fractalnavel

vague thought: if you could manage ftl travel / signals, and you attempted an act resulting in a causality paradox (eg, shooting your own grandfather), then maybe something different happens than the usual crop of conclusions (which pretty much fall into two camps: the act is prevented, or reality bifurcates).

i'm thinking it would look something like quantum superposition on a macroscopic scale for all spacetime in the affected region. 

region ? what do its boundaries look like ?  some sort of topological continuity so that the indeterminacy smoothly drops off, or an event horizon ?  what would the properties of such a region be ?  what would it “look” like ?

flipped around, quantum mechanical uncertainty at the usual scales might be interpreted as exactly this issue with causality.  which gets me thinking about the relationship between qm and relativity.  i don't know qed (1, 2; there's probably an actual course online - right ?), which is the next physics to consider. 

then for the the hell of it, how might these concepts speak to the problems of quantum gravity ?  causality, entropy, blackholes, event horizons ...

wishy-washy thoughts.  been reading the “relativity and ftl travel faq”.  yeah, i know; i never actually said this was science anywhere, did i ? ;-)  but you never know what of value might pop up when bouncing around a bunch of speculations, if nothing else, then as possible mechanisms in works of fiction.

hee hee - ok, if you buy into “indeterminacy” as inextricably linked with things like free choice, consciousness, and the things that make us human (the “soul”), which is one mystical view of the universe, then try this on for size: perhaps the universe was an unconscious mechanical reality - until someone eventually did come up with ftl, time travel or some other technology with the potential to cause violations of causality.  it was their attempt to change history at some time in the past - oh, let's make it the 6000 or so years ago that the creationists seem so fond of - that created this bubble of indeterminate reality in which we now exist.  a macroscopic quantum spacetime soliton, so to speak (well, maybe standing wave; a soliton needs something to travel in - ?).  it is self sustaining, as it was created by one of its products.  that event - occurring some unknown distance in the future (and connected to the creation in the past) - could be known as the god event, the moment of creation of the conscious universe (the physical one has existed all along).

is this region expanding ?  and how in hell could it start (“start” ?) in the first place ?

all right, that's enough nonsense for now ;-)