I just realised that I’ve not posted any of my stories for a while. In fact I’ve not posted much at all! I’ve still been writing stories, but most of the time I’ve been polishing ones that I’ve already written.
The stories that I am posting below are ones which I’ve not posted before, but when I’ve figured out how to update files on this site I will update some of the older ones. I’ve not substantially changed them though. I’ve just changed a few sentences, corrected some grammar and spelling mistakes. That sort of thing. I hate seeing mistakes in my stories!
Under the Bridge
The troll didn’t have a name, and the humans teased him. He lived quietly under a bridge, and appreciated the smoothness of a stone, the strength of a rock, and the trickling of the stream. But he saves the humans and meets an intriguing fellow stream dweller.
There was something about the cat, the Boffin decided, that was not quite right. The Mage agreed, so they kept an eye on her. She led them to an encounter with a prickly Cat Queen, and the Mage and the Boffin uncovered a plot.
The Master lives high on the mountain known as the Behemoth. He sees climbers come to try to conquer the mountain and often, they die. The Master knows everything, except those things that he deliberately chooses not to know. He is waiting for his Student to appear from the world below.
It’s a time of war, and a time of disruption. The girl robs dead bodies for food because her mother is dead and her father is missing. She is barely surviving, but then one of the dead bodies turns out to be not as dead as she thought.
Azathoth searches for something, but he doesn’t know what. He travels the infinite universes, searching for life and the meaning for his existence. He meets a girl and lives a full human life, but there is more to him than that.
Please note, I’ve decided to share my stories here as PDFs. If you would prefer a different format, for example, an ePub file, just let me know through my feedback form.
Merlin, from the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Some accounts have the wizard Merlin living his life from future to past, in the opposite direction to the rest of us. This meant that to him, what would a final farewell to us would be a joyous first meeting for him, and a first meeting would a sad goodbye. He remembered the future, but the past was a complete mystery to him.
Troll becoming a mountain ill jnl (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The trolls in Terry Pratchett’s Diskworld had similar ideas. They considered that they travelled through time from past to future, as is normally understood, but they also considered that we were facing backwards in time as we travelled through it. This was conjectured by the trolls, to explain the fact that we can see where we are going when we travel in whatever direction we choose but we cannot see where we are going in time. Similarly we can’t see where we have been when walking from one place to another, but we can see where we have been in time.
discworld town lancre terry pratchett (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Scientists have no difficulties with direction in time. In an equation with a time variable in it, one can trace the changes to other variables from the nominal zero point to see what would occur in the future, merely by incrementing the time variable. A scientist can predict the trajectory of a thrown item (a parabola) merely by substituting later times into the time variable in the equation.
y =ax² + bx + c
The scientist should compare these results to experiment and find, that this more or less works. Lets say though, that the scientist is an astrophysicist investigating an asteroid or other object on a parabolic trajectory around a larger object, like a moon or planet. (A parabolic trajectory is the trajectory which divides objects in hyperbolic trajectories which are not bound by the larger body’s gravity, from those in elliptical trajectories where the object is bound by the larger body’s gravity).
English: Parabola showing relation between the focus, directrix, and a point on the curve. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The astrophysicist would be able to track the trajectory of the body backwards in time, simply by substituting negative values for time into his equations. He would be able to see where it had been. However this process of substituting negative time values into the equations only works so far. At some point the body will feel the influence of other objects and the retrograde trajectory will deviate from the values predicted by the parabolic equation.
Of course, if the trajectory is projected forwards far enough similar considerations arise. Eventually some other body will divert the body away from the parabolic trajectory. However in the region in which the parabola applies, the behaviour is symmetrical with respect to time. From a film of the event one could not tell whether or not the film was being run forwards or backwards.
Of course, if a film is run backwards for any length of time, it becomes obvious that something is wrong. Things fall upwards, and broken crockery comes back together again. People walk backwards.
On a closer look, people can intentionally walk backwards and it is possible that a spring or other mechanism could be used to shoot things upwards, but it is a lot harder to imagine a way of reversing the breakage of the crockery. It implies that some process involved in the breaking of crockery is not reversible at a macro level.
It is likely that the process in question is at the molecular level or slightly above. To rejoin two broken surfaces spontaneously would presumably require that the molecules be in the correct positions and that a little burst of energy (equivalent to the little burst of energy that comprises the sound that the crockery makes in breaking and any heat release) be supplied at an instant in time. The weak bonds between the parts of crockery would need to be created, and that is really difficult.
There’s therefore a discrepancy between the scientist’s view of the world, through his equation which time-symmetrical, and the man in the street’s view of the world, which is asymmetrical with respect to time. In fiction this asymmetry is used to good effect, when the protagonist may “wind back time”, to write a wrong or divert history to an alternate course.
When we consider space we usually imagine a three dimensional space. Events happen at locations in this space and three coordinates are enough to locate an event in space. Every possible point in space has its set of unique coordinates. It is common to add an extra dimension for time, making the space four dimension and consequently difficult to imagine successfully.
English: Coordinates as distances from coordinate planes in 3 space. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
All events in space and time have a location and time and are represented by a point in the four dimensional space. The path of a particle is a line within this space, and any point on the line represents the position of the particle at a particular time. Positions on the line are either before or after this point, so it constitutes a “now” point for the particle. There is no actual motion over the line, since in the 4-D space all points represent the past and the future of the particle. They are already there.
The Klein bottle immersed in three-dimensional space. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
To move to an earlier time, all we need to do is move to an earlier spot on the line. We would need to either travel back along the line at a speed of so many seconds per seconds where the first “seconds” is seconds measured in the space and the second “seconds” is some other time scale or we could jump out of the space-time completely and return to the requisite point earlier in time. We’d need to do the latter in some other space-time that embeds the original space-time, adding a number of extra dimensions to the mix.
Both options require the addition of extra dimensions, which while possible complicates the situation unacceptably to my mind. The process of adding extra dimensions could be repeated and go on forever, so we end up with infinite dimensions. I believe that it is correct to employ Occam’s razor at this point and declare that it appears unlikely that we could either roll back time or jump to an earlier point in time because of the implication that we would needs infinite dimensions as a result.
English: The Church at Ockham William of Occam, died 1285 is commemorated in the church in a stained glass window. He gave his name to ‘Occam’s Razor’, whereby in any investigation: follow the obvious path first – it’s likely to be correct. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
We had reason to visit another suburb today. It wasn’t until I was sitting waiting for some traffic lights to change that I thought about how I was navigating from home to destination.
We just got into the car and drove there. I didn’t consider the route in advance, and it seemed that I just pointed the car and we got there. Obviously I knew the way, as we had been there or through there a number of times in the past. But I didn’t have the destination in mind from start to finish, at least not consciously. I’m not sure that I had it in the forefront of my mind at all.
English: Driving Route 40 to El Chalten was pure driving pleasure. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I knew that it was in that direction though, and that did not leave a lot of route options. I did have a general feeling that I should go south, in this instance and that really only leaves two options, the back road, or the motorway. The back road is a lot prettier!
I made the choice to take the back road but it was not, as I said, at the forefront of my mind, as I was doing other things at the time, like finding my keys, my phone, my wallet and these things occupied the forefront, while the decision about which route to take was more background.
English: Mind the dip Looking down the road is a hidden dip. The farmers are busy with the harvest while the weather stays dry. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
So the route was chosen more of less in the background, but not subconsciously. Much the same process happened on the way there, and at each junction or turning point, I didn’t have to consider at the front of my mind which direction I should drive. I just did it. Some part of my mind knew that to get to our destination I had to turn right, or go straight on or whatever.
This is good because the front of my mind was doing the driving, keeping the car on line, signalling, accelerating or braking, keeping us safe on the road. Except that it wasn’t right at the front mind, since I was also talking to my wife about various things. Christmas things from memory.
English: Two motorcycle trailing off the brakes through Tooele Turn at Miller Motorsports Park. Rider on the white bike is Warren Rose, Rider of the green bike is Dave Palazzolo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I’ve been driving for many years and I’m confident that if needed the driving part of my mind can instantly oust the things currently in my mind should the unexpected happen. Many year ago, when I used to smoke, I was driving with a friend and an emergency happened. When it was over I realised that I was no longer holding my cigarette. Meantime my friend was scrabbling between his legs where my cigarette had ended up when the driving part of my mind grabbed precedence and the cigarette holding part was temporarily ousted.
The route planning part of my mind would not suddenly get control like that, fortunately. That would be highly dangerous. I could if I had wanted have brought the route planning part of my mind to the front, but it wouldn’t say much except “turn left at the next junction”.
Turn Left, Turn Right (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I have on occasion made a navigating mistake. I’m going to A and the route to B is the same in part. Suddenly I realise that I have missed a junction and will have to backtrack. It seems that the route finding part of my mind spends much of the time dozing and checks in only infrequently, sometimes missing the turning point or ritually following a more usual route.
It also seems that the information it keeps is like an instruction to take an action at each decision point rather than the whole route from home to destination as well as a general direction, less well specified. GPS guidance systems seem to work this way too in that they instruct you to take an action at each junction without setting out the whole route each time.
The model of the mind that I’ve used above, of various parts of the mind at various levels of “forefrontness” or consciousness is nothing new. The need to make a part of the mind the one at the top of the conscious levels, suddenly as a result of a danger, or selectively by choice, as in route following reminds me of the way that computer programs
Computers have several methods for navigating through programs and reacting to things that happen when they are running. One big part is called “handling errors”. Dividing by zero is an error and if the computer reaches a point where it has to divide by zero something needs to be done. The program can report the error and gracefully stop, or it can take some action to fix the error and then carry on.
English: A Texas Instruments TI-86 graphing calculator displaying an error message, indicating that the user or a running program has attempted to divide by zero. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Computers handle error by means of “interrupts”. Whether the errors is software (eg divide by zero) or caused by hardware connected to it (eg input/output errors) the computer stops what it is doing and runs a bit of program that handle the errors by sending a message or fixing things up. The bits of program that were running are suspended and after the error is handled the bits that were running may be given back control.
The mind seems to work in a similar way. When an emergency arises the current part of the mind that is at the forefront gets suspended and the emergency is handled by another part of the mind. A pedestrian steps into the road and you react by standing on the brakes “before you know it” as the saying goes. As soon as the emergency is over, the conscious mind takes over again.
a short .gif of the Taiwanese animated pedestrian road crossing sign (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
You do indeed react “before you know it”, one might say instinctively. But humans have not been driving cars for much more than one hundred years, so it appears that the reaction is not instinctive in itself, but is an instinctive reaction to a danger that has been learned. We seem to have this fast reaction to events which is instinctively based but can be applied to learned situations, which is much more flexible than hard-wired instincts would be.
So, pondering on how I get from A to B has led me to conjecture that there are parts of the mind which are forefront in our minds and other parts which are not directly in the forefront but which can be brought to the forefront in an instant, when an event happens. It is evident that these parts are only partially backgrounded as the mind as a whole has some aware of the location at the time, but they do act semi-autonomously, that is until the pedestrian steps out onto the roadway.
Evidently there are parts of the mind that are less foregrounded and more backgrounded. When the part of the mind that is concerned with driving wants to signal or change gear, another part of the mind which controls the arms and legs wakes up and make the limbs move as needed.
I’ve spoken above as if all these different levels are discrete states, but I think it more likely that is a continuum from the foreground of the mind to the background or a least the series of levels of consciousness are close enough togerther to appear so. The mind is a complex and wonderful thing.
[Comment: After finishing this post I went looking for other discussions of the same topic. I first found this Wikipedia article which has the issues mentioned in the article’s header. Interestingly the implication in the article is that there is a single level of consciousness at any one time. This I do not agree with. Another article I found was a little better, I feel, but only because it acknowledges that several levels may be active at the same time, but divides them into three levels with well defined scopes. I feel that it is a lot more complex than that, with all sorts of sections of the mind at all sorts of levels being active at the same time. Neither article deals with the issue of one section of the mind apparently seizing the highest level when an external event triggers it.]
English: The Clump looking from the Redhouse (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Where ever one looks, things mostly seem to be in lumps or clumps of matter. We live on a lump of matter, one of a number of lumps of matter orbiting an even bigger lump of matter. We look into the sky when the bigger lump of matter is conveniently on the other side of our lump of matter and we see evidence of other lumps of matter similar to the lump of matter that our lump of matter orbits.
We see stars, in short, which poetically speaking float in a void empty of matter. We can see that these stars are not evenly distributed and that they gather together in clumps which we call galaxies. Actually stars seem to clump together in smaller clumps such as the Local Cluster of a dozen or so stars, and most galaxies have arms or other features that show structure at all levels.
Ancient Galaxy Cluster Still Producing Stars (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The galaxies, which we can see between the much closer stars of our own galaxy, also appear to be clustered together in clumps, and the clumps seem to be clumped together. Of course, the ultimate clump is the Universe itself, but at all levels the Universe appears to have structure, to be organised, to be formed of lumps and clumps, variously shaped into loops, whorls, sheets, arms, rings, bubbles, and so on.
OK, but in the other direction, towards the smaller rather than the larger, our planet has various systems, weather, orogenic, natural, social and evolutionary. All sorts of systems at all levels, from global scope to the scope of the smallest element.
In other personal worlds, below the level our interactions with our families, we have all the systems that make up our own bodies. The system that circulates our blood, the system that processes our food, the system that maintains our multiple systems in a state homeostasis.
That is, not a steady state, but a state where all the individual systems self-adjust so that the larger system does not descend into a state of chaos, leading to a disruption of the larger whole. Death.
The main pathways of metabolism in humans, showing all metabolites that account for >1% of an excreted dose. ;Legend PNU-142300, accounts for ~10% of excreted dose at PNU-142586, accounts for ~45% of excreted dose at steady state PNU-173558, accounts for ~3.3% of excreted dose at steady state (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
By and large most systems in our environment are made up of molecules, which are in turn made up of atoms. Atoms are a convenient stopping point on the scale from very large to very small. They are pretty “well defined”, in that they are a very strong concept.
Atoms are rarely found solo. They are sociable critters. They form relationships with other atoms, but some atoms are more sociable than others, forming multiple bonds with other atoms. Some are more promiscuous than others, changing partners frequently.
These relationships are called molecules, and range from simple to complex, containing from two or three atoms, to millions of atoms. The really large molecules can be broken down to smaller sub-molecules which are linked repeatedly to make up the complex molecules.
To rise higher up the scale for a moment, these molecules, large and small are organised into cells, which are essentially factories for making identical or nearly identical copies of themselves. The differences are necessary to make cells into muscles or organs and other functional features, and cells that make bones and sinews and other structural parts of a body.
A section of DNA; the sequence of the plate-like units (nucleotides) in the center carries information. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
As I said, atoms are a convenient stopping point. Every atom of an element is identical at least in its base state. It may lose or gain electrons in a “relationship” or molecule, but basically it is the same as any other element of the same sort.
Each atom consists of a nucleus and surrounding electrons, a model which some people liken to a solar system. There are similarities, but there are also differences (which I won’t go into in this post). The nucleus consists a mix of protons and neutrons. While the number neutrons may vary, they don’t significantly affect the chemical properties of the atom, which makes all atoms of an element effectively the same.
An early, outdated representation of an atom, with nucleus and electrons described as well-localized particles on well-localized orbits. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Each component of an atom is made up of smaller particles called “elementary” particles, although they may not be fundamentally elementary. At this level we reach the blurry level of quantum physics where a particle has an imprecise definition and an imprecise location in macroscopic terms.
Having travelled from the largest to the smallest, I’m now going to talk mathematics. I’ll link back to physics at the end.
Nucleus (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
We are all familiar with counting. One, two, three and so on. These concepts are the atoms of the mathematical world. They can be built up into complex structures, much like atoms can be built into molecules, organelles, cells, tissues and organs. (The analogy is far from perfect. I can think of several ways that it breaks down).
Below the “atomic” level of the integers is the “elementary” level of the rational numbers, what most people would recognise as fractions. Interestingly between any two rational numbers, you can find other rational numbers. These are very roughly equivalent to the elementary particles. Very roughly.
Half of the Hadron Calorimeter (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
One might think that these would exhaust the list of types of numbers, but below (in a sense) the rational numbers is the level of the real numbers. While many of the real numbers are also rational numbers, the majority of the real numbers ate not rational numbers.
The level of the real numbers is also known as the level of the continuum. A continuum implies a line has no gaps, as in a line drawn with a pencil. If the line is made up of dots, no matter how small, it doesn’t represent a continuum.
Qunatum dots delivered by ccp (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
A line made up of atoms is not a continuum, nor is a line of elementary particles. While scientists have found ever more fundamental particles, the line has apparently ended with quarks. Quantum physics seems to indicate that nature, at the lowest level, is discrete, or, to loop back to the start of this post, lumpy. There doesn’t seem to be a level of the continuum in nature.
That leaves us with two options. Either there is no level of the continuum in nature and nature is fundamentally lumpy, or the apparent indication of quantum physics that nature is lumpy is wrong.
It’s hard to believe that a lumpy universe would permit the concept of the continuum. If the nature of things is discrete, it’s hard to see how one could consider a smooth continuous thing. It’s like considering chess, which fundamentally defines a discontinuous world, where a playing piece is in a particular square and a square contains a playing piece or not.
It’s a weak argument, but the fact that we can conceive the concept of a continuum hints that the universe may be fundamentally continuous, in spite of quantum physics’ indications that it is not continuous.
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