You can take the girl out of the lab, version 779.

[mrissa]

I try to keep my book notes non-spoilery, especially for brand-new books, but I can't keep this one in any longer:

People. You need your physics. You really, really need it. If you go into a different universe with different physics, starving to death will probably not be a problem. Okay, look: if there are different energy levels in atoms, such that lasers come out at different wavelengths, there is a reason for that. Atoms do not pick electron shells out of a hat. It comes from very, very basic physics. So if that very, very basic physics is different -- different mass of electron? different charge? -- a person who is transplanted into that new physics will interact with it immediately. Your neurons firing? Physics. Your skin remaining intact in the shape it's currently in? Physics.

You do not! Aaaaaagh, sorry, this is just too much. You do not keep a set of electrons labeled, "$yourname's electrons," and they all go around and around like wee planets at the Bohr radius. That is not what electrons do! We know this! We have known this for quite some time! Longer than my grandparents have been alive, we've known this! You don't even keep a set of protons that's all yours. It's not just those wacky mobile electrons. It's everything, everything, everything.

Never mind breakfast. Never mind breathing. In a split second between breaths, sitting on your chair, your ass and your chair have already traded approximately one gajillion* pieces of physical information. If you were suddenly in a situation where one electron you traded off from brushing the keyboard with your thumb was of a different charge or a different mass, you probably wouldn't notice, but that is not the same as being completely immersed in a different physics. Where you would, and I don't feel I am being too restrictive here, DIE. Because we are extremely physical organisms, because every biological process has physical roots, and changing the atmosphere around you is completely different from changing how atmospheric gases -- how molecular interactions in general -- work.

This is what we know as really really stupid. Insultingly stupid. Gah.

*I r teknikl Mris. This r teknikl thread.

Comments

[the_rck]

::laughs:: I keep having this sort of mental disconnect with certain fantasy novels, particularly those with travel to other universes that have different rules. I occasionally GM games set in Zelazny's Amber universe, and I have to deliberately not think about certain things because of the headaches that result-- I mainly have to avoid considering why the internal combustion engine doesn't work there and why gunpowder doesn't burn/explode there.

I understand the plot reasons for it, and I can enjoy the story anyway-- As long as I don't think about it. When I do think about it, I start waving my hands and making incoherent noises of distress. (Most of my rather minimal science background is in chemistry, so I don't go so far as thinking about the physics. I get stuck on chemical properties and combustion as a basic chemical reaction involving a simple (relatively) hydrocarbon and oxygen.)

[the_rck]

I meant 'gasoline combustion' for 'combustion.'

I do really know that there are many, many different combustion reactions.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

The only person who's really had magic-not-science work for me in their books even a little bit has been pameladean. And really the character Patrick is the main reason why, there.

[p-j-cleary.livejournal.com]

So what you're saying is that if the physics of someone else's universe were totally different than our physics, and I went to visit them, I'd have to, like, wear a hat and gloves, right?

Thanks

[tournevis.livejournal.com]

You and she just made my day. *BFG*

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

And the angle at which you turned down the corner of your calling card might be different, yes.

[numinicious.livejournal.com]

THIS.

I feel the same way when reading pretty much anything that touches on any kind of Science. ( Mr. Preston, I am looking at you. ) Although I felt that Stephenson handled the mathematics and computer science in Cryptonomicon well.

( Aside from the obvious physics fail, how is the book? )

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

BAD.

I mean, not as bad as it could possibly be. But still pretty craptastic. Our Hero gets the girl for no reason other than that he is Our Hero. The cutesy portmanteau words are not nearly as clever as he thinks they are. They go over a north pole! Because they can, whee! Bah. It's in my last book post, in its non-spoilerific form, but: bad writer, no biscuit.

[numinicious.livejournal.com]

Damn. :(

But have you read Stephenson's other work? What are your opinions on those?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I have read all of his other work, and liked or loved much of it, even though he can't write endings to save his life.

So this was disappointing in addition to being craptacular.

[ellameena.livejournal.com]

Oh, dear. I'm not a physicist, but I don't think it's totally invalid to ask why the different physics even work. It's not as if you can invent an arbitrary set of orbitals for electrons and then convince them to occupy those orbitals. The orbitals are determined by the energy levels of the electrons, which are discrete, not continuous. And if you don't have pi orbitals, your resonant carbon ring structures will not resonate, and if they won't resonate, then you don't have life--period--because all of your carbon structures won't work. But, getting back to the not working thing, my understanding of the fundamentals of physics is that they are fundamental, and you can't just make up unicorn shaped orbitals or fancy, jelly-bean shaped subatomic particles or whatever.

If he only wanted people to starve to death, why not simply mess with the chirality of amino acids? Of course, I haven't read Anathem, so I wouldn't know.

Catherine

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yah, exactly: carbon ring structures are not the sort of thing that just comes tripping along gleefully in whatever math you set up. "In this universe, quarks come in top, bottom, up, down, charm, strange, and lavender sparkles!"

He wanted the laser wavelength difference to be a clue that there was Something Strange Going On Here, which wouldn't happen if you reversed the chirality of the amino acids. The starving part was another clue to the same.

It's a bad sign when I hate a book more the more I think about it.

[ellameena.livejournal.com]

So does he ever get around to explaining his new physics, or is it one of those Star Trek moments. "I have to adjust the flux capacitor and charge up the dilithium crystals and we'll be good to go."

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It's that one character turns out to have been from a different universe with different physics (ours), and the characters we've been observing all along are from the one where it's hard to make carbon rings. Probably. From what we've heard.

So the guy from the different universe has to bring his own food! Because a different physics, like a bad mood on a summer day, can be fixed with a picnic lunch!

[ellameena.livejournal.com]

Okay, I think it's really cool to start the book in an alternate universe and have the reader not know it's an alternate universe, and then have someone visit from our universe. I *like* that. The lavender sparkles quarks, I like not so much. Surely there was another way to solve the narrative problems? Oh, well.

[markgritter.livejournal.com]

He actually does try to build up to it. His base universe contains "newmatter" which is not, in fact, nanotechnology (why does the Firefox dictionary not include that?) but attotechnology! They messed with the neutrons and protons somehow but it's stable. So the visitors from different-physics universes are just like newmatter in that their neutrons and protons are all screwed up but yet they don't undergo radioactive decay upon switching universes.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

This is my "totally buying it" face.

Oh wait, no it isn't.

[themagdalen.livejournal.com]

You keep making me giggle too loud and wake the baby.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Hey, I wrote it when the baby was wide awake and playing happily with his/her feets!

I mean, I can't prove that I didn't....

Change the isotope distribution

[moviedrone.livejournal.com]

Okay, so he did something dumb. He could have just changed the isotope distribution of his imaginary universe. If you change the isotope distibution, you chage the molecule's electronic ground state and the subsequent excited states. A laser based on an dihydrogen line is different than a laser based on a dideurterium line. Here is something that I think would be a cool scifi twist: Imagine a world where Raman scattering is almost as intense as Rayleigh scattering. That would be really trippy.

Re: Change the isotope distribution

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yah, he was very clear that it was not a laser line that could be gotten from anything they knew of, not even unusual rather than common, but impossible.

That is a cool idea, though. I like different physicseseses. I just have kind of high standards for when I feel someone's done a good enough job developing them to set a story in them.

[mastadge.livejournal.com]

This reminds me of the delightful scene in a Terry Pratchett novel in which they change the value of pi.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

And we have had some charming hours around here trying to visualize what geometry fundamentalists must be living in if pi = 3. But Pratchett knew what he was doing, more or less, and Stephenson really ought to have.

[reveritas.livejournal.com]

buhsquh?

i've never taken a single physics class in my life, so most of this made no sense. but since you are one of like three people on the planet who can Explain Things to the TK So She Gets Them, if you feel like being more teknikl you could shoot me an email with the basics. ;) only if it would distract/make you happy.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Where should I start? Electrons? Or Neal Stephenson?

[reveritas.livejournal.com]

Mr. Stephenson please! i'm not likely to read it, so no worries about spoilery. :) i guess i don't know enough about our physics to know what "a different physics" is. the DYING part is also intriguing.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Okay, so: a different physics. You could do this many different ways. You could say, for example, that in our universe there are three fundamental forces (strong, electroweak, gravity), but that in another universe there might be five (strong, electroweak, gravity, blarg, and hooey). You'd have to set up how blarg and hooey would interact with objects, and how strong they were compared to the ones we know, and what they did over distance, and like that. The problem with this is that physics is pretty comprehensive, sort of by definition. So if you started with, "Okay, how would my house be different if, in addition to gravity pulling it in, it had blarg pushing it out but only if it was in contact with ground that was strongly blargish?", you'd be starting way too far up: you have not yet built a universe up to the level of houses. What if the blarg force as specified made life impossible? Or made it extremely different from what we've got now? This is why very few people make up their own physics for a novel, or should.

But there are much simpler things you can do to physics. You can give fundamental particles different charges or different masses than they have in our universe, for example, or you can tweak how strong a force is, so that it's a universe with a very similar physics to ours, but still different. A sister physics, if you will. This is what Mr. Stephenson has tried: the creatures who are analogous to humans in these other universes are very, very close to humans. They are human-like. But lasers emit at detectably different wavelengths, and oxygen from one universe can only be processed partially by the bodies of people from another. And this is where I call bullshit, because -- oh, lordy, I'm not even sure where to start with the bullshit. Let's start with the fact that oxygen does not enter and leave our lungs without chemical reactions. You inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide, right? (Approximately.) The oxygen you inhale goes into your bloodstream and out to all the cells of your body, not floating around as happy gas bubbles but on red blood cells. These are chemical processes. If the oxygen you breathe was somehow different, the difference would permeate your body. You would no longer have oxygen type A only, you'd also have oxygen type B. This would not result in shortness of breath, it would result in cell death throughout the body much faster than that, if the type B oxygen was not sufficiently useful to universe A cells.

That's even assuming that basic building blocks like carbon rings would work. There's a reason we don't have life based on a million different elements: the wide range of stable bonds formed by carbon are not very easy to find in molecules with other characteristics. Change carbon's characteristics, and you almost certainly change its utility in that regard.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

So what Mr. Stephenson did is he used this as a plot point as though it was "pointy beard Spock universe" instead of "physics is different universe." Bah.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I think he's doing physics-speak poetry. Poetic physics?

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

Ugh. Yes.

Different physics => completely different chemistry, biology, etc. Spock with a beard is a minor variance as AU's go. Different physics gets you lifeforms that are utterly alien (if you're an optimistic sort), or no life at all (if you're not).

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Ah. I wondered if it was that you didn't like.

It's fantasy. It works on the exact same principle as the relationship between our world and Sulien's world in my King's Peace novels. When he says electrons, he means something the size and shape of a small pea, as Heinlein puts it.

Fantasy. Really. And as such, so not a problem.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oh, how I wish this was my sole gripe.

But anyway: I don't think fantasy is just science fiction that's poorly thought out and tries to use the language of physics without having any kind of grasp on what it's actually doing. And I don't think you think that, either, or you'd be a lot more willing to write the sort of thing you used as an example of the sort of thing you can't write.

One difference might be that you do actually know a fair amount about the Roman Empire and immediately post-Roman Britain, so you know what you're doing when you take them sideways. In the Farthing novels, you didn't posit that Churchill was the leader of fascist Britain. For me this is that level of counterfactual supposition.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

Given the shape of the philosophy in the novel, isn't the easiest assumption that the whole thing - the whole collection of parallel universes - is all happening in an Eganesque simulation? A simulation can keep its electrons labelled with universe tags, and if there's an over-arching simulator then a lot of the philosophical questions acquire actual answers based on the architecture of the simulator itself; there is a data structure somewhere with the property of the directed acyclic graph of Hylaen Theoric Worlds.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That even explains some of the other things I disliked about Anathem.

It doesn't make me like them. But it explains them.