Hard Sci fi book that seems 'wave' like

[lamalamalamalama]

It's called 'Schild's ladder' by Greg Egan and even though it's quite different in context, the idea of two totally different realities, one outside the wave front, the other inside an the expanding sphere, seems a bit like what the C's talk about

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schild%27s_Ladder

quote from above link

" The novo-vacuum turns out to be more complicated than anyone suspects, however, and Egan's usual topics of simulation and quantum ontology are taken to the extreme when we learn that a whole ordered universe exists within this zone of apparent chaos, existing as direct elaborations of the quantum graph's lattice structure, of which elementary particles, fundamental interactions, and spacetime itself are only special cases."

 

[Buddy]

It's called 'Schild's ladder' by Greg Egan and even though it's quite different in context, the idea of two totally different realities, one outside the wave front, the other inside an the expanding sphere, seems a bit like what the C's talk about

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schild%27s_Ladder

quote from above link

" The novo-vacuum turns out to be more complicated than anyone suspects, however, and Egan's usual topics of simulation and quantum ontology are taken to the extreme when we learn that a whole ordered universe exists within this zone of apparent chaos, existing as direct elaborations of the quantum graph's lattice structure, of which elementary particles, fundamental interactions, and spacetime itself are only special cases."

Did you read it? If so, what do you think of it? Did you notice the apparent protagonist's name is 'Cass' and part of the publisher's name is 'Orion'? :P

Synopsis, Information and illustrations:
_http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/SCHILD/SCHILD.html

This is an excerpt from the novel Schild's Ladder by Greg Egan, first published in the United Kingdom by Orion/Gollancz and in the United States of America by HarperCollins. Copyright © Greg Egan, 2002. All rights reserved.
_http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/SCHILD/00/SchildExcerpt.html


The author, Greg Egan, also has another page of articles of physics theories:

Foundations is a series of articles, first published in the magazine Eidolon, on some of the theories of twentieth-century physics that have most influenced modern science fiction. However, these are not essays on the history or philosophy of science; their aim is to show how the central idea of each theory leads to detailed, quantitative predictions of real physical effects. For example, the article on special relativity derives formulas for time dilation, Doppler shift, and aberration.

These articles are for the interested lay reader. No prior knowledge of mathematics beyond high school algebra and geometry is needed.
_http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/FOUNDATIONS/index.html

 

[ark]

On first sight it looks to me like all 3D. No consciousness involved? Yeah, physics is not yet there.

 

[John G]

Another Greg Egan book might be a little closer to consciousness:

http://www.valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/1TSphysics.html

The quotations here are edited excerpts from a novel set in 2055 AD with Epilogue set in 2105 AD: DISTRESS, by Greg Egan (HarperCollins 1995). In it, the TOE paper was written by an intelligent software agent named Kaspar living on the internet. However, the TOE paper was not complete until a unifying Keystone was added - a human who read Kaspar's paper from the internet.

"...Kaspar...had done a good job [on] the paper...The first section...ended with the TOE equation [of Mosala, the physicist who used the Kaspar agent]...In the second section, Kaspar had trawled the databases for other references to the same mathematics, other resonances to the same abstractions - and in this scrupulously completist search, it had found enough parallels with information theory to push the TOE one step further....There could be no information without physics. Knowledge always had to be encoded as something....But there could be no physics without information. A universe of purely random events would be no universe at all. Deep patterns, powerful regularities, were the whole basis of existence.

"So - having determined which physical systems could share a universe - Kaspar had asked the question: which patterns of information could these systems encode?

"A second, analogous equation had emerged from the same mathematics...The informational TOE... an inevitable corollary [to the physical TOE]. Then Kaspar had unified the two, fitting them together like interlocking mirror images...

"[The Keystone human] saw the flaw in Kaspar's reasoning...Could one mind, alone, explain another into being? The TOE equation said nothing....all [the Keystone] had to do...was to give up...[being alone at the] center of the universe. ..."

Compare Akira:
Neither Akira nor Tetsuo, alone, could create a new universe,
but both together, with help from others, did.

 

[lamalamalamalama]

To Bud

Yes, I read it a while ago. At the time I did notice the mention of Cass and thought of Sott, but the Orion thing escaped me.

I like Egan, although in my opinion he isn't exactly the most graceful writer. What I have noticed in his works is that he always seems to include something a bit outside the general rules of reality that are in effect in his books. I'm not sure if this is a subtle out of what seems to be the standard 'consciousness is just computation' line.