Sci-Fi Alternate Dimension

[Ejcards]

I think a story where a person is transported to an alternate reality could have some potential. Authors could make the new reality however they wanted, and the experience of a person from our society discovering a new world and learning to have a role in it could be interesting.

 

[Jenny_Jackson]

I think a story where a person is transported to an alternate reality could have some potential. Authors could make the new reality however they wanted, and the experience of a person from our society discovering a new world and learning to have a role in it could be interesting.

EJCards,

The definition of Sci-Fi is "Fiction in an alternate universe or reality that works". HG Wells Time Machine is one example of the type of story you are talking about. In some ways Wells cheated the reader with impossible technology to move his character from Edwardian England to some alternate time in the past. But, it worked so... Heinlin did the same in several of his early novels. So it can be done ligitimately.

It's much easier to develop an alternate universe independant of our own and allow the characters to be contemporarry to our universe and interact on the other side. I've done that in a number of stories. In most contemporary Sci-Fi the characters are and act just as they would in our own universe. The thing that makes it interesting is the characters dealing with new experiences, new life forms etc.

JJ

 

[Fantasies_only]

EJCards,

The definition of Sci-Fi is "Fiction in an alternate universe or reality that works". HG Wells Time Machine is one example of the type of story you are talking about. In some ways Wells cheated the reader with impossible technology to move his character from Edwardian England to some alternate time in the past. But, it worked so... Heinlin did the same in several of his early novels. So it can be done ligitimately.

It's much easier to develop an alternate universe independant of our own and allow the characters to be contemporarry to our universe and interact on the other side. I've done that in a number of stories. In most contemporary Sci-Fi the characters are and act just as they would in our own universe. The thing that makes it interesting is the characters dealing with new experiences, new life forms etc.

JJ

Actually, Wells didn't do an alternate reality story, he wrote a dimensional transport story.
Time is the fourth dimension.
As for transporting from England (Boston in the new version) to the Eli community, it was explained in a world war, and a 2nd civil war which started the fall of Great Britain and the deterioration of London.

Planet Of The Apes is a good story to draw on.
Humans used apes as slaves, until one baby ape learned to talk.
This was taught by the very humans who saw them in the future to begin with.

 

[paskee]

Nice story........



Spam deleted

 

[Jenny_Jackson]

Actually, Wells didn't do an alternate reality story, he wrote a dimensional transport story.
Time is the fourth dimension.

Actually, Wells had no idea of Dimensional Transport. That theory was developed in the 1930's. As far a Time being the fourth dimension, that's a theory from pulp Sci-Fi in the 50's. The Math doesn't really support that theory. The Special Theory of Relitivity says both Time and Matter can and are distorted under some circumstances, but only from a point of reference of an outside observer. For instance, if you drive your car in a straight line at 60 mph for 1 mile, during the trip your car will be/appear shorter by 1/3 the width of a hydrogen atom and you will lose 0.001 nano seconds during the trip. (from Classical Physics 315). But you haven't moved from one Dimension to another any time during the trip. If you increase your speed to something approaching the speed of light, you could change states from matter to energy, but still would remain in the same dimension.

What Wells did was build a mechanical device using 19th Century materials and technology to TIME TRANSPORT to an earlier Time. There was no dimensional transport at all and the possibility of such a machine either in Wells' time or our own is unlikely even with current technology.

Wells used his fictional machine to transport into an alternate universe not alternate reality. If you are looking for alternate realities, try Philip K. Dick's work.

I hold to my previous statement.

 

[Fantasies_only]

Remember the end of the book/movie?
He tried to rebuild the Eli city with knowledge from his time, by bringing back books from the past.

My question is why wasn't it a one way trip as Einstein suggested?
The other question is how did he go to the future in the first place, when the future wasn't written yet?
He should have traveled to the past, not the future.

 

[Jenny_Jackson]

Remember the end of the book/movie?
He tried to rebuild the Eli city with knowledge from his time, by bringing back books from the past.

My question is why wasn't it a one way trip as Einstein suggested?
The other question is how did he go to the future in the first place, when the future wasn't written yet?
He should have traveled to the past, not the future.

In the book (which I read as a teenager) as I remember Eli City was in the future. He returned to his own time for the books. Then moved the machine to a location outside the cavern and returned to the future.

Wells was a product of Edwardian England. This was a time of Empire for the British. Empire and wars go hand in hand. I don't know that Wells would have too much trouble predicting that wars would occur and, like all Empires of History, the British Empire would fall also.

As you recall, Time was passing very quickly and his observations of the future events of the late 19th and 20th centuries was rather sketchy. The entire exercise was to move from his world to some future, primative alternate universe, unlike Edwardian England.

I can't think of anything in Einstien's Special Theory of Relativity or his Unified Field Theory that would predict travel into either the future or the past. Instead, he seems to say that time is a relative thing based more on point of view than anything else. That is to say, if you could accelerate to something approaching the speed of light, you would see no difference in time. However, another observer would see that your time appeared to have slowed down. There is nothing in either theory that would predict time speeding up for a moving object. For that reason, I don't see that Einstein is really applicable to time travel at all.

As I originally said, Wells drew on some imaginary technology that did not exist in his day (or ours for that matter) simply as a vehicle to move from his own universe to and alternate one in the future. It's a fanciful idea that has been used over and over in Sci-Fi. Even, Azimov and Heinlein used it some years ago. But they did the same thing. The used it, but didn't try and explain it.

 

[Fantasies_only]

As far as Einstein goes, what he said was light cannot bend (although we know better now) so if something could travel on it, navigation would be impossible.
He also suggests that light from the present can go back to the past he calls "light years".
Since time is relative to the current timeline, that stream of light is broken into many possible streams, but from the starting point, it can only go backwards, because if it went forwards, the light would break up like a shattered mirror (see multiple universe theory).

 

[Jenny_Jackson]

As far as Einstein goes, what he said was light cannot bend (although we know better now) so if something could travel on it, navigation would be impossible.
He also suggests that light from the present can go back to the past he calls "light years".
Since time is relative to the current timeline, that stream of light is broken into many possible streams, but from the starting point, it can only go backwards, because if it went forwards, the light would break up like a shattered mirror (see multiple universe theory).

What world are you living in and what pulp fictional account of Einstein are you reading? Einstien said SPECIFICALLY that there is no such thing as either a straight line or a flat surface. ALL SPACE IS CURVED. He never said either in a lecture or in his math that time could move either forward or backwards. Nor he even imagine using light or time as a vehicle.

In fact, he uses the speed of light ( C ) as the only constant in his equations.

I really think you need to go back and review his math (not what someone said about his math) before you say anything else. I hope you have a good back ground in quantum mechanics. You'll need it.

If you are going to do Science Fiction today, you need to get the theory and math right because the readers will. If you are wrong they will call you on it.

 

[Fantasies_only]

What world are you living in and what pulp fictional account of Einstein are you reading? Einstien said SPECIFICALLY that there is no such thing as either a straight line or a flat surface. ALL SPACE IS CURVED. He never said either in a lecture or in his math that time could move either forward or backwards. Nor he even imagine using light or time as a vehicle.

In fact, he uses the speed of light ( C ) as the only constant in his equations.

I really think you need to go back and review his math (not what someone said about his math) before you say anything else. I hope you have a good back ground in quantum mechanics. You'll need it.

If you are going to do Science Fiction today, you need to get the theory and math right because the readers will. If you are wrong they will call you on it.

Curved space is Professor Stephen Hawking's theory (see wormholes) that could take decades off a space journey.

Einstein said if you could travel on a beam of light, you would go backwards in time.
Later it was added (possibly by Carl Sagan) that you would also lose mass, like astronauts on other worlds.

 

[AlienHunter]

I think a story where a person is transported to an alternate reality could have some potential. Authors could make the new reality however they wanted, and the experience of a person from our society discovering a new world and learning to have a role in it could be interesting.

intresting idea ... perhaps it can be a world in which men are forced to have sex with women and then they're killed after they're no longer needed