shades of history

Celeritas

Celeritas

the lovechild of logic
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Jul 22, 2008
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"Yes, I may have started it, but I regarded these
I keep having this weird dream where Albert Einstein, Lise Meitner, J.R.R Tolkien, Emilie Du Chatalet, Hunter S. Thompson and George Orwell and sitting a table, playing poker and arguing about Religion.

the scientists argue that there is no conclusive method of verifying or denying the existence of a higher power and thus addressing the issue for them wouldn't become a priority until technology progresses to a point where we can gather relevant data.

the authors (minus Thompson, he's just snoozing in a drunken stupor, firing his gun off randomly in his sleep.) are arguing that something that specifically calls for faith has no need of evidence because that would defeat the purpose of religion.

though Tolkien repeatedly dissents with both sides.

so...I feel that this might hold a companion story to my major story about a scientist who finds proof of a "greater being" (though not a god, but religion has a lot to do with the story as well as science.)

i'm going to post in this thread regularly as the ideas develop. please feel free to offer any respectful comments or critisisms that come to mind if you happen flip through this thread.



______


so. i've got three people who are deeply scientific in nature and three very different writers.

I'm toying with the idea of a sort of six degrees of separation series of connected short stories involving characters loosely based on the above historical figures.

i'm off to do a little refresher research on Herr Einstein.


I will return when I have more to add.

cheers!
 
"Respectful" comments? From Chronners? Optimistic of you!:D

Sounds interesting - and a way of bringing in a very wide and diverse range of views. Look forward to seeing it develop...
 
i'm not certain where you're headed with this (subtlety isn't my thang - i can't normally even spell subtlety). but veering off on one of my more usual tangents brings us to a chap called Hugh Everett, one of the principal proponents of the "many-worlds" thesis, who corresponded with Einstein early in his life and later went on to be highly regarrded by writers like Poul Anderson.
Hugh was an atheist - he asked for his ashes to be thrown in the trash - but, hypothetically, according to the "many-worlds" scenario, there could well be a parallell universe where God is alive and well and doin' just fine thankyouverymuch.
an interesting quote from a biography of Hugh Everett :
Atheist or not, Everett firmly believed that his many-worlds theory guaranteed him immortality: His consciousness, he argued, is bound at each branching to follow whatever path does not lead to death —and so on ad infinitum.
Click to expand...
and another (possibly more pertinent):
Before long the many-worlds view became a whole branch of science fiction, and posthumously Everett himself became a character in stories and novels
Click to expand...
am i somewhere near a target?

Hugh Everett III - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
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*hugh everett has been quoted quite a few times in the works i've read on M theory and it's whole "multiverse" ideas with the strings stretching to becomes membranes and such. I use him in my main novel actually but what i'm going for here is something in the spirit of the dream itself told in a different format.



*being respectful like don't tell me it sucks and not tell me why kind of thing. if it just doesn't strike you or evolves into something that is just "not your thing" don't post. (though I have extremely high hopes for this forum in this regard compared to other unnamed forums populated by adolescent trolls and verbal pyromaniacs)



Enter Professor Bert Aalders, my character i'm going to sort of revolve the rest of this unborn foetal story around.


he's an obsessive intellectual and a womanizer who totally cuts the fat out of his life and focuses on the meat of things. unfortunatly bert's idea of "cutting the fat" includes things like his wife, time with his children and other earthly concerns with the meat being his burning curiosity about the world. though he doesn't mind an 'informal' dinner date with a giggling undergrad every now and again.

his intellegence and curiosity are high and his morals are somewhat questionable. now what is his great scientific vision going to be?


* note * i'm setting this in the universe of my other story so when anomalys pop up, if you're confused, just ask.



more later....
 
whoops. y'all got a glimpse of me being the nutty being I am. I honestly thought the my first post was deleted when I got booted offline by an incoming call....take the existing post as the better version. *kicks self in head*


this may happen again and I apologize in advance....I partied too much in the ol' days and have a tendency to be absentminded...
 
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so I think i've gotten the general idea laid out better.

six learned people who roughly correspond to the figures in my dream each make a contribution indirectly through their life's work to the world view of the main character in my novel as they are historical figures in his universe.

starting with Dr. Aalders we go through a bit of his upbringing and significant events in his life leading to a great discovery(he's a physicist) that is a key point in my maincharacter's scientific work. Dr. Aalders proves (in this made up universe) that gravity is directly responsible for what is generally referred to as time. as he's struggling with his work, right before the night he attains his revelation he goes to a bar and has a chat with an attractive young female bartender who also attends the college he teaches at. her name is Tallulah Driscoll. (*sidenote i'm choosing all my name based on similarity in meaning to that of the person they are based on.) they have a conversation about religion. he goes home disappointed she was toomuch of a lady to spend the night with him and has his big lightbulb moment and goes down in history as one of the greatest thinkers that ever lived.

(*sidenote the traditional scifi elements only become really tangible in the actual writing. with the help of a buddy who is a physicist i've pretty much created a workable unified theory of everything for this world. the differences from the way our physics works are slight but the ramifications are apparent in things like the technology, arts and architecture and so on. though the ramifications get weirder and weirder the larger the focus of inquiry gets. i've also had the assistance of a biologist in this.)

so that was the basics of the first little novella. the next concerns the life and career of ms. driscoll, a shade of nuclear physicist Lise Meitner.(though the name wasn't an exact match as I found too much variation in the meaning.) and yes i'm turning history on it's head but I hope to both do some of my heroes (in the case of h.s. thompson it would 'demon possessing my brain') decent homage and create a little more meat for my main story and really assess and digest these principles i've got all put together. because I think that this dream was born of some subconcious desire to do this. each of the figures in the dream is one of my literary/life heroes and weirdly corresponds to the six basic principles that make up the everything theory in the main story. like the einstein character being obsessed with basic physical principles and hitting on a unifying theory of gravity and time.

more later
thoughts churning and burning, gotta sort it out in my head which I really where I do the bulkload of the work. this is proving helpful however both with the outside commentary and being able to reread the whole shebang(*beavis voice* heheheh).

cheers!
 
I think I should stay focused on bert and worry about talullah and the others once i've got bert's piece worked through.


bert is basically a good guy. the reason his morals seem questionable is that he lets his passions overide his practical judgment. he's been fascinated by the concept of time for his entire life. his father was a historian and full of stories of times gone by which fascinated the young bert to no end. he relates in the beginning of his life to time as a matter of perspective. time plagues him. until one day he reads of a strange phenomenon, it seems that an experiment was done with two sychronized clocks. one was flown higher and higher into the atmosphere and as it went higher it became more and more off. when they were compared(this is a real experiment by the way)
bert is stunned by what appears to be the implications of this. a clock is an instrument to measure time. when flown higher into the atmosphere it would be subjected to less of the earth's gravitational pull. was that what threw the instrument out of whack? gravity? bert dives headfirst into his life's obsession.

now I think I need a romance element with a touch of the strange. after all elsa einstein didn't get the einstein name from albert marrying her....but incest is not what i'm looking for...


more bubbling thoughts. need to turn up the burner on my mental stove.

meaning more later


cheers!
 
i'm going with my original idea for the 'forbidden' women scenario, that being the teacher/student naughtiness scenario. I think though it would be best to only touch on the subject perhaps in some of bert's internal musings as too much naughtiness would detract from the point of the story.


more later

cheers!
 
I think someone already proved that a supreme being could exist in all dimensions at once. I'll get back to you on this.

The dog is suddenly becoming a problem
 
I decided to give a little back ground on the scifi element of the story.

this is the the response of an aquaintance that sparked the story elements being examined

uote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_h... vent_horizon
Before the falling object crosses the event horizon

An object in a gravitational field experiences a slowing down of time, called gravitational time dilation, relative to observers outside the field. The outside observer will see that physical processes in the object, including clocks, appear to run slowly. As a test object approaches the event horizon, its gravitational time dilation (as measured by an observer far from the hole) would approach infinity. Its time would appear to be stopped.
Of course, this is all still just theory.

But suppose you altered the numbers, and say, if you lived in a valley, you'd age 10 times slower than if you lived on a mountain. Everyone would want to live in the valley because they would stay younger longer than the people who lived on the mountain. Everyone's self perception of their life spans would be the same, but people in the valley with binoculars, looking at the people on the hill would see them scurrying around like ants on Redbull. And because the society on the hill aged faster, they'd advance more quickly technologically. But they'd be jealous of the longer life spans.

If a bird on the mountain were to fly down to the valley to get food for it's chicks, when it got back, the chicks might have either starved to death or grown older than the parents!

The sun rising and setting would also be viewed differently. The valley people would have 240 hours in their day, while the mountain people would only have 24. I think.

the people i'm writing about here come from the "mountain" so to speak but communicate with those in the "valley"( which is basically a piece of severely warped spacetime fabric) bert's theory explains why the sort of "companion" culture relates to his own in the way that it does and why the strange aging takes place....


more later


cheers!
 
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