do u think big physicists visualise like Oppenheimer does in the Oppenheimer movie

Einstein used to do these visualisations apparently

Happy Star Wars Day! May the Fourth be with you!

Star Wars has some dark scenes like children getting murdered in Revenge of the Sith

@PM2Ring May the Fourth be with you

Yeah. I haven't seen the prequels, etc. I've only seen the original trilogy.

whoa

how could u resist when prequels came out @PM2Ring

did u hate episode 6

I really enjoyed the first Star Wars movie when it was released. But I didn't like the direction that the series took. I thought the whole midichlorians thing was stupid. So I lost interest.

@PM2Ring oh

Of course, being a science fiction fan, I've picked up most of the story & various details about the Star Wars universe over the years. But I have no great desire to watch any more of the movies or TV series.

@PM2Ring yeah.. the scene wasnt gory at all

@PM2Ring oh

@PM2Ring have u tried the new Dune movies?

u will love Dune Part 2

OTOH, I'm a fan of Natalie Portman, and I'm tempted to see her Star Wars work...

@RyderRude Not yet.

@PM2Ring she is badass in the second prequel

@PM2Ring please see it. especially part 2

I saw the David Lynch Dune back in the 1980s. It was mostly ok, but it did have some annoying stuff, like the severely mutated navigators, and it didn't really cover the full story.

@PM2Ring i have not seen that version. the new Dune is about how a prophecy slowly consumes a person.

it's one of the best movies ever

Although Dune focuses on important individuals, it's about the interplay between those individuals and the long-term fate and destiny of humanity as a whole.

Asimov explored those themes in his Foundation series.

I guess it was a pretty major theme in the mid 20th century, with people like Hitler & Stalin. They were products of their time, but their thoughts and feelings had huge repercussions on the lives and deaths of millions.

the movies havent yet shown the bad things done by Paul. pls dont spoil :)

On a more positive note, we also had popular musicians and actors having a big influence on culture. Eg, The Beatles were just 4 young blokes from Liverpool. They weren't musical prodigies, but they had a huge permanent impact on popular music.

yeah.. lots of people got inspired by them. they also did some peace music in the latter half of their career

i guess they werent standouts initially but later became standouts

it's hard to create music

it requires some sense of it. like having a sense of math, let's say

@RyderRude Oh, The Beatles were a huge sensation from the days of their earliest recordings. They had been performing for a few years by then, though, in England and Germany.

If you like sci-fi epics you may enjoy the novel Neverness by David Zindell en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neverness

yes. they were a sensation since the beginning

@PM2Ring sounds really cool. i think that summary spoiled it

@PM2Ring today i had an idea about a sci-fi story. it is inspired by Veritasium's video recent on spacetime highways

It spoiled it a tiny bit, but there's so much going on in Neverness, and that the summary is a little bit misleading.

oh

i will check it out. thanks

In Neverness, the FTL navigation is performed by pilots neurally linked to AI. The hyperspace manifold isn't simple, and to get from A to B you have to prove that the worldline exists. In some bad parts of hyperspace, you may not be able to find any finite exits.

wow

It's not quite Greg Egan level, but it's the closest thing I've seen in sci-fi of pilots literally doing diff geo in cyberspace in order to fly their ships.

my idea was similar.... my story is based in a world where spacetime has become weirdly structured. in this world, people have the map of spacetime and their daily life involves visiting points on the spacetime similar to how we would visit points in space.

there is no linearity to past or future. past people and future people effectively live together in a society.

but u cant visit any point whenever u want because eventually, parts become causally disconnected

and this is where i will write the emotional parts

so eventually, u get blocked out from every portion of spacetime that was previously accessible to u

In Neverness, the galactic structure in hyperspace is rather different to the structure in normal space, but the pilot guild have pretty good maps, that they guard jealously. The guild headquarters are on an icy planet in a pretty average stellar system. But in hyperspace, that star is near a really major navigation nexus.

oh

Here's a tiny spoiler. IIRC, it gets revealed fairly early in the book.

@PM2Ring does it include the worldline calculations

The main guild city has streets of ice, so people ice skate everywhere. There are no street signs. But the streets are marked by different colours of ice.

@RyderRude No, there's no actual mathematics. It just talks about the process of doing the proofs, literally on the fly.

oh

@PM2Ring oh

The streets of the city are actually a map of the hyperspace nexus. So when an apprentice pilot has memorised the street map they've also memorised the local hyperspace.

really smart

so this hyperspace is like the portal connecting the normal spacetime

hyperspace is utilised by almost all space stories

In the Neverness universe, it was discovered that consciousness has a tiny but important affect on spacetime. Basically, a version of "consciousness causes wavefunction collapse" combined with quantum gravity. But the author doesn't go into details.

oh.. so it has QM too

i hav never read hard sci fi. this seems like a good start. thanks..

Kind of. It's a bit hand-wavy. He focuses more on the story than the technical details. That can sometimes be a bit frustrating when you actually want to know those details. ;)

oh :P

@PM2Ring what do u think about my story setting?

But anyway, when you're flying through hyperspace, you aren't just proving that your worldline exists, your consciousness is also willing that worldline into existence.

ooh

now u r spoiling too much

so this is the consciousness causes collapse bit

Yeah, I better shut up. :)

@RyderRude It sounds like it has potential.

thanks :)

will be fun to write emotional parts on the verge of causal disconnect

like people failing to say goodbye becuz they got causally dosconnected

Speaking of causally disconnected... The other day, you were talking about comparing times in different universes in the string landscape. ACM pointed out that the landscape doesn't actually imply that all of those universes exist. But if they do (or some of them do) it's not valid to make any kind of time comparisons. Not only are they causally disconnected, their time axes aren't even in the same space!

oh. i initially thought the same thing. they are literally entire universes, so no way to talk about what moments from different universes are simultaneous

@RyderRude That reminds me of a thing in a short story by Ursula LeGuin. It's not a total causal disconnect, just a slip caused by time dilation.

i will check it out

In most of her stories, there's no FTL travel, but there is FTL communication.

oh

my story doesnt have FTL. FTL is too crazy for me to handle in a story

it's just a spacetime without any order... like one lives as if all of it existed at once

but people get causally disconnected

A family of 4 is returning home, after ~ a decade doing admin work on a colony planet. At the last minute, the parents get separated, so they end up going on different ships, with each parent taking one kid.

oh

The ships take different routes. When they meet up, one half of the family has aged ~10 years more than the other half.

tough

It might be more than 10 years. Maybe 20.

what is the name of this story

It'd certainly have an impact on the relationships.

like in the Interstellar movie

@RyderRude Sorry. I read it years ago. I'd have to do some detective work to track it down.

it's ok

there is this list en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/…

@PM2Ring do u think the QM multiverse is certainly a misinterpretation of QM

i get these vibes from it. but given that all theories give some multiverse, it is maybe a partially correct interpretation

LeGuin had some great titles, eg The Word for World Is Forest

@RyderRude Maybe. ;) I have mixed feelings about the various flavours of Many Worlds.

yeah. u once told me about the stack of cards version.. it somehow made my objections go away

I suspect that we're incapable of perceiving some fundamental aspect of time. And if we could perceive that aspect, it would all fall into place, and be obvious.

i too agree with that. humans are only capable of perceiving classical time. the quantum gravity equivalent of time is outside our limits

really trippy

I have a fondness for Cramer's Transactional interpretation, but unfortunately no-one has been able to make it work for anything more complicated than "one atom emits a photon, another atom absorbs a photon".