Wasn’t there some idle speculation in the press at least that the startup of the Large Hadron Collider encountered some unexpected delays for a similar reason?
Possibly; the difference is that it was impossible. The LAC doesn’t do anything that nature doesn’t do all the time; its usefulness lies in the fact that it can do so on command, in a specific way at a specific spot. If the LAC could cause a vacuum transition, then one would have happened billions of years ago due to some random cosmic ray and we wouldn’t be here.
I read a story based on a similar premise 15 years or so? ago. It was titled The Ultimate Anthropic Principle, and would have appeared in Amazing Stories just before the latter folded. Can’t remember who wrote it.
The narrator had gotten an idea of how to use the Many Worlds theory to improve his lot in life. He decided, naturally, that any universe where he didn’t go as far as possible was one he didn’t want to live in, so any time he came to a major crux point in his life, if things went the wrong way, he would kill himself. So, only the ones who succeeded would live, therefore he’d live an apparently charmed life. He eventually (once he’s done it enough to build up some serious resources) makes this easier by building an explosive collar, and hiring someone to trigger it under the bad circumstances, just to keep himself from chickening out. He rises far and fast - or, rather, the one who doesn’t explode, and therefore can tell the tale does - and is soon on the road to becoming President (or something similar).
In the end…
It turns out that the variation of this guy we’ve been following was one who failed to keep up the maintenance on his explosive collar. So when he failed to be elected President, and his suicide-goon pulled the switch… The collar didn’t detonate correctly, merely maiming him for life (in a way that precluded further suicide attempts), rather than killing him.
I’ve always wondered what it would be like being the guy who beat this dude at a high stakes poker game, or whatever. One second, you’re gloating, because, hey, you won. The next you’re sitting there covered in bits of the guy you just beat…
Greg Egan’s Quarantine.
20-ish years ago, a reflective sphere appeared around the solar system. It lets heat out so we don’t all bake, but it’s otherwise 100% reflective. If you point a powerful enough telescope at it and look at Earth’s reflection, you’ll see what happened x number of light-seconds ago. We can’t see out and we can’t break it.
This weirds out the world. Much of the novel is a detective story that seems to be unrelated to the main gimmick.
It eventually turns out that the missing girl is the key to the sphere (I don’t remember how). We find out… (spoiler warning–this ruins the mystery)
…that humans are unique in that we don’t live in a state of quantum uncertainty. Remember Schrodinger’s Cat? How, until you looked inside the box, the cat was both alive and dead, in different eigenstats? Turns out that every other race in the universe lives in that state of being smeared across eigenstats. As we develop better telescopes and look at the universe further and further out, we’re fixing their eigenstats. So they stopped us from looking at them.
The concept and reveal just blew me away/
Not quite.
One of the story’s three main characters thinks what you said. He thinks that cancer is caused by the alien parasite leaving its host, so defeating the parasites would give everyone cancer. He’s some sort of government agent CIA, FBI or something, and has to keep the parasites’ existence a secret.
His wife, who is a biologist, or a doctor or something, realises that he must be mistaken. The idea doesn’t make sense. Even plants can develop cancer. The idea that there is a symbiosis is a false one, planted by the parasites themselves.
Yes. Not just ketchup, but all sorts of tomatoes.
I was going to mention Quarantine, glad to see it’s been covered. The other work to leap to mind was Blindsight, which I’m happy to find out is legally online in its entirety, which, among many well thought through and innovative concepts (it’s a blast for anybody interested in the philosophy of mind), includes vampires as a variant human species, vastly more intelligent than us, but less conscious; they have evolved their ‘undead’ state in order to not thin out their prey too much, effectively limiting the amount of sustenance they need.
In the novel, the long durations of interstellar flights are bridged by putting the crew in just such an undead state, from which they are then reanimated at their destination. It’s a great spin on the usual cryosleep/suspended animation idea…
This isn’t just fantasy, but how tachyons work, at least according to special relativity (in more modern theories, tachyons are generally deleterious). Turns out, if you consider a particle of imaginary mass, you have to apply different transformation laws to translate between reference frames; the upshot of that is that, while to us, light speed is the limit of infinite energy from below, to tachyons, it is the limit of infinite energy from above, leading to the paradoxical conclusion that if a tachyon were to lose energy (say, if it is charged, by cherenkov radiation), it accelerates until it reaches infinite speed at zero energy.
I’ve toyed around with a similar idea for a story, where conversion into tachyonic matter is something very advanced civilizations do in order to get rid of the confines of locality, becoming effectively distributed across the whole universe. This explains gamma ray bursts (which is the energy expended in the acceleration) and the Fermi paradox – advanced civilizations simply don’t exist in normal matter form anymore.
One that I love is the idea of the Planiverse – a two-dimensional universe where everything is in 2 dimensions.
Edwin Abbott, of course, got the whole thing started with his classic Flatland, and he’s had many imitators since (and his book was the basis for a pretty good animated short, and an episode of the original Outer Limits), but his idea of an ideal universe populated by ideal shapes (triangles, line segments, and polygons) is artificial and limited.
A.K. Dewdney gave the whole idea greater life when he started his newsletter about the Planiverse 9in those pre-internet days. Nowadays it’d be a blog) and people contributed ideas, and the whole thing grew. Fairly early on Martin Gardner did a piece on it in his Scientific American column, but the concept grew far beyond what it was then. In the Sci Am article, they were still picturing the Planiverse inhabitants as triangles.
The ideas finally flowered into a book Dewdney wrote, The Planiverse, which was copiously and wonderfully illustrated. Dewdney and his correspondents came up with a richly detailed 2-dimensional universe with working laws of mechanics, physics, electricity, and biology – no small task. There were plenty of problems to be solved –
How do you have a complex organism in 2 dimensions that isn’t split in two by its digestive system?
Or its circulatory system?
How do you make a hinge work in 2D?
How do two 2D beings pass by one another? how can they fight a war?
How do you build a 2D house so that it doesn’t impede progress by everything else (how can people pass it? How do you prevent it’s becoming a dam?)
…and so on. Along the way, some fascinating insights come up. You can sorta visual 2D things in a 3D world by imagining them stretching with the same cross-section through the third dimension, or rotating them around an axis. as a result:
1.) You can’t tie knots in a 2D world. But you can glue strings together.
2.) Only a string will hermetically seal whatever’s behind it. If you try to build a one-string violin in 2D world, you’ve really made something more like a drum.
3.) 3D creatures can’t appreciate 2D drawings and paintings – we simply can’t appreciate things in a 2D view. We can appreciate 2D sculpture, but not in the same way 2D creatures do.
4.) You can have 2D books that look like sections through 3D books (or 3D books seen edge-on), but they hold a lot less information per page.
There’s a lot more, but I direct you to Dewdney’s book for the rest of it. I’d love to see a sequel. And I could do without the higher-dimension mysticism at the end.
Identify exit and entrance?
I think you’re trying to say “have the same orifice serve as entrance and exit”, which is how creatures like the Hydra do it in our 3D world.
The Planiverse works out a scheme with an actual passage all the way through the organism
Yes, that’s what I meant. Doesn’t ‘identify’ mean ‘make the same as’ or ‘equate’, additionally to, well, ‘establish the identity of’?
How does that work – can the creature ‘glue’ itself shut again, forming some sort of bubble around the food while it’s digested? Otherwise, I find it hard to readily visualize a solution…
To me, at least, that’s an awkward and ambiguous way to phrase it. Even if I wanted to use “identify” in that sense, I’d write “identify the Entrance with the Exit”, not simply “Identify Exit and Entrance”, which makes it seem as if you want to put signs there.
Read the book.
Possibly because it comes under the rubric of naughty ideas, not nifty ideas. Frankly, the French seem to have exhausted their ability to write SF with Jules Verne. Possibly the greatest SF writer, followed by nothing much …
Now THAT is a nifty idea, and obscure, too!
Quantum suicide/quantum immortality and similar riffs on many-worlds theory have generated a lot of science-fiction stories, actually. This is a very incomplete list, and the distinction between the “suicide” and “immortality” stories is not really coherent–but the story titles will give you a starting point.
Another nifty idea, and obscure. I’ve read a couple of Egan novels, I really enjoy his balls-to-the-wall willingness to take on difficult scientific ideas, but I have found them a lot of often unnecessarily hard slogging, for their entertainment value. If I want to study math or physics, I’ll just study math or physics, thankyewverymuch.
Basically with Egan the ideas are the entertainment. There are occasional touches of character and lyrical description, but for the most part everything is there to serve the presentation of the Idea. If you don’t find the ideas, in themselves, compelling enough to sustain everything (I almost always do), you won’t really like Greg Egan.
Nice link. I think there would be a LOT of works exploring quantum immortality/suicide if mainstream folk ever glom onto it. Not holding my breath, mind you.