Sundial with "multitudinous faces"?

James Wynn · 13 May 2011, 19:18 · from 2011-May.txt.gz

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: crushtv at gmail.com (James Wynn)
Date: Fri, 13 May 2011 14:18:08 -0500
Subject: (urth) Sundial with "multitudinous faces"?
In-Reply-To: <4DCD7301.10005 at io.com>
References: <BANLkTi=Av8hgtqywSRrR2u2RK1besHpTBg at mail.gmail.com>	<4DCB99B5.9090009 at io.com>	<A4F1B6DA-7F73-4378-A889-3518B09A8DCA at butcherbaker.org>	<BANLkTimfpzXR86OM+rS70VXQVF6V3dKGYw at mail.gmail.com>	<BANLkTimFOJ2tbs42r+AdaU_DGq5ow4G2AQ at mail.gmail.com>	<426F9A20-11AC-4493-AE69-5D8162933F6A at butcherbaker.org>	<BANLkTikE9n4fvYpwQ6Zj2v7JVB+_bYza6A at mail.gmail.com>	<BANLkTina2hR=CT=MhAAiayaEq853NG5YvQ at mail.gmail.com>	<4DCC1FEC.9090904 at gmail.com>	<881344.47809.qm at web114712.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>	<4DCC4497.5070602 at gmail.com>	<136906.58189.qm at web114718.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>
	<4DCD7301.10005 at io.com>
Message-ID: <4DCD83F0.80909 at gmail.com>


>> Jerry Friedman wrote:
>> Let me try to explain the same thing as Dan'l and Sergei.  When the 
>> sun is at a
>> certain place in the sky (I mean when Urth is aiming the Citadel at a 
>> certain
>> angle to the sun), the sundial will show a certain time.  A day 
>> later, the
>> sundial will show  a similar time, and 365 days later [*], an even 
>> more similar
>> time.  But if it was morning on Mongo during the first reading, 
>> there's no
>> reason for it to be morning on Mongo at the later two readings, since 
>> Mongo's
>> day presumably isn't the same length as Urth's.

I don't see why this seems unimaginable. The vibration rate of a quartz 
crystal is no less random a time-keeping sequence than the cycle of the 
Urth around Sol. A sun-dial that monitored the time on another planet 
would be extremely complex, and --for civilization that can travel to 
other stars-- more of a curiosity than an object of utility. But there 
is no reason that it would not be possible (as long as the other planet 
had a stable orbit). I don't really think that Wolfe ever considered 
what the various sun-dials monitored. They had symbolic value only.

> Jeff Wilson wrote:
> Is it the same time everywhere on Mongo at once? :)

Obviously this is an issue with any set of synchronized clocks, not just 
sun-dials. Presumably, in the case under discussion, it would tell the 
time a a major city on another planet.

>>> Of course, I might have been taken in by metaphor: They could have been
>>> actually saying that if you travel instantaneously to a distant 
>>> star, you are
>>> moving FORWARD in Time since the star we can see from Earth is some 
>>> number years
>>> ago. Or something along those lines.
>
> Jeff Wilson wrote:
> Since the rate of time's progression is relative, you can't say travel 
> is instantaneous without saying in which frame of reference it is 
> measured as instantaneous. Since other, equally valid frames of 
> reference measure the time between your departure and your arrival as 
> having finite, you can switch over to a frame where it was negative, 
> and do the instantaneous thing in that one, then find one where that 
> was negative, and do it again, etc., and that's how you end up  
> returning before you left.

See? I suppose this is why I get confused when they talk about travel in 
a wormhole being Time-travel. I got lost after your first sentence.

J

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