The David Boyle / Katie Lucas Letters

Me: I confess I'm sort of amazed that you're not all sort of 'Star Wars'ed out for one lifetime, but I dig the enthusiasm.

KL: I mean, I am, but its part of the job. I also love how much you guys love it. Makes me happy.

Me: I hope the noise from the cynical dicks isn't quite so loud at that end as it seems from here. They were good movies... I find the not-subtle political commentary getting missed by everyone but the kids elevates the movies to performance art... I figure someday we'll look back on this era and your dad's movies, shake our heads, and say, 'Well, we can't say we weren't told.' Unfortunately, art and reason and imagination seem to be losing the war to repetition and demagoguery. More movies needed.

KL: Millions were affected by the Star Wars vision. My father followed his passion, and inspired others. That's all that matters. The bottom line is: you can't please everyone. The movies are what they are and they're not going to change. Same with The Clone Wars. We do our best to create something worth watching, but some people dismiss it as though it were easy. It’s not!

Me: Thanks for the thoughtful reply. It saddens me to see you are practiced at defending something that shouldn't need defending. After a man transforms movies, imagination, and generations of people forever, I'm not sure what he can do for an encore. What he did was create solid entertainment that hit its target audience, made money, and pushed SFX forward AGAIN. I know JarJar has haters but they aren't real. My dad laughed at JarJar. So did my nephew. It was on the mark. It was fine. And the haters themselves are a solid revenue stream so what does that say about them? Anyways. I don't mean to bore you but I think I'm a smart guy and nothing about Star Wars was that far off the mark.

KL: It doesn't bore me at all. It’s nice to get thoughtful, kind responses once in a while. And yes, it does suck to be so practiced at defending your parents' legacy.

Me: Well, some of us are keeping score for real. I'm just sorry there's so few of us. The cynicism of people my age is actually a bit worrying. I'm just sort of outgrowing it myself. Get me talking about Battlestar Galactica sometime and I'll show you that I can be a cynical, critical dick... when it's warranted.

Secrets of the Universe?

1.> Matter distorts space-time. This is what we call gravity. It turns out also that matter in complex arrangements produces consciousness. I donno. Maybe consciousness is a distortion of space-time as well?

2.> The universe is, in fact, conscious, in that it can be said to contain you enfolded nonlocally within its, uh... want to call it universalness? potentium? matrix? You are a superdetermined part of the lattice of being, and the dreams, thinks, and feelings you have are written on the same slate as the laws of physics, made of the same stuff as found in the hearts of stars. This should freak you right out.

3.> Either our insistence on observing meaning is meaningful, or it isn't. We are probably better off assuming that it is.

From a letter to a friend.

Commenting on the French Revolution, somebody-or-other said it was still "too soon to tell". I find myself agreeing with that more and more, along with a dawning realization that constitutional democracy sort of came into being alongside banking, which made it possible to buy votes and governments. I know the arrival of the billionaire industrialists was the end of America as a land of free and private farmers. I know that the liberalism we claim as our heritage is a privilege afforded by the same extreme affluence that makes it so easy for us to devolve into apathy, sloth, and narcissism... what allows us to value life so highly also tempts us to care nothing for community or civic virtue.

I feel that since 2001 we have been living in an age of post-history. Reason and enlightenment and free press and the informed populace it is supposed to prop up... it's officially dead. Nothing to see here, folks. The golden age is over and the darkness will be fast upon us. I think it will be a sort of drab, stupid, stultifying darkness, though... a slow roast apocalypse of idiocy while we ride the dying momentum of the squandered wealth our ancestors left us to while away the hours of our squandered future.

My only problem is that this is the kind of conversation I usually find myself trying to make on a first date.

The David Boyle / Dr. Dave Goldberg letters

David Boyle:

My admittedly vague understanding of Hawking's model of the Big Bang seems to me to suppose that there was a very definite "beginning" of the universe in a linear sense. First A happened, then B, then C, but the track was already laid down before the train started forward.

My admittedly vague understanding of Einstein's theory of relativity seems to me to suppose that linearity is a subset of universal being, rather than the reverse. A, B, and C are all there enfolded in the superdetermined structure of the multiverse, and the order that you pass through them in depends entirely on your approach vector.

I imagine an orange rolling across the ground, apparently in a straight line, without any real sense that it's actually just interfacing parts of its surface with the surface of a much larger sphere, the big picture of its motion revealing the truth of its straight line to be a petty illusion. Is that where this arrow of time nonsense comes from?

David Goldberg:

I'm afraid Hawking has very little to do with it. The Big Bang picture predates him by a good margin. But you're basically right. The timeline of the universe seems somehow inconsistent with the notion that "time is relative" to the motion of the observer. Sort of. First, how you're right. When cosmologists talk about the big bang, we need to be clear about whose clocks we're using: whether we imagine people floating around at "average" points in the universe, or whether they are uniformly spaced. This is a "gauge choice" and affects the details of things like the growth of structure. They do _not_ affect_ the order in which events occurred. Relativity describes two events as "timelike separated" when no matter how you observe them, "A" always precedes "B" (or vice-versa). If there really is an ambiguity between the two, they are "spacelike separated." If there are two events that happen in the same place as one another but occur at different times, those events are timelike separated to everyone, and it makes sense to talk about the timeline (as we do in our book, and everyone else does in theres). That's exactly how it worked in the Big Bang.

Make sense?

David Boyle:

Right, I guess Hawking strikes me as someone so caught up in the prettiness of his mathematics that he ignores the fact that a lot of what he says makes no sense. So, I like to pick on him (I can't really do math that well). Er, so I was being a bit of a smart-ass, I actually know who Ed Hubble was, sort of.

You asked me if what you said made sense. After thinking about it for a couple of days, yeah it does, but I sort of get the feeling someone is playing a joke on us. Honestly, very little about physics makes sense to me for long before my head starts to hurt and I need to go shoot the dog with the garden hose.

So, some follow-up questions that have been bugging me since I was 12...

What would happen if you got in the millenium falcon, pointed it , say, north, and flew off towards the edge of the universe as fast as possible, then looked in the rear-view mirror? There'd be an event horizon described by the limit of the expanding universe, right? Does that mean we live in someone's singularity? The idea that we're all in a black hole appeals to me because of a> the fractal geometry of nature seems like a good indication that it is, in fact, turtles all the way down (it would make sense to me if our universe contained nearly infinite variant subsets of itself) and b> you could get some kind of escherian top-down conservation of mass if the matter we were funneling into black holes was being replaced by being funneled in from somewhere else.

This apparent expansion of the universe really feels like it must be related to the sense we have of time moving "forward".

My Dad thinks the red-shifted light isn't indicative of an expanding universe at all, it's just what happens to light when it gets old and goes really far. Can you explain to me why he's full of shit?

Regards!

David Goldberg:

Sorry for the delayed response. As you might imagine, I got swamped with entanglement followups after my last column.

Anyway, if by "as fast as possible" you mean "at sublight speeds," then the short answer is that the horizon for the millenium falcon would be the same as the horizon for whatever star system it was passing. Event horizon and horizon, in this case, can be used interchangably.

If, on the other hand, you mean "at superlight speed", then I'm afraid the question is ill-posed. We just don't have an answer.

Dave Goldberg, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Drexel University Department of Physics
"A User's Guide to the Universe: Surviving the
Perils of Black Holes, Time Paradoxes, and Quantum Uncertainty"
http://www.usersguidetotheuniverse.com
io9.com's "Ask a Physicist"
askaphysicist@io9.com

The David Boyle / William Gibson letters

The sky above the port was the color of television tuned to a dead channel.

- Neuromancer


Me: Is there a port above the sky?

William Gibson: No telling. But it's turtles, all the way down.

Ok, let's turn sharply to the left...

The human race, it seems to me, is stampeding towards extinction. There's a pretty big cliff up ahead and we're going to charge right off it. We probably won't even notice that we've stopped stampeding as the ground rushes up to meet our hard little heads.

There's no way we can just go back to living in small, agrarian townships in harmony and oneness with the Earth. Not at this point. I admire people who do this and expect to lead by example, but come on, have you been to Asia? It's a termite mound.

Jumping in front of the stampeding herd and screaming 'STOP' isn't going to accomplish much.

If we are going to change course, even a little bit, someone has to get running alongside the rest of the stampeding beasts and signal a change of direction.

Sometimes I think that's what Obama's doing. I'll come back to him some other time.

Charlie Jane Anders is a super-duper writer working for the io9.com website. Really enjoy everything she does. Except her LOST reviews, but we're past that. Anyways, I was pretty inspired by this recent article of hers, and I suggest you teeming masses all go and read it.

Crom!

A musical version of Conan the Barbarian that must be seen to be believed