More Book Cover Designs

 Hi Guys,

Okay, just having a little fun with Deep Dream. So take a look!

So this, or a variant will be the cover for the next Barton Villa. That's Dee Wallace by the way. and pretty close to how I imagined her, just a little hotter!

A couple of versions for the other novel I'm working on - "A Ghost Of A Chance" It's a steampunk fantasy in case you couldn't guess!

And while I was looking for covers for Moody Rockers - an urban sci fi, I somehow created this! Hell if I know how! But here's something closer to the actual cover:

Damn this thing is fun!!!

Cheers, Greg.

Airlocks and Reality

 Hi Guys,

Bit of a pet peeve of mine, which I thought I'd let loose. (Sometimes you just see the same thing too many times and you just have to say something.) For me it's airlocks. I've been watching a whole bunch of sci fi / space opera shows lately, (even though I should be writing!) and I don't know how many times I've seen it but people keep getting blown out of airlocks. I hate that! It drives me nuts! It's just so wrong!

There's a couple of reasons for that. The first is of course the design of airlocks which has a single overwhelming priority - keeping the air inside the ship. Air is absolutely the most precious resource a space ship can have, and it can never be wasted. Which means that every airlock in a space ship has a single operational principle - the outer hatch will not open if there's air in the airlock. If it did every time one opened the ship would lose air.

So the way they actually operate, is that you get into the air lock, both hatches are closed, and then the air is pumped out of the airlock, before the outer hatch is opened.

It works exactly the opposite way on submarines where the water is trying to get in. The airlock is emptied before you can open the inner hatch. If it wasn't, then every time you opened the inner hatch, you'd be hit by a wall of water. 

Of course there's a physics issue too. In order to blow someone out of an airlock, you need a pretty good blast of wind. But unless the inner hatch is open as well - in which case all of the ship's air is escaping to space and everyone's dying - it's not happening. The airlock itself is only a small space within the ship - lets say eight cubic metres - or a two by two by two cube. The hatch has to allow people in and out so it's probably the same size as a door in your home, say two square metres. So if all the air rushes out in one second when the door opens, the jet stream hurling the guy out is blasting at a rate of two metres per second for that second or four and a half miles an hour. Which means that only if the man inside was standing right at the outer hatch and got hit by all the air escaping the airlock, would he have to face a full second of this tiny breeze. But most likely if he was up against the inner hatch, banging away frantically as they do in so many films, he wouldn't get hit by any rush of air at all.

You could of course speed up the rush of air by decreasing the size of the outer hatch - rather like making air fly faster by blowing through a straw. But there are limits to how fast the air can fly, and even if all the air smashed into the chest of the trapped man, there would still be no more air mass hitting him than before. And worse, even if for a second that faster moving eight cubic metres of air at one atmosphere dislodged him, he wouldn't go very far. The outer hatch would be so much smaller to achieve this, that he would hit it and get stuck!

So airlocks are a pet peeve of mine - as are killer storms on Mars which has an atmosphere only one percent as dense as that of Earth. Even thousand mile an hour winds would be no worse than someone blowing on you on Earth. And ray guns making noises in space where there's no sound.

My point here is that space operas like all genres, needs to follow some basic physics rules and you can't just write things because they sound cool. And I say that as someone who isn't even a hard science fiction writer. So my thought for writers of sci fi when they're plotting is to add another question to their plotting process - "is this possible?"

Anyway, enough griping. I should get back to writing. After all I am busy working on three books at once! But the good news is that Chy is almost done and hopefully in another month or so it'll be out.

Cheers, Greg.

Relativity-ly Speaking

Hi Guys,

New post this time. It's late and I'm tired, so I thought I'd give all the relativists among you a conundrum to enjoy.

This is one that's based on the theory of special relativity, and also one that I posted long ago on Philosophy Forums before it went away. You may still be able to find it under my nom-de-net of Psychotick.

This is based on the commonly known twins paradox. Most of you will be familiar with the basics of it. In essence special relativity says that if you have two twins and you stick one on a rocket ship and he flies away at high speed and comes back, because he's been traveling at a significant fraction of the speed of light, he will have experienced less time. So when he comes back to Earth and meets his twin brother, he'll actually be younger than him.

Now about three or four years ago it occurred to me that this scenario is self defeating. (From a philosophical / logical point of view. Those of you who've watched The Good Place - which is brilliant by the way - will have heard the oft repeated complaint that "this is why everybody hates moral philosophers". Here I'm going to expand that to "this is why everybody hates philosophers!")

Okay, so lets get back to the paradox - and try and place it within the frame of special relativity. Now the first tenet of relativity is that there is no absolute inertial frame of reference. A complicated way of saying that you can't look at an inertial problem from the outside. You can only examine it from the perspectives of the - usually two - inertial frames of reference concerned. Call them A and B - or in this case the rocket ship and Earth.

Immediately you do this, you run into a basic problem of definitions - and no I don't mean that semantically. In short if we have no absolute inertial frame of reference, then it becomes impossible to say that a rocket ship leaves Earth. You can only say that if you have an external perspective on the situation such that you can see that the Earth is stationary or alternatively moving at a standard rate with no accelerative force acting on it, while the rocket ship is traveling away from it. Since you don't have this by definition of the theory of special relativity, you can't make this statement.

Instead the statement you have to make is that the earth and the rocket ship are moving apart.

I know, that sounds screwy. But within the confines of special relativity, it's correct. And you can understand it from a practical perspective too. If you're on the rocket ship and you stare out of the port hole at the retreating Earth, who are you to say that you're the one who's leaving the Earth and it's not leaving you? If you're not accelerating, you won't feel any motion. So the only thing that tells you you're leaving the Earth is your understanding that the Earth is huge and you blasted off from it. Likewise if you're on the Earth staring at the rocket ship, the sensation of gravity makes you think that you're standing still and it's leaving you, but that is no part of special relativity.

Alright, now lets hook this new definition into the twins paradox. Now according to the original paradox the rocket ship was leaving Earth. Now we can say instead that the rocket ship and the Earth are leaving each other. If that's the case than our two twins are both in the same situation. Each sees the other leaving him at whatever speed, and according to special relativity that means they're both in the position of claiming that because the other is traveling away from them at a significant fraction of the speed of light, and therefore both will expect the other to have experienced less time. Which means that when they come back together, there should be no real difference in elapsed time. Time slowed down equally for both of them.

So now we find ourselves in a conundrum - I think I'll call it a Psychotickian Conundrum! There are two options. Either the paradox doesn't hold, and we don't expect the twins to come back together having experienced different amounts of time - despite what we are constantly being told has been observed. Or the basic tenet of relativity, that there is no absolute inertial frame of reference, does not hold.

Now of course those who believe in relativity, are going to argue that it's due to mass, gravity and acceleration, none of which I would point out are a part of special relativity.

Okay, so enough of this. I'll leave you to your head scratching, and just finish with this most basic of all understandings. This is why everybody hates philosophers! We love to poke holes in things!

Cheers, Greg (aka Psychotick).

Magical Science

Hi Guys,

This time I thought I'd turn to a slightly different aspect of writing - magical science. Or put another way, science that simply isn't possible.

Now as you know I write space opera and one of the impossible sciences that's fairly much vital to the genre is faster than light travel. To those purists among you who only read so-called hard science fiction, this is pure fantasy. And who knows, maybe you're right. But maybe, you're wrong. It all comes down to whether the theory of relativity is right. And for my part, while I don't intend to expound in great detail about the problems I find with the theory, I would point out one important fact. It's a theory. Therefore I feel quite comfortable inventing and using various methods of FTL travel in my books.

There are however, other scientific principles that I have a harder time allowing to be broken. One of them as you may know - since I actually wrote a book about it - is the concept of disassembling and reassembling someone and expecting them to somehow live through it. Yes this is the Star Trek transporter! This device, invented because the show was low on budget and they couldn't afford to create sets of shuttles etc, if it worked would actually be a killing booth that murdered a man at one end and created an exact duplicate at the other, Or according to others a nearly exact duplicate with bits of fly mixed in!

Having said that, there are other, similar ideas which for me at least, don't pass the sniff test. One of them, which pops up all over the place, is the idea of somehow uploading your consciousness into a computer to become a digital immortal. To me at least, this is pure nonsense. It will never be possible. Yes you may be able to make an exact digital copy of your brain / mind one day and put it out on a network of some sort. That seems perfectly plausible. But what isn't plausible is that that copy will be you. It'll just be a copy. You'll still be where you were in the real world - though quite possibly dead.

Time travel also falls within the spectrum of impossible science for me. I don't accept that time travel is possible in anyway - and not just because of the inevitable paradoxes it would cause.

And while I'm at it, mirror universes are also out. Parallel universes are fine. But mirror ones where there's an exact duplicate of everyone on Earth living the same lives? No. That's fantasy too. I mean think about it - an exact duplicate universe with just one tiny little change as they all inevitably have? That change, no matter how minor, after its been experienced by every person in the mirror universe for millions of years, is no longer minor. The butterfly effect would have kicked in and it would be extremely unlikely that any single person in our universe would have a duplicate in the other one.

I could go on. I could mention the bizarre mish mash of diseases that turned up in the Helix tv series - none of which made any sense. Or the immense windstorms on Mars that apparently blow people around like confetti when the atmosphere there is only one percent as dense as that on Earth. Then there's the Xelayan heavy worlder from the Orville. Yes she may have vast strength. But unless she also weighs thirty or so tons, when she hits a metal wall with all her strength, she's the one who's going to be bouncing off it!

My point here, is that everyone has different limits to what they will accept as believable, and when it comes to basic scientific principles you have to tread very carefully as authors. Because it doesn't matter how you spin it - whether you try to gloss over the impossibility without any explanation, make up some pseudo scientific sound basis, or simply assert it as scientific fact - the moment you cross these boundaries, you're going to lose readers.

As someone once said, as a writer you can be allowed one impossible thing in a story, but no more. So treasure it and use it wisely.

Anyway, Cheers, for now,

Greg.

The Speed Of Information

Hi Guys,

Bit of a change in topic this time. First up the next book – Fineas and Tusk: The Epic Journey of a Man and His Pig, is with the editor at the moment, but since she's in the process of moving house at the moment, it may be a while before it returns to me. The image above by the way is one that I found on DeviantArt.com while I was searching covers for the book, and while I can't use it since it doesn't really match the story at all, I loved it so I thought I'd share it. I may contact the artist and get him to paint me something similar.

However, this time I thought I'd return to an old chestnut of mine – Relativity and space opera. We all know the basics, Relativity means that faster than light travel is essentially impossible, so most space opera is impossible. In essence if we want to write space opera grounded in any sort of reality we have to resort to cheats like warp drives and hyperspace. Theoretical speculations and mathematical possibilities but still things not observed. Or else write things like The Expanse and Starhunter – sub-light speed space opera contained within the solar system. Alternatively we risk arousing the wrath of hard science fiction fans and being told we're fantasists. (That may actually be true in my case!)

But as some of you may know, I have never been the most ardent believer in Relativity. Yes I know – it's one of the most tested and validated theories in physics, and even suggesting that it may not be right is like standing on sacred ground for many. But I have never been comfortable with the idea that time is mutable. To me it seems that if time can be slowed by motion or gravity, or even stopped, then it can be reversed and time travel becomes possible – and I really do not accept time travel. To me something either is completely mutable or it isn't at all. And if time is actually mutable as Relativity says, than we live in a universe of time travel paradoxes.

Naturally I don't think my speculations are going to end up on the title pages of any physics text books any time soon! In fact quite likely I may end up labelled as a Luddite! But that's life.

However in keeping with my views, I've often found myself wondering over the years, is there a way to explain the observations of Relativity without actually having to claim that time itself is somehow being bent? And the answer is yes – at least in my view. I'll attempt to explain my answer here. (Physicists avert your gazes now – this may be treason!)

So my theory is a simple one. That what is observed, has nothing to do with time being bent or slowed. It is in fact nothing more than an artifact of what I'll term the speed of information. Time is not in any way affected by motion. Only the information about it is.

Now I should say at the outset that this artifact is real. It must logically exist. So any theory of apparent time dilation must include it. I'm not sure however, if it's included in current relativistic calculations. I thought about contacting NASA and asking but could feel the laughter building!

OK, that said lets consider the old twins paradox which is what essentially buggers up a lot of space opera. Now according to Special Relativity we have one twin on Earth and the other on a rocket ship leaving Earth at the speed of light. The twin on the rocket ship has time slow down or stop for him, so that when he returns to Earth, he finds he is in fact younger than the twin he said goodbye to. And we have evidence that objects travelling away from Earth do in fact appear to be experiencing less time. Sounds like a case closed sort of thing doesn't it?!

But what I would ask you, would we expect to see if Relativity wasn't an issue? If the universe operated purely by Newtonian principles? Would we expect to see the rocket ship leaving us at the speed of light and everything as if it was happening right in front of us?

Actually no. If Relativity was not an issue we would expect to see that rocket ship which is heading away from Earth at the speed of light, seemingly only travelling at half the speed of light. And if there were portholes on that ship, we would expect to see the people on board moving and ageing at half speed. It would look like everything was in slow motion.

This has nothing to do with time dilation. Time is not being slowed in any way. This is purely an artifact of the speed with which the information about that rocket ship's travel comes back to us – at the speed of light.

To explain this, consider that the rocket ship has been travelling at the speed of light for a year. Could we sitting on Earth staring at it with our telescopes, expect to see the rocket ship one light year away? No. We would see it at the six month point in its trip. This is because the light from the rocket ship as it travels takes time to get back to us. So at the one year point in its journey, that light will take a second year to get back to us, meaning that we will observe the rocket ship at its one light year point, after two years.

To extend this point a little, if the ship is travelling to Alpha Centauri, four and a half light years away and is travelling at the speed of light, it will arrive in the system in four and a half years. But we on Earth will observe it arrive nine years after it left, without any time dilation being involved. Naturally this fits perfectly with the fact that everything we see of Alpha Centauri is four and a half years out of date.

Now lets reverse this a little. What does the man on the Rocket ship staring back at Earth see when he's travelling at the speed of light? And the answer assuming that he sees anything at all, is that he would see the Earth as if it was frozen in time. Someone had hit the pause button on the dvd player. This again is simply an artifact of the speed of information. All the light from Earth telling him what's happening there, is travelling with him at exactly the same speed. So the light that left Earth one second after he did, is still one second behind him for the entire journey.

And again to extend this point a little, when he arrives at his destination and stops, four and a half years later, he suddenly sees the Earth start moving again as someone hit play on the machine. But everything he sees is four and a half years out of date. Naturally once more this fits perfectly with the fact that everything seen of Earth from Alpha Centauri is four and a half years old.

Now lets add a third observer. This time the guy at Alpha Centauri watching the rocket ship come to him. What does he see in a universe without time dilation? Oddly, he sees nothing. The rocket ship takes off, but he won't see that until four and a half years later – at exactly the same time as the rocket ship arrives beside him. So he has the unusual experience four and a half years after the rocket ship leaves Earth, of seeing it take off, travel for four and a half years, and arrive all in the same instant. A sort of photonic boom.

So what does all of this mean for us space opera writers? It means at the very least that there is a simple explanation for why we might observe what seems to be time dilation without it actually existing. It also means there might be a very simple reason that we cannot observe anything travelling faster than the speed of light – all the information about that thing travels to us at the speed of light since it's axiomatic that light cannot travel faster than the speed of light.

Most importantly it means that we can write space opera involving faster than light travel without having to invoke the gods of hyperspace and warp drive etc, and still feel good about it! Hard science fiction be damned!!!

Anyway, must dash. I see the men with the white coats walking up the drive and I suspect they have a new jacket for me – one that straps up at the back!

Enjoy your writing.

Cheers, Greg.