Backlinks!
The ICC Espionage Massacre: here and here
XBox reference: here
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And more below!
Bobservations
Time For Some Gravity
UPDATE 2016-02-11 – Gravity wave detection announced! Congratulations to the physicists at LIGO, and somewhere in the afterlife my dad is cracking open a bottle of Cardhu.
We were a little concerned (as we were roughing out this page) that gravity waves and/or (by implication) their component gravitons might actually be discovered just before the page went live and we would look like opportunists who were trying to siphon off some of the publicity. Not that it would stop us from doing exactly that, but at least we could honestly say that it wasn’t our intention, because the script for this ep was written well prior to all the recent gravity wave buzz.
So we are not like a certain cosmologist who tweeted about their possible discovery by LIGO even though he had nothing to do with the project – thereby guaranteeing that if the LIGO research did confirm the presence of gravity waves, the media would plaster the cosmologist’s name all over the story despite his non-involvement in the research. It may have been unintentional; I hope it was. He could have just been excited, and I can understand that. But it was still a dickish move, so you will notice I’m not using his name here.
We, however, have a perfect right to babble about gravity waves and gravitons. My father was one of the earliest gravitational physicists, working with Joe Weber in attempting to detect gravity waves even in the 1960s, and I grew up with one of the family closets making whirring and clicking noises that were oddly soothing in their way. The closet contained a “gravity antenna” (also known as a Weber Bar) which was (if I recall correctly) a massive aluminum cylinder suspended in a vacuum chamber by ribbons of pure gold and studded with piezoelectric crystals. The whirring and clicking noise came from the recording mechanism making squiggles on a spool of paper as the bar flexed and distorted – hopefully by gravity waves passing through. Of course, any amount of other things could cause false readings; seismic activity, trucks passing by, children running full-tilt into walls, etc. But in theory, since there were several of these antennas scattered over the country, these false readings could be eliminated by comparing the recorded data. A gravity wave from a distant neutron star collision or something would affect all the antennas more or less equally; other lesser signals would not.
There were encouraging signs; and my father did in fact help invent the gravity gradiometer, which could detect changes in mass at a distance, and was subsequently used in submarine guidance systems and for detecting oil deposits from aircraft. He also postulated the use of gravity to create a time machine. As in our comic, this time machine had tremendous limitations; it would only allow time travel back to the time when the machine was first activated, and it likely would have ripped apart any physical object. About the best you could hope for was a coded signal. It also required a certain amount of technology that we don’t currently have as yet – but it wasn’t impossible.
Apparently, in our story, Nevada physicist Noel Crumbliss has worked out the issues and built a functioning prototype. Naturally, the first thing he does is start amassing funds. But with those funds will come a bigger machine, and bigger problems. So the UD3 has to make its move now.
In honor of my own childhood growing up with gravity wave detectors, the home pictured is based on the house where we lived at the time. Because why the heck not?
— Bob out
Five gets you ten he built it to look like a blue police call box.
I’d also bet folding money that the good doctor is no longer home.
Should have built it into a DeLorean. Easier to move.
Why would he be no longer home? They would not bother with live surveilance if they were not sure he was still there.
And the issue with time machines is they only bring you something if you can use them (in time). If they just managed/will manage to prevent him from using it for the week after starting any operation, there is no way he will have a warning in this timeline.
I never found time machine mechanics in Fiction that difficulty, personally.
It does not remove the cause-effect relationship. It meerely moves the cause out of the observable universe. And I do not need to observe the electrons in a cloud to gather, to accept that there is lightning and thunder.
Did you observe the generator producing the electricity for your computer and light right now/when you charged the battery?
Did you watch the organic mater that became your fuel grow, die, get burried under rock, transformed into oil over millions of years, burrowed back up, refined and transported all teh way to the Gas station?
I grew up with timetravel stories as far back as Star Trek TOS. The writers that still let thier characters “get headaches from timetravel” are so oldschool. There is already so much stuff where we only see the effect of and never bother to wonder about the cause.
Your Topwebcomics link is not to the vote page. It is to the graphic banner. It should link to this page:
http://topwebcomics.com/vote/15444/default.aspx
Whoops! Slippage in the copypasta. Fixed, and thanks!
Seriously, three weeks in a row? How can someone smart enough to build a time machine be stupid enough to draw attention to himself like that? Marissa would would probably find that both hilarious and contemptible…
He propably thought he was unusually smart and that there is no government agency to deal with superpowers. Like a certain group of Teleportation Scientists did.
So there would be nobody to suspect or proove that he used them.
This guy’s clearly pretty smart when it comes to physics – but that doesn’t preclude him from being an idiot when it comes to subtlety.
Now, now, it doesn’t have to be a full fledged time machine. Observable data could be as easily explained by a temporal telegraph. All that really needs to travel back along the timeline/stream is a series of numbers.
Which, reading the entirety of the ‘Bobservations’, is what is being postulated. Derp.
Greets:
The votey link just leads to the rank image.
Most time travel theories that are even vaguely plausible (based on our current understanding of physics) are limited to the time the machine itself was turned on. This does, of course, leave the problem of all those future objects/messages arriving at the same moment, which no one ever seems to discuss, but then, that’s a fairly small problem compared to all the other stuff you’d have to solve before actually creating any such thing, so I guess that’s OK.
My favorite is the “move one mouth of a wormhole around at the speed of light so time doesn’t pass for it” one, as something close to that (moving the mouth of the wormhole around at some fairly high speed so time passes more slowly) is pretty easy to imagine us actually doing, with sufficient effort, even at our current technology, meaning that the “only” problem with that one is creating/finding/sustaining a wormhole. Compared to most other time travel theories, that’s a much shorter list of things to solve.
There’s a variant of that, I think I read it in “A Short History of Time”: Put or find one mouth of a wormhole near a black hole and the other mouth some distance away from it, and wait. Since it uses the idea that high gravity causes a slowdown of time, it’s even more on topic 🙂
Still… I can’t help it, even if it leaves the problem of finding or creating a wormhole wide enough to get something through and “long” enough to get some distance between both openings, these both seem too easy. I can’t put my finger on it but it feels just wrong. Because it’s too easy. There must be an error in the idea.
Hnnng.
James P Hogan’s Thrice Upon A Time in 1980 did cover many problems with a data time machine. His had a limited range, a small message buffer and interference from an outside source. So the protagonists had to basically write a virus into their message to change the software of the machine to allow a daisy chain relay of multiple part messages to reach their destination time. Along with a list of times to avoid sending to because of machine downtime, bursts of outside interference and other messages being sent because overlap caused garbage to be received instead of a clear message.
Love the comic and the discussions, just hate to write myself.
I remember that book! great story because the limitation was not only time but location in space. he had to have enough energy to send the message to where the earth was in the universe the day, 2 days, week in the past. People forget that the earth is moving around a sun that is moving around the center of a galaxy that is moving through space. We’re quite a distance from where we were yesterday.
“Another effing time machine!” – LOL
So Sharma’s pictures of those old game consoles boards that Emil embedded in the wall, really paid off with the FBI being nicely mis-directed. 😀
I did like that touch, making the espionage games they are playing with Sharma having UD3 thinking an actual lead is nothing more than an internet hoax.
Not wanting to be nit-picky (love the comic btw) but people hit trifectas all the time. Even casual bettors.
And Nevada doesn’t have a state lottery because the casinos don’t want the competition. We’re one of the few states that doesn’t participate in Powerball.
Agro – Las Vegas resident.
Thanks! True dat. I actually knew about the lottery thing, since there are stands right on the California/Nevada border for residents to cross over and buy CA lotto tickets – but I figured he’d locate in a state with lots of gambling opportunities to mask himself, and details clog the word balloons.
Changed it to “a state lottery” just to CMA. 🙂
A mercaptan diffuser. Nice. I like Mr Exposition’s style.
I hope the guy who planted it was wearing good protective gloves, though. The smell of the concentrated stuff could be on the overwhelming side.
Discovered recently the comics, love it and the authors’ insights, too. You’re broadening my horizons.
Thank you, and welcome!
“A mercaptan diffusor” & “people are already reporting the smell of gas” – uh oh. Now we know what they are going to do… And since the strike team may be misled by these reports of the smell of gas… uh oh!
And on top of that they’re going to cross UD3, now (probably) enforced with an all-to-eager Letoa…
You know this feeling when you see a bomb under the table, ticking down the last seconds, and upon the table people are talking casually, taking their time and not knowing about the bomb, and you can’t warn them?
Er… How long until the next page…? The suspense is killing me already.
So, the first question is, does the physicist have a pre-arranged bug out code ready to be sent back a week? Because if he does, then he just has to push the button when the UD3 kicks in the door and he will retroactively disappear days before the raid. Probably with the plans, if not the device itself.
If he’s really nasty, he can take the time to set up a very big boom as a housewarming gift for the raiders.
Better still the absence of a message would indicate something nasty is going to happen & best move to a safe distance away.
Really depends on whether the intervals they detected are due to machine constraints, or due to him holding back his curiosity and greed. If he is just sending back info whenever he feels like, to be received whenever he cares to browse, then a lack of material would be obvious, but if they can pop in just before he sends his burst of data, or receives it as the case may be, they can get him unaware.
If the time travel/message machine is restricted to a single self-consistent timeline, then the idea of the time travel guy sending a “bug-out” code to themself the instant the door was kicked in, and thus leaving days before the raid even began, couldn’t happen. Because if it did, it would result in a temporal contradiction (not a paradox, which is just an APPARENT contradiction, but an ACTUAL contradiction. It would literally be logically (& thus physically) impossible, if it’s restricted to the single self-consistent timeline.)
Here’s why: Suppose that the time messager has a button which, if pressed, sends a “bug-out” message to themself a week ago in the same timeline (lets call it timeline #1), warning them of the upcoming raid, and to get out of dodge. Now suppose the messager is raided, and presses the button, successfully warning their past self.
So the past time messenger recieves the message, bugs out, and thus successfully avoids the raid. But because the past messenger was never raided, they don’t send the warning back to their past self. Because they weren’t warned, they didn’t bug out, and were raided.
So the time messenger is thus both raided, and not raided. Warned and not warned. This is a contradiction. Both of these mututally exclusive conditions can’t be true at the same time. Thus the initial supposition, that the bug-out warning could work, must be false. The bug-out warning would not, and could not work.
Now if you allow there to be multiple different parallel timelines, then this could work. You could have time messenger get raided in timeline #1, and have them send a warning to timeline #2. Then in timeline #2, they bug out, and successfully avoid the raid. Even though time messenger #2 might never send the warning back to their past self in timeline #2, no contradiction occurs, because the cause was from timeline #1. Causality is thus satisfied, and in this way it could work.
Your pattern isn’t allowing for the multiple items that would change as a result of the bug out code. For instance, if the physicist leaves, he’s taking the machine with him and/or wrecking it. If he disappears, the Feds aren’t likely to raid on the same schedule–they’ll go earlier once he breaks pattern. And given that the UD3 is setting up a ‘gas explosion’ to cover their tracks, they probably aren’t actually planning a raid; they’ll just blow the place up with the target inside.
Making the one change has thousands of follow on effects just in that week. And that’s why time travel stories give people conniption fits. Because causality takes a holiday.
Honestly, it’s like none of these time traveler guys learned the lesson taught to us by that sacred tome ‘Gray’s Sports Almanac’.
Time Traveler’s Strictly Cash.
“Seven Days”, huh?
I remember that series.
Me too! It was wacky!
That was a close one 🙂
Juuuuust under the wire!
Bob, I’m sure you already know your comic is loved by many folks.
I just I’d remind you of that before this physicist discovers a way to remove you reporting his actions.
???
For a moment, I actually thought you were serious.
I guess that shows how my life has been going lately.
Geez! That seems a bit harsh! o_O
Man this setting is some dystopian shit – and those guys had the gall to talk about due process.