The Eternal Flame 1-2 - Greg Egan

In Lightspeed Magazine 28 : "Straining against the harness that held her to the observation bench, Tamara cranked the azimuth wheel of the telescope mount. Each laborious turn of the handle beside her nudged the huge contraption by just one arc-chime, and though she still had strength to spare there was nothing to be gained from it: a governor limited the speed of rotation to prevent excessive torques that might damage the gears. The soft, steady clicking of the wheel, usually a reassuring, meditative sound, drove home the machine’s serene indifference to her impatience. When the telescope was finally pointed in the direction of her last sighting of the Object, she lay flat on the bench and wriggled into place beneath the eyepiece. As she brought the image into focus she was granted as glorious a vision as she could have hoped for: there was nothing to be seen here but the usual mundane star trails. The trails were exactly as Tamara remembered them, so she knew that she hadn’t mis-set the coordinates. Twice now, the Object had escaped the field of view that had framed it just one day earlier. Such elusiveness proved that it was crossing the sky faster than anything she’d seen before. Tamara turned the secondary azimuth wheel until she was rewarded with a small gray smudge of light at the top of the field, then she adjusted the altitude to center it. To the limits of the telescope’s resolving power, the Object was simply a point. Nothing in the cosmos was close enough to the Peerless to reveal its width, but even those orthogonal stars that had remained fixed in the sky for three generations showed color trails at this magnification. To possess a point-like image the Object had to be moving slowly—but the only way a slow-moving body could cross the sky as rapidly as this was by virtue of its proximity." 4 out of 5

The Eternal Flame 1 - Greg Egan

"Carlo scooped up the chosen boy's co and pulled himself along the rope into the front room, a child clutched awkwardly in each free hand. From the box he took two clearstone vials and a syringe. He extruded an extra pair of arms, uncapped the first vial and filled the syringe with its orange powder. When he held the sharp mirrorstone tip to the base of the boy's skull he felt his own body start shuddering in revulsion, but he stared down his urge to take the child in his arms and soothe him, to promise him as much love and protection as he would lavish on any child of his own. He pushed the needle into the skin and searched for the angle that would take it between two plates of bone – he knew the invariant anatomy here was not that different from a vole's – but then the tip suddenly plunged deeper without the drop in resistance he'd been expecting upon finding the narrow corridor of flesh. The child's skull wasn't fully ossified, and his probing had forced the needle right through it. Carlo turned the boy to face him then squeezed the plunger on the syringe. The child's eyes snapped open, but they were sightless, rolling erratically, with flashes of yellow light diffusing all the way through the orbs. The drug itself could only reach a small region of the brain, but those parts it touched were emitting a barrage of meaningless signals that elicited an equally frenzied response much farther afield. Soon the tissue's capacity to make light would be depleted throughout the whole organ. In this state, Carlo believed, there could be no capacity for thought or sensation. When the boy's eyes were still Carlo withdrew the needle. His co's tympanum had been fluttering for a while, and now her humming grew audible. “I'm sorry,” Carlo whispered. “I'm sorry.” He stroked the side of her body with his thumb, but it only made her more agitated. He refilled the syringe with the orange powder, quickly drove the needle through the back of her skull, and watched the light of her nascent mind blaze like a wildfire, then die away." 4 out of 5 http://www.gregegan.net/ORTHOGONAL/E2/EternalFlameExcerpt.html

The Orthogonal Universe - Greg Egan

"What would it be like to live in a universe with four dimensions that were all essentially the same? The universe we inhabit has three dimensions of space and one of time, and though relativity has taught us that there is no absolute notion of time that is shared by everyone, the whole variety of directions in space-time that different people might call “the future” is entirely separate from the set of directions that different people might call “north”. What would be the outcome if that distinction were erased, and there were four dimensions that were all as much alike as “north” and “east”? Such a universe is the setting for a trilogy of novels that I’m writing, with the overall title of Orthogonal. The first volume, The Clockwork Rocket, was published in 2011; the second, The Eternal Flame, has just been released by Night Shade books in the US, and will be out from Gollancz in the UK in October. Since time as such is absent from the Orthogonal universe, a first guess might be that it would resemble a snapshot of the world we see around us at a single moment, albeit a snapshot with four dimensions of space rather than three. Worse, it would be a snapshot with no backstory: no sequence of prior events to organize and enrich the subjects caught in the flash. It would consist of nothing but scattered, isolated objects with no history or duration." 4.5 out of 5 http://fantasybookcritic.blogspot.com.au/2012/09/guest-post-orthogonal-universe-by-greg.html

Orthogonal: Riemannian Quantum Mechanics [Extra] - Greg Egan

"Units Throughout these notes, we've adopted a system where time and distance are measured in identical units. This is the equivalent of setting the speed of light, c, equal to 1 in our own universe (for example, by measuring distances in metres and using the time it takes for light to travel one metre as the corresponding unit of time). In the Riemannian universe, it amounts to choosing units for time such that Pythagoras's Theorem holds true, even when one side of the triangle involves an interval of time rather than space. In the novel Orthogonal, it is found empirically that this is the same as setting the speed of blue light equal to 1. In this section, we will go one step further and choose units for mass and energy such that the “reduced Planck's constant”, ℏ = h/(2π), is equal to 1. Mass and energy are then measured in units with the dimensions of inverse lengths or spatial frequencies — or, equally, inverse times or time frequencies. Our particular choice means that the Planck relationship between frequency ν and energy, E = h ν, becomes E = 2 π ν = ω, where ω is the angular frequency of the wave, and the relationship between spatial frequency κ and momentum is p = 2 π κ = k, where k is the angular spatial frequency. The maximum angular frequency ωm that appears in the Riemannian Scalar Wave equation is then simply equal to the rest mass of the associated particle. Relativistic Energy and Momentum Operators In the non-relativistic quantum mechanics we have discussed so far, we have simply applied the usual Schrödinger equation to the potential energy associated with the force between charged particles, on the basis that non-relativistic classical dynamics in the Riemannian universe is identical to Newtonian mechanics, so long as we treat kinetic energy as positive and choose the sign for the potential energy to be consistent with that. For Riemannian relativistic quantum mechanics, we will need to do things slightly differently. The structure of quantum mechanics in its usual formulation is closely linked to the Hamiltonian form of the corresponding classical mechanics, and in the Riemannian case the momentum conjugate to each coordinate in the Hamiltonian sense is the opposite of the relativistic momentum in the same direction."\ 5 out of 5 http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/ORTHOGONAL/07/QMExtra.html

Girih Animation - Greg Egan

"This animation was created using the same methods as the Girih applet, but as it's been precomputed it's possible to include a finer level of detail than can be generated by the applet in real time." 4.5 out of 5 http://www.gregegan.net/APPLETS/32/GirihAnimation.html

Conic Section Orbits - Greg Egan

http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/SCIENCE/ConicSectionOrbits/ConicSectionOrbits0.png

"The aim of this page is to assemble a variety of simple proofs for the wonderful fact, first proved by Isaac Newton, that the orbits of bodies subject to an inverse-square force are conic sections: ellipses, circles, parabolas, hyperbolas or straight lines.

Although conic sections are defined in the first instance as the curves produced when a plane intersects a cone, these curves have a wealth of well-known properties that characterise them equally well. The idea of this page is to explore the relationship between the inverse-square force law and as many of these properties as possible."


5 out of 5

http://www.gregegan.net/SCIENCE/ConicSectionOrbits/ConicSectionOrbits.html

The Eternal Flame - Greg Egan

"Book Two of the ORTHOGONAL trilogy, THE ETERNAL FLAME, has been scheduled to appear in September/October from Night Shade Books in the US and Gollancz in the UK."


http://www.gregegan.net/ORTHOGONAL/ORTHOGONAL.html

Booked! Author The Clockwork Rocket - Greg Egan

"It was only in 1996 that I finally came across Gravitation by Charles Misner, Kip Thorne and John Wheeler. Published in 1973, this 1279-page masterpiece takes all the time it needs to prepare the reader for the subject, spelling out the beautiful geometric principles that underly Einstein’s conception of gravity. In general relativity, the way lengths and angles are measured varies from place to place and time to time, so there needs to be an underlying framework in which these concepts can be defined without simply taking them for granted. That framework is known as differential geometry, and once you learn its concepts and tools, black holes, the expanding universe, and other counterintuitive features of modern science finally become comprehensible. This book gives you the mathematics you need, defined with care, but backs it all the way with physical intuition. I only wish I’d read it twenty years earlier."


3.5 out of 5

http://suvudu.com/2011/09/booked-greg-egan-author-the-clockwork-rocket.html

Locus Roundtable on Greg Egan - Karen Burnham

"Welcome to another single-author focused edition of the Locus Roundtable. This time Greg Egan is in the spotlight, as I egregiously abuse my position by wrangling some very kind individuals into talking about my personal current obsession. Participating in this discussion are Gardner Dozois, whose early championing of Egan’s short fiction helped to make him one of the more influential sf authors of the 1990s; Kathleen Ann Goonan, author of the Nanotech Quartet of stories as well as In War Times and This Shared Dream; Russell Letson, long-time reviewer for Locus; and Paul Graham Raven, owner of Futurismic and short story author."


4 out of 5

http://www.locusmag.com/Roundtable/2012/03/roundtable-on-greg-egan/

Art and power in the age of empire: Greg Egan's society of control - Phillip Drake

"The precise realization of the appearance--the surface, I call it, however three-dimensional--is only the most rudimentary beginning. It is the network of relationships between the subjects, and between the subjects and their setting, that constitutes the challenge for the generation that follows. (1)

* In these lines from Greg Egan's short story, "The Caress" (1990), artist and pharmaceutical empire heir, Andreas Lindhquist theorizes on the future of "Lindhquistism," an art movement dedicated to the recreation of classical paintings in real life. Lindhquist achieves these effects by manipulating bodies, light, and space, but, as the above passage suggests, he envisions a future where artists shape the entire "network of relationships" that circumscribe the subjects of the painting. The idea of controlling whole networks of relationships implies an artist with daunting power, who is capable of extending and influencing the array of relationships that shape the ways we think, live, and relate to objects and individuals in the world: an artists who shapes subjectivity itself. As Egan's short story plays out, Lindhquist succeeds so thoroughly that his artworks transgress the boundaries between performance and real-life experience: life literally copies art."



4 out of 5

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Art+and+power+in+the+age+of+empire%3A+Greg+Egan's+society+of+control.-a0278950693