from Hacker News

Special Relativity and Middle-Earth

by goy on 12/19/22, 8:25 AM with 10 comments

• by roenxi on 12/19/22, 12:32 PM

  I've always liked this sort of interpretation. because it suggests that the entire universe might actually be a static object; and time itself a complete illusion.

  Imagine a hyper-being that has a few more dimensions, looking down on us as we look down on Tao's treefolk. We might optimistically imagine that they see our little moment of conscious perception moving backwards and forwards in time like a motivated fish. We perceive it as one way though, because when our little window of perception moves backwards it enters a state where it cannot remember the future, and when it moves forward it enters a state where it has no reference of lingering unevenly at different past times.

  Seems unlikely, but so does everything else.

• by pavo-etc on 12/19/22, 10:34 AM

  The way this describes two treefolk seeing each other both aging slower is the first time I've really understood how two parties relativistic effects are both able to see each other aging slower than themselves: the points at which they are seeing each other are not simultaneous.

• by ndsipa_pomu on 12/19/22, 10:03 AM

  Fun article, but I think the connection to Middle-Earth is tenuous at best. I had hopes that there was going to be some interaction between trolls and humans, but he ends up just using the tree-like beings.

• by philipwhiuk on 12/19/22, 2:57 PM

  I don't really understand why he didn't just use trolls (which, as he mentions don't move in the day) rather than invent a new tree folk.

  It seems like he came up with the disk idea and then thought 'this looks like a tree' and back-solved Middle-Earth and then was like 'oops, this behaviour is actually trolls' when writing it up (rather adjusting his paper to use stone discs)

  I can't imagine there's many people who both get past the opening and don't understand the concept sufficiently for the allegory to be useful.