UotNS and how it screws with your head

Jeff Wilson · 15 Jul 2010, 03:57 · from 2010-July.txt.gz

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From: jwilson at io.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Wed, 14 Jul 2010 22:57:08 -0500
Subject: (urth) UotNS and how it screws with your head
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On 7/13/2010 3:19 PM, Cliff Judge wrote:
> Remember that in BotNS it is spelled out that the cosmology involves an
> expansion / big crunch concept of the universe - I apologize for being
> bad with quotes on this list but when Famulimus is explaining the
> sucession of races that led to the creation of the Hierodules he states
> that the universe expands, then collapses in on itself and expands
> again. In UotNS Severian refers to each such cycle as a....manuvantara?
> An obviously Hindu word that I looked up and refers to one instance of
> creation by a Manu, which is in turn created by Brahma.
>
> (I understand that the cosmological models most popular with physicists
> these days involve a constant expansion until entopy has reached max,
> but on the other hand, some recent papers have thrown credibility
> towards the concept that black holes in our universe connect to white
> holes in other universes, so Wolfe seems to be 1 for 1 here).

I'm not sure what you mean by recent. The black hole/white hole thing 
still had some currency at the time of writing despite 1975's 
"discovery" and rapid acceptance of Hawking radiation allowing all of 
the black hole's matter-energy to eventually leak back into the same 
universe (for excessively long values of eventually) but as of 2005, the 
bulk of physicists including Hawking have held that that the information 
can return as well, though the only other black hole theorist of equal 
stature, Kip Thorne, remains unconvinced.

> The voyage from Briah to Yesod in UotnS seems to take place in "real"
> time, as it would in a more simply-troped science fiction world, where
> there may be FTL travel through hyperspace, different than time travel,
> different than travel to "other dimensions" or "alternate realities." In
> other words, a gateway to another universe was opened at 1200 hours in
> our universe and the ship was through it by 1205 hours. But while
> adventuring on the ship, Severian had two occasions to find himself
> floating in space perilously close to being lost in the void. The first
> time he looks forward and sees the end of the universe, aft and sees the
> beginning. The second time, he sees Briah compress into a ring which the
> ship passes through to wind up in Yesod.

Even though Wolfe is using a lot of hokey superscience in the book, he's 
using accurate relativistic imagery here in the ring. The blue- (rather 
than red-) shifted creation seen to aft is the reversed, superscience 
version as befits using mirrored sales to outrace light itself; the ship 
goes back in time like Ms. Bright, all the way to creation and before. 
This "explains" Yesod being the product of previous incarnations, and 
perhaps the original ms. he throws finding  its way to our era.



-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
IEEE Student Chapter Blog at
< http://ieeetamut.org >

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