Four Dimensional Hyperspace
That's a ridiculously long time since I posted anything, but I have somehow managed to put it off through a combination of busy-ness and laziness. There was one semester (slightly disastrous) of college, and then this past semester I've actually been earning money off an internship! Bank balance is looking rather good.
But I don't really know how much intellectual work I've been doing lately - been reading a ridiculous amount of fiction this semester because I had only one class. On the other hand I got to indulge my sci-fi craving, which meant loads of Iain M. Banks. I first got introduced to him because a friend of mine (who's also a Lit major... of course) mentioned he was good, and that he wrote sci-fi. The last two words made me grab ahold of the book, and I started with The Player of Games.
Here's my thing about science fiction: it's really not just about the science. Anything created in a human society - regardless of whether it follows fundamental physical laws of the universe - is going to be subject to human problems. What makes good sci-fi, for me, is how the author manages to treat some outlandish (by today's standards) scientific advancement in a way that makes sense in society. Case in point: Neil Gaiman (whom I've always considered more of a fantasy author) and one of the stories in his Smoke and Mirrors short story collection, about a scientist who invents a cure for cancer that also manages to change your gender. And then there are writers like Frank Herbert, who pull together a huge range of fields - like geoscience, psychology, physiology, religion and politics - to make something as fantastic as Dune.
Banks does something similar to that, too. At first I was slightly annoyed by the fact that he throws out scientific miracles nonchalantly at the start of the book - the Culture, their drones, their Orbitals - but I loved the sheer scope of his ideas and the way he pulled them together. I'd also just started reading Asimov's Foundations (horribly late, I know) and while I was impressed with the basic concept of his ideas like psychohistory and the blurring of religion and science, I didn't particularly like his writing style and the lack of detail. (Besides which one major annoyance I have with many fantasy/sci-fi writer is the ridiculous names they come up with) Banks sounds more... coherent, more in control of his universe. But I have to admit this is slightly unfair, comparing the first of the Foundations and Banks' later works in the culture universe.
I went on a book buying spree and got Banks' Consider Phlebas. As one of the reviewers puts it, it's like a blockbuster action movie played out in space, but intelligently written. Several of my favourite sci-fi moments are when Banks talks about the Culture destroying an Orbital. They don't simply break it down - they annihilate it. Splitting the fabric of spacetime, they conjure up anti-matter to simply erase any evidence of the Orbitral altogether. Screw Dan Brown's Angels and Demons antimatter - this is way cooler. (I just looked it up - CERN published an FAQ stating that since creating antimatter takes more energy than using antimatter, it's not a viable alternative energy source). Another geek moment: Banks actually descibes 4D spacetime, calling the underlying energy - string theory, membrane theory, take your pick - works like a "grid" of energy. He writes about how spaceships travel in between space and 4D - black holes are huge twisting tornadoes connecting the two sufaces, supernovae are lightning flashes in the real space above. I don't know if I just haven't read enough amazing books not to find this amazing, but somehow visualizing a 4D environment in a 3D brain strikes me as pretty damn cool.
What would seem to be an interesting mental exercise is to try to think a little like these writers. Starting with a cliche sci-fi staple - bending time. Sort of a Minority Report, what-if-you-could-see-into-the-future kind of thing. This isn't as far off a theory as it seems to be. What got me interested in the first place was a medical study that suggested that people would be able to tell that something bad would happen in the future. I tried looking for it online but a lot of the links I got were rather wishy-washy pseudo-spiritual things. The gist of the study was this: you make a bunch of people sit through a series of photos, where highly unpleasant ones were spliced in between pleasant ones. After a while I believe the researchers noticed that just before the unpleasant photos, in random order, came up on the screen, the subject's brain showed a spike that showed they expected that image to occur.
I'm specifically interested in how these special people would fit into society. Although I've to admit this was inspired a bit by Ender's Game - and what a book that was - I think it's very likely that these people would be the regular outcasts of society. It's one thing to be called special and be treated like a sort of shaman because you're the conduit for a higher plane of existence, but I remember reading an Asimov story where news of time bending is suppressed vigorously because, as the author puts it, how would you like your nearest and dearest to be dialing back five minutes ago (or forward, in this case!) to spy on you all the time? It's going to be a little creepy if you know someone who's always responding ahead of time to something they can't possibly know.
Thinking this through a little more, the religious connotations involved are also immense. Predestination and all that, where people believe that your destiny/fate type thing is written out for you completely - I wonder how that would play out in this case.
And if you're looking at a story set in the future where quantum computing - or at least supercomputing - is on the rise, then it's interesting to note that the you techncially don't need anyone gifted to see into the future. With enough variables, I think you could conjure up a viable (at least for your specific purpose) picture of the future. There's probably an economic factor here to be considered, somewhere - training up a bunch of people who will give more specific ideas of the future, vs. spending a ton of money on a huge computer that will give you the details in crisp percentage points. (Actually if I were a government I would do both).
Getting down to brass tacks though, how exactly does precognition work? I recently read a SciAm article which suggests that, living in this universe, we can't actually tell everything we need to about it, because we're caught up in its laws. A bit like the phrase about "observing causes the thing observed to be changed". So - say we accept that, just beacuse it's confusingly cool - exactly how are people observing the future?
But we could solve this problem if we assumed that they were observing other universes which contain exactly the contents of this universe, just advanced in time a little bit. As outlandish as it sounds, it's actually a suggestion (admittedly widely derided) called the Multiverse theory which tries to reconcile the fact that there are billions of possible conclusions from situation that are quantum entangled, and that only one emerges from that tangle as an observation collapses the quantum waveform (meaning, where do the other solutions go?)
I'd love to think that, given my current training, I'd end up in a sci-fi career that neatly combines both my engineering (such as it is...) and liberal arts background. The current state of the economy is a bit of a damper. But hope springs eternal!
But I don't really know how much intellectual work I've been doing lately - been reading a ridiculous amount of fiction this semester because I had only one class. On the other hand I got to indulge my sci-fi craving, which meant loads of Iain M. Banks. I first got introduced to him because a friend of mine (who's also a Lit major... of course) mentioned he was good, and that he wrote sci-fi. The last two words made me grab ahold of the book, and I started with The Player of Games.
Here's my thing about science fiction: it's really not just about the science. Anything created in a human society - regardless of whether it follows fundamental physical laws of the universe - is going to be subject to human problems. What makes good sci-fi, for me, is how the author manages to treat some outlandish (by today's standards) scientific advancement in a way that makes sense in society. Case in point: Neil Gaiman (whom I've always considered more of a fantasy author) and one of the stories in his Smoke and Mirrors short story collection, about a scientist who invents a cure for cancer that also manages to change your gender. And then there are writers like Frank Herbert, who pull together a huge range of fields - like geoscience, psychology, physiology, religion and politics - to make something as fantastic as Dune.
Banks does something similar to that, too. At first I was slightly annoyed by the fact that he throws out scientific miracles nonchalantly at the start of the book - the Culture, their drones, their Orbitals - but I loved the sheer scope of his ideas and the way he pulled them together. I'd also just started reading Asimov's Foundations (horribly late, I know) and while I was impressed with the basic concept of his ideas like psychohistory and the blurring of religion and science, I didn't particularly like his writing style and the lack of detail. (Besides which one major annoyance I have with many fantasy/sci-fi writer is the ridiculous names they come up with) Banks sounds more... coherent, more in control of his universe. But I have to admit this is slightly unfair, comparing the first of the Foundations and Banks' later works in the culture universe.
I went on a book buying spree and got Banks' Consider Phlebas. As one of the reviewers puts it, it's like a blockbuster action movie played out in space, but intelligently written. Several of my favourite sci-fi moments are when Banks talks about the Culture destroying an Orbital. They don't simply break it down - they annihilate it. Splitting the fabric of spacetime, they conjure up anti-matter to simply erase any evidence of the Orbitral altogether. Screw Dan Brown's Angels and Demons antimatter - this is way cooler. (I just looked it up - CERN published an FAQ stating that since creating antimatter takes more energy than using antimatter, it's not a viable alternative energy source). Another geek moment: Banks actually descibes 4D spacetime, calling the underlying energy - string theory, membrane theory, take your pick - works like a "grid" of energy. He writes about how spaceships travel in between space and 4D - black holes are huge twisting tornadoes connecting the two sufaces, supernovae are lightning flashes in the real space above. I don't know if I just haven't read enough amazing books not to find this amazing, but somehow visualizing a 4D environment in a 3D brain strikes me as pretty damn cool.
What would seem to be an interesting mental exercise is to try to think a little like these writers. Starting with a cliche sci-fi staple - bending time. Sort of a Minority Report, what-if-you-could-see-into-the-future kind of thing. This isn't as far off a theory as it seems to be. What got me interested in the first place was a medical study that suggested that people would be able to tell that something bad would happen in the future. I tried looking for it online but a lot of the links I got were rather wishy-washy pseudo-spiritual things. The gist of the study was this: you make a bunch of people sit through a series of photos, where highly unpleasant ones were spliced in between pleasant ones. After a while I believe the researchers noticed that just before the unpleasant photos, in random order, came up on the screen, the subject's brain showed a spike that showed they expected that image to occur.
I'm specifically interested in how these special people would fit into society. Although I've to admit this was inspired a bit by Ender's Game - and what a book that was - I think it's very likely that these people would be the regular outcasts of society. It's one thing to be called special and be treated like a sort of shaman because you're the conduit for a higher plane of existence, but I remember reading an Asimov story where news of time bending is suppressed vigorously because, as the author puts it, how would you like your nearest and dearest to be dialing back five minutes ago (or forward, in this case!) to spy on you all the time? It's going to be a little creepy if you know someone who's always responding ahead of time to something they can't possibly know.
Thinking this through a little more, the religious connotations involved are also immense. Predestination and all that, where people believe that your destiny/fate type thing is written out for you completely - I wonder how that would play out in this case.
And if you're looking at a story set in the future where quantum computing - or at least supercomputing - is on the rise, then it's interesting to note that the you techncially don't need anyone gifted to see into the future. With enough variables, I think you could conjure up a viable (at least for your specific purpose) picture of the future. There's probably an economic factor here to be considered, somewhere - training up a bunch of people who will give more specific ideas of the future, vs. spending a ton of money on a huge computer that will give you the details in crisp percentage points. (Actually if I were a government I would do both).
Getting down to brass tacks though, how exactly does precognition work? I recently read a SciAm article which suggests that, living in this universe, we can't actually tell everything we need to about it, because we're caught up in its laws. A bit like the phrase about "observing causes the thing observed to be changed". So - say we accept that, just beacuse it's confusingly cool - exactly how are people observing the future?
But we could solve this problem if we assumed that they were observing other universes which contain exactly the contents of this universe, just advanced in time a little bit. As outlandish as it sounds, it's actually a suggestion (admittedly widely derided) called the Multiverse theory which tries to reconcile the fact that there are billions of possible conclusions from situation that are quantum entangled, and that only one emerges from that tangle as an observation collapses the quantum waveform (meaning, where do the other solutions go?)
I'd love to think that, given my current training, I'd end up in a sci-fi career that neatly combines both my engineering (such as it is...) and liberal arts background. The current state of the economy is a bit of a damper. But hope springs eternal!