Platt%UPenn@UDel-Relay@sri-unix.UUCP (09/27/83)
From: Steve Platt <Platt%UPenn@UDel-Relay>
In the past two weeks, I have read Rucker's "57th Franz Kafka",
"Sex Sphere", and "Spacetime Donuts". Sometime past, I had also
read around half of "Software" before losing the book... this
makes me somewhat qualified to comment on his writing.
Rudy Rucker is to curved spacetime what Larry Niven is to black
holes.
All of what I have read is quite good, quite enjoyable. But then,
I enjoy the highly mathematical basis for the writing. His method
of teaching/demonstrating gravity, curvature, creating pocket
universes, Schroedinger's cat nonparadox, etc. is very well done --
I now have no problem visualizing a good portion of the modern
physics he presents. (BTW, I don't think Wilson really understood
or fully utilized Schroedinger's cat -- see "Schroedinger's Cat"
in the "Kafka" book, and compare to Wilson's universe(s).) (And at
last, time travel paradoxes are resolved, in a manner!)
"57'th Franz Kafka" -- all short stories. The best of what I have
read -- Rucker writes quite good short stories. (No crime in excelling
in short stories. Arthur Clarke, a most respected author, is a 5*
short story writer, but only a 2 1/2 * novelist.) Rating: 4 - 4 1/2 *.
"Sex Sphere" -- Novel, described in yesterday's SFL. Enjoyable, flowed
nicely. Good visualizations of polydimensional space. 3 1/2 *
"Spacetime Donuts" -- slightly more difficult to visualize what is
happening. (This is an earlier work, but not by much.) 3 *
General comments: Admittedly I have OD'ed on Rucker. It's the first
really hardcore SF I've read in a while; as a defrocked mathematician,
I appreciate the envisionments offered. It seems that every other
story or chapter brings in a lineland or flatland visualization of
polyspace, and it does get repetitive after a while. I hope Rucker
develops beyond this, or can integrate the theory more smoothly into
his stories. Consistencies and cutenesses: he has some "continuing
characters", business/scientistpeople Harry and Joe; in addition,
random references to Alvin Bitter, his alter ego (as in Rudolph
von Bitter Rucker...), etc.
Recommendation: read his books, don't be scared off by any
of the concepts involved.
Final note: All you alternate universe people: Consider the Flatland
model of a long series of planar spaces, laid on top of one another.
They can be viewed as seperate universes, labelled by the dZ from
some base universe. This gives an aleph-1 number of universes, each
distinguishable from one another. Now take an infinite (again a-1)
sequence of universes labelled in this manner, seperated along the
W-axis. Our universes are now labelled by [dz,dw] (still a-1).
There is no reason we cannot repeat this step an arbitrary number
of times, resulting in universe labels, each of which consists
of an uncountably infinite number of nonrational numbers... this leaves
us with an aleph-2 number of universes (that's the infinity *after*
the infinity **after** the integer infinity we normally deal with...)!!!
There is no reason we can't increase our labelling to the level of
aleph-3 or beyond... you'll have to excuse me here, I was defrocked
about the time of aleph-0 and am walking on unsteady waters. But I'll
part with the concept of aleph-(aleph-0).
And some other notes: Even if you could label your universe by
the statevector of all the particles (see Heisenberg, Werner,
"Uncertainty Principle"), storing the information would be a bit
of a problem (see Goedel, Kurt, "Incompleteness Theorem").
"Schroedinger's cat is sitting on Heisenberg's shoulder, and
they are both laughing at me."
--steve platt
platt.upenn@udel-relay