#the clockwork rocket

[abalidoth]

Rereading the Orthogonal trilogy by Greg Egan and I'm still amazed at how naturally "academic plagiarism as an act of radical liberationist lesbian sex" flows in a narrative that's otherwise largely about relativistic physics.

[cryptologicalmystic]

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

i know for a fact it’s inaccurate in terms of plants and such but idc

[realsciencefiction]

One Plus Sign Created a New Universe

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.

One of the wildest acts of science fiction worldbuilding ever written.

[is-this-scientifically-accurate]

how accurate is The Clockwork Rocket by Greg Egan

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

The author’s website is a great tool if you want to get deeper into the topic and learn more as well! He can explain it much better than me :)

[haveyoureadthisscifibook]

have you read The Clockwork Rocket, by Greg Egan (2011)?

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Voting ended onAug 5, 2024

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[cooljacekkursky-blog]

The Clockwork Rocket by Greg Egan epub download

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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…

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[amtrak12]

Two chapters in and so far I'm not regretting this Greg Egan book at all.

[firstlineliterature-blog]

When Yalda was almost three years old, she was entrusted with the task of bearing her grandfather into the forest to convalesce.

- The Clockwork Rocket by Greg Egan