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I'd love to read alternate endings to it. I've been thinking about writing a story with a very similar plot for a couple of years, but it had a big plot hole:
by diego_sandoval 2y ago
I'd love to read alternate endings to it.
I've been thinking about writing a story with a very similar plot for a couple of years, but it had a big plot hole: computation overhead between the universes, and I hadn't thought about quantum computers as a way to solve it.
The other main difference with the story that I had in mind is that the characters would write a story about it, which would be "my" story, and they'd find a way to make it so that the ending would tell the reader the universe depth they are in, by creating a variable whose value is incremented by 1 for each universe.
For anyone reading this on HN, you're 8474771628371839 levels deep.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> it had a big plot hole: computation overhead between the universes Unless you're going hard sci-fi, you can do what this story did. Give them by fiat "infinite processing power and infinite storage capacity."
- LoganDark 2y agoI think all of qntm's stories are hard sci-fi.
- Retric 2y agoInfinite processing power, infinite storage, zero latency, etc is about as soft of a setting as it gets.
- LoganDark 2y agoIs it? A new fundamental particle doesn't necessarily make it soft sci-fi. The story seems perfectly technical to me. Can't black holes already encode an infinite amount of information past the event horizon?
- Retric 2y ago> Can't black holes already encode an infinite amount of information past the event horizon? No, current physics has a bunch of hard limits on information. > A new fundamental particle doesn’t necessarily make it soft sci-fi Calling something a particle doesn’t matter here. It’s a fully formed computational device that happens to magically solve all problems. Consider, how do you encode and read information from such a particle. Qubit’s are physical properties of something, such as spin. Is this particle supposed to have infinite properties which you can access with infinite precision? No, it’s just a magic macguffin that does whatever the author wants.
- LoganDark 2y ago> No, it’s just a magic macguffin that does whatever the author wants. As a general rule I consider this unfair. It's okay for science fiction to be set in universes that have different physical laws than our own. Hard or soft sci-fi has nothing to do with whether the rules match up to reality, only whether they're internally consistent and whether they are delved into in technical detail. Sure, there is no known particle in our universe that could do this, nor is there any known way for such a particle to exist. Does that mean its existence in the story makes the sci-fi soft? Take a look at how it's described: > They - by which we now refer to Tim, Diane, their eight colleagues, their two supervisors, four chemical engineers, six electrical engineers, the janitor, a countable infinity of TEEO 9.9.1 ultra-medium-density selectably-foaming non-elasticised quantum waveform frequency rate range collapse selectors and the single tormented tau neutrino caught in the middle of it all - represented the sum total of the human race's achievements in the field of quantum computing. Specifically, they had, earlier that week, successfully built a quantum computer. Putting into practice principles it had taken a trio of appallingly intelligent mathematical statisticians some 10 years to mastermind, and which only about fifty-five other people in the world had yet got a grip on, they had constructed an engine capable of passing information to and processing the responses from what could, without hyperbole, be described as a single fundamental particle with infinite processing power and infinite storage capacity. Sure you could call it a MacGuffin, but it's not magic, it's clearly science (just within their universe). It's clearly explained to have been science. Maybe it's not explained in infinite detail, but it does not need to be. Nothing about this looks like soft sci-fi to me. Nothing about qntm's other stories - Ra, Fine Structure, and a bunch of the short ones - seem like soft sci-fi to me either. I mean, seriously, Ra contains academic lectures[0] where the whole speech, parts of the equations, and the principles behind them are all actually explained to the reader in detail, not just glossed over. There is even an appendix where the actual in-universe mechanics behind the "magic" are explained.[1] And another one where a specific case of it is thoroughly considered and explained.[2] This is science. Fictional science, but that is what science fiction is. There's not really anything soft about it, imho. [0]: https://qntm.org/know https://qntm.org/know (warning: few chapters into Ra) [1]: https://qntm.org/what https://qntm.org/what, https://qntm.org/spells https://qntm.org/spells (many spoilers) [2]: https://qntm.org/invisibility https://qntm.org/invisibility
- rcxdude 2y agoThey're pretty soft, I would say. Most of Fine Structure is basically just magic.
- LoganDark 2y agoIf you're going to accuse something of using magic, I'm surprised you didn't accuse Ra, which even has something called 'magic'. I've been reading Fine Structure this morning and it doesn't seem magical to me at all. It's about as magical as quantum physics would be, I guess. I suppose even Ra still obeys the speed of light, though.
- LoganDark 2y ago> For anyone reading this on HN, you're 8474771628371839 levels deep. "Do you know how big the average positive integer is?"
- Bluestein 2y ago> 8474771628371839 888 412 1289018?