Subject: Re: (urth) Father Inire's Mirrors and Wolfe Physics

From: James Wynn <crushtv at hotpop.com>
Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2003 16:04:05 +0000

Josh said:
> Everyone knows that Leonardo Da Vinci built a mirror thingie like
> this, right? Or at least drew it in a notebook.

Crush bites:
*I* was not aware of this. I googled for it and could only find references
to to da Vinci's "mirror-image script", how he recommended that painters use
a mirror to check their work, and an invention to grind mirrors. It would
not be surprising for Wolfe to have an interest in da Vinci since he was one
of the fathers of modern engineering.

So please elaborate, Josh!

On this and on the subject of how well Wolfe describes technical concepts in
layman's terms, I have picked up a rumor that Father Inire's mirrors operate
by quantum tunneling. Is this true and, if so, can any physics grads
critique how well he justifies this in the famous "fish" explanation"?

-- Crush

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From: Josh Geller <brunians at brunians.org>
Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2003 17:26:57 +0000

> of the fathers of modern engineering.

Among other things.

> So please elaborate, Josh!

I've seen the drawing. It's in a book somewhere around here. 

> critique how well he justifies this in the famous "fish" explanation"?

I don't know about any of this. I do know that time is really 
interesting, and has a number of poorly documented features.

I'll be building one of these things as soon as I can afford to.

Ask me then.

.

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From: Tony Martinez <tonyms at terra.es>
Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2003 17:21:26 +0000

> critique how well he justifies this in the famous "fish" explanation"?

I don't have a copy of the book on hand, so forgive any
misrememberings.  I seem to remember the argument goes something like
this: light is, mathematically, made up of lots of different
frequencies, from 0 upto infinity.  This means that some of the
components of light travel *faster than light*.  I remember this scene
as a speculation that if you could remove all the frequencies which,
added together, slow down the sum total, you'd have the ones which
travel faster than light. (*)

It's a nice idea, which someone once told me had been the object of
study.  But light seems to strongly resist being separated thus
so... (**)

                                        --Tony

(*) It's the speed of the wave group which is "the speed of light",
not it's components.

(**) I remember being told by a physics professor that he knew of a
group which researched this very topic.  Year after year, they came up
with ingenious ways of splitting the frequencies, and year after year
people came up with even more ingenious explanations of how they
hadn't /quite/ managed it.  Dunno how true this is, mind you.

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From: Tony Martinez <tonyms at terra.es>
Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2003 17:35:44 +0000

I forgot: the mirrors are one way to filter out all the frequencies
except the one you're interested in, since only the components whose
wave-lengths subdivide the space between the mirrors exactly add
together, rather than reducing each other.  Lasers and the like are
built on this idea, and provide light with a very narrow frequency
set--although, unfortunately, below light-speeds.

                                --Tony

P.S. Um, I think.  It's been a while, and I don't have my books and
notes etc. with me, so forgive the non-research.

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From: Josh Geller <brunians at brunians.org>
Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2003 18:44:17 +0000

You'd want a tunable laser.

.

___

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From: Antonio Martinez <tonyms at terra.es>
Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2003 18:30:33 +0000

> You'd want a tunable laser.

Could you elaborate a little? (I don't remember all this stuff that
well!)  Is this to modulate the signal, i.e. achieve different speeds?
Or, as is likely, for some completely different purpose altogether?

                Thanks,
                                        --Tony

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From: Michael Buice <mabuice at uchicago.edu>
Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2003 18:34:32 +0000

> critique how well he justifies this in the famous "fish" explanation"?

As I recall when I first read New Sun, my exact thought was that 
Severian was straining to describe something Quantum Mechanical.  My 
copy of Shadow & Claw is out on loan collecting new Wolfe converts at 
the moment, so it might be awhile before I can contribute something 
erudite and mind-boggling concerning said Fish.

Michael

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From: Michael Buice <mabuice at uchicago.edu>
Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2003 18:50:55 +0000

> travel faster than light. (*)

The fact I believe you are trying to get at is the concept that group 
velocity and phase velocity are distinct.  This is not directly Quantum 
Mechanics, per se, just wave mechanics (classical physics; however, it 
does apply to QM).

Drop a stone into a pond.  You will see circular waves propagating from 
the impact point.  These wave fronts are moving at a certain speed, the 
speed of "sound" in water.  The velocity of those wave fronts is called 
the "group velocity" and is the analogous speed referred to by the 
"speed of light" for wave packets of light, when it is viewed as an 
electromagnetic wave.

These same waves you see on the pond can also be seen as a combination 
of waves which each have precise frequencies of oscillation.  These 
constituent waves travel at all sorts of different speeds, and the same 
situation is true of light as an electromagnetic wave.  Propagating 
through a given material, there are components which travel faster and 
slower than the speed of light in that material.  This velocity is 
called the "phase velocity".  There have been many experiments which 
have measured these two velocities and received far more press than 
they should have for reporting such things as "speed of light broken" 
and so forth.  You can't "separate" these components in the sense that 
you can't use them to transmit any useful information faster than light 
speed, which is one colloquial manner of stating the limits placed on 
velocity by Lorentz invariance (i.e. special relativity).

The rub is that, under QM, all of these behaviors apply to matter and I 
seem to recall more than a few descriptions of wave mechanical nature 
(or at least what Severian can piece together from what he's been told) 
in New Sun.

Michael

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From: Tony Martinez <tonyms at terra.es>
Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2003 19:04:10 +0000

> On this and on the subject of how well Wolfe describes technical
> concepts in layman's terms, I have picked up a rumor that Father
> Inire's mirrors operate by quantum tunneling. Is this true and, if
> so, can any physics grads critique how well he justifies this in the
> famous "fish" explanation"?

[ I'm not a physics grad, so salt cellar at the ready. ]

FWIW, I thought the explanation reminiscent of the EPR
(Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen) paradox, which is, as you say, an aspect of
QM (and a very interesting one, linked to the idea of FTL
communication); don't know how it connects to tunneling, though.

                          --Tony

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From: Josh Geller <brunians at brunians.org>
Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2003 19:41:34 +0000

On Tue, 2003-08-19 at 11:57, Tony Martinez wrote:
> [ I've assumed you didn't CC the list so as not to murder half of it's
>   readers with dry technical discussion, so haven't followed up
>   there. ]

More like I forgot. I don't think they'd mind, I assume you don't 
mind, and so I am Cc'ing the list now. What the heck, I say.

>> Right.

> Ah.  Perhaps it's a binary transmission, that is, the mirrors set up
> the monochromatic (FTL) light source, and some other bit handles the
> rest (binary, perhaps, rather than modulation?).

I sure don't know.

>> There's another thing about mirrors. Time's a direction at right
>> angles to the three we know about. You get lots of funny angles with
>> multiple mirrors.  
 
> Heheheh!  I wonder what shaving with them would be like :)

A bit of excitement with the straight razor every morning.

Who *does* shave the Spanish barber?

>           Thanks for the clarification,

You are generous!

.

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From: Michael Buice <mabuice at uchicago.edu>
Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2003 19:18:58 +0000

> communication); don't know how it connects to tunneling, though.

It doesn't connect.  EPR has to do with Entanglement, which is unique 
to the mathematical structure of QM.  Tunneling is another aspect of 
wave mechanics which happens to carry over to the QM world.  If you 
shine light through a prism such that total internal reflection 
prevents the light from escaping the other side of the prism, you can 
still "pull it out", if you will, by holding another prism close to the 
first.  The light wave will propagate "over" the gap between prisms and 
continue propagation in the nearby prism, never propagating in the 
space between.  Since QM forces wave-like behavior on matter, it must 
be able to do this as well.  That's what "Quantum" Tunneling is.

Michael

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From: James Wynn <crushtv at hotpop.com>
Date: Wed, 20 Aug 2003 04:16:43 +0000

> > communication); don't know how it connects to tunneling, though.

Crush responds:
My ability to defend connecting QT with Fr. Inire's Mirrors pretty weak.
However, I thought "Quantum Tunneling" sounded promising because it worked
so well within the themes of tBotNS and Wolfe's general themology in
general -- specifically, the twinning aspect (as I understand QT).

For other laymen, my understanding of QT is to imagine a bowling ball
stationary in a valley between two hills. The ball does not have enough
energy to escape the valley based on Newtonian Mechanics, but QM says that
it is remotely possible that the ball could suddenly appear on the other
side of one of the hills. Since matter (as energy) cannot be created, one of
the bowling balls would have to be destroyed -- if the bowling ball in the
valley is destroyed then the ball has moved beyond the valley without any
energy expended. This analogy works just as well if the "hill" is 500
million light years. I don't really understand math enough to believe this
could actually happen -- but I did find a website that offers an experiment
that permits one to see it in action (also I'm led to understand transistors
incorporate QT???):
http://www.altair.org/Qtunnel.htm

While this experiment involves a prism instead of a mirror, one could
*imagine* it being done with mirrors. Also, QT seems to have been observed
only in discrete particles over minute distances, but theoretically one
could use this method to instantly transport from one end of the universe to
the other.

Well, all this seemed so relevant to Severian whose name implies twinning,
who is repeatedly annihilated and recreated.

Another way to imagine QT is to imagine matter as a wave passing through the
hill -- just as Tzadkiel's ship became a wave to move beyond Space, Time,
and Universes.

It seemed to work so nicely, I wonded whether there was any basis to it in
the Fish explanation.

-- Crush

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From: matthew.malthouse <matthew.malthouse at guardian.co.uk>
Date: Wed, 20 Aug 2003 07:19:41 +0000

>interesting, and has a number of poorly documented features.

That's "bugs" isn't it?

Matthew

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From: Josh Geller <brunians at brunians.org>
Date: Wed, 20 Aug 2003 12:18:30 +0000

> That's "bugs" isn't it?

No, bugs are undocumented features. These are merely poorly 
documented. Most of them have been well documented at one
time or another, but the documentation has been lost, suppressed,
ignored or whatever. A lot of it is actually still around, even
quite widely distributed, but most people - even the people who 
have the most to do with it - don't understand it.

.

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From: Michael Buice <mabuice at uchicago.edu>
Date: Wed, 20 Aug 2003 15:14:49 +0000

On Tuesday, August 19, 2003, at 11:16  PM, James Wynn wrote:

>  but I did find a website that offers an experiment

I don't want to be obnoxious, but this is the same experiment I 
described in my previous post about tunneling, and it is completely 
accounted for by Classical Physics, no Quantum Mechanics required.

> *imagine* it being done with mirrors.

	I don't understand what experiment you're proposing.

> It seemed to work so nicely, I wonded whether there was any basis to 

	If you're interested, when my copy of Shadow & Claw is returned to me 
I'll endeavor an examination of the matter.

Michael

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From: James Wynn <crushtv at hotpop.com>
Date: Wed, 20 Aug 2003 16:12:15 +0000

After Crush posted the following:
> > but I did find a website that offers an experiment that permits one
> > to see it in action (also I'm led to understand transistors incorporate
> > QT???):

> accounted for by Classical Physics, no Quantum Mechanics required.

Crush responds:
After stating "I don't want to be obnoxious" you should have said "but I
can't help myself". That would have at least engendered some sympathy.

I didn't receive your post before writing mine, nor did I get a chance to
read your post before sending it - although I'm sure you can imagine that I
normally let nothing interfere with the chance for your wisdom to drop upon
my
ignorance-parched tongue. If I confirmed your explanation, what of it?

I think I made it clear that I am not an expert in physics -- nor that I
should be trusted with higher mathematics. That's why I posed the questions
to experts. The website presents the experiment as an example of quantum
tunnelling. If quantum tunneling does not require quantum mechanics, then
that's fine by me.

After Crush posted the following

> I don't understand what experiment you're proposing.

Crush responds:
That because I didn't propose an experiment. However, the first prism *does*
operate *practically* as a mirror tilted at a 45 degree angle. I recognize
that no genuine mirror would be practical for the experiment described. Yet,
I can *imagine* that if one *did* successfully replace the first prism with
a mirror that the second prism could be replaced as well -- I was thinking
in terms of plot-device rather than practical engineering.  But Father
Inire's mirror's are not real mirrors either. Perhaps they're some sort of
cosmic prisms.

> I'll endeavor an examination of the matter.

Please, please don't make me wait too long.

-- Crush

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