#the clockwork rocket

there was some stuff in orthogonal re: the alien culture that was kinda (very) skeevy by human standards imo but ill be damned if the descriptions of the landscape and the sky didnt sound beautiful as hell

A science fiction author changed one minus sign to a plus sign.

That sounds like nothing.

In Greg Egan’s Orthogonal Trilogy, it changes everything.

Spacetime stops behaving like spacetime.

Time is no longer fundamentally different from space.

There is no universal speed limit.

Time dilation reverses.

Light travels at different speeds depending on wavelength.

Stars smear into rainbow trails.

Photons have mass.

Electrons do not exist.

Technology has to be rebuilt from the ground up.

And a generation ship called the Peerless uses this broken version of physics to buy centuries of subjective time while only years pass back home.

This is not normal worldbuilding.

This is an entire alternate universe engineered from one mathematical change.

I made a documentary breaking down why Greg Egan’s Orthogonal Trilogy might be one of the most ambitious hard science fiction universes ever created.

One plus sign.

One impossible universe.

Anon sorry for taking so long to answer your ask.

Time and Space - How Are They Related?

The book takes place in an alternate universe, where the laws of physics are slightly different. In our universe, velocity and time are inversely related - going very fast causes you to experience less time than a stationary observer. In the book’s universe, velocity and time are directly related - going very fast causes you to experience more time than a stationary observer. This effect is called time dilation and is predicted by Einstein’s special theory of relativity.

This universe also doesn’t have a universal speed of light. Instead of using our laws of relativity to determine how much time will pass for a stationary observer (which involves a complicated equation with a fraction under a square root) you can just use the Pythagorean theorem. One of the sides represents the distance traveled, one represents the amount of time experienced by an observer, and the hypotenuse represents the amount of time experienced by the traveler.

We aren’t sure at the moment if other universes exist or if they even could exist. If they do exist, they could have different laws of physics than the ones in our universe. Article about this

Rating: speculation

If we follow along with this ruleset, time and space have drastic changes. You now experience much more time compared to an observer if you were going very fast (rather than less as it is in our universe). You would also see weird other changes, like a colorful trail of rainbow light from the stars in the sky and a noticeable absence of black holes. This follows the ruleset of the story, but since it is still so foreign to what we know I can’t really justify a rating of scientifically true or scientifically plausible.

Rating: Scientifically possible

vote yes if you have finished the entire book.

vote no if you have not finished the entire book.

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The Clockwork Rocket by Greg Egan epub download In Yalda’s universe, light has no universal speed and its creation generates energy. On Yalda’s world, plants make food by emitting their own light into the dark night sky. As a child Yalda witnesses one of a series of strange meteors, the Hurtlers, that are entering the planetary system at an immense, unprecedented speed. It becomes apparent that…