Via Boing Boing, a "conceptual artist" is selling a make-your-own-universe kit:
According to [a slightly garbled explanation of quantum mechanics], any kind of measurement causes the universe to split and this is the basis of Keats' new device. His universe creator uses a piece of uranium-doped glass to create a steam of alpha particles, which are then detected using a thin sliver of scintillating crystal. Each detection causes the creation of a new universe.
The kits sell for $20.
For a limited time only, though, I'll make you a better offer: if you send me $15, I won't send you an art project based on misapprehensions about quantum mechanics, enabling you to create an effectively infinite number of universes in which you have $5 more than you would if you bought your universes from Jonathon Keats.
That's a 25% savings! How can we afford to offer this amazing deal? Volume.
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In some universes, I bought Jonathon Keats' make-your-own-universe kit. In some universes I sent Chad Orzel $15.
In some universes, Jonathon Keats became the richest man in the world. In some universes, Chad Orzel won the Nobel Prize in Physics.
I still await clarification on what is the topology of all these universes within the manifold of the metaverse. And whether or not I'll have one of my or my wife's or my son's stories in the "Oh, and Another Thing About the Universe" series about navigating the multiverse win a Hugo or a Nebula.
So, Chad and Kate, what is YOUR favorite fiction ever that assumes the multiverse?
The universes where everyone buys Keat's kit, including me(hey, they rhyme! :) ) sounds like a creepy universe. I am glad I don't live in that universe.
Hey, in some universes, I must have gotten away from High School in 2 years and went to a university at 17, and my blog is famous... What? I can always dream!
Vaseline glass does EVERYTHING! Who could have imagined alpha particles can penetrate a thickness of glass then air then a scintillator? Betas from decay daughters are still a stretch. Gammas don't scintillate well. ART!
OK. I get the joke of the post and some of the comments and truly LOL'd.
However, I am an artist, who is founding a new Post Conceptual art theory that has a strong science base, and even application, I don't get it. Why the need for paraphernalia -- the kit?
Although, I am not a scientist or as knowledgeable as most of the readers, I am perplexed that no one has mentioned that when we think, we create energy. Energy is what is first created at the formation of a new universe.
We are all, in the sense of the kit, creating new universes whenever we think new thoughts.
Hey, we could sell out brain waves! Make a fortune. For $20 I am personally willing to aim thoughts at anyone for a whole second! And, for an brand new universe a whole second is a lot of time!
I think the artist could save on production costs by selling light bulbs. They produce a lot of photons which can conveniently be observed by interaction with the human eyeball.
In fact, I happen to have a few extras laying around. For the low, low price of a mere $10, I'll sell 'em to you!
Creating new universes. Big deal. People do it all the time. They're called science fiction and fantasy writers. /snark
Re #7:
No, what Science Fiction and Fantasy writers do is properly "subcreation." In "Hard Science Fiction" it is the essential nature of "worldbuilding." In a minute, I'll get to the core of Fantasy.
The definition of "Hard Science Fiction" is important. The analogy is between the "Hard Sciences" such as Astronomy, Physics, and Chemistry, ruled by mathematics and repeatable laboratory experiment on the one hand, and "Soft Sciences" -- fuzzy subjective fields such as Psychology, Sociology, and Anthropology where no two humans are identical the way two electrons are, and yet we still try to apply empirical methods.
It is partly a matter of attitude. The Bible tells us:
"Who seeks hard things, to him is the way hard."
Indeed, the disciplined author who attempts to capture the rigor of Hard Science in fiction, in terms of plausible setting and mechanism, and in the skeptical yet pragmatically quantitative attitude of the scientist, the
writing is itself quite difficult to achieve.
Many writers and critics point to one specific novel as being the very model of this genre:
"Mission of Gravity" [Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement, Garden City NJ: Doubleday, 1954] has one of the most vividly rendered alien planets with ETs ever written. Set on the planet Mesklin, where gravity is some 300 times as intense as Earth at the poles, and yet only 3 times
Earth-strength at the equator (due to centrifugal force on the very-rapidly spinning planet), the methane-chemistry ETs (Mesklinites) explore weird parts of their world while being in constant radio communication with human beings in orbit whom they have already met face-to-face aboard the human spaceship.
This is one of the first great "Hard Science Fiction" novels, dealing with meticulously accurate astronomy, chemistry, and physics, and also clearly presents us with intriguing aliens. Author Hal Clement (pseudonym for the high school chemistry teacher Harry Stubbs) even defines "Hard science fiction" for us in a related essay ["Hard Sciences and Tough Technologies", Hal Clement, in The Craft of Science Fiction, ed.
Reginald Bretnor, New York: Harper & Row, 1976, p.51]:
"Hard" science fiction is a recognizable field within a field; it is enjoyed largely by people who take their
own scientific knowledge seriously; writing it therefore demands on the part of the author a fair amount of scientific knowledge and ability (partially replaceable by good research facilities and informed friends whose brains can be picked); and the worst mistake a hard science fiction writer can make, aside from failing to tell an entertaining story, is to write something that makes him look ignorant. He can disagree with accepted science, but he'd better have an impressive-sounding excuse.
J. R. R. Tolkien's theory of Subcreation spawned, at least indirectly, the vast Gaming industry, which has for some years been bigger than Hollywood.
"Are fairy-stories for children?" asks Tolkien [in his piece "On Fairy-Stories," "may well believe ... that there are ogres in the next country; many grown-up persons find it easy to believe of another country" (Tree and Leaf [Houghton Muffin, 1965], p. 39)]. He laments that children read fairy stories as stories while adults read them as Curiosities. He also laments the loss of wonder. But that loss, he says, is neither necessary nor irrevocable, for through Faërie we may experience once again the awe of vision, learn to see through the optics of insight. Faërie is a world, a subcreation, not a genre....
Grimm's fairy tales hardly qualify as subcreation. The stories and lessons are self-contained, but we are not invited into the fairy-tale world to share the story and experience the lesson. We stand outside this world, deducing -- and deduction is the bane of subcreation. Similarly, despite some attempts to interject racial judgments into them, Joel Chandler Harris's tales place the reader outside, watching the cunning resourcefulness of animals whose human-like pride is on the line....
[extracts adapted from "Tolkien's Crucible of Faith: The Sub-Creation", by John H. Timmerman.
John H. Timmerman is professor of English at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. This article appeared in the Christian Century, June 5. 1974, pp. 608-611. Copyright by The Christian Century Foundation]
Universe schmuniverse! I'm holding onto my money until you can show me how to make a uni-chapter-and-verse....
Chad, you never explained why this "universe creator" could be considered based on a misapprehension. Considering the way multi-worlds QM theory is usually presented, IIUC; why would you (anyone?) say it doesn't work as advertised?
Chad, you never explained why this "universe creator" could be considered based on a misapprehension. Considering the way multi-worlds QM theory is usually presented, IIUC; why would you (anyone?) say it doesn't work as advertised?
It's not that terrible a mis-use of the popular idea of Many-Worlds, but the popular idea isn't that great a reflection of the underlying theory.
A more detailed answer probably deserves an entire blog post. I'll try to get to it in the next few days, once I have my brain back.