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When Nephilim die.....do they even go to hell/heaven? I don't think we've yet see one actually die so far or at least within direct view.

Junghalli wrote:How about using something like that for the sun of Heaven and Hell? IMO it sounds a lot better than just saying "they have light ... by magic!".

A black hole which emits deadly X-rays which are then converted to visible light by a thick insulating layer that sits in the upper atmosphere? And what keeps such a high-density insulating layer up there, in defiance of the concept of buoyancy? Is it anti-gravity too?

Maybe we should surmise that the "bubbles" in which Heaven and Hell exist are actually doomed pocket universes. They are slowly shrinking rather than expanding. As they shrink, the entire bubble universe continually reduces its energy state and one of the side-effects is an omnipresent light with no apparent source, within this steadily shrinking bubble. Their denizens, not having a scientific mindset, have never studied this, and the rate of contraction is slow enough that it's not obvious.

That's a fairly fascinating concept. It seems dangerously close to running afoul of the second law, though. You're shrinking a closed system, so the total number of possible states is decreasing. I'll have to ponder that.

I admit that I only remember enough statistical thermodynamics to get myself into trouble.

That makes sense, given the 'multiple universes' theories I've seen bandied about in cosmology. There are more unstable 'bubble' universes than there are 'true' universes, and Yaweh and his kind have discovered how to harvest some sort of energy transmission between them.

I think we have to accept that at a certain point its not going to make sense, because as Stuart said we're starting with theology and it can't be made to fit perfectly.

Darth Wong wrote:And what keeps such a high-density insulating layer up there, in defiance of the concept of buoyancy?

The black hole's gravity?

erik_t wrote:That's a fairly fascinating concept. It seems dangerously close to running afoul of the second law, though. You're shrinking a closed system, so the total number of possible states is decreasing. I'll have to ponder that.

I admit that I only remember enough statistical thermodynamics to get myself into trouble.

I'm in a brainstorming mood today, which is probably the right mood for discussing this story. After all, any story which starts with the premise of peoples' brain patterns materializing into solid objects in a bubble universe is not exactly starting off on rock-solid scientific foundations to begin with. We just want to propose mechanisms which are not really obviously wrong or which make no sense. If you're going to bend or break a law, the second law of thermodynamics is actually one of the more benign victims you might choose.

Junghalli wrote:

Darth Wong wrote:And what keeps such a high-density insulating layer up there, in defiance of the concept of buoyancy?

The black hole's gravity?

Just how close to this black hole are we supposed to be? And what the fuck keeps everything from falling in if we're that close? Why isn't the whole gravity field inverted? What exactly is keeping anything on the inner surface of the sphere?

This explanation falls into the class of "causes far more problems than it solves".

Darth Wong wrote:Just how close to this black hole are we supposed to be? And what the fuck keeps everything from falling in if we're that close? Why isn't the whole gravity field inverted? What exactly is keeping anything on the inner surface of the sphere?

Well, in the original model the article was talking about (a hollow planet) the gravity of the hollow world's rocky mass is orbiting the black hole, and its gravity is much stronger than the black hole's gravity on its inner surface, hence how it can hold an atmosphere and oceans.

Hell might be more complicated as it's not a simple sphere. Perhaps we could suggest that the spacetime there is simply curved in such a way that matter naturally tends to fall away from the "middle" and congregate in the "center" and the "edge". The matter in the center becomes the black hole with its surrounding cloud of gas, while the matter on the edge becomes the rocky "crust".

Actually, I'm wondering if we necessarily need a black hole at all if we go with that model. Could Hell's "sun" simply a big ball of gas shining by contraction? And how long could such a "sun" shine?

Junghalli wrote:Well, in the original model the article was talking about (a hollow planet) the gravity of the hollow world's rocky mass is orbiting the black hole, and its gravity is much stronger than the black hole's gravity on its inner surface, hence how it can hold an atmosphere and oceans.

The sphere won't exert any net gravity inside itself. Everything would just fall into the black hole unless it's all spinning so fast that it actually orbits the black hole, and that creates its own host of problems.

Darth Wong wrote:The sphere won't exert any net gravity inside itself. Everything would just fall into the black hole.

Why can't it orbit the black hole? It seems no different, in principle, from a solid Dyson sphere, and while there are many objections to that idea "it couldn't orbit and would fall into the sun" is one I haven't heard.

Edit: what problems are created by having it spinning fast enough to orbit the black hole?

I think we're also forgetting about the weird dimensional geometry of Heaven/Hell - as Stuart alluded in the first story, the spacial dimensions are not necessarily the only ones with a non-linear geometry.

Thinking about time as nonlinear makes my head hurt. If you always arrive back where you started when traveling in a straight line in Hell, and time is similarly nonlinear, things would get really weird.

The fact that time isn't necessarily linear in Hell could possibly account for some of the thermodynamics issues that aren't accounted for by the fact that Hell is a closed system. If time is actually cyclical, what effect would that have on entropy?

I like the idea that the universes are shrinking. Could one model background radiation as having wavelength proportional to the size of the universe? Then what's happened in our universe is the universe has gotten really huge, so the wavelength has gotten proportionally large, pushing the peak of the blackbody distribution into the microwave. In these universes, the wavelength has gotten smaller, pushing the peak into the visible. It would also correspond to an increase in temperature, ensuring that the universes are livable.

How would this model work with the klein bottle topology, as opposed to our mostly-flat cosmology?

The problem is that it's a *sphere*. (Well, except it isn't; the exact geometry of that thing is still somewhat up for grabs..)

The equator can spin fast, sure enough, but what happens at the poles?

Also, even if you somehow contrive to avoid the atmosphere being sucked up by the hole, the hole will still be attracted to the ground - move it an inch from perfect center, and it'll fall. Please note, speed of falling is not a function of your mass.

Nah. I like the "collapsing bubble universe" theory by far the best. It makes sense, and explains where the energy is coming from; it isn't breaking thermodynamics, it's just squeezing the same number of states into a smaller space, which means pushing the energy states up instead. Eg. energy appears.

Rahvin wrote:I think we're also forgetting about the weird dimensional geometry of Heaven/Hell - as Stuart alluded in the first story, the spacial dimensions are not necessarily the only ones with a non-linear geometry.

Thinking about time as nonlinear makes my head hurt. If you always arrive back where you started when traveling in a straight line in Hell, and time is similarly nonlinear, things would get really weird.

The fact that time isn't necessarily linear in Hell could possibly account for some of the thermodynamics issues that aren't accounted for by the fact that Hell is a closed system. If time is actually cyclical, what effect would that have on entropy?

Oh lordy.. now you've done it. Time to have fun.

The laws of thermodynamics are actually laws (not statistics), but about phase space being conserved, not entropy always increasing. Phase space being conserved *causes* entropy to apparently always increase, due to entropy being zero at the start of time, and.. some other stuff. Basically, a boundary condition.

Time is a result of this boundary condition, so you pretty much have to have it to have time at all; specifically, because the state of the universe is fixed at one end of that dimension, constraint-solving the laws of physics causes information to flow in one direction only. Well mostly.. see post-selection experiments, which turn that on its head. Anyway, that's time.

Now, if you turn time into a loop, things get weirder. Let's ignore hell not being a closed system for the moment, and just look at what'd happen if it were.

First off.. we need that boundary condition. If it isn't there, time stops working at all.

So we fix the universe to a known (and more to the point, very simple) state at one point. Entropy = 0. You can use more points if you like, but it doesn't make any actual difference; that's effectively producing more universes. (Hmm...)

What happens next depends on the size of the time dimension. If it's small (some couple trillion years, maybe), the allowable states at any given point will be determined strongly by both the future and the past, and you get utter weirdness I don't know how to quantify - probably not anything we'd recognize.

If, instead, it's sufficiently long - and we're talking a googol years here - what you get is effectively two separate universes.

To explain: The "strength" of the time arrow - how strongly a given instant is determined by the past, instead of the future - is determined by the entropic gradient. The closer you get to the big bang, the stronger the arrow - the less often you see violations. (Not that you'd be able to spot them; they only happen when you can't)

But the gradient is slowly lessening, as entropy drifts away from zero. Give it enough time, and the arrow will effectively vanish; at that point, you have a universe that's basically random noise. There may be local (temporally local) perturbations that reduce entropy again, producing local "universes"; their arrow of time will point away from the point of lowest entropy. Yes, that's in two directions. They won't look much like this one, though, which is a good reason to think the universe has a finite lifespan.

Now, if you move further through time, you eventually hit another gradient as you approach the big bang from the other side; what you see here is a universe apparently running backwards in time. Of course, if you live in it, it'll seem to be going the right way, and as the entropic gradient is what in fact defines time, it is.

So that's what would happen in hell too. Two universes, separated by lots of noise. That's not counting how portals to other universes would affect it, which is mostly because if you have portals, it's not a universe.

One last point: Because of the fundamental symmetry of this scenario, and assuming no actual randomness in the laws of physics, the two sides of the big bang would in fact be exact mirror images. Effectively, then, there's just one, and the circularity of time makes no difference. If there is randomness, of course, you can disregard this - then there are two distinct universes.

That goes for the case of a too-small loop as well, except that in that case.. well, the two halves must be identical mirror images, but.. gah. Never mind, I can't handle that one.

It isn't a 'sphere' in the physical sense, it was just described as that in the cosmological model in chapter 5. An interesting thing would be if a jet in hell can fly 'up' until it reaches a different part of the ground. The collapsing universe fits just fine with the klein bottle as far as I think we're capable of knowing, because I don't think the shape of a dimension (or pocket dimension) is dependant on energy, only the size.

Does anyone else find it funny that we're working on an entire theoretical model of the universe just for the purposes of a work of fiction? I wonder which, if any, cosmologist may have posited such a multiversal structure to existence. If he's still alive, he's probably doing the 'I told you so' dance.

Thought: I wonder if there's any limit to how 'far away' you can teleport. There's going to be a new breed of explorers going through portals and cataloguing not just pocket dimensions, but true dimensions as well. Can you get ANYWHERE from here, or do other dimensional realms have to be 'close'? Damn, we need some firm terminology before we go too much further. I imagine there's a white board somewhere in Aperture Science at DIMO(N) that's entitled 'What these words mean' and someone added 'today' at the end of it.

So that's what would happen in hell too. Two universes, separated by lots of noise. That's not counting how portals to other universes would affect it, which is mostly because if you have portals, it's not a universe.

What does this mean? Are you saying that our entire universe, and the two 'realms' which adjoin it, are all part of the same universe, which is your googol-years-old backround noise universe where they are simply a local entropy reduction, and not contained?

Some thoughts on the too-small loop..

- There must be a point of largest entropy, and it follows from mathematics that it's in the exact middle of the time dimension.
- This level of entropy need not be all that high. There could still be intelligent structures (eg. some sort of life) at this point; that's more a function of the size of time.
- At a point very close to the big bang boundary condition (well, if it's hell, might not be a bang..), the arrow of time works just fine. At the limit, the future is determined wholly by the past. Therefore, our kind of life could develop.

Therefore: Our kind of life could develop, and then proceed to see time slowly stop working. What a concept.

CaptainChewbacca wrote:

So that's what would happen in hell too. Two universes, separated by lots of noise. That's not counting how portals to other universes would affect it, which is mostly because if you have portals, it's not a universe.

What does this mean? Are you saying that our entire universe, and the two 'realms' which adjoin it, are all part of the same universe, which is your googol-years-old backround noise universe where they are simply a local entropy reduction, and not contained?

A universe is, quite simply, everything you can reach (transitively). If there are portals between two "universes", at any point in their existence, then they are in fact the same universe.

This kind of extremely general argument about time works with practically any possible laws of physics. There are possible laws where they don't apply, but there is extremely strong evidence that these don't apply to our situation either, nor anything even remotely related, and their math might in fact be inconsistent.

The problem is, they only work for the universe as a whole. Since Hell is a substructure in a larger universe that includes (among other things) our own, it doesn't apply to just hell alone. The actual laws of physics governing hell might well produce the same result, but with considerably less certainty; however, looking at the earth-heaven-hell system as a whole (plus whatever else might get thrown in), it applies just fine.

Stuart, don't resolve these explicatly for your book. Make sure the story is self consistent and has hints and have the characters raise all these different theories

Oh, and the "local entropy perturbation" version of a "universe" would look like basically still random noise, just random noise that (through sheer random chance) reduces itself sufficiently that there is enough time (heh. literally.) for life to develop and wonder about things.

There would be no structure. Some physicists might suspect hell of fitting this scheme, however; you'd have to look outside the bubble to check.

(Yes, you could still have the evolution I described for a single universe inside a sub-universe such as Hell. It's a pretty robust evolution. It just isn't guaranteed, then.)

Methinks that perhaps in your postulated 'mega-universe' which is infinitely older than ours and contains the local-entropy-reductions (LERs) that we call OUR univers that you'll have small clusters of bubbles which are similar to 'local groups' of galaxies.

I vote that the physicist/cosmologist/master-geek in charge of Aperture Science be named Doctor Buaghn. Anyone gonna second that?

You know, all of this talk of boundary conditions conjures forth to mind actual quantum mechanics, not the pop sci version, where the quantization occurs due to the fact that the only solutions to boundary conditions applied to the Shrodinger equation (other than a free particle, but I digress) are integer multiples of some value, hence quantization. Also, if time is a closed loop then the only restriction on the boundary conditions are that S(t) = S(t+nX) where X is some value and n is an integer (and yes, it does hurt my head to be abusing poor t like that, but hey). Any waveform that satisfies those conditions would work. A logarithmic rise followed by an exponential drop back to 0 would work just as well as a half-wave sine function where the entropy maxes out at the midpoint. Perhaps the way these bubble universes work is that they are generated, exist for a time, and then "pop" in a cataclysmic event, collapsing down to their original state.

And perhaps the reason there are creatures from our universe having migrated in is some outside entity trying to prevent or manipulate this sort of event.

Sure, such a collapse would be a valid solution as well. I can't speak for its probability, of course.

Heh. That sort of mega-universe was not what I had in mind, I was trying to explain why LERs don't happen - because if they did, we'd be living in one; they'd be infinitely common or so.

But for a story, the concept is too cool to pass up. And there *are* solutions that don't have that problem, they just don't match with our universe.

Damn right: SCIENCE IS COOL!

Rahvin wrote:Oh, wow - he did just -POOF!- the water into and out of existence, with portals!

But was that really Yahweh, or was it him taking credit for the works of others again, like with Sodom and Gomorrah?

Could have been, easily enough.

Belial is not more powerful than Yahweh. If Belial can do it, there's no reason for Yahweh to be unable to do it. Moreover, even if it wasn't really him, he now knows how the thing is done. Get him mad enough, and he just might take the trouble to do it again.
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Darth Wong wrote:As for the idea that he can simply open a portal in the base of an ocean, I don't think so. If he could do that, he probably would have already. Even the Biblical Flood was obviously a very small regional event, since it was chronicled by people in ancient Israel but went completely unnoticed in other places, including places as close as Egypt.

I was trying to come up with an in-story explanation for the Flood; clearly something happened. But regardless of whether the Flood was regional or global, it was devastating over a substantial chunk of land, more so than what happened to Sodom and Gomorrah. It's not something you want happening to the crowd of several million people you just amassed to taunt God.

So, to sum up my point, I would not recommend massing a large number of people to chant in an attempt to tick off Yahweh, because of the very real danger that he will become angry enough to go all Old Testament on them in a way that can't be countered easily, and that doesn't produce a militarily useful portal.
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Darth Wong wrote:If angels have telekinetics (and I stress again that we already know they do, from Satan's example), then there is no reason why they need to use conventional sonic propagation through air in order to produce a sound at a certain point... if I had telekinetic powers, I could simply use my telekinetic powers to make the air vibrate at the target point directly, without propagating a sound wave through the intervening air. This would save me enormous amounts of energy.

Hmm... I like. That's a good one.
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erik_t wrote:That's a fairly fascinating concept. It seems dangerously close to running afoul of the second law, though. You're shrinking a closed system, so the total number of possible states is decreasing. I'll have to ponder that.

I admit that I only remember enough statistical thermodynamics to get myself into trouble.

The closed Friedmann-Robertson-Walker metric is well defined within general relativity; the Second Law can't stop it from collapsing on itself.

In any system, entropy is an emergent property of large numbers of particles interacting. It can't drive violations of the rules that describe interactions between specific objects (like electromagnetism or general relativity).
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Destructionator XIII wrote:If this is true, an experiment to test it would to be setting up a camera in the middle of a dark room and looking around. Sensitive enough equipment could confirm it, and cosmologists would surely have a lot of fun with the data. Such a thing would probably be considered low priority pure science though; I can't think of a practical application to this knowledge for the war effort, so I doubt we'll see it tested in the book.

Of course, it would be really cheap (one good photodetector, and someone will give you their photodetector to let you test this theory). So it would probably happen off-screen.

This brings me to something else though: I'm no expert, but isn't there a constant source of light all over the universe, as left over energy from the big bang (I know my wording is imprecise here)? If the real universe were smaller, would we not see light in all directions seemingly from nowhere?

We'd see it from the edges of the visible universe. That light was emitted at the time of "last scattering:" at the point in time when the very hot plasma left over from the Big Bang cooled down to the point where it was no longer opaque and glowing.

All the cosmic microwave background radiation we see today was emitted X light-years away, where X is the number of years since the time of last scattering. So someone could put up a barrier between us and the CMB radiation, and we wouldn't see any appearing from our side of the barrier.

I don't know if that means you're right or wrong; I'm not sure I understand your question properly.
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Junghalli wrote:Why can't it orbit the black hole? It seems no different, in principle, from a solid Dyson sphere, and while there are many objections to that idea "it couldn't orbit and would fall into the sun" is one I haven't heard.

Edit: what problems are created by having it spinning fast enough to orbit the black hole?

A solid Dyson sphere (which this is) would be spinning at many miles per second. If it were spun fast enough to have appreciable centrifugal "gravity" pulling you out towards the floor when you stand inside it, it would have to spin at many thousands of miles per second.

To do that without flying apart, it would have to have incredible strength. Literally "incredible" as in "cannot be credited, unbelievable." You'd need a building material with a tensile strength on the order of that of the atomic nucleus; nothing made out of atoms could qualify.
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Samuel wrote:Stuart, don't resolve these explicatly for your book. Make sure the story is self consistent and has hints and have the characters raise all these different theories

Seconded.

Very few people have the qualifications to create a self-consistent universe that answers all the questions we've raised on the past few pages. There is absolutely no shame in not being one of them; such a one would probably be on friendly professional-peer terms with the like of Einstein, Feynman, or Hawking.

Speaking of Hawking, if he were to die, would he be up and walking and articulate in hell?