Problematic element in chronology

Gerry Quinn · 27 May 2011, 23:53 · from 2011-May.txt.gz

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From: gerryq at indigo.ie (Gerry Quinn)
Date: Sat, 28 May 2011 00:53:51 +0100
Subject: (urth) Problematic element in chronology
Message-ID: <87E792FA008E4A679A9EFA68176C4976@jill>

I got to thinking about the distance from Urth to Blue today and after looking up some stuff I found a problem.

On Blue, SilkHorn explains to prospective astral travellers that they can, if they peer for some time, see a dim red star - this is of course Sol, etiolated by the black hole inside it.  

I looked up some stuff, and as near as I can tell, they following is true:  Sol (currently) has an absolute magnitude of 5.  That means it would be barely visible from 50 light years away.  Red Sol will be even dimmer.

But if the Whorl only travelled 50 light years, relativistic time dilation will have been fairly insignificant.  Specifically, there's no reasonable way that you could 'lose' more time than the distance you travelled in light years.  On this basis, the Whorl was launched no more than 350 or so years ago in Urth time.

On the whole, I put this down to Wolfe not fretting too much about the details - I still think there is supposaed to be a relativistic time dilation factor of up to five or six, even if it is contradictory in some ways (it also fails because the energy needed to accelerate the Whorl to such a velocity would have been more than enough to replace the solar energy deficit, and Typhon would surely have repurposed the Whorl drive for this).

But if the physics is correct, the Whorl has little in the way of time dilation, and Typhon lived only about 350 years before Severian.

- Gerry Quinn

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