from "north" and "south" — and just as those compass points take their meaning from a particular object, the Earth, whose axis could as easily be pointing any way at all in space, in this hypothetical universe "the future" and "the past" would always be the future and past of a particular physical object, such as a cluster of stars and planets, rather than a property of the universe itself.
Of course the instinctive response to this is to say that without time, nothing can change, so nothing can happen — the whole universe will be a kind of frozen snapshot. But that turns out not to be true at all. In such a universe, you can still have a "history" laid out across space that, from the inside, would look very much like the passage of time appears to us.
Now, if you make that one simple change, what follows? What would the physics and the chemistry be like, in this new framework? Before I started writing I put a lot of work into fleshing out those details, so I could predict exactly how light would behave, how matter would behave, and what kinds of technology would or wouldn't be possible. The result is a combination of novelty and consistency that really appeals to me: there are a lot of very strange aspects to this universe, but they're not just an arbitrary collection of weird phenomena, they all flow directly from a single premise. "
4 out of 5
http://www.diamondbookdistributors.com/default.asp?t=1&m=1&c=53&s=656&ai=108976
Monday, May 9, 2011
Saturday, April 2, 2011
Forget the true shape of the planet: The Anarchic Spaces of Greg Egan’s Distress - Brian Greenspan
"“‘Forget the true shape of the planet’: The Anarchic Spaces of Greg Egan’s Distress,” in Jennifer Rutherford and Barbara Holloway (eds.)"
Unseen.
http://www1.carleton.ca/fass/news/2010-fass-publications-and-awards/
Unseen.
http://www1.carleton.ca/fass/news/2010-fass-publications-and-awards/
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Border Guards - Tomasz Jedrzejowski
"Illustration for Greg Egan's story "Border guards"
Nowa Fantastyka 10/2007"
4 out of 5
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Oracle - Greg Egan
Novella
Number of words : 18000
Percent of complex words : 12.1
Average syllables per word : 1.5
Average words per sentence : 19.7
READABILITY INDICES
Fog : 12.7
Flesch : 58.0
Flesch-Kincaid : 10.1
PEOPLE
Robert Stoney
A professor of mathematics.
Peter Quint
A spook, and one of Stoney's captors.
Franza Kafka
Not a Commie, and a writer.
Arthur
Stoney's boyfriend at the time of his trouble.
Mr Wills
A detective at the Manchester CID.
Guy Burgess
A corrupted English spy.
Hermann Weyl
A mathematician.
Chris
A friend at school Stoney was in love with who died of bovine tuberculosis.
Eddington
A physicist.
Hardy
A mathematician.
Newton
A scientist.
Helen
A time travelling multiverse shifting android.
Ealing
A movie director.
Everett
Had a time travel theory that was right.
Feynman
A physicist.
Yang
A physicist.
John Hamilton
Professor of Mediaeval and Renaissance English at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Also an author of religious defenses and children's fantasies.
Elizabeth Anscombe
A philosopher and winner of a debate with Hamilton.
Aquinas to Wittgenstein
Philosophers.
William Hamilton
John's brother.
Malcolm Muggeridge
Another mathematician that did war work.
Nevill Mott
Made the superconducting alloys for the imager.
Rosalind Franklin
From Birkbeck, helped perfect the fabrication process for the computing circuits.
William Blake
A poet.
Joyce Hamilton
John's dying wife.
Helen of Troy
Ancient beauty.
Huysmans
Basically just a very dim Catholic.
Luke
Assistant and an affair of Stoney's.
Wagner
A composer.
Michael Polanyi
An academic philosopher who agrees to moderate the debate.
Kurt Godel
Austrian mathematician.
Aristotle
Ancient philosopher.
Hamilton's young friend
Has a PhD in algebraic geometry from Cambridge.
H.G. Wells
An author.
Milton, Dante, John the Divine
Writers.
PLACES
Sherborne
A public school he went to.
Thames
A river in England.
Westminster Abbey
A church in England.
Saint Paul's Cathedral
A big church in England.
Cavendish Laboratory
Where Stoney works at Cambridge. A mid-Victorian building.
Cairo
City in Egypt.
Bogota
City in Colombia.
London
Capital of England.
Calcutta
City in India.
Manchester
City in England.
Boston
USA city.
Auschwitz
A nazi concentration camp.
Madras
City in India.
Shepherd's Bush
Where the BBC studios are located.
Guy's Hospital
Stoney knows an oncologist there.
ORGANISATIONS
CID
Police detectives.
Trinity College
Part of Cambridge University.
MI6
English international espionage agency.
Socratic Club
A society that holds debates at Oxford University.
BBC
British Broadcasting Corporation.
Oxford University
In England.
Cambridge University
In England.
TECHNOLOGY
Mark I
A computer.
Spin resonance imager
Used to see inside the human body.
MEDIA
Yang and Mills in '54
A paper that generalised Maxwell's equations for electromagnetism to apply to the strong nuclear force.
Physical Review
A physics journal.
Kingdom of Nescia
Children's fantasies by John Hamilton.
Signs and Wonders
Anti-materialism tract by John Hamilton.
The Broken Planet
Anti-science book by John Hamilton.
Faustus
Devil-dealing character.
Letters from a Demon
Satirical newspaper column by John Hamilton.
Cedric Duffy
A John Hamilton character.
Pendragon
Mythical Arthurian leader.
Tower of Babel
Mythical ancient structure.
Mythopoesis
Essay by Tollers.
Can A Machine Think?
A BBC debate between Stoney and Hamilton.
The Seat of Oak
One of Hamilton's Nescia books.
CONCEPTS
Baudot Code
A character set for telegraphy.
Mercury
Roman deity.
Pan
Woodland deity.
Incompleteness Theorem
Postulated by Kurt Godel.
The Goldbach conjecture
One of the oldest unsolved problems in number theory and in all of mathematics. Every even integer greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two primes.
Fermat's Last Theorem
About positive integer algebra.
Oracle
A machine that could solve the halting problem.
ANIMALS
Pekinese
A created dog breed.
Hamsters
Small rodents that will fuck anything.
PLOT
Robert Stoney is a professor of mathematics and of interest to MI6 because of the work he could do. He is also exploited by some dodgy spooks because he is gay, and in this decade that is something that can be used against you.
They actually take him to try and torture it out of him at one stage, locking him in a cramped cage. Amazingly, he is rescued by a woman who is a time traveller. Even more than that, an android and a multiversal troubleshooter. Helen stays with him for some time, and they discuss the problems of trying to change the past, and the differing branches. They can't change big things, but certainly can affect minor elements. So they bedevil the spook Quint that tortured Stoney, driving him towards breakdown.
This soon leads him to success as she can point out some shortcuts in research to come up with some technology like a resonance imager, or medical breakthroughs, even if it is not his field.
Others wonder why he is so successful all of a sudden, and he attracks the interest of a religious conservative and anti-science and anti-materialist author John Hamilton. They end up debating on the BBC, which goes ok. Helen accompanies Stoney and Hamilton has a 'young adviser'. Hamilton's wife Joyce is dying of bone cancer, but he thinks Stoney is of the devil and refuses any help.
Something Helen tells John can be accomplished with timeline tricks is a solution to the halting problem, of being able to tell if a computer program will work or not because you can use an infinite number of paths to interrogate it. To be able to solve the halting problem would give you an Oracle machine, as Stoney calls it.
At the end, after his wife has died he is visited by a version of himself from another timeline, which rather freaks him out. He still refuses to accept technological assitance towards his happiness, however and will not go with his visiting self.
4 out of 5
http://www.gregegan.net/MISC/ORACLE/Oracle.html
Number of words : 18000
Percent of complex words : 12.1
Average syllables per word : 1.5
Average words per sentence : 19.7
READABILITY INDICES
Fog : 12.7
Flesch : 58.0
Flesch-Kincaid : 10.1
PEOPLE
Robert Stoney
A professor of mathematics.
Peter Quint
A spook, and one of Stoney's captors.
Franza Kafka
Not a Commie, and a writer.
Arthur
Stoney's boyfriend at the time of his trouble.
Mr Wills
A detective at the Manchester CID.
Guy Burgess
A corrupted English spy.
Hermann Weyl
A mathematician.
Chris
A friend at school Stoney was in love with who died of bovine tuberculosis.
Eddington
A physicist.
Hardy
A mathematician.
Newton
A scientist.
Helen
A time travelling multiverse shifting android.
Ealing
A movie director.
Everett
Had a time travel theory that was right.
Feynman
A physicist.
Yang
A physicist.
John Hamilton
Professor of Mediaeval and Renaissance English at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Also an author of religious defenses and children's fantasies.
Elizabeth Anscombe
A philosopher and winner of a debate with Hamilton.
Aquinas to Wittgenstein
Philosophers.
William Hamilton
John's brother.
Malcolm Muggeridge
Another mathematician that did war work.
Nevill Mott
Made the superconducting alloys for the imager.
Rosalind Franklin
From Birkbeck, helped perfect the fabrication process for the computing circuits.
William Blake
A poet.
Joyce Hamilton
John's dying wife.
Helen of Troy
Ancient beauty.
Huysmans
Basically just a very dim Catholic.
Luke
Assistant and an affair of Stoney's.
Wagner
A composer.
Michael Polanyi
An academic philosopher who agrees to moderate the debate.
Kurt Godel
Austrian mathematician.
Aristotle
Ancient philosopher.
Hamilton's young friend
Has a PhD in algebraic geometry from Cambridge.
H.G. Wells
An author.
Milton, Dante, John the Divine
Writers.
PLACES
Sherborne
A public school he went to.
Thames
A river in England.
Westminster Abbey
A church in England.
Saint Paul's Cathedral
A big church in England.
Cavendish Laboratory
Where Stoney works at Cambridge. A mid-Victorian building.
Cairo
City in Egypt.
Bogota
City in Colombia.
London
Capital of England.
Calcutta
City in India.
Manchester
City in England.
Boston
USA city.
Auschwitz
A nazi concentration camp.
Madras
City in India.
Shepherd's Bush
Where the BBC studios are located.
Guy's Hospital
Stoney knows an oncologist there.
ORGANISATIONS
CID
Police detectives.
Trinity College
Part of Cambridge University.
MI6
English international espionage agency.
Socratic Club
A society that holds debates at Oxford University.
BBC
British Broadcasting Corporation.
Oxford University
In England.
Cambridge University
In England.
TECHNOLOGY
Mark I
A computer.
Spin resonance imager
Used to see inside the human body.
MEDIA
Yang and Mills in '54
A paper that generalised Maxwell's equations for electromagnetism to apply to the strong nuclear force.
Physical Review
A physics journal.
Kingdom of Nescia
Children's fantasies by John Hamilton.
Signs and Wonders
Anti-materialism tract by John Hamilton.
The Broken Planet
Anti-science book by John Hamilton.
Faustus
Devil-dealing character.
Letters from a Demon
Satirical newspaper column by John Hamilton.
Cedric Duffy
A John Hamilton character.
Pendragon
Mythical Arthurian leader.
Tower of Babel
Mythical ancient structure.
Mythopoesis
Essay by Tollers.
Can A Machine Think?
A BBC debate between Stoney and Hamilton.
The Seat of Oak
One of Hamilton's Nescia books.
CONCEPTS
Baudot Code
A character set for telegraphy.
Mercury
Roman deity.
Pan
Woodland deity.
Incompleteness Theorem
Postulated by Kurt Godel.
The Goldbach conjecture
One of the oldest unsolved problems in number theory and in all of mathematics. Every even integer greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two primes.
Fermat's Last Theorem
About positive integer algebra.
Oracle
A machine that could solve the halting problem.
ANIMALS
Pekinese
A created dog breed.
Hamsters
Small rodents that will fuck anything.
PLOT
Robert Stoney is a professor of mathematics and of interest to MI6 because of the work he could do. He is also exploited by some dodgy spooks because he is gay, and in this decade that is something that can be used against you.
They actually take him to try and torture it out of him at one stage, locking him in a cramped cage. Amazingly, he is rescued by a woman who is a time traveller. Even more than that, an android and a multiversal troubleshooter. Helen stays with him for some time, and they discuss the problems of trying to change the past, and the differing branches. They can't change big things, but certainly can affect minor elements. So they bedevil the spook Quint that tortured Stoney, driving him towards breakdown.
This soon leads him to success as she can point out some shortcuts in research to come up with some technology like a resonance imager, or medical breakthroughs, even if it is not his field.
Others wonder why he is so successful all of a sudden, and he attracks the interest of a religious conservative and anti-science and anti-materialist author John Hamilton. They end up debating on the BBC, which goes ok. Helen accompanies Stoney and Hamilton has a 'young adviser'. Hamilton's wife Joyce is dying of bone cancer, but he thinks Stoney is of the devil and refuses any help.
Something Helen tells John can be accomplished with timeline tricks is a solution to the halting problem, of being able to tell if a computer program will work or not because you can use an infinite number of paths to interrogate it. To be able to solve the halting problem would give you an Oracle machine, as Stoney calls it.
At the end, after his wife has died he is visited by a version of himself from another timeline, which rather freaks him out. He still refuses to accept technological assitance towards his happiness, however and will not go with his visiting self.
4 out of 5
http://www.gregegan.net/MISC/ORACLE/Oracle.html
The Goldbach conjecture : Oracle - Greg Egan
One of the oldest unsolved problems in number theory and in all of mathematics. Every even integer greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two primes.
3 out of 5
3 out of 5
Yang and Mills in '54 : Oracle - Greg Egan
A paper that generalised Maxwell's equations for electromagnetism to apply to the strong nuclear force.
4 out of 5
4 out of 5
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Cavendish Laboratory : Oracle - Greg Egan
Where Stoney works at Cambridge. A mid-Victorian building.
4 out of 5
4 out of 5
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