erturs

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• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  I get confused when people ask me what the names of my pets are, because it's usually effectively the first time the idea has occurred to me at all. To say I don't see the point would not really be...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  It might look a lot like our current world! only with sarcastic talking cats giving our heads of state their marching orders (and no reduction in carbon emissions because the Owners like it hot). And it just takes some tweaks...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  Let's try that one again - why would you wind up in the spacial location that you began, just because you wind up in the temporal location you began? A closed timelike curve is a closed path (loop) in spacetime....
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  What kind of society would superintelligent cats form? Governance would be a difficult. I can't see a strong central government forming. Democracy might be an option, but requires compromise, and cats aren't particularly inclined to compromise. Perhaps some sort of...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  Why would a closed timelike path take you to your past? Why would it not end right where it began? It does end right where and when it began, that's why it's a loop. So at some point in the...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  How do I know I've traveled through time? What happens to me that's different than what happens if FTL doesn't contradict relativity? FTL doesn't have to involve time travel; your example is a case where it probably wouldn't. But if...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  You've misunderstood my point, which is that education doesn't necessarily have to be "useful". As for quantum mechanics, yes there are many problems in quantum field theory which are computationally intractable. But that's true even of classical mechanics (e.g. fluid...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  I don't think you read the original paper, or else misunderstood what a "closed timelike curve" is. It's a path that if followed literally takes you to your own past. You don't need a powerful telescope to observe the potential...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  There is essentially damn-all reason to teach any 20th century mathematics or physics (except for statistics and just possibly special relativity) before university. Quantum mechanics is particularly irrelevant. I have to disagree, although I suppose it depends on what you...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  Well, alcubierre warp drives aren't time machines. They warp space, rather than accelerating the ship. Like a wormhole, a warp radically decreases the distance the ship moves across space, in this case by warping the distance the ship moves through...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  No idea where you're located, but here (Canada) there is no time/money for teachers to stay current in their fields. This might not make a difference when the subject is Shakespeare, but for the sciences it means that senior teachers...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  Actually, I have a short I'm trying to sell, set in my future universe, where they invent the FTL drive, and my handwaving is a lot less vague. Unless you've got an explanation for why your FTL drive doesn't double...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  Well, no. Fiction is presented as fiction. Lies are presented as fact with intent to deceive. Fair enough; I was being too glib with the "I tell lies for a living" tagline many authors use. I think my main...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  On the subject of chatGPT (and potential strossGPT, heinleinGPT, etc.): if the purpose of a system is what it produces, consider that chatGPT produces "plausible sounding" text without regard for whether it is actually true or not. In other words,...
• Commented on Empire Games (and Merchant Princes): the inevitable spoiler thread!
  I will try again, once. With what I am talking about, the cause DOES precede the effect, in all frames involved in the causal chain. Inertial frames of reference are coordinate systems. Only events can be "involved in a causal...
• Commented on Empire Games (and Merchant Princes): the inevitable spoiler thread!
  Anyway, what MIGHT be the sticking point is the idea of "clearly and inevitably violates." This is an assumption, based on the notion that one causality violation makes FTL completely and universally impossible. Obviously we're talking past each other, and...
• Commented on Empire Games (and Merchant Princes): the inevitable spoiler thread!
  I have never heard of the first being referred to as causality; yes, it obviously breaks that, The idea that cause must precede effect is hardly original to me :). but it should say "the cause APPARENTLY comes after the...
• Commented on Empire Games (and Merchant Princes): the inevitable spoiler thread!
  Firstly, SPECIAL relativity IS inevitable given Newtonian mechanics and the observed fact that the speed of light is constant in all frames. There is no other solution but the Lorentz transformations. I wasn't wrong. I said that the (Galilean) principle...
• Commented on Empire Games (and Merchant Princes): the inevitable spoiler thread!
  Again, you're wrong. Consider a beam of light going from A to B, and bouncing, and returning to A. Simply by doing that... they are in the same frame of reference. In relativity a "frame of reference" is a set...
• Commented on Empire Games (and Merchant Princes): the inevitable spoiler thread!
  Probably expect a US-Chinese codominion like Pournelle's US/USSR alliance, with the US and China both deciding authoritarian capitalism is the way to go. I can imagine the US/China deciding to use propaganda calling the commonwealth racist/antisemitic for not letting blackrock/the...
• Commented on Empire Games (and Merchant Princes): the inevitable spoiler thread!
  And I guess before this spirals out of control again: you can have both FTL and causality, you just have to give up on relativity. And that's fine! The principle of relativity is not logically inevitable. But if you're writing...
• Commented on Empire Games (and Merchant Princes): the inevitable spoiler thread!
  Consider A and B, both moving slower than light. A fires up their ansible, and sends a message to B. B gets it... inside the light cone. B now responds with their ansible.. and A receives it, again inside the...
• Commented on Empire Games (and Merchant Princes): the inevitable spoiler thread!
  That is NOT a proof of a causality breach; I did slightly more thorough calculations and convinced myself that it couldn't be made into one. Yes, without an exclusion principle (i.e. that two frames cannot both use FTL if they...
• Commented on Empire Games (and Merchant Princes): the inevitable spoiler thread!
  Speaking of the Hanovers, I wonder what will become of Liz Hanover. She seems like a natural policitian, and IIRC even asked whether she would be allowed to participate in politics and was assured she would be. But in practice...
• Commented on Empire Games (and Merchant Princes): the inevitable spoiler thread!
  All distances and times are as measured by the slower than light observers (that's what the "as measured in an inertial frame whose endpoints are at rest" means). How the warp drive works doesn't matter, unless it permanently alters the...
• Commented on Empire Games (and Merchant Princes): the inevitable spoiler thread!
  I am pretty sure that the paradox arises only if the messages are fast enough, where that depends on the relative speeds of the observers. True, but for any FTL message speed there's a slower than light observer speed that...
• Commented on Empire Games (and Merchant Princes): the inevitable spoiler thread!
  I'd suggest stepping carefully on this one. I'm not a physicist, obviously. However, the problem with warp drives is that they're not exactly FTL. They change distances until the distance can be traveled STL. No. The paradox arises if strictly...
• Commented on Empire Games (and Merchant Princes): the inevitable spoiler thread!
  I have no idea how you turn an Alcubierre warp into a time machine... You do that by pairing it with a slower than light drive. To make a closed timelike curve (aka Grandfather paradox) with any FTL mechanism whatsoever,...
• Commented on Empire Games (and Merchant Princes): the inevitable spoiler thread!
  > However, I wish someone like you who's more mathematical than I am could tackle the craziness of time being half quantum entropy, half relativistic dimension. That's worse than half man half biscuit, at least when I think about it....
• Commented on Empire Games (and Merchant Princes): the inevitable spoiler thread!
  > Inter alia, in evolution, there has to be some definite advantage for the change at every stage. It is NOT enough for there to be a definite advantage towards the end point. Actually mutations are random, and neutral mutations...