Backwardness

David Duffy · 04 Sep 1998, 00:41 · from urth-v0018.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: David Duffy <davidD at qimr.edu.au>
Subject: (urth) Re: Backwardness
Date: Fri, 4 Sep 1998 10:41:26 +1000 (EST)
Message-ID: <urth-v0018-0096 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0018/0096.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

I had two points - the first is about the arrow of time and entropy.=20
Briah could actually be the contraction phase of our universe -- to
viewers there, we are in their distant future and vv.  I have been
recently reading "Archimedes Point" (author escapes me), who provides
various arguments, and how to design a causally reversed telescope to
detect (backward) light from that epoch.  This might fit in with the
various mirrors.  Note that reversed light will tend to converge
on targets, to our way of thinking.  Travel between the epochs would be
subjectively quick on the ship only if it was travelling v close to c,=20
but at least you don't need hyperdrive.=20

THe other is about living backwards.  Only TH White (IIRC) has Merlin
living backwards, in the _Sword In the Stone_.  And other main uses
predating Amis are in Williamson's _SeeTee Ship_, PK Dick's _Counterclock
World_ and Vonnegut's _Slaughterhouse 5_.  I always thought the latter was
Amis's inspiration, with its reversal of the damage to cities, followed by
processing of the bombs so they were safe, and dispersal of their
components into landfills.=20

| David Duffy.                                                    ,-_|\
| email: davidD at qimr.edu.au  ph: INT+61+7+3362 0217 fax: +0101   /     *
| Epidemiology Unit, Queensland Institute of Medical Research    \_,-._/
| 300 Herston Rd, Brisbane, Queensland 4029, Australia                v=20

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net