It's very Science but also very Gender and I love that for it.
Only a weird-ass book like this could utter the statement that "hoping to see the beginning of the universe is like hoping to meet your own mother" (paraphrased) and have it both make sense and come across as poignant.
Content warning Chapter 9-ish
Unsure if I'm supposed to read the relationships between Yalda and Tullia as romantic, but I am, so Tullia's fate seems a bit Bury Your Gays. But then, it's not like the story is trying to shy away from the consequences of its bizarre biology on the characters' lives and relationships.
Wonder what made it happen, though, or if we'll ever know.
People write by forming symbols on their bodies, covering them with dye, and pressing paper against themselves.
The newspaper is called "The City Skin".
Amazing.
Yalda had not been keeping track of the old calendar; she had to calculate the answer on the spot. The only practical approach was to use the home world’s idea of simultaneity to link the two histories; the date obtained that way would cease advancing while the Peerless was traveling orthogonally, but was otherwise well-behaved. Attaching the definition of “now” to the Peerless’s own meandering history would have made the date back home race into the infinite future as they accelerated, swing back all the way to the infinite past as they reversed, and then return to sanity just in time for the reunion.
A nice summation of asymmetry of the twin paradox!
Content warning Afterword
That said, the most striking aspects of the Orthogonal universe—the fact that light in a vacuum will travel at different speeds depending on its wavelength; the fact that the energy in a particle’s mass will have the opposite sense to its kinetic energy; the fact that like charges will attract, close up, but then experience a force that oscillates with distance between attraction and repulsion; the existence of both positive and negative temperatures; and the fact that an interstellar journey will take longer for the travelers than for the people they left behind—are all straightforward consequences of the novel’s premise.
Yeah. Straightforward.
Tegmark classifies universes with no time dimension as “unpredictable” (p 34). However, he appears not to have considered cases where the underlying space-time is a compact manifold, making the universe finite.
Oh please do dunk on Tegmark, I love it.
