Hashing the Improbable from the Impossible

Discussion regarding the Outsider webcomic, science, technology and science fiction.

Moderator: Outsider Moderators

Post Reply
User avatar
Cy83r
Posts: 114
Joined: Mon Jun 27, 2011 9:29 pm

Hashing the Improbable from the Impossible

Post by Cy83r »

Okay, I'm a sci-fi nerd that hates lazy technobabble and, because of that, I always try and make things a believable as possible with the knowledge I currently have and now I've causality on my list of concerns (it's at the top because I understand it the least).

On that note, I had an idea last night. Would causality be violated if, say, spontaneous antimatter annihilated a ship while a copy of the ship spontaneously created in a distant location? I'm aware of matter/antimatter pairs and quantum entanglement, but I'm not sure if this mixture of the two is plausibly hard or completely soft when using them as the mechanism of a jump drive.

Also, we can treat this as a jump drive/impossible physics thread.

elizibar
Posts: 32
Joined: Wed May 04, 2011 5:43 am

Re: Hashing the Improbable from the Impossible

Post by elizibar »

Cy83r wrote:On that note, I had an idea last night. Would causality be violated if, say, spontaneous antimatter annihilated a ship while a copy of the ship spontaneously created in a distant location? I'm aware of matter/antimatter pairs and quantum entanglement, but I'm not sure if this mixture of the two is plausibly hard or completely soft when using them as the mechanism of a jump drive.
Not in a universe where the mass is dominated by boltzmann brains, it won't.

User avatar
Cy83r
Posts: 114
Joined: Mon Jun 27, 2011 9:29 pm

Re: Hashing the Improbable from the Impossible

Post by Cy83r »

So, you're saying... if there are spontaneous super-entities out there somewhere (and if there is one then it is somewhat likely that there are many) then 'Ia Ia Cthulhu Fhtagn'?

Karst45
Posts: 785
Joined: Sat Mar 05, 2011 4:03 pm
Location: Quebec, Canada
Contact:

Re: Hashing the Improbable from the Impossible

Post by Karst45 »

Cy83r wrote:Would causality be violated if, say, spontaneous antimatter annihilated a ship while a copy of the ship spontaneously created in a distant location? I'm aware of matter/antimatter pairs and quantum entanglement, but I'm not sure if this mixture of the two is plausibly hard or completely soft when using them as the mechanism of a jump drive.
Only if the captain of the ship is named Memnon Vanderbeam

User avatar
Cy83r
Posts: 114
Joined: Mon Jun 27, 2011 9:29 pm

Re: Hashing the Improbable from the Impossible

Post by Cy83r »

Great, now I have to look that up and see what you're trying to referrence at me. :?

EDIT: okay, I'm not getting the relevance.

Alexandr Koori
Posts: 80
Joined: Mon Mar 21, 2011 7:20 pm
Location: Moscow

Re: Hashing the Improbable from the Impossible

Post by Alexandr Koori »

If current theories are correct, then the equivalent mass of ordinary matter may appear, but its structure - a question of probability theory.

elizibar
Posts: 32
Joined: Wed May 04, 2011 5:43 am

Re: Hashing the Improbable from the Impossible

Post by elizibar »

Cy83r wrote:So, you're saying... if there are spontaneous super-entities out there somewhere (and if there is one then it is somewhat likely that there are many) then 'Ia Ia Cthulhu Fhtagn'?
I'm saying if a spontaneously generated burst of antimatter from the vacuum were to appear in large enough quantity to annihilate a ship completely (turning everything into photons), and a similar quantity of matter were to assemble itself somewhere else, spontaneously, into an exact replica of the destroyed ship, the universe would be full of spontaneously assembled intelligences because both events are both so statistically unlikely that... well you'd probably need a much longer time than a few ages of the universe for it to happen. And by a few, I mean a few orders of magnitudes of ages of the universe. You're probably looking at numbers of years that, for convenience, get expressed as 10^10^x instead of just 10^x years, because there's so many zeroes in them.

Strictly the answer to the question is "No" and also "Yes". Because the a) two events are not causally related to each other and b) information was just transferred at superluminal speeds, so someone somewhere could potentially know a fact before the fastest signal carrying that fact reaches them. The problem arises from the statistical nature of these events: statistical mechanics (or rather thermodynamics in this particular case) deals with lots of tiny things in a very gross and crude way which does not necessarily preserve causality. This is because statistical mechanics does not understand the underlying physical processes involved: if it did, the solutions would (to the limits imposed by chaos theory) become deterministic. This is the classical view of course, Quantum Mechanics just makes it weirder.

Quantum Mechanics can violate causality in weird ways at very small scales; the spontaneous generation of constantly annihilating pairs of vacuum particles is one example. Those particles come from nowhere and they return to nowhere. There is no cause for their generation: they are not causal events. However they last on timescales short enough that they don't disturb much of anything else in the universe*. And this is not an event which would enable one to carry information at superluminal speeds. The two particles spawn very close together, live for a short life, and die together in the cold embrace of nirvana. If they happen to spawn close to an event horizon (such as near the surface of a black hole), one particle can escape the event horizon at the sacrifice of the other particle (and a tiny amount of mass from the object creating the event horizon). This escaping particle may carry information about the black hole, but that topic is the ongoing subject of debate by people that have too much time on their hands, and in any case is limited by the speed of light.

I suppose quantum mechanics would allow the sort of event your describe, but with probabilities so low that the afore mentioned many, many ages of the universe would need to pass before it would ever happen, once. And the end result would be a chance for some information to travel faster than light. Of course if you're using this as a drive mechanism, then the destination point probably isn't some random point in the universe somewhere, and you'll need some way of sending a signal to the destination to guide your 'annihilation wave' to where it's supposed to go, and sending that signal FTL is probably disallowed by whatever future combination of relativity and quantum mechanics we eventually come up with.

* Exception: This is probably the origin of, or at least a dominant component of, the Casimir effect. Really, once you start getting down to spacial scales where these vacuum effects start to become important and not completely averaged out over space-time, the very notion of space-time breaks down into a sort of quantum space-foam.

User avatar
Cy83r
Posts: 114
Joined: Mon Jun 27, 2011 9:29 pm

Re: Hashing the Improbable from the Impossible

Post by Cy83r »

Alexandr Koori wrote:If current theories are correct, then the equivalent mass of ordinary matter may appear, but its structure - a question of probability theory.
elizibar wrote:I'm saying if a spontaneously generated burst of antimatter from the vacuum were to appear in large enough quantity to annihilate a ship completely (turning everything into photons),
The drive causes/directs the spontaneity and somehow substitutes its ship with the locally generated antimatter for the distantly generated replica linked to the annihilation event only by quantum entanglement (which I'm still reading up on). I would drop a black hole into the equation to make things simpler if it didn't sound even more ridiculous than what I'm already proposing. But the primary conceit is that the mechanics of the drive subvert probability and statistics for its director's ends.

As to Mister Koori's statement, again, the drive takes care of the formation of the distant copy, presumably through the psuedomagic I'm calling QE. But this isn't perfect and a malformed substitute is probable except in areas of space more stable than the rest; thus gas giant Lagrange points as 'jump points' (and even then accidents and errors may happen, I'm not one to say).

User avatar
Mjolnir
Posts: 452
Joined: Sat Mar 05, 2011 1:24 pm

Re: Hashing the Improbable from the Impossible

Post by Mjolnir »

It's not forbidden outright by quantum mechanics, but it is absurdly unlikely. Causality wouldn't be violated by that happening spontaneously, because the same random fluctuations that did this could just as easily have produced any other ship or object of the same complexity...no information is transferred, the luck of the draw just made it appear to be. And it's even less controllable than quantum tunneling...we can push particles up against a barrier and wait for them to tunnel across it, we can't make them spontaneously annihilate with identical particles appearing elsewhere.

If you can cause it to happen on demand, with a copy of the ship consistently occurring at a distance that a speed-of-light signal could not reach in the time taken, then yes, it does allow causality violations. Anything that gets information from point A to point B faster than light could travel the distance between those points does so, it does not matter how the information is transported. (Note that quantum teleportation, which is somewhat similar to what you describe in that it destroys a system and recreates it elsewhere, requires some information to be sent to the destination via a classical signal, limited by c.)

User avatar
Cy83r
Posts: 114
Joined: Mon Jun 27, 2011 9:29 pm

Re: Hashing the Improbable from the Impossible

Post by Cy83r »

Okay, correct me if I'm wrong, but:
1) a non-directed event could conceivably create the same effect according to what we know, so what's the difference between directed and "undirected" substitutions? (humans being pieces of the universe can't really be said to direct things in my philosophical opinion)
2) is it possible to either: a) fold space-time, or use existing folds in space-time, to reach the destination in a punctual manner with quantum teleportation as the drive does take time to spool up and produce the final result (distance to the destination is also a function of the spool-up time); or, b) function outside of causal constraints by literally functioning outside of causal constraints, aka time-space? (this is pretty much what I said in a, but ponders any other known possible mechanism)

If chaotic forces can do this and be said to not violate causality, then I don't see how a machine ordered by the press of a button to carry out the same result is then said to violate causality. It's almost as if you believe in the idea of free will (and if you do, please know that I didn't mean that as an insult).

elizibar
Posts: 32
Joined: Wed May 04, 2011 5:43 am

Re: Hashing the Improbable from the Impossible

Post by elizibar »

Cy83r wrote:If chaotic forces can do this and be said to not violate causality, then I don't see how a machine ordered by the press of a button to carry out the same result is then said to violate causality. It's almost as if you believe in the idea of free will (and if you do, please know that I didn't mean that as an insult).
I just said "They do violate causality." On incredibly tiny scales. With extremely low chances of an event involving anything but virtual particles having ever occurred in our universe's existence.
Okay, correct me if I'm wrong, but:
1) a non-directed event could conceivably create the same effect according to what we know, so what's the difference between directed and "undirected" substitutions? (humans being pieces of the universe can't really be said to direct things in my philosophical opinion)
There's not one. It's all breaking causality, congratulations, if you're a single electron lost in the quantum foam of the planck scale, you may not always be able to tell what the cause of the event you're currently experiencing is. You also have much bigger problems to worry about, such as massive gravitational shears as quantum fluctuations of the space-time fabric render notions such as "time" or "space" into meaningless words.
2) is it possible to either: a) fold space-time, or use existing folds in space-time, to reach the destination in a punctual manner with quantum teleportation as the drive does take time to spool up and produce the final result (distance to the destination is also a function of the spool-up time);
Why do you need quantum teleportation? You can fold space-time with enough energy. Get a big enough blob of energy together and you can really rip it open and make a wormhole, letting you totally violate causality in every orifice it's ever had, will have, or might have had if its future-past hadn't just gotten confused by time travel.
or, b) function outside of causal constraints by literally functioning outside of causal constraints, aka time-space? (this is pretty much what I said in a, but ponders any other known possible mechanism)
[/quote]

All you really need is to have a preferred reference frame somewhere in the universe (or whatever meta-space the universe is embedded into, probably, maybe, I haven't tried to figure out the math of higher dimensional spaces with general relativity, the Einstein equation was quite enough for me in that class) and bam, you can have your FTL without breaking causality. Outsider, since it's the example at hand, does this with hyperspace: it is literally the location of a preferred inertial reference frame from which all other clocks could in principle be calibrated. (Proof? Hyperspace jumps don't seem to make ship clocks run backwards. Okay it's not really proof, but it's good circumstantial evidence.) Other universes do similar things: Star Trek has its subspace and warp fields, Warhammer 40k has the Warp which is literally another universe sitting on top of the regular one, Battletech rips space apart and shoves the ship into (unknown place) for an instant before it pops back out into reality This is the easiest way to have your cake and eat it.
The drive causes/directs the spontaneity and somehow substitutes its ship with the locally generated antimatter for the distantly generated replica linked to the annihilation event only by quantum entanglement (which I'm still reading up on). I would drop a black hole into the equation to make things simpler if it didn't sound even more ridiculous than what I'm already proposing. But the primary conceit is that the mechanics of the drive subvert probability and statistics for its director's ends.
Really, at this point, a black hole is a *lot* simpler and straightforward compared to somehow manipulating probability and sending entangled particles faster than light to destinations.

User avatar
Mjolnir
Posts: 452
Joined: Sat Mar 05, 2011 1:24 pm

Re: Hashing the Improbable from the Impossible

Post by Mjolnir »

Cy83r wrote:Okay, correct me if I'm wrong, but:
1) a non-directed event could conceivably create the same effect according to what we know, so what's the difference between directed and "undirected" substitutions? (humans being pieces of the universe can't really be said to direct things in my philosophical opinion)
The "undirected event" could be anything. A ship appearing is just a lucky roll of the dice. A vastly more likely outcome is "nothing interesting happened".

Cy83r wrote:2) is it possible to either: a) fold space-time, or use existing folds in space-time, to reach the destination in a punctual manner with quantum teleportation as the drive does take time to spool up and produce the final result (distance to the destination is also a function of the spool-up time); or, b) function outside of causal constraints by literally functioning outside of causal constraints, aka time-space? (this is pretty much what I said in a, but ponders any other known possible mechanism)
Case A seems to be "spool up for 4.2 years without interacting with the outside universe, then jump instantaneously to Alpha Centauri". That might be done without violating causality, but it's basically equivalent to transportation at c.

Your case b can essentially be summed up as "it violates causality". This might not be impossible. I haven't been saying it's impossible, I've just been saying that FTL travel or communications will allow you to violate causality.

Cy83r wrote:If chaotic forces can do this and be said to not violate causality, then I don't see how a machine ordered by the press of a button to carry out the same result is then said to violate causality. It's almost as if you believe in the idea of free will (and if you do, please know that I didn't mean that as an insult).
Chaotic forces didn't produce an effect from a cause at a distant point, the appearance and disappearance just happened. Any number of other drastically different things are equally likely to happen. The ship that arrives is only identical to the ship that disappears because you are only considering that specific possibility. If you could force the a ship to disappear and an identical one to reappear in another place, you would be violating causality.

Say you want to transmit the number "6" to someone, FTL. You instruct them to roll a dice at a certain time. They roll a six. Did you just break causality? No, they just happened to roll the right number. Odds were against them rolling the "right" one, but it wasn't impossible for them to do so. It's not impossible for a ship to spontaneously annihilate in one place and spontaneously resume existence in another. It's about equally likely for an asteroid to spontaneously turn into the very same starship and crew. Neither is likely enough to consider as an actual physically plausible event.

If you can do something to influence these probabilities and actually cause a ship to appear at the destination ahead of any classical signal, then you can violate causality. Again, it does not matter one bit how information is transported, if it gets from point A to point B faster than light can, causality violation can occur.

User avatar
Cy83r
Posts: 114
Joined: Mon Jun 27, 2011 9:29 pm

Re: Hashing the Improbable from the Impossible

Post by Cy83r »

Ah, alright, I was kind going for a theme with having the BBEG be a quantum AI entangled with all of the Federation's fancy new quant drone and battleship AIs, leaving humans with nothing but hard AI, old ships, really old ships, and a brand spanking new quantum jammer which seems to mess up both quant AI and organic brains, but the AI gets hit real hard by the jamming field.

Using a similar force for the FTL jump let me slap those same jammer effects into jump mechanics, explaining the need for neurotoxic jump drugs on combat vessels to maintain combat ability and jump-reboots for quant AI systems or else they start to go mad.

The jump field could still be written off as a side effect of matter/antimatter collision formation of a wormhole and the ensuing travel through said wormhole and Lagrange points still needed to properly aim said wormhole without interference.

And to cap it all off Wormholes fold space-time through a fifth objective state dimension.

Karst45
Posts: 785
Joined: Sat Mar 05, 2011 4:03 pm
Location: Quebec, Canada
Contact:

Re: Hashing the Improbable from the Impossible

Post by Karst45 »

Cy83r wrote:Great, now I have to look that up and see what you're trying to referrence at me. :?

EDIT: okay, I'm not getting the relevance.
i win ;)

Starslip. In the webcomic of the same name their FTL kind of use the Principe your talking about. They just Jump to a reality where their ship actually reached their location, making them travel instantly almost anywhere in the galaxy.

But because of the law of conservation, their ship is destroyed in that reality as it is in the original one.

User avatar
icekatze
Posts: 1399
Joined: Sat Mar 05, 2011 8:35 pm
Location: Middle of Nowhere
Contact:

Re: Hashing the Improbable from the Impossible

Post by icekatze »

hi hi

Somehow, I feel that webcomic is particularly relevant. I would love to live in a universe where jelly donuts spontaneously appeared out of quantum foam.

User avatar
Mjolnir
Posts: 452
Joined: Sat Mar 05, 2011 1:24 pm

Re: Hashing the Improbable from the Impossible

Post by Mjolnir »

Cy83r wrote:Ah, alright, I was kind going for a theme with having the BBEG be a quantum AI entangled with all of the Federation's fancy new quant drone and battleship AIs, leaving humans with nothing but hard AI, old ships, really old ships, and a brand spanking new quantum jammer which seems to mess up both quant AI and organic brains, but the AI gets hit real hard by the jamming field.
Just saying "it's quantum" qualifies as lazy technobabble, IMO. Quantum entanglement can't be used to transmit information, and there's nothing that indicates it's particularly relevant for AI. (Penrose may be a good mathematician, but his quantum consciousness ideas are basically mysticism.)

Cy83r wrote:Using a similar force for the FTL jump let me slap those same jammer effects into jump mechanics, explaining the need for neurotoxic jump drugs on combat vessels to maintain combat ability and jump-reboots for quant AI systems or else they start to go mad.

The jump field could still be written off as a side effect of matter/antimatter collision formation of a wormhole and the ensuing travel through said wormhole and Lagrange points still needed to properly aim said wormhole without interference.
There's nothing particularly special about Lagrange points themselves, it's as much a matter of the motions the objects involved as it is the gravitational field of the two main objects in the system. It's not a "more stable" area of space, it's just an orbit where perturbations from the other bodies exert a restoring force when an object deviates from the ideal orbit, instead of one of them mostly exerting disturbing forces. And L1, L2, and L3 are actually unstable, the forces from the two main bodies will exert a disturbing force along one direction if you aren't right at the point.

There is a point close to the L1 point that is a bit gravitationally unusual, though...the point where the gravitational forces cancel. (The L1 point is shifted from this location by the rotation of the orbiting bodies.) Or perhaps the system barycenter...the center of mass of the target system, the point a distant object would orbit as if a point mass were at that location. For the Earth-Luna system, it's always deep inside Earth, for Alpha Centauri A and B as a binary pair it's about halfway between them, ~10 AU from each, and for the solar system, it loops in and out of the sun:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Solar ... center.svg

This could lead to a system being accessible for long periods, becoming progressively riskier to reach, and then becoming inaccessible for a time. Depending on the gas giants in the system, it might regularly become available and inaccessible, have an irregular pattern with occasional brief periods of accessibility (like late 1969-early 1972), with longer ones (1954-1964, 1978-1988) when the planets are better aligned, or always be accessible. Systems with multiple stars or large gas giants in distant orbits would be more reliably reachable.

Cy83r wrote:And to cap it all off Wormholes fold space-time through a fifth objective state dimension.
4 dimensions are enough for wormholes, actually...it's a matter of topology of space-time, not of traveling outside of space-time. The main problems are the ridiculous amounts of negative energy needed to stabilize them enough to be traversable, and the possibility of effects related to their causality-breaking potential that would destabilize them in spite of that negative energy.

User avatar
Cy83r
Posts: 114
Joined: Mon Jun 27, 2011 9:29 pm

Re: Hashing the Improbable from the Impossible

Post by Cy83r »

Mjolnir wrote:
Cy83r wrote:Ah, alright, I was kind going for a theme with having the BBEG be a quantum AI entangled with all of the Federation's fancy new quant drone and battleship AIs, leaving humans with nothing but hard AI, old ships, really old ships, and a brand spanking new quantum jammer which seems to mess up both quant AI and organic brains, but the AI gets hit real hard by the jamming field.
Just saying "it's quantum" qualifies as lazy technobabble, IMO. Quantum entanglement can't be used to transmit information, and there's nothing that indicates it's particularly relevant for AI. (Penrose may be a good mathematician, but his quantum consciousness ideas are basically mysticism.)
Ah, so I guess Eclipse Phase is out as hard sci-fi (then again, they did have psychic viruses, so yeah).
There's nothing particularly special about Lagrange points themselves, it's as much a matter of the motions the objects involved as it is the gravitational field of the two main objects in the system. It's not a "more stable" area of space, it's just an orbit where perturbations from the other bodies exert a restoring force when an object deviates from the ideal orbit, instead of one of them mostly exerting disturbing forces. And L1, L2, and L3 are actually unstable, the forces from the two main bodies will exert a disturbing force along one direction if you aren't right at the point.

There is a point close to the L1 point that is a bit gravitationally unusual, though...the point where the gravitational forces cancel. (The L1 point is shifted from this location by the rotation of the orbiting bodies.) Or perhaps the system barycenter...the center of mass of the target system, the point a distant object would orbit as if a point mass were at that location. For the Earth-Luna system, it's always deep inside Earth, for Alpha Centauri A and B as a binary pair it's about halfway between them, ~10 AU from each, and for the solar system, it loops in and out of the sun:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Solar ... center.svg

This could lead to a system being accessible for long periods, becoming progressively riskier to reach, and then becoming inaccessible for a time. Depending on the gas giants in the system, it might regularly become available and inaccessible, have an irregular pattern with occasional brief periods of accessibility (like late 1969-early 1972), with longer ones (1954-1964, 1978-1988) when the planets are better aligned, or always be accessible. Systems with multiple stars or large gas giants in distant orbits would be more reliably reachable.
Yes, the perturbation canceling effect was the special quality that helped jumps not end in mysterious disaster. And most gas giants seem to orbit far enough away that any jump corridor that create is going to stick around for a while. The time scale you're talking about is going to be in the order of decades and centuries if not longer and thus be relegated to a strategic level that only plots like Outsider need to address even tangentially.

As it is, the psuedo-science I have right now should be sufficient enough to set the game where I'd like it and not bog the players and plot down in numbers that do not further the plot or the gameplay. This discussion (and several others like it on 4chan) has helped me isolate the points at which the game's needs trump the preference for scientific accuracy, thank you.

Post Reply