#relativity

[dyke-parade]

i think the funniest thing rocky does in the phm book is straight-up refuse to believe grace for multiple hours when grace explains relativistic physics. and then finally accepts it in the face of evidence but stays really pissed off about it. i wish we could’ve seen that shit like “where is einstein now, question, rocky just want to talk”

[teambyler]

The "One Way" sign to Mike's closet is next to THE ESCHER DRAWING (Byler talk)

Just saw this great post "It's All Relative" by @eeriesilkworm breaking down the placement of M. C. Escher's famous lithograph "Relativity" right underneath Mike's infamous "One Way" sign:

@eeriesilkworm discusses more of the symbolism of triangles and LGBT people and the concept of relativity to support Mike's internal homophobia arc.

However, what's also striking to me is the clear juxtaposition of ideas here:

A "One Way" sign pointing at a closet

A CONFUSING drawing. Gravity itself points in DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS. The VERY OPPOSITE of "ONE WAY."

In one sense, they CONTRADICT each other, reflecting Mike undergoing an internal turmoil and indicating that not all is as it seems with him.

The Escher drawing reflects Mike's disorientation of figuring out, well, his sexual orientation. AND it's next to a BIG GIGANTIC SIGN trying to stick to one way.

In a second sense, you can say the drawing depicts how one can go "one way," but end up going nowhere and instead walk around in a circle. You might always be walking forward, but you're not getting anywhere.

Even as you go one way and seem to tell yourself you're moving forward, you are still TRAPPED.

The Mike-is-in-the-closet symbolism is so blatant here that it's more than "subtext." The obvious meanings of these symbols might as well read as TEXT.

These are not random placements; they scream meaning and intentionality. And as far as I can tell they're only compatible with a reading that Mike at this point is in a closet, and walking a path that is a dead-end.

-teambyler

EDIT: And @5qu1rr3l points out that Mike's room has a "curve right" road sign in this same shot. Which reinforces the pathway into a closet, traveling in a circle, and yes, not walking straight. Plus, there is another famous M.C. Escher drawing of him drawing himself looking into a globe, which suggests having a distorted subjective view of yourself (i.e., not seeing yourself as you really are).

[cypresswarrior]

Relativity by M. C. Escher (1953)

[runestonefox]

I dunno if the book touches on it more, but it was always so profoundly sad to me that the Eridians didn’t know about relativity before shooting Rocky into space. Rocky thinks he’ll be leaving for a few years and going back, but because he’s going so fast, time is going pass way, way faster back on Erid compared to him. He’s loosing decades. I’m thinking about Grace having this horrified realization that he doesn’t know what relativity is on the Hail Mary, and having to tenderly explain that he’s been away for much longer than he thinks. That Adrian is waiting for much longer than he thinks.

[prokopetz]

Kerbal Space Program was once afflicted by a bug the fans dubbed the "Deep Space Kraken", whereby if you travelled far enough from the origin of the game's coordinate system, floating point rounding errors would cause your spacecraft's components to become misaligned and/or clip into each other, resulting in the craft falling apart or exploding for no obvious reason.

The bug was later fixed by defining the active spacecraft itself as the origin of the game's coordinate system. In effect, the spacecraft no longer moves; instead, the spacecraft remains stationary and the entire universe moves around it. Owing to how relativity works, to the player this is indistinguishable from the spacecraft moving about within a fixed coordinate system, and it ensures that the body of the craft and its components will always be modelled with maximal precision.

While elegant, this solution introduced a new problem: it was now possible, by doing certain stupid tricks with relativistic velocities, to introduce floating point rounding errors to everything except the active spacecraft. In extreme cases, this could result in the destruction of the entire observable universe.

Some might call this one of those situations where the solution proves to be worse than the problem. I call it a perfect expression of what Kerbal Space Program is truly about.

[scifigeneration]

What is time? Rather than something that ‘flows,’ a philosopher suggests time is a psychological projection

by Adrian Bardon, Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University

Time isn’t an illusion, unlike optical illusions that trick your eyes. There’s nothing to ‘trick’ because it has no physical basis. BSIP/UIG Via Getty Image

“Time flies,” “time waits for no one,” “as time goes on”: The way we speak about time tends to strongly imply that the passage of time is some sort of real process that happens out there in the world. We inhabit the present moment and move through time, even as events come and go, fading into the past.

But go ahead and try to actually verbalize just what is meant by the flow or passage of time. A flow of what? Rivers flow because water is in motion. What does it mean to say that time flows?

Events are more like happenings than things, yet we talk as though they have ever-changing locations in the future, present or past. But if some events are future, and moving toward you, and some past, moving away, then where are they? The future and past don’t seem to have any physical location.

Human beings have been thinking about time for as long as we have records of humans thinking about anything at all. The concept of time inescapably permeates every single thought you have about yourself and the world around you. That’s why, as a philosopher, philosophical and scientific developments in our understanding of time have always seemed especially important to me.

Parmenides of Elea was an early Greek philosopher who thought about the passage of time. (source: Sergio Spolti/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA)

Ancient philosophers on time

Ancient philosophers were very suspicious about the whole idea of time and change. Parmenides of Elea was a Greek philosopher of the sixth to fifth centuries BCE. Parmenides wondered, if the future is not yet and the past is not anymore, how could events pass from future to present to past?

He reasoned that, if the future is real, then it is real now; and, if what is real now is only what is present, the future is not real. So, if the future is not real, then the occurrence of any present event is a case of something inexplicably coming from nothing.

Parmenides wasn’t the only skeptic about time. Similar reasoning regarding contradictions inherent in the way we talk about time appears in Aristotle, in the ancient Hindu school known as the Advaita Vedanta and in the work of Augustine of Hippo, also known as St. Augustine, just to name a few.

Einstein and relativity

The early modern physicist Isaac Newton had presumed an unperceived yet real flow of time. To Newton, time is a dynamic physical phenomenon that exists in the background, a regular, ticking universe-clock in terms of which one can objectively describe all motions and accelerations.

Then, Albert Einstein came along.

In 1905 and 1915, Einstein proposed his special and general theories of relativity, respectively. These theories validated all those long-running suspicions about the very concept of time and change.

Relativity rejects Newton’s notion about time as a universal physical phenomenon.

By Einstein’s era, researchers had shown that the speed of light is a constant, regardless of the velocity of the source. To take this fact seriously, he argued, is to take all object velocities to be relative.

Nothing is ever really at rest or really in motion; it all depends on your “frame of reference.” A frame of reference determines the spatial and temporal coordinates a given observer will assign to objects and events, on the assumption that he or she is at rest relative to everything else.

Someone floating in space sees a spaceship going by to the right. But the universe itself is completely neutral on whether the observer is at rest and the ship is moving to the right, or if the ship is at rest with the observer moving to the left.

This notion affects our understanding of what clocks actually do. Because the speed of light is a constant, two observers moving relative to each other will assign different times to different events.

In a famous example, two equidistant lightning strikes occur simultaneously for an observer at a train station who can see both at once. An observer on the train, moving toward one lightning strike and away from the other, will assign different times to the strikes. This is because one observer is moving away from the light coming from one strike and toward the light coming from the other. The other observer is stationary relative to the lightning strikes, so the respective light from each reaches him at the same time. Neither is right or wrong.

In a famous example of relativity, observers assign different times to two lightning strikes happening simultaneously.

How much time elapses between events, and what time something happens, depends on the observer’s frame of reference. Observers moving relative to each other will, at any given moment, disagree on what events are happening now; events that are happening now according to one observer’s reckoning at any given moment will lie in the future for another observer, and so on.

Under relativity, all times are equally real. Everything that has ever happened or ever will happen is happening now for a hypothetical observer. There are no events that are either merely potential or a mere memory. There is no single, absolute, universal present, and thus there is no flow of time as events supposedly “become” present.

Change just means that the situation is different at different times. At any moment, I remember certain things. At later moments, I remember more. That’s all there is to the passage of time. This doctrine, widely accepted today among both physicists and philosophers, is known as “eternalism”.

This brings us to a pivotal question: If there is no such thing as the passage of time, why does everyone seem to think that there is?

Time as a psychological projection

One common option has been to suggest that the passage of time is an “illusion” – exactly as Einstein famously described it at one point.

Calling the passage of time “illusory” misleadingly suggests that our belief in the passage of time is a result of misperception, as though it were some sort of optical illusion. But I think it’s more accurate to think of this belief as resulting from misconception.

As I propose in my book “A Brief History of the Philosophy of Time,” our sense of the passage of time is an example of psychological projection – a type of cognitive error that involves misconceiving the nature of your own experience.

The classic example is color. A red rose is not really red, per se. Rather, the rose reflects light at a certain wavelength, and a visual experience of this wavelength may give rise to a feeling of redness. My point is that the rose is neither really red nor does it convey the illusion of redness.

The red visual experience is just a matter of how we process objectively true facts about the rose. It’s not a mistake to identify a rose by its redness; the rose enthusiast isn’t making a deep claim about the nature of color itself.

Similarly, my research suggests that the passage of time is neither real nor an illusion: It’s a projection based on how people make sense of the world. I can’t really describe the world without the passage of time any more than I can describe my visual experience of the world without referencing the color of objects.

I can say that my GPS “thinks” I took a wrong turn without really committing myself to my GPS being a conscious, thinking being. My GPS has no mind, and thus no mental map of the world, yet I am not wrong in understanding its output as a valid representation of my location and my destination.

Similarly, even though physics leaves no room for the dynamic passage of time, time is effectively dynamic to me as far as my experience of the world is concerned.

The passage of time is inextricably bound up with how humans represent our own experiences. Our picture of the world is inseparable from the conditions under which we, as perceivers and thinkers, experience and understand the world. Any description of reality we come up with will unavoidably be infused with our perspective. The error lies in confusing our perspective on reality with reality itself.

[cabinetteofcuriosities]

Relativity by M.C. Escher