My main question was: How much fusion fuel there is in a typical H-bomb? I asked here precisely because I could not find this information anywhere. Wikipedia was my first stop.
It's all there, but I'll save you the trouble.
In modern one stage nukes and the primary of modern two stage nukes, the amount of fusion "fuel" used to boost the primary is up to 5 grams of D/T, pumped into the hollow core of the bomb. Smaller bombs use less, and some bombs allow the user to select from a range of explosive yields just prior to deployment. Yield is reduced simply by pumping in less than the maximum amount of D/T. (Not only does less D/T release less energy from fusion, it releases fewer high energy neutrons, which causes less of the fissile material to undergo fission.) At most about 1.7% of the energy released from a one stage nuke will come from fusion.
The amount of LiD used to boost the secondary depends on the size and shape of the bomb in question, the ratio of Lithium-6 to Lithium-7, and the ratio of U238 to U235 in the tamper, but in general you want 4-10 molecules of LiD per atom of uranium in the tamper. LiD will generally account for 6-12% of the total weight of the bomb. Fusion will generally account for 10-20% of the explosive yield of a two stage bomb.
As you increase the number of stages (which are assumed to be identical to the secondary), obviously LiD's contribution to the weight of the bomb asymptotically approaches its contribution to the weight of just the secondary, which is 12-25%. By using a non fissile/fissionable tamper, fusion can account for nearly all of the explosive yield of a multistage bomb. (You will always need a fission bomb for the primary and a fission sparkplug in all subsequent stages, though, so it can never be 100%, barring radical new developments in design.)
Note that for military purposes, a nuclear bomb's size is limited by the fact that you need to be able to deliver it via missile or plane, so in practice no nuclear weapons require more than two stages. (A small number of tests, such as Tsar Bomba, have been conducted with bombs that have three or more stages.)
This isn't a pure physics question per se, but close enough.
I have been trying to find out how much fusion fuel there is in a typical H-bomb, but I cannot find this info. Does anyone have any idea?
Also: Is the fusion fuel pure hydrogen, an isotope, or something else?
Saying "I cannot find this info" is a bit disingenuous, since it implies you tried to find the info, which you couldn't have, since wikipedia would be your first stop, and wikipedia does have this info, and it's not hard to find.
Anyway, there are two different kinds of "fusion fuel" in a standard "hydrogen bomb", namely a small amount of a 50/50 dueterium/tritium gas mixture (appropriately called the "booster") pumped into the core of the "primary" just prior to detonation, and a much larger amount lithium deuteride (lithium hydride made with deuterium instead of protium, somewhat inappropriately called "fuel") that boosts the "secondary".
Since the primary is compressed by chemical explosives, the much harder to handle and manufacture (but easier to fuse) D/T gas is used to boost the primary. The secondary is compressed by the nuclear explosion of the primary, so the much cheaper and easier to manufacture LiD is used to boost the secondary. (Conveniently, the lithium is totally converted to tritium mid explosion by neutrons from fission of the plutonium "sparkplug" in the middle of the collapsing secondary.)
Note that calling either D/T gas or LiD "fuel" is fairly misleading since the majority of the energy released from a hydrogen bomb, despite the name, comes from fission of uranium (namely the uranium "tamper" of the secondary, which can even be made from depleted uranium, though enriched is better.) The purpose of D-T fusion in nuclear bomb design is to create high energy neutrons (much higher energy neutrons than are created by fission of uranium) that cause a greater proportion of the bomb's uranium (the actual fuel) to undergo fission than would otherwise.
Of course, if you make the secondary's tamper out of non-fissile material, then most of the bomb's power will come from fusion, and such bombs have even been built, but they really have no use other than limiting fallout during tests. (Tsar Bomba, for example, the most powerful bomb ever made, was purposely nerfed in this manner.)
After reading all of the examples linked in your OP, adelikat, the only thing that comes to mind is, "Really? You banned someone for that?" It really just sounds like you hate XKeeper for whatever reason, and can no longer objectively evaluate his posts.
XKeeper obviously doesn't go out of his way to be nice, and is often snarky, condescending, and dismissive, but his posts seem downright innocuous to me. They are even sometimes helpful, for example when he pointed out the LUA rendering bug, or when he voiced opinions about how the site should be managed.
Perhaps I'm an iron-skinned internet veteran, but mere snark, occasional curse words, and name calling are par for the course, in my opinion. Welcome to the internets. These very forums have countless examples of far worse, some of them quite recent, and it almost always goes unacknowledged.
In fact, it seems the only time any action is ever taken is when some unfortunate forum member somehow gets under the skin of an admin, and that admin forms an irrational personal vendetta against the user. It's happened before, I'm almost certain it's what happened here, and it will no doubt happen again, but that doesn't make it right.
So boo on you, adelikat. I don't expect you to change your opinions or your behavior, since people never do, but on the off chance you are an enlightened space being and not a person, here is a useful trick for ensuring you don't let negative personal emotions cloud your judgment and cause you to abuse your authority in the future: whenever someone or something's got you mad, pretend the source is someone you love. Are you married? Do you have a best friend? A child? Pick one. Consider how understanding and mediated your reaction would be in response to them. Now give everyone else (even the XKeepers of the world) the same consideration.
None of the Multimedia Fusion / Multimedia Fusion 2 games I've tested seem to work in Hourglass. (They just crash.) They do run in kkapture, however. It might be worth checking kkapture's source code to see how Fabien Giesen does whatever he does: http://www.farb-rausch.de/~fg/kkapture/
I don't know if it's directly analogous, but I'd imagine the goals and methods of kkapture and Hourglass are very similar, since they both wrap programs and trick them into running at arbitrary frame rates.
Back when I used to play Mario Party 4, I could get ~152 presses in 10 seconds using that guy's "vibrating" method. Almost every semiserious gamer I know can vibrate like that, so it's comical he would claim to be the fastest with such poor execution of such a common method. I also had a different method using three fingers that could max out that particular minigame (160 was unfortunately the max) in roughly 7 seconds.
There was another minigame on Mario Party 4 where you had to alternate the L and R buttons as fast as possible. My roommate in college at the time could actually vibrate both of his arms in opposition to each other, perfectly alternating while each hand was vibrating at roughly the speed shown by that "fastest" guy. I was never able to learn how to do that, and his record on that breath-holding minigame was unassailable.
This TAS made me physically ill to an extent that I haven't experienced since watching Cloverfield. The camera controls were nauseating and the action was impossible to follow. I couldn't tell what was going on even though I've seen every other SM64 TAS published on this site.
There have been times in the past when minor improvements were loudly derided because of questionable stylistic choices, and I voted yes on them all, not willing to impose my aesthetic sensibilities on the community. But this movie made me want to vomit.
I just voted no, for the first time ever.
[Blahblahblah you think you know what makes fiction good and bad, sometimes good things can arise unpredictably from anything therefore anything can be good in some respects.]
I am not and never was concerned with whether or not people like HP, or whether or not it (or anything else) inspires little boys to dream whatever things they dream of, or whether or not people think HP is good or bad (obviously lots of people think it's good ... and?), or whether or not anything in particular can lead to anything in particular through enough contrivance or coincidence.
I started my discussion with two citations having to do with more or less objective criteria on which stories can be evaluated. Eco's blurb was concerned with how a story represents itself to the reader, and whether or not the representation gives appropriate clues to the reader to allow him to most effectively understand the intent of the text. Lem's blurb was concerned with semantic meaning and further criteria by which we (subjectively) evaluate stories that lack semantic meaning.
In a later post I offered Harry Potter as an example of a story that both misrepresents itself to the reader and has the fatal flaw of inconsistency, which renders at least that portion of the story void of meaning, and the implication that my personal evaluation of the empty portions of the story was negative.
The proper way to respond to disagreements with what I was actually talking about would have been something like, "I don't think Harry Potter represents itself as seriously as you think it does. Though it does have many analogues to the real world, it is more akin to a fairy tale than a serious novel for the following reasons, so nonsense isn't undesirable, to the contrary, it may even be apropos." And then I might have responded with something like, "The books maintain one continuous story arc throughout them, and tend to address increasingly grave concepts as the characters age. Whereas the first book may have been mostly pure fantasy, the later books dealing with issues like teenhood and death aren't, don't you think?" And then the other person might have responded with, "No, I still felt like they were still just fluffy fairy tale novels." And then I might have said, "Oh, ok. We have different interpretations of how the text represents itself."
Instead someone responded with, "Hey, here's some incredibly obscure scientific mumbo jumbo that doesn't have anything to do with anything, but it PROVES that the time travel in Harry Potter is consistent! Why would anyone ever use time travel to save their beloved parents!?!?!??!"
@Pointless Boy:
Let me guess, you read Wikipedia's article on scientific theories, right? I could tell you that defining what is scientific or not is not so straight-forward as you may think, and is one of the greatest questions in epistemology, and that the (unfortunately bad) Wikipedia article is almost exclusively the empiric view of science, but as I correctly assumed, you're not interested in philosophy, a surprising fact given the topic's title.
I'm not making incoherent statements at all, it's just that you are obsessed with a subject, at the point of discussing with me parts of a book I already told you I didn't read, and when anyone tries to discuss how pointless your argumentation is, you avoid the subject by saying you were not addressing that matter and adding more stuff to make it as confusing and tiring as possible.
TASVideos ill needs a writer such as you, perhaps one day I'll see you start something more useful than an empty quote war. Until that day comes, I hope this thread gets locked for at least a week.
Another valiant ad hominem attack. "You're just reading wikipedia, I'm not, therefore you're stupid and I'm right!" But to answer your question, no, I don't care what wikipedia says about the nature of science because it really has nothing to do with the discussion to begin with, even though you think it does. Insofar as you think science has anything to do with anything, you strangely seem to demand that readers of a children's book have a vast, encyclopedic knowledge (knowledge exceeding that which can be found in crappy wikipedia, even!) of whatever it is you think is important just to understand the book! How insane!
What I've been trying to talk about the whole time is Lem's and Eco's thoughts on more or less objective criteria on which fiction can be evaluated in many cases, having to do with how text represents itself to the reader, and whether the text stays true to that representation and maintains internal consistency for the reader with respect to that representation. (It's harder to talk about that stuff when you have a text which intentionally misrepresents itself for effect, but I've been fairly careful to repeat ad nauseum I am ignoring such cases because I don't believe that Rowling (or most authors) intend to write stories that are inconsistent and confusing in that manner. Some admittedly do. I'm not talking about them or their stories.)
Obviously the time travel in Harry Potter doesn't make sense. Any reasonable person would eventually hit upon the idea of using time travel to accomplish something meaningful to that person, like saving parents, or a beloved teacher, or making money, or something. Harry Potter is a world filled with supposedly reasonable people that know about time travel and don't attempt to use it in that way. The author's best attempt at an explanation is to say three books later that 100% of the time travel devices in the world were stored in one place and they were all destroyed on accident, and no one knows how to make any more! It makes no sense and is stupid and still doesn't explain why supposedly intelligent people never thought to use them before. Discussion of closed timelike curves and mathematical artifacts of obscure field equations from graduate level physics is immaterial.
I was merely illustrating how a scenario you have described as contrived, nonsensical, and self-inconsistent could be seen as the opposite if you weren't so adamant at preloading your arguments with words like "nonsensical", "invalid", "clearly", "perfectly", "lazily", "obviously", and other kinds of implicit argumentation boiling down to "anyway, as I said, A = B", because, as you may have known, there are things notably less contrived than attempting to poison somebody with a "non-toxic" substance whose LD50 for humans is estimated to be at least four orders of magnitude lower than that of water when ingested orally.
Except the "opposite" scenario is yours, not mine. My quite obvious intent was to express how stupid a murder mystery would be if the author doggedly and without explanation had a murderer supposedly kill people by means which are clearly not harmful. I offered a bare bones "real world" example only as a kindness. You then invented your own scenario whereby LSD could be used as a poison, which is immaterial, and had nothing to do with my argument, or even my scenario, which I then elaborated upon because you insisted on being pedantic. A murder mystery where the author doggedly and without explanation has a murderer supposedly kill people by means which are clearly not harmful is stupid. It makes no sense and contradicts the reality which all stories are parasites of. (Unless of course not making sense is the point of the story, which we are not assuming is the case.)
(See Erowid sources here and here for your future references; and yes, you should have noticed yourself how LSD makes your breath heavier as one of the first effects of the onset.)
All I see there is a lot of stuff confirming that LSD is perceived as universally safe and nontoxic to things that aren't rabbits, and that it seems pretty darn hard to use LSD as a poison. And as you well know, many substances affect different people differently. Do you suppose it's possible LSD doesn't make some people breathe heavily? Or maybe it generally does but people in really good shape don't notice?
In a criminal setting involving an expert chemist with murder intent, a message to send out to, and every prerequisite to synthesize the needed amount, that actually makes quite a bit of sense, and is actually pretty original as far as poison is chosen. If you think that doesn't make sense, you should get out more and notice how there are things happening everywhere around you that make even less of it.
Except the scenario where a serial killer is injecting people with grams and grams and grams of LSD is your scenario, not mine. I agree, your scenario is strange but believable, and perhaps would make an interesting story. It's not my scenario, though, in which death by LSD is not believable, and would therefore be inconsistent.
The target audience of HP (read: those who are supposed to enjoy it) are people who don't ask many questions, are easily pleased, and don't expect clever art-house from a fairy tale setting involving prepubescent boys and girls in a world of magic.
I don't know what clever art-house is, but would the target audience you purport be alienated if HP didn't have inexplicable inconsistencies? Magic and trolls and snakes and quidditch and whatever the heck else you want are all still perfectly fine in a world where characters are smart enough to wonder whether they should use time travel for something useful or not. So how does fixing a story thusly not make it objectively better? You've as much said your purported target audience doesn't care one way or the other, because they aren't thinking about it.
What I was trying to say was that in theory, it'd make it better, but an increased level of consistency would in reality often have to come at the cost of something else.
While I admit the possibility of that being true in some particular case, I've never seen such a case where it is true. In practice, it turns out that in stories where inconsistency is not a feature of the story, style, or characters, removing inconsistencies doesn't detract from whatever essential features the story, style, and characters do have.
Yes indeed. I'd argue that inconsistency always stems from flaws in the internal logic of a piece of fiction. If the rules of the fictional world are inconsistent, that makes that world less logical. That in turn leads to an increased freedom of imagination, at the cost of credibility.
Does writing internally consistent fiction (when inconsistency is not a feature of the story) limit "freedom of imagination," though? Authors are still free to imagine whatever the heck they want. When they finally distill their ideas down to a final form, I only ask their work be consistent with the cues it provides to readers to contextualize the characters and story. The problem isn't necessarily that Rowling wrote inconsistent fiction, but rather that she didn't properly contextualize it. (Because various cues in the text point toward Rowling intending to write a somewhat serious story, I contend she should have written fiction without inconsistencies, rather than included correctives that allow readers to accept the entire story as, for example, a fairy tale.) Most of the characters in Harry Potter appear to be essentially normal people with essentially normal motivations, various magical powers and caricatures notwithstanding. In that context, why do none of them think to use time travel to accomplish something more significant than saving an animal? (Note that time travel is not the only inconsistency in Rowling's novels, just the one we are focusing on here.)
I don't understand a lot about physics, but I've heard that if a body had to travel backwards in time and arrive at a location in space that is close enough so that the body could have an influence on its own past, then that would require that body to travel faster than the speed of light and to become infinitely big. To my understanding worm holes that will eject you in the past will always eject you so far away that you cannot have an influence on anything that could have had a casual impact on the body that entered the worm hole either. I assume that if you create a fictional universe in which any of that is possible, it always creates logical inconsistencies in the physics of that world, that can be found if you only dig deep enough. I'd be curious if you can point out any logically consistant piece of fiction that involves backwards time travel in the usual sense. (if it instantly creates a parallel universe then you aren't in the actual past, but in a copy-verse, that it'd take more amount of energy to create than you could possibly have at your disposal. or whatever argument)
Idle speculation about how certain fake ideas about time travel, wormholes, or faster-than-light travel might integrate with real-world physics is neither here nor there. For one, it doesn't have anything to do with anything. Two, it's unreasonable to suppose the model reader of a children's book would know about all that stuff. The issue is that Harry Potter presents itself as a somewhat serious story, and in the contexts in which it is serious, it has inconsistencies, such as, "why doesn't anyone in the Harry Potter universe think to use time travel to accomplish something important?" (Note that I don't complain about the less serious parts of the story, such as the Dursleys as caricatures of the relatives / adoptive family from hell, which is provided as comic relief. Harry takes the death of his parents, and Dumbledore, for example, very seriously, however, yet he never thinks to use time travel to right those wrongs, nor do any of the supposedly intelligent and essentially normal people around him.)
As to your other question, sure, plenty of stories represent time travel consistently. For example, from what I remember of Groundhog Day, it was entirely consistent with respect to time travel. Bill Murray traveled back in time repeatedly through an unknown mechanism, which eventually stopped due to an unknown mechanism. It's certainly implied to some extent that the temporal prison ended when Bill Murray finally became a "good person," though it's also very clear much more time passed than was shown in the movie. (He learned to play the piano, learned to sculpt, learned to speak a foreign language fluently, etc.) The truth is no reason was ever given for why the time travel started or stopped, which while not terribly satisfying, is perfectly consistent, and doesn't leave you wondering why someone who can control time travel doesn't use it in an obvious fashion. Moreover, Bill Murray actually behaved in a way that's easy to imagine a real person would behave in those circumstances, running the gamut from puzzled, to depressed, to suicidal, to finally accepting his fate and determining to make the most of each day he got -- even if it was the same one over and over again.
Yes. But there is a part of the audience that won't get alienated either way.
Ah, but if that part of the audience won't get alienated either way, how is it not objectively superior to make a modification that will continue not alienating those people, but moreover stops alienating people who will wonder "Uhh, why doesn't just Harry go back in time to save his parents, and Dumbledore, and kill Voldemort? And why doesn't Voldemort just go back in time and strangle Harry instead of casting some spell that's going to backfire because of the power of love or whatever the hell happened? How does any of this make any sense? Hello?"
That is true, except that for that part of the audience who won't get alienated either way, it'd probably be more efficient to take the approach that you dislike so much.
Too true, writing bad fiction is terribly easy. Rowling has done a lot of it.
No, there are people who like to escape into worlds where anything is possible.
I don't see how that's relevant to the discussion of whether or not stories that don't intentionally feature inconsistency should be consistent.
And yes, if a world is less consistent, then more is possible.
A baseless assertion. Are there more rational numbers than integers? It seems to me that if your argument hinges upon the contention that "the set of stories which are consistent or inconsistent" is larger than the "set of stories which are consistent or inconsistent but properly contextualized" you need to prove it. Good luck. (I also don't really see how "more things are possible" is relevant to the discussion of whether or not stories that don't intentionally feature inconsistency should be consistent. I thought the goal was to have good fiction, not to have every story possible regardless of merit.)
Maybe I'm reading the book because I'm sick of the self-consistency of this world. Maybe I'm having trouble understanding anything that involves logic, but I like the world of Harry Potter where they can use magic to make their dreams come true (somewhat) and they don't have to care if it makes any sense. Maybe that'd feel like a big relief to me because for the time I'm reading the book, I don't have to worry about logical constraints at all.
But if you don't care if anything makes any sense, how is it bothersome if a story happens to make sense? Why does reading a story which makes sense mean you "have to worry about logical constraints"? Obviously it doesn't. If you don't care whether or not anything makes sense, then your enjoyment is not reduced if the story happens to make sense. You suggest some people read fiction to escape into worlds where anything is possible, but are those people really searching for unintentionally inconsistent nonsense, or simply a fantasy world of magic and enchantment?
Anyway, I don't feel the need to spend much time or effort refuting this, you and I both know you are just grasping at straws. But if you are really desperately searching for a book that lacks the "self-consistency of this world," there are plenty of good ones that take the trouble to make nonsense and lack of consistency meaningful features of the story. And if you are honestly searching for a poorly written book that misrepresents itself and then subjects the reader to unintentional (but obvious) inconsistencies, well, Harry Potter is a good choice. We both know you aren't. No one is.
If that story is set in an otherwise realistic setting, then you are totally right. The reader would assume that any rules that they know from the real world would also apply to that fictional world. But if the book starts out by somebody entering a magic world through the wall at track 9 3/4, and the reader still assumes that, then he's just being an idiot. Such an introduction should tell the reader, similar to "Once upon a time...", that logic and consistency will play only a minor role in that fictional universe. Introducing high numbers of humanoid alien species that all happen to speak English should f.e. suffice to serve a similar purpose.
Harry Potter is so very far from "once upon a time." It's true that there is magic in the Harry Potter world, as indicated by things such as walking through walls at track 9¾ at a train station. But Rowling also goes to great pains to represent Harry Potter as a world virtually identical to our own, save for a secret, underground society of magic that is hidden from normal people who are just like you and me, and exist in a world just like our own. Those privy to the magic even have a smug superiority about them, feeling themselves better than mere muggles. For some of them, those feelings have turned to hatred. Harry Potter, for all intents and purposes takes place on our Earth, and we are pathetic muggles reading about things we could never otherwise witness, because we aren't cool enough. There's also the fact that magic in Harry Potter isn't presented as nonsensical fairy tale magic where anything and everything happens at the whim of contrivance. HP magic is scientific. Students go to school and study it. They practice flicking their wands just so, practice mixing reagents, memorize phrases and practice saying them, etc., precisely because magic, it seems, has logical rules that need to be learned and followed.
So when those oh-so-smart and oh-so-smug magicians have at their disposal the ability to travel through time, and not a one of them think to use it for something incredibly obvious like saving Harry's parents, saving Dumbledore, or thwarting Voldemort in the past, well ... this muggle begins to wonder what the hell is going on.
Hm, yea, in your example I'd basically agree. If the book is consistent everywhere else but for that one part, then it could either have been a deliberate decision by the author for whatever reason or just be a case of bad writing. The same goes for some worlds in science fiction, but not for all of them. It's certainly a whole different story with Harry Potter.
How is Harry Potter any different than my example? Harry Potter bludgeons readers with bafflingly moronic plot holes an uneducated child can spot. It's bad writing.
That just tells me that you like consistency. You feel that any piece of fiction is clearly improved by it.
Incorrect. Again, the problem with Harry Potter is that it presents itself as an essentially serious, consistent world. (Our world, plus some magic.) Then it bludgeons the reader with bafflingly moronic plot holes an uneducated child can spot. Fairy tales lack logical consistency and I don't feel they would necessarily be improved by it. But fairy tales correctly direct the perceptions of the reader with cues such as "once upon a time." Harry Potter sends mixed signals and then gets a kid with down syndrome to kick you in the nuts.
That's just you and that's totally fine. How do you figure, they'd be objectively better though? Have you never seen somebody preferring something that's not consistent and they weren't even bothered by it? I know many people who watch movies just to go on an emotional rollercoaster. They won't care about consistency, they'd just expose themselves to the emotional part of it exclusively, totally suspending any form of disbelief. Again, adding an element of consistency will restrict the writer, unnecessarily, if their audience only consists of people who don't care.
If the audience you speak of doesn't care about consistency, then how is it not objectively better to write a story that will also appeal to people that do care? The emotional rollercoaster is still there whether or not the story makes sense. A bomb exploding is still a bomb exploding. The people that don't care still don't care, and the people that do care are now having a good time.
Also, "adding an element of consistency" is not the only way to correct an inconsistent work that misrepresents itself to the reader/viewer. For example, add "Directed by M. Night Shyamalan" to the beginning of any movie and all of a sudden anything goes. It's quite simple. You are also unduly obsessed with some ephemeral concept of not restricting authors or whatever, which has nothing to do with anything. Is the goal to write good stories or to somehow have every story that could ever be written?
I totally agree. Why do you have such trouble with inconsistencies then? There are model readers who don't care about it. At all.
You misuse the concept of model reader here. Read Six Walks in the Fictional Woods if you want to know more. A "model reader" is not someone who can enjoy any fiction, no matter how poorly written. It is the reader that is implied by the text itself. When the text represents itself as mostly serious, and taking place in a world not far removed from our own, with characters very similar to essentially normal people in the real world, then when those characters repeatedly overlook a painfully obvious use for time travel that any normal person would think of, and that glaring inconsistency isn't an intentional feature of the story, then the author has failed. I understand some (most) people take their coffee brainless and just don't care. That's irrelevant. The ones that don't care that the text doesn't make sense wouldn't care if it did.
So what if there's a group of people who are involved in an anti-LSD campaign and are quite happy to see a book where LSD is used to kill people? Maybe you should read it in a symbolic sense (LSD is ruining some people's lives, no matter if it's relatively non-addictive, the murderer is the "dealer", etc). Maybe some people would argue that the author made that mistake on purpose so that people actually inform themselves about LSD. They'd all love the book for the same reason you'd dislike it, and you'd be there telling them they're objectively wrong, accomplishing what?
I decidedly would not tell them they were objectively wrong for liking the book for the reason that they irrationally hate LSD. I would tell them the book was not well-written, though. You trying to come up with stupid nonsensical examples for reasons to justify stupid nonsense is also getting really tiring. First of all, trying to justify an obvious error with arbitrary contrivance is just unconvincing. Have some self-respect, you're better than that. Secondly, if you really want to argue in support of spreading lies and misinformation, then HITLER HITLER HITLER OBAMA HITLER, QED. The point is not that you could conceivably find at least one person that would enjoy used toilet paper. The point is for readers not to be surprised by used toilet paper randomly being in the middle of a book. (Unless, of course, the point actually is to shock readers with used toilet paper randomly being in the middle of your book. I don't believe that was Rowling's intention, though. Hence, she is a bad writer.)
If that one single inconsistency can be fixed that easily, then you may generally be right. But you are talking about an author trying to achieve consistency, but failing. I'm talking about an author who thinks holding up the inner consistency of their fictional world will only get in the way of their writing. In that case there'd maybe be numerous inconsistencies that couldn't be fixed without ruining their book (that you'd argue was objectively bad in the first place, so of course from your point of view, it'd improve the book. but that's just you)
But that's the whole point. Rowling screws up simple stuff that could easily be fixed if she just bothered to think about it. Instead she just strings together arbitrary sequences of equally arbitrary events, having her characters jump from one stupid contrivance to the next. When there's so much low-hanging fruit to be had, the only conclusion that can be drawn is she's either stupid or lazy, and either way she's still bad.
It seems you have a misconception of science then, as both of your replies make no sense. I'm not sure if I should have used the expression "no sense" in a sentence, because I run the risk of you bringing up other evidently clear points of your view of semantics.
I'd love to take the matter further, but it looks like you're more interested in writing long winded posts about why you don't like a book rather than understanding a physical principle.
But that is part of my point. The principle you love to so crazily invoke in this argument (implying it's a concept you believe the model reader of Harry Potter should both already know of and believe in, which is insane) is not a physical principle. It represents nothing physical, as far as the current state of "scientific theory" is concerned. A scientific theory is one that makes testable assertions about the universe. It makes predictions. The Novikov self-consistency principle doesn't. There are some mathematical oddities that arise from relativity that are supposed by most scientists to represent something physical, or describe the behavior of physical things. The Novikov consistency principle is not one of them.
Seriously, I really don't care whether you consider Harry Potter a good series or not, I haven't read any of the books and have only seen the first movie, it's just that through two pages your overstated point is that anything which is irrational according to reality (or, more generally, one possible interpretation of the reality proposed by the author) is automatically devoid of meaning.
Incorrect. What I have said is that in fictions in which irrationality and inconsistency are not central features of the story, style, or characters, excessively irrational and inconsistent behavior constitutes bad storytelling. I don't believe irrationality and inconsistency to be central features of Harry Potter's story, style, or characters. Yet the series on a whole is rife with inexplicable and unjustifiable instances of arbitrary irrationality and inconsistency. Therefore, Harry Potter constitutes bad storytelling.
Notice that the notion of what is true or a rational behavior within a situation depends on one's own view of reality, your whole text is just an attempt to rephrase your opinions, making them look like based on a solid, incontestable vision of science, fiction or whatever, that cannot possibly be purely objective, just to make them seem universally accepted. You'd be really lucky to convince someone arguing that way, this is just sophistry.
We aren't talking philosophy here, I have no concern with crazy views of reality and how they pertain to fiction. Most people are mostly capable of evaluating the real world mostly correctly and rationally when they put their minds to it. I have no care for whether there is or is not a spoon, or even whether there are or are not closed timelike curves, or anything of that nature, because it all has absolutely no relation to what I'm talking about. Most people, when presented with the opportunity for time travel, would want to exploit its potential to the fullest. Save Buckbeak? How about Harry saves his @#$%ing parents?! The otherwise mostly normal characters in Harry Potter don't attempt to exploit time travel in a painfully obvious way. The setting of Harry Potter is "a world much like our own where magic is possible," not "a world much like our own where magic is possible and everyone is inexplicably stupid when it's convenient for the author." Anyway, the text gives no explanation for such an astonishing global oversight. Assuming inexplicable stupidity is not a feature of the story, style, or characters, that's just bad storytelling.
Also, you'd only change your mind if someone showed that something has meaning inside your own assumptions, and this is impossible since no one can fully understand your conceptions. This discussion can't possibly lead anywhere.
My assumptions are based in part on the work of the authors I cited originally. You could read them (or read about them and their concepts.) The main reason this discussion hasn't led anywhere is because you make incorrect and irrelevant statements at every juncture, so not only am I forced to continually attempt to explain to you how you aren't arguing about what you think you're arguing about, I have to correct your incorrect arguments about what you aren't arguing about to begin with.
Obviously that's not what is wrong with that. First of all, LSD depresses respiratory activity at a high dosage, progressively more so as it grows. Even though it may remain non-toxic per se in such amount, if fed continuously, at some point the victim will inevitably suffocate. Otherwise, similarly high dosages can also cause permanent damage to central nervous system leading to coma or death.
An interesting claim, one for which I've never seen any evidence, either in medical literature or from personal experience.
I suppose that is somewhat different from classic poisoning, but then again, drinking a couple tablespoons' worth of undiluted LSD would most definitely kill you anyway, making it far more toxic than, say, water. Oh, didn't you know water was toxic? It's possible to poison a human with pretty much any substance; it doesn't take one to be an MD or a chemist to know. You just have to have enough of it to cause sufficient damage where needed.
Anyway, this is obviously true, and though I didn't specify, is clearly not the scenario I was proposing, because it was a simple argument I didn't care to elaborate upon in defense of future pedantry. Clearly the thrust of my argument was that a murderer poisoning someone with a nontoxic substance is objectively bad storytelling, and as an example of a nontoxic substance I suggested LSD. (Even making a suggestion was not relevant to my argument, I did it as a kindness to readers in order to ground the argument in something real.) Having readers imagine incredibly contrived circumstances in which massive doses of LSD could be construed as being poisonous in any normal sense of the word was not my intent, as you well know.
Consider the difference between your "well ANYTHING is toxic if you give someone enough of it, he could be poisoning his victims with water as far as I'm concerned, hurrrrrr" with "why don't people in the Harry Potter universe use time travel for anything useful?" The former is grasping at straws, while the latter is perfectly natural. Anyway, since you insist on being a pedant where it is uncalled for, consider my scenario modified to:
"In his retirement, an expert chemist/MD owns and manages multiple Starbucks franchises. On the rare days when he goes into his stores, he poisons people to death by surreptitiously putting a small blotter of LSD in each cup of piping hot tea he serves."
If you have half as much knowledge/experience with LSD as you seem to be representing, you will know that won't even result in his victims tripping, much less dying. Also note that in an actual story, as opposed to a one sentence synopsis brought up for the sake of an argument, the method by which the killer was poisoning people would have been described in detail, so it would be clear whether or not the concept of LSD poisoning was sensible in that context. Though I did not further elaborate on the context, since I mentioned LSD was non-toxic, clearly I was imagining a context (such as my modified scenario above) in which LSD was non-toxic and not suitable as a poison in any reasonable sense of the word.
I would say the setting you described was wrong because LSD is very expensive and a pain to produce in amounts required to guarantee human poisoning.
Except, in the setting I lazily described, LSD was clearly nontoxic (because I said as much when talking about it,) which should have clued you in to the fact that perhaps your extension to the example which I purposely didn't elaborate much upon was invalid as a representation of the text's intent. (Implicit in all of my complaints about Harry Potter is the idea that the text represents itself as actually being concerned with internal consistency, among other things. If you believe the text represents itself as nonsensical fluff on par with Leslie Nielsen movies, then the argument is over because we disagree on the premise.)
But if the killer is rich (which I could expect him to be, him being an MD and an expert chemist), and has a vendetta against LSD in particular to skimp upon using more easy-to-come-by chemicals (lead, arsenic, water as said above, whatever), that is not at all implausible. Imagine that his son, arguing on forums all day long that LSD wasn't toxic, ingested four grams of it to demonstrate its safety, and died. People on the forums called bullshit, and desperate and deranged father, being an expert chemist, decided to teach them the toxic effects of LSD the hard way.
Try again. :)
Again, you are manufacturing complexity where none exists solely for the purpose of arguing. Contrast that with my simplifying question about Harry Potter. "Why don't any of the characters in Harry Potter do the most obvious thing with time travel, that is, use it for something incredibly useful?" When presented with the opportunity to travel through time, that's what most people would do. They would go save a loved one, or make a billion on the stock market, or kill Hitler as a baby, or use it to learn how to woo the man/woman of their dreams, etc. Why don't any of the characters in Harry Potter (good or bad, stupid or smart) do that?
I'm pretty sure you can interchange Megadrive and Master System controllers, too, since they have the same plug. Obviously games won't always work right since they have different numbers of buttons, but lots of them probably do.
But to make it more consistent, you'd have to make it more logical (o rly?) and leave stuff like backwards time travel out.
You make a number of assumptions here, namely that consistency in fiction is the same as logic (it is not) and that backwards time travel is necessarily both inconsistent and illogical (it is not.)
It restricts what is possible.
No, it restricts how the author can present the story without alienating the reader.
However, Harry Potter is meant to fuel children's fantasies, and that is done by envoking the totally opposite feeling in the reader (that in the world of Harry Potter (almost) anything is possible).
Such feelings can easily be evoked in a fashion that doesn't alienate the reader, assuming alienation of the reader is not the author's goal.
I'd say to make them more consistent would actually make Rowling's books worse for what they are.
This is almost a tautological falsehood. Consider, for example, a story in which one of the characters is presented as an expert chemist and an MD. He also happens to be a crazed serial killer, and his method of killing is to poison people to death with LSD.
Ok, what's wrong with that? LSD is non-toxic, and both expert chemists and medical doctors would of course know that. Even if the character somehow didn't know that, he'd soon discover it to be the case after he tried to poison his first victim. At least, he would if the story were consistent and crafted so as not to alienate the reader. A good author would simply have the chemist-doctor poison people to death with something that is actually capable of killing people, e.g. heroin. Or if the victims hallucinating hysterically before they die was part of the story, he could use a species of mushroom that contains both psilocybin/psilocin and a poisonous substance, of which there are a few.
Does altering that story for the purpose of consistency and to avoid alienating the reader result in any meaningful change for people who don't recognize the inconsistency, either because they are stupid, ignorant, or lazy readers? Not in the least. It simply makes the story objectively better in every way.
I certainly can't claim this is possible for all stories ever told, but I can say that I've never seen a movie or read a book that couldn't be easily fixed in this manner without making substantive changes to the plot, Harry Potter included. (Granted, HP would require many such changes.) Moreover, in most stories, the actual execution of the plot is rather unimportant, it is only necessary that it is done well.
What will be perceived as good always depends on the readers' demands and expectations to the book.
Part of the reader's demands are, in fact, shaped by the author. For example, when a story starts with "once upon a time," the author has instantly groomed the reader to be prepared for a fantastic, bizarre, and entirely arbitrary fairy tale. Good authors include the correct cues to allow their readers to shape their thinking appropriately, to become what Eco calls a "model reader." An actual reader, whether model or not, may still not enjoy fairy tales, but he cannot deny the author gave a cue to appropriately shape his expectations, and he has nothing to complain about.
Usually, it is impossible to fulfill all of them at once, so a perfect book cannot exist. When a book doesn't meet the needs of any reader, then it's definitely a bad book (it may still prove to only have been "ahead of its time" though). But books that at least meet the needs of one certain group of readers are impossible (or at least incredibly difficult) to compare objectively in terms of how good they are.
Patently false. Changing LSD to heroin in my above example is inarguably an objective improvement. (We assume LSD and heroin have no meaning other than as potential poisons, that is, for example, no character had a mother that died due to an accidental overdose of heroin. If that's not true, then potential changes to the text must also be aware of any additional meaning the text carries.) In my experience, such improvements are universally available, most authors simply don't care to avail themselves of the opportunity to write good books.
Making something appeal to a broader audience usually makes it less appealing to that subset of the audience that would have been satisfied anyway (because there's less of what they like most in it).
Patently false. If you correct an inconsistency that the "original audience" was already incapable of detecting, then the story now appeals to the original audience plus all people that were bothered by the inconsistency. I do not want Rowling to change her stories or her style. I merely want her to write well.
p4wn3r wrote:
It's not useless blather, it's an ad hoc principle added to a scientific theory to make it consistent. After reading some parts of the articles, it seems that general relativity alone allows in some special cases that objects interact in such a way that would lead to contradictions inside the theory. Thus, they impose such a principle to abolish these paradoxes.
No, it is a made up concept that means nothing and makes no predictions. Relativity is not a "scientific theory" in the domains in which the Nabokov/Novikov/Nolikov consistency principle would apply, because in those domains it means nothing and makes no predictions.
Also, if one would take strictly what you wrote, no serious scientists would consider science at all to be real, since the problem of induction states that causality cannot be observed nor deduced within a finite set of experiments. Additionally, I find it funny how you consider such questions as artifacts of mathematics when they are more closely related to epistemology than math itself.
Except I did not consider the question you seem to think I considered. I said that fake fakery is not "real" in the sense that it says nothing about the universe. (It makes no predictions.) We all understand that relativity says something about the universe. (It makes predictions.) In that sense it is real enough, which was eminently clear from my previous statements. In the domain in which the Nabokov/Novikov/Nolikov consistency principle would apply, relativity is not "real" because it says nothing about the universe. (It makes no predictions.)
OK, I think your example may have helped. The idea is that it's not about the setting, it's about people. That the story needs to focus not on your wonderful fantasy world/fictional future, but on the characters that inhabit it. While I'll certainly agree that this sort of thing is a problem that crops up a lot in speculative fiction, it's not nearly as widespread as you propose, and certainly not an issue with the Harry Potter series.
Incorrect. It is about whether or not the characters behave in a reasonable fashion within the context of the story's setting. So it depends on both the characters and the setting. What happens so often in science fiction (and other genres, but especially in science fiction) is that authors use the setting as free license to inflict the reader with a completely arbitrary, unreasonable, and usually inconsistent sequence of events without justification. (As Rowling does in HP.)
So, in the likely case that the above is also incorrect, all I can say is that you've done an excellent job of telling me what this "semantic meaning" is apparently not. Now how about telling me what it is. From what you've been saying, it seems to be complaining about inconsistencies you don't like. In fact, this was my original assumption about its meaning, but I had wanted to give it the benefit of the doubt.
No, but inconsistencies are one way to rob a work of semantic meaning. (Because any reasonable person would assume, for example, if time travel existed, it would naturally be used for something useful. Time travel isn't used for anything useful in HP, therefore it has no semantic meaning in HP.)
As for the apparently continued Harry Potter topic, the fact that they already changed the past is explicit in the book, so you can't claim otherwise. Harry's realization of that fact when he saves himself from the dementors is made quite a big deal of, so it's also not something that should have been easily overlooked. The only inconsistency is the one that you've imagined must exist because Rowling is a hack.
No, as I mentioned, one view is that Rowling only relayed to readers the equilibrium state reached after correction of the timeline. In this view, Harry didn't realize that the past was immutable, he only realized that it was himself that saved himself, and who cares? It's meaningless with respect to this conversation. It seems that in this scenario (the one absent the consistency principle) you presume that either there are either multiple timelines (in which case nothing was changed in the original timeline, the characters merely came to inhabit a different timeline) or consciousness exists outside of the timeline (in which case even if an equilibrium state was reached, Harry would still remember the original bad timeline.) Again, who cares? You are making all sorts of unjustifiable assumptions about the Harry Potter universe just to get around the fact that if time travel exists, any reasonable person would use it to do something useful. (Which no one in Harry Potter did. Which Rowling never explained.)
Also, the Nolikov self-consistency principle is not "entirely fictional". It was formulated in regards to closed timelike curves, a potentially pathological feature in the very real theory of General Relativity. Perhaps you should actually read the article I linked to.
It is entirely fictional. It is meaningless blather based on meaningless blather that cannot be tested and makes no predictions. Moreover, relativity isn't "real" in the sense you seem to think it is. It is merely a mathematical description of our universe that is mostly correct in certain circumstances. No serious scientist considers it to be anything but that. And no serious scientists considers "closed timelike curves" to be "real" in even the limited sense that relativity is "real" in the domains in which it applies, since they are unobserved, unobservable, and nearly universally seen as artifacts of mathematics. (Again I point out that all of that is immaterial, since you can't blindly assume insanely erudite mathematical trickery about an already more or less inaccessible mathematical description of spacetime in an argument about what is and isn't consistent in a children's book featuring time travel. Any reasonable person would ask "why isn't time travel being used for something important," not scour wikipedia for obscure theoretical errata aiming to desperately explain an obvious error on Rowling's part.)
And BTW, it's really not that hard to spell correctly, especially considering you could simply look at my post to check. Unless you're doing it to be clever and subtly dismissive, in which case you've actually made yourself look like an idiot.
Oh is it? Maybe that's why you just misspelled it? Anyway, it's humorous that rather than make any meaningful arguments, you launch into an ad hominem attack and engage in fruitless name calling. I forgive you.
Time travel didn't actually change anything. People in the universe don't use time travel to go back and change things. This is consistent with the idea that time travel can't change things. So where's the inconsistency?
Really, all I'm seeing here is a massive hate-on for Rowling.
In HP, time travel (maybe) happened to not change anything. That is, perhaps, Harry and friends merely utilized time travel to fulfill their expectations of the past. Nowhere was there any indication that time travel could or could not be used to change past outcomes. It merely happens that (maybe) it was not used thusly. (As an aside, curiously you seem to think that if time travel serves no purpose in HP, that further justifies its existence, when in fact that is just the sort of "empty game" Lem talks about in his essays. Why would an author contrive a major plot component that serves absolutely no purpose, as you have admitted you believe of time travel in HP? And why do you personally think that makes for good storytelling?)
Anyway, as Eco mentions, stories are parasites of the real world. We naturally assume our own universe as the backdrop for any story, and adjust on the fly when given "correctives" to our beliefs about the world by the author. Sometimes correctives can be specific information, such as a character mentioning they are on a space ship traveling faster than light, sitting across from a sentient bug. Sometimes correctives can be as simple as beginning a story with "once upon a time." Whatever the correctives are, they are what give us a window into what makes a story's universe unique from our own. Without proper correctives, we have no reason to believe anything in particular about anything.
You correctly point out that in the real world "time travel can't change things," but that's merely because time travel is not possible in the real world. (Not because of the "Nabokov consistency principle," which is a made up concept about time travel, which is another made up concept.) As there is no "scientific" basis (and I remind you by scientific I mean empirical and deterministic, which "magic" appears to be in HP) given by Rowling for time travel, we have no reason to have any more specific beliefs about time travel in HP other than it is possible. As far as anyone can know, HP appears to be our universe, plus an empirical and deterministic science called "magic," which curiously enough allows for time travel. Again, all we are told by Rowling about time travel is that it is possible. No mention of any limitations are given. It seems you would have readers automatically assume yet another made up concept (in this case, the Nabokov consistency principle) despite no explicit direction from the author. What of readers that have never heard of such a thing? How are they supposed to automatically assume the Nabokov consistency principle? What about people that know of it but don't believe in it? Do you assume all people described as having black hair are black-skinned? No? Why not?
As far as anyone can tell, time travel can be used without limitations in HP. Many people would probably even argue that time travel was used to change past outcomes in HP, and that Rowling only showed readers the "second pass" through the timeline (after correction via time travel) to avoid telling the same story three times. (And so that kids wouldn't have to read about Buckbeak being killed in no uncertain terms, etc.) That is, your assumption of the Nabokov consistency principle is not only baseless, but is simply incorrect, and the equilibrium state reached after correction through time travel was the only portion of the story that was told. Of course, we have no reason particular reason to believe that, either. I was just pointing out how baseless assumptions can go both ways.
All we know is that time travel is possible in HP. Which naturally raises the question, why isn't it used to do anything remotely important? Rowling never addresses this inconsistency, and for that (and many other reasons) her fiction is disappointing.
As in life we can solve real problems with the help of images of nonexistent beings, so in literature can we signal the existence of real problems with the help of prima facie impossible occurrences or objects. Even when the happenings it describes are totally impossible, a science fiction work may still point out meaningful, indeed rational, problems.
This paragraph suggests that "semantic meaning" requires that the work be an allegory of some real life problem. Which is all well and good, however...
Incorrect. The paragraph only states that rational problems can (implied, should) arise from fantastic circumstances. Nowhere does Lem mention "real life" problems as being necessary or even desirable.
For example, the social, psychological, political, and economic problems of space travel may be depicted quite reliastically in science fiction even though the technological parameters of the spaceships are quite fantastic in the sense it will for all eternity be impossible to build a spaceship with such parameters.
This paragraph suggests that the problems be treated realistically, as if actual people were in that situation.
Incorrect. The paragraph only states that fantastic settings can (implied, should) nonetheless represent themselves otherwise realistically. Nowhere does Lem mention integrating "actual people" into a story as being necessary or even desirable.
So which is it? The two are very much not the same.
They aren't the same only to the extent that two lines in one proof leading to one conclusion aren't the same. You seem to have read a lot more into Lem than what he actually said, and followed your misconceptions to demonstrably incorrect conclusions. (Just as you did with Rowling.)
If the first definition is what we are going with, so be it. I've never found an allegory that didn't beat me over the head with it's message, though, so I won't claim this is a desirable quality.
Lem makes no mention of allegories in stories being necessary or desirable.
If the second definition is what we're going with, then you're going to have to give me an example of such an empty game. Because I don't see it. Any problem can be treated realistically. The fact that I have never encountered the problems the characters face, and may never encounter them myself, does not mean I cannot relate.
Many situations can be treated realistically, but are they? For example, is time travel treated realistically in HP? No, of course not. Painfully obvious functions for time travel are overlooked by supposedly (but not apparently) intelligent people, and no explanation is given by Rowling. Empty game! (It also bears mentioning that whether or not a story is portrayed realistically within the context of that story has nothing to do with whether or not you can relate to it. For example, I can't relate to stories about Paris Hilton's various retarded exploits, but I am certainly well-enough equipped to evaluate the realism of many things said about her. I recognize (and hopefully so do you) that any story that claims Paris Hilton starved to death because she couldn't afford food is not realistic, even though I can't relate to her or to the concept of starving.)
So, you know what helps in this situation? Examples. And that's a plural, so I don't want more of your vendetta against Harry Potter. If 98% of Science Fiction is merely an "empty game", you should have no shortage of examples to give me. So produce them.
Name virtually any story in any medium (book, movie, comic, play, opera, ballet, TV show, musical, whatever) and I can show you an empty game. The true challenge is to find a story that isn't empty. As an example, I watched Stargate today with my roommate because we've been watching Boston Legal on DVD and wanted to see some of James Spader's earlier work.
In Stargate, James Spader's character (Daniel) is brought in by the US military to help them translate hieroglyphs (and other symbols) found on an apparent wormhole generator (and associated artifacts.) His major contribution is recognizing that certain shapes represent constellations as seen from Earth, a breakthrough that took him 14 days. (It's mentioned that the military had been working on it for two years without results.) It's extremely implausible no one would have noticed things that looked like constellations over the course of two years of detailed study, but let's just give the writers the benefit of the doubt and believe that military scientists really are that daft.
Before even knowing about the existence of the stargate, Daniel then used the mere existence of the constellation symbols to suppose they were used as some sort of universal coordinate system. In a meeting explaining his findings to military muckity mucks, he explains how in three dimensional space you need six reference points to uniquely define any other point. (It's not clear what that actually means, but any way you look at it, it's patently ludicrous.) When the muckity mucks mention there is a seventh symbol on the particular segment of writing that Daniel is referring to, Daniel nonchalantly rattles off that of course you need a seventh point for the point of origin. Again, that makes absolutely no sense because what makes the point of origin special? Why is one symbol sufficient to define the point of origin, but you need six symbols to define the destination? And since we, as viewers, likely know a little about the general plot of the movie, either from previews, from the TV show of the same name, or simply from the name of the movie itself, how does it make sense to us that a wormhole generator capable of transporting actual matter instantaneously from one point in the universe to another needs to refer to constellations (as seen from Earth and only Earth?!) to locate other places in the universe? Do hyperadvanced races capable of constructing massive wormhole generators not know about phone numbers? Is it easier for stargates to calculate locations based on various constellations as seen from Earth (all of which are moving relative to each other) instead of having the stargates themselves communicate locations to each other as necessary? It makes no sense.
Anyway, Daniel's discovery is a bombshell. The military types immediately tell Daniel about the actual stargate and then run off to try to make it work, since Daniel has finally "found the seventh symbol," which in fact was there the whole time. So they start "dialing" the stargate. Once they dial the first six symbols in (which the military already knew about), someone mentions to Daniel, "This is as far as we've ever gotten before." Ok, so they have a stargate, which they are attempting to operate essentially like a phone. There are 20 or so symbols they can "dial" and they already know the first six, AND they know there are only seven symbols total. Yet no one, over the course of two years, had the bright idea of just trying all 20 options for the seventh symbol? They needed awkward geniusman Daniel to come and tell them which of the twenty to try? Are you kidding me?
I could go on and on, but I think I'm only about 8 minutes into the movie, so clearly it would take me a while. I'll just go ahead and quit now. So there's an example of an empty game.
Now, is Stargate a bad movie? It's certainly chock full of both scientific inaccuracies and baffling examples of huge numbers of "intelligent" people all simultaneously being monstrously stupid and/or irrational. Does it matter, though? The point of the movie is that people discovered a stargate, went through it, and various things happened on the other side. Is any of that negatively impacted by the fact that a bunch of people were too stupid to activate the gate until Daniel came along? Not really. On a whole, the movie continues to follow that formula, where lots of stupidities and inconsistencies fail to undermine the development of the plot or the motivations of the characters. Combine that with nice costumes, good visuals (for the time), and decent acting (except French Stewart), and I personally can't say Stargate was any worse than "decent."
Contrast that with Harry Potter, where many many many many many many many inconsistencies grossly undermine both the plot and the motivations of the characters, and you may begin to understand why I consider HP to be a bad series of books. Combine that with the fact that Rowling's writing (independent of her storytelling) is juvenile and unspectacular at best, and I can't see any reason to appreciate the novels, or recommend them to others.
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American prudery combined with their begrudging legal acceptance of public breastfeeding always entertained me. Then again, hypocrisy in a society whose laws are determined predominantly by the agenda of rich, white, male, conservative religiosos probably shouldn't surprise me.
The rules are clear: Write in english or GTFO.
A lot of people here aren't native english speakers, but here we are anyway.
They don't come because they don't want to.
Simply put: I don't agree with these sentiments
Make something that will autotranslate the forums so that Japanese people can read our English in Japanese, and we can read their Japanese in English. (Something like Google's automatic translator ... it wouldn't surprise me if they have an API to use it.)
If you'd been paying attention to the book, you'd notice that in the Harry Potter universe time travel can't change anything.
No, time travel didn't change anything. Nothing was said about what time travel could or could not do, as there was no "scientific" basis for time travel given in the books. Readers had nothing to go on. Rowling introduced a concept that absolutely wrecked the entire story, and gave no explanation for the glaring inconsistencies that resulted.
(And please don't argue that magic isn't science. For all intents and purposes, magic in the Harry Potter universe is the same as science in ours, that is, empirical and deterministic. Specific words, or actions, or reagents, or whatever, have predictable results when used or acted upon in particular ways. Sometimes ephemeral qualities such as "skill" or "experience" enter into the equation, and some things aren't fully explained, but nothing in the Harry Potter universe is presented as unempirical. In fact, quite the opposite. Students go to Hogwarts and practice waving their wands and chanting words precisely because magic is an empirical skill that needs to be learned. Screwing up a spell in Harry Potter is akin to an NBA player missing a shot in the real world. Even though we don't have all the variables and would have a hard time measuring all of them perfectly, whether or not the ball goes through the hoop is empirical and deterministic.)
On the subject of time travel, a lot of works use the rule that you can't interfere with your own timeline. And that works perfectly well. And until you build a time machine and prove otherwise, you can't say that that's not realistic.
You miss the entire point. Semantic meaning has nothing to do with what is and isn't realistic. It has to do with what is and isn't consistent within the world defined by the author.
But even at that, would a small inconsistency like that really ruin the entire series for you? You seem to be really fixated on that one thing.
I'm not fixated on it, I just offered it as one obvious example that I thought people would understand. The Harry Potter series is absolutely rife with plot holes and inconsistencies. I could list hundreds more but then I'd have to read the books again.
Also, I'd like you to define "semantic meaning". If I'm going to be arguing against a vague literary term, I'd like to at least have some idea of what it is.
I don't believe the excerpt from Lem was vague in the least, what is confusing to you specifically? Cite whichever part you don't understand and I will try to explain it to you.
Kuwaga wrote:
I get that for some people when they're faced with inconsistencies within the logic of the fantasy worlds within certain books they can no longer keep up their willing suspense of disbelief. It may be stupid to have those inconsistencies, but most people don't care. So if you're aiming at a casual audience, it really doesn't matter.
You are correct that most people don't care. As Lem suggests, we evaluate empty games on the basis of elegance, wit, precision, originality, etc. Most people are simple-minded, irrational, and easily confused and impressed. Most people would also argue that Lem's evaluations are largely subjective, and I won't bother arguing they aren't, even though you can probably guess I personally believe Rowling's stories rarely show any of those desirable qualities.
Is it correct to say, though, that all other things being equal, a story that is internally consistent is objectively better than one that isn't? (Assuming lack of internal consistency isn't an intentional feature of the story, for example, for humor, to confuse the reader, to signify dreams, to show a character's own fractured state of mind, etc.) I certainly think it is correct to say that. Rowling could have written an internally consistent story with everything that HP3 had. Hippogriffs, deatheaters, quidditch, young love, daring rescues, caricatures of good and evil, you name it. Time travel was not a meaningful feature of the story, but rather a crutch that allowed the story to be told lazily. I argue that at least that one aspect of Harry Potter is objectively bad in a way that can be agreed upon by all rational people.
Time travel, for example, is in itself pretty illogical. It never makes sense. So does that mean every author who has used it is automatically objectively bad? I really don't get how anybody could argue that way. There are people who enjoy stories that involve time travel a lot, but writing a piece of literature they'd enjoy makes you a bad author?
No, but abusing time travel in an inconsistent and objectively bad way makes you a bad author, at least in that respect. (Assuming, of course, you both bought the previous argument and agree that the inconsistency isn't an intentional feature of the story.)
Ferret Warlord wrote:
Okay, I get what you said. In other words, it's all about how it gets written. How is this any different that virtually any other form of fiction? Why must science fiction be isolated to be beaten up with big, fancy words?
Umm ... cuz the thread was about science fiction, and science fiction is pretty bad about the "empty game" problem?
petrie911 wrote:
You can certainly go back in time to try to change something, but you'll just fail, because you've already failed. See the Novikov self-consistency principle.
I must have skipped the chapter in Harry Potter 3 where Rowling introduced this entirely fictional concept and suggested it had any bearing in Harry Potter universe. Note that she wouldn't have had to do so explicitly. For example, she could have had someone repeatedly go back in time to change a particular outcome, and fail repeatedly in increasingly fantastic scenarios. A reader would naturally be guided toward supposing the Harry Potter universe innately imposes some sort of deterministic self consistency similar to the entirely fictional concept you mention. Of course, Rowling is a bad author, so she was content to merely construct a universe devoid of internal logic or consistency.
I found this run to be quite boring. There are plenty of platformers I've never played that I thoroughly enjoyed runs of, for example Kirby, Gimmick!, SMB64, Metroid, Super Metroid, Circle of the Moon ... most of which have stars. Wario Land comes nowhere close to those movies, at least in one person's opinion.
Plevens forbid that someone should enjoy a story that happens to feature faster-than-light travel.
You make me feel bad for enjoying the Infinite Improbability Drive.
I was being facetious to Pointless up there.
And apparently without understanding what I wrote. Faster-than-light travel does not make a story bad. Authors relying on the concept of faster-than-light travel to dazzle inattentive readers so that they don't actually have to write a story with semantic meaning does, though. So do authors stupidly introducing inconsistencies into the very universe they got to define.
For example, the infinite improbability drive is not real, but Douglas Adams conveniently provides readers with many, many correctives that allow us to understand that the universe in which his story takes place is one where sense and logic take a back seat for the sake of humor. Nonsense is part of the humor, and when it exists, it is most often elegant, strict, witty, precise, and original. Douglas Adams is a good author.
An example on the opposite end of the spectrum is J.K. Rowling. In book 3 of her Harry Potter series she introduces the concept of unlimited time travel, having first Hermione and then all three of the plucky protagonists traveling back and forth throughout time at will. That is a huge inconsistency that invalidates everything ever written in the series. If time travel is possible (and indeed, so cheap and easy that grade school students are allowed to make use of it), why is it not used by everyone to accomplish everything? Why are Harry's parents still dead? Whenever anyone fails at anything, why don't they just go back in time and correct it? Why doesn't the Harry Potter universe resemble the Primer universe with an impossible tangling of timelines and copies of people popping in and out whenever and wherever possible? Because J.K. Rowling is a bad author. Because her books are an "empty game" that are neither elegant, strict, witty, precise, nor original. Her fiction is "a very primitive, very naive one parameter process."
And Ms. Rowling, probably after years and years of being hounded by people with half a brain, finally attempted to "correct" her error by mentioning in one of the later books that every single time travel device (the entire world's supply of which were kept in an easily accessible glass cabinet) were destroyed in an accident, and apparently no one knows how to make any more of them, even though they are so trivially unimportant they are passed around to schoolchildren on a whim. The ending to SMB2US was more convincing.
Mukki's story neatly encapsulates the major problem with most science fiction, something along the lines of, it's written to service a misinformed or misguided conceit of the author, and has virtually no redeeming literary value because the writer isn't actually a good writer or interested in telling a story or in relating to the reader, but rather, someone that has stupid ideas about science and is compelled to write nonsensical fiction with sciencey sounding words and letters and numbers because it makes them feel smart.
As a young child I used to read a lot of science fiction but gradually found myself to despise the genre almost universally. I didn't give it much thought, I just stopped reading it since it no longer pleased me. That is, until I started getting into the nonfiction of analyzing fiction.
For me, the most easily accessible book on the subject is Six Walks in the Fictional Woods by Umberto Eco. In a nutshell, it talks about the roles of both the reader and the author in fiction, and the responsibilities they have to each other, and the ways they fail. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of science fiction authors fail their readers nearly entirely. Here is a a telling passage from Six Walks that has much to do with one of science fiction authors' primary failings:
Figure 11
Certain authors have suggested that a good visual metaphor of a self-voiding fiction is the celebrated optical illusion shown in Figure 11, which on a first "reading" gives both the impression of a coherent world and the feeling of some inexplicable impossibility. On a second reading (to read it properly, one should try to design it), one realizes how and why it is bidimensionally possible but tridimensionally absurd.
Yet even in this case, the impossibility of a universe in which Figure 11 can exist derives from the fact that we tend to think such a universe operates according to the same laws of solid geometry that obtain in the real world. Obviously if these laws hold, the figure is impossible. But as a matter of fact, this figure is not geometrically impossible, and the proof is that it was possible to design it on a bidimensional surface. We are simply misled when we apply to it not only the rules of plane geometry but also the rules of perspective used in drawing three-dimensional objects. This figure would be possible not only in Flatland but also in our own world, if we did not take the shading as a representation of shadows on a three-dimensional structure. And so we must admit that in order to be impressed, disturbed, frightened, or touched by even the most impossible of worlds, we must rely upon our knowledge of the actual one. In other words, we ought to take the real world as a background.
This means that fictional worlds are parasites of the real world. There is no rule that prescribes the number of fictional elements that are acceptable in a work. In fact, there is a great deal of variety here -- forms such as the fable, for instance, lead us to accept correctives to our knowledge of the real world at every step. But everything that the text doesn't name or describe explicitly as different from what exists in the real world must be understood as corresponding to the laws and conditions of the real world.
Of course, most science fiction authors fail us at every turn with nonsensical fictional elements, without proper or believable correctives to our knowledge that would allow a thoughtful person to suspend disbelief and immerse themself in the story. In his seminal essay On the Structural Analysis of Science Fiction (which can be read in his essay collection Microworlds), Stanislaw Lem talks about a similar problem specifically from the perspective of science fiction:
If we were to change railway signals so that they ordered the stopping of trains in moments of danger not by blinking red lights but by pointing with stuffed dragons, we would be using fantastic objects as signals, but those objects would still have a real, nonfantastic function. The fact that there are no dragons has no relationship to the real purpose or method of the signaling.
As in life we can solve real problems with the help of images of nonexistent beings, so in literature can we signal the existence of real problems with the help of prima facie impossible occurrences or objects. Even when the happenings it describes are totally impossible, a science fiction work may still point out meaningful, indeed rational, problems.
For example, the social, psychological, political, and economic problems of space travel may be depicted quite reliastically in science fiction even though the technological parameters of the spaceships are quite fantastic in the sense it will for all eternity be impossible to build a spaceship with such parameters.
But what if everything in a science fiction work is fantastic? What if not only the objects but also the problems have no chance of ever being realized, as when impossible time travel machines are used to point out impossible time travel paradoxes? In such cases science fiction is playing an empty game. Since empty games have no hidden meaning, since they represent nothing and predict nothing, they have no relationship at all to the real world and can therefore please us only as logical puzzles. Their value is autonomous, because they lack all semantic reference, therefore they are worthwhile or worthless only as games.
But how do we evaluate empty games? Simply by their formal qualities. They must contain a multitude of rules, they must be elegant, strict, witty, precise, original. They must therefore show at least a minimum of complexity and an inner coherence, that is, it must be forbidden during the play to make any change in the rules that would make the play easier. Nevertheless, ninety eight percent of the empty games in science fiction are very primitive, very naive on parameter processes.
And there is the rub. Almost all of science fiction (and indeed, much of fiction in general) is just one big giant empty game of no semantic value. Inelegant, imprecise, unclever, unoriginal, with neither intrinsic nor extrinsic meaning. Of course, certain allowances must be made, and we evaluate fiction written in 1890 differently from that written in 1990. But even when we allow for the fact that people didn't know as much back in the early days of science fiction, we are still stuck with the inevitable realization that they knew enough to construct a story with semantic value, they just didn't care to. And almost none of the science fiction authors in history are good enough at their craft to make their empty games worth our while.
What is the maximum possible value of a1a2 + a2a3 + ... + ana1?Figure 11 Certain authors have suggested that a good visual metaphor of a self-voiding fiction is the celebrated optical illusion shown in Figure 11, which on a first "reading" gives both the impression of a coherent world and the feeling of some inexplicable impossibility. On a second reading (to read it properly, one should try to design it), one realizes how and why it is bidimensionally possible but tridimensionally absurd. Yet even in this case, the impossibility of a universe in which Figure 11 can exist derives from the fact that we tend to think such a universe operates according to the same laws of solid geometry that obtain in the real world. Obviously if these laws hold, the figure is impossible. But as a matter of fact, this figure is not geometrically impossible, and the proof is that it was possible to design it on a bidimensional surface. We are simply misled when we apply to it not only the rules of plane geometry but also the rules of perspective used in drawing three-dimensional objects. This figure would be possible not only in Flatland but also in our own world, if we did not take the shading as a representation of shadows on a three-dimensional structure. And so we must admit that in order to be impressed, disturbed, frightened, or touched by even the most impossible of worlds, we must rely upon our knowledge of the actual one. In other words, we ought to take the real world as a background. This means that fictional worlds are parasites of the real world. There is no rule that prescribes the number of fictional elements that are acceptable in a work. In fact, there is a great deal of variety here -- forms such as the fable, for instance, lead us to accept correctives to our knowledge of the real world at every step. But everything that the text doesn't name or describe explicitly as different from what exists in the real world must be understood as corresponding to the laws and conditions of the real world.
