knudsen (08/06/82)
Serious query: Are laws of physics "enforced" instantaneously and at all times and places? Uniformly? Suppose some collision starts a subatomic particle moving faster than light. Can it go faster for a few femtoseconds (or whatever) until the Law catches up with it? Semi-serious: Imagine two parallel universes with the ssame physical laws, but with different values for the constants. If you set up some kind of bridge between the two, might the values of constants near that bridge tend to be pulled in the direction of the other universe's values? Isaac Asimov wrote a great novel "The Gods Themselves" based on this (actually it was a great parody of Transactional Analysis pop psychology, so was both soft and hard sf). Not-serious: Before engaging warp drive or jumping to hyperspace, do Ahuru and Han Solo call ahead on subspace channel 19 for reports on Einstein's Space Police cruisers? How closely packed in space are God's speed traps (back to the serious version)? --mike knudsen ihnss!knudsen
sjb (08/07/82)
There was an issue of Science Digest a few months ago devoted to current schemes of interstellar travel. One method was to somehow 'make it' so that your physical entity (in this case, the ship and all in it) could not physically (by the Laws of Physics) exist in the 'spot' of space where you currently are (were?) In this event, you would pop out where you were and pop in where you could physically exist. The only hard parts where to figure out how to reach these conditions and to figure out exactly how to make it so that you would pop in at a specific place. Now, if you follow this scheme, your subatomic particle (the one going faster than light) would pop out and pop in in a different place.