Science fiction musings

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Not sure where to post this, so it goes in the general forum... I just finished a sci-fi book called Moving Mars by Greg Bear. He's not my favorite style of sci-fi, but he's my favorite current writer (besides L. Niven who is slacking!) anyway. This book starts (STARTS!) with a University student protest, a love affair that ends badly, and major political rift between old mother earth and the newish colonies on Mars. All that in the first quarter of the book.

The story gets speculative with physics, and not being more than a fan of physics, I don't know whether the threads he picked up were mainstream or way out there. I'd bet way out there. But, they were awesome to me.

The lead theoretic physicist, Charles, has come up with a way to manipulate matter, blah blah blah... but as he's explaining it to another lead character (this one's political) he gives a description of the universe that I thought was cool.

Charles relates the universe to our minds. He explains that when our mind figures a mathematical equation, we store info in our heads (or on paper) like a computer. But the universe stores those information as nature.

Quote:

" '....Math is useful in describing nature because nature itself uses a set of rules. Nature behaves as if it is a computational system....

The universe stores the results of its operations as nature. I do not confuse nature with reality. At a fundamental level, reality is the set of rules the results of whose interactions are nature. Part of the problem of reconciling quantum mechanics withlarge-scale phenomena comes from mistaking results for rules -- a habit built into our brains, good for survival, but not for physics.' "

Then he goes on to say that at the big bang, all was possibilty and no universal laws (gravity, time, space) existed. That possibilities came into a sort of existence and were erradicated by, in effect, natural selection. That those possibilities which worked stayed, those that didn't, disappeared.

Sorry if the above is muddled, I guess I'm putting this out there to see if anyone can or wants to help my refine my thoughts on the ideas there.

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How very odd. I just finished reading Bear's "Darwin's Radio." A virus has lain hidden in our dna since the Neanderthal. For one reason or another, it becomes active and infectious. Though resulting in stillborn children and miscarriages worldwide, it is ultimately the mechanism for the next level of human evolution. How's that for muddled.

If I'd read "Moving Mars" I would have said so.

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I read that book (and the next one, too). I said so in the pages of this thread. The book was a present for my dad's birthday and has been read by 4 of 6 of my family members since april.

The president of Mars was an aweful lot like the big woman head of the huge medical company in Darwin's Radio. (muddled again).

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or, rather I said so on the "what book are you reading..." thread. Oy.

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This is the enigmatic and eclectic Mr. B. writing as a proxy for Dagmaraka*. I like the hard sci-fi stuff (Bear, Niven, et al). However, I would like to recommend several books/authors. My tastes tend to run to dystopian futurist side of the genre. Have y'all read Ian Banks, China Mieville or Alistair Macleod? The trio are all British Sci-fi writers. I tend to think the Brits are a little less cliche than many US Sci-fi authors. Also, just read "Idlewild" by Nick Sagan (son of Carl). Good book!! Also "Kiln People" by David Brin is also a worthwhile read.

*This message hs been approved by Dagmaraka aka Queen of all Slovaks.

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Well, well, well..... Don't you have your own username, Mr B? Maybe you should tell me all about these british authors over lunch or a beer - the three of us: the enigma, the queen and I.

I miss my friend, share her!

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Funny - this article was in my Scientific American emailing, Inconstant Constants: Do the inner workings of nature change with time?

It explains that while we've discovered numbers to represent the natural constants with, well, consistancy, we don't know why those number works. Or where they come from. It continues to talk about a string (unification of micro and macro physics) theory, 'Mtheory', that needs at least 7 additional dimensions to do it's unifying work.

Blahblahblah, yaddayaddayadda - the article goes on for 6 pages (I haven't read them all).

I stopped at this bit:

Quote:

physicists have also come to appreciate that the values of many of the constants may be the result of mere happenstance, acquired during random events and elementary particle processes early in the history of the universe. In fact, string theory allows for a vast number--10500--of possible "worlds" with different self-consistent sets of laws and constants [see "The String Theory Landscape," by Raphael Bousso and Joseph Polchinski; Scientific American, September 2004]. So far researchers have no idea why our combination was selected. Continued study may reduce the number of logically possible worlds to one, but we have to remain open to the unnerving possibility that our known universe is but one of many--a part of a multiverse--and that different parts of the multiverse exhibit different solutions to the theory, our observed laws of nature being merely one edition of many systems of local bylaws [see "Parallel Universes," by Max Tegmark; Scientific American, May 2003].

SciAm: Inconstant Constants

Isn't that what Greg Bear was getting at?

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it is said that Nasa will reach the Mars in 2033

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They already have reached Mars.

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I think s(he) means reaching mars with people in the spacecraft.

2033 is too long.

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Bakku - I figured. I was just being a pain in the butt.

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Strange coincidence you mentioning NASA going to put a man on Mars. Smile

I have just seen a documentary called "Did we landed on the Moon" or something like this, and I am not convinced that humanity really reached the moon, not to say anything about Mars.

But the movie is not the best one, the arguments are good but there is nobody going to sustain the con's for this idea. So... I still have to do some research on this: "Did we landed on the moon" stuff...

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This was a well-known hoax, probably designed for April Fool's Day, dovie. Sorry to disappoint you!

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