my brain hurts...

[ratcreature]

Obviously 6 a.m. in the morning after a night of no sleep is not a time to be able to follow websites on DC's Hypertime, even less so essays on why/how Hypertime is very different from the pre-Crisis Multiverse concept. Still the Hypertime site looks really interesting, and I'm definitely going to check these essays out when my brain is less addled.

Comments

[greenygal.livejournal.com]

...just looking at these essays is enough to make my head hurt. And I've read Hypertime stories.

(Actually, in my experience the main way it's different from the multiverse is that they kept adding rules to make it impossible to use. First you couldn't use it without threatening the stability of reality, then nobody was even allowed to know about it except a few chosen heroes...no surprise it hasn't amounted to much.)

[ratcreature]

Heh. Well I could follow the introduction essay once I had some sleep. But maybe that's because I'm used to basic principles not making sense so that you'd really *grok* them, but just making sense in that they work... I mean quantum theory is like that a lot. When they teach it to you as a physics student you get explained the mathematical mechanisms that allow you to calculate the things that you measure in experiments, first on an introductory level and it comes up many times later, and obviously people ask "but what does it mean?" and "how am I supposed to imagine that?" at first, but it just doesn't make the same kind of "intuitive" sense classical physics does, and basically they just tell you to use and practice the calculations and to accept the axioms, because so far everything has proven the calculations are in accordance with the experiments and that's really all you could ask for. And if you use the equations enough, then you'd get used to it, so that after a while accepting it seems normal and for those who do it a lot even kind of intuitive. But it's really just practice.

Unlike DC universe laws quantum theory at least works consistently though, and doesn't change its rules every couple of years. *grin* Fortunately with the DCU the "practice" (i.e. reading comics using Hypertime) is more pleasant than to practice solving Schrödinger equations, so you don't mind adapting to the changing rules so much. ;)

[greenygal.livejournal.com]

And if you use the equations enough, then you'd get used to it, so that after a while accepting it seems normal and for those who do it a lot even kind of intuitive.

Heh. Like comics in general. "So the next time he died he...why're you looking at me like that?"

I can get the general idea, I think--there's an infinite number of alternate realities, and you can move from one to another, and sometimes they overlap and affect the reality as a whole. But the details still make my head hurt.

[ratcreature]

Like comics in general. "So the next time he died he...why're you looking at me like that?"

ROTFLOL

So true, so true, for superhero comics anyway.