Call number
Genres
Collection
Publication
Millennium, 1995
Pages
368
Description
THE HUNDRED LIGHT YEAR DIARY-Scientists can bounce messages from the future backto the present,but there's no guarantee they'll tell the truth... LEARNING TO BE ME-Crystalline minds may take the place of human brains,but where does the self really lie? CLOSER-Lovers exchange bodies and minds,but their experiments go just that little bit too far,proving that you can have too much of a good thing
Awards
Ignotus Award (Winner — Anthology — 2007)
Language
Original language
English
Original publication date
1995 (Collection)
1992 (Into Darkness)
1992 (Ustable Orbits in the Space of Lies)
1995 (Seeing)
1990 (The Safe-Deposit Box)
1990 (The Moral Virologist)
1991 (The Moat)
1990 (Learning to be Me)
1995 (A Kidnapping)
1991 (The Infinite Assassin)
1991 (Appropriate Love)
1992 (The Hundred Light Year Diary)
1990 (Eugene)
1989 (The Cutie)
1992 (Closer)
1990 (the Caress)
1991 (Blood Sisters)
1990 (Axiomatic)
1992 (The Walk)
Physical description
368 p.; 6.93 inches
ISBN
9781857983098
Similar in this library
Library's review
One of the best single-author SF collections ever, especially in terms of the mind-warping ideas that Egan is so good at.
User reviews
LibraryThing member AsYouKnow_Bob
The hardest of hard sf. I have a couple years of college physics, and Egan's stories were a challenge for me to follow.
'bluetyson' here on LT characterizes this sort of thing as "mind melting". That's exactly what I got from it, too: this is so good that I found that I needed to take a rest between
(So good that it forever destroyed any illusions I ever harbored of writing the stuff: the state of the art is now Too High for me.) Hell, this is so good that it put me off reading the stuff for a while: nothing else measured up.
'bluetyson' here on LT characterizes this sort of thing as "mind melting". That's exactly what I got from it, too: this is so good that I found that I needed to take a rest between
Show More
stories.(So good that it forever destroyed any illusions I ever harbored of writing the stuff: the state of the art is now Too High for me.) Hell, this is so good that it put me off reading the stuff for a while: nothing else measured up.
Show Less
LibraryThing member bianca.sayan
Greg Egan's short stories are both deeply grim and great escapism. Most of his stories explore really compelling ideas. I highly recommend because he wields his intensity well so you don't get depressed, but rather excited about his stories. Recommend!
LibraryThing member atreic
This is a collection of short sci-fi stories that I really love. They have surprisingly 'hard' maths / physics / biology (Cantor sets, cell biology, strange attractors, etc) and address big questions about what it means to be human interestingly.
LibraryThing member AndyGE
I first read these stories when I was a teenager and they had a profound effect on me. I still come back to them regularly. Greg Egan is, for me, the best writer of short fiction alive today.
LibraryThing member antao
One thing I found about Greg Egan's novels and short stories, is that they are so densely layered and packed with information (that often swamps the plot and characters) that they are very good to re-read. When I do this I tend to forget how well the story and characters work or don't work, and
A few notes and rating on some of the stories and the Physics (or lack thereof) behind it:
The Infinite Assassin: Physics -> MWI/Parallel Universes (4 stars)
“The number of parallel worlds is uncountable infinite – infinite like the real numbers, not merely like the integers – making it difficult to quantify these things without elaborate mathematical definitions, but roughly speaking, it seems that I’m unusually invariant: more alike from world to world than most people are. How alike? In how many worlds? Enough to be useful. Enough to do the job.”
The kind of "multiverse" that the physicists are referring to when they discuss the cold spot is the Bubble Multiverse, which necessarily demands that each universe is a separate entity. The kind of "multiverse" quantum physicists mean is the Quantum Multiverse, in which a new and entirely separate reality is created each time something happens that could have happened differently due to probabilistic quantum events. While they may exist simultaneously, the existence of one, even if it were proven, does not attest to the existence of the other. What Egan is writing about here is not MWI but parallel universes.
There's a strange paradox with the multi-verse. If there's infinite universe and infinite possibilities, then there's an infinite amount of universes where someone has figured out a way to destroy the entire multi-verse. And even if they choose not to destroy it, there's an infinite amount of universes where they do destroy the multi-verse, and so we shouldn't exist anymore...
observable universe...
multiple observable universe...
multi-o-universe......
we should be calling it oniverse and multoverse :^3
The Hundred-Light-Year-Diary: Physics -> Time-Reverse Universe (5 stars)
“I climbed out of bed and started dressing, although I had no reason to hurry home [he’s shagging someone other than his wife]. Alison [his wife] knew all about us; apparently, she’d known since childhood that her husband would turn out to be a piece of shit.”
“The ignorance cults say that knowing the future robs us of our soul; by losing the power to choose between right and wrong, we cease to be human.”
The Time-Reversed Universe according to Janus model
The theory describes two sheets or parallel universes in CPT-symmetry interacting through gravity, both originating from the same initial singularity. In Janus model, four species of matter coexist:
1- Positive mass matter (baryonic matter). Baryonic matter refers to all matter composed of elementary particles called baryons. In practice, this corresponds to protons, neutrons, their constituents (bosons, quarks), to which leptons are implicitly added (such as electrons and neutrinos) and which compose atoms and molecules and all directly visible structures in the observable universe (stars, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, etc.).
2- Positive mass antimatter (C-symmetry with respect to the first specie). This is the antimatter according to Dirac definition which is not very abundant compared to the first type. C-symmetry reverses not only the sign of the electrical charge but also the other quantum charges qi including the baryonic number, but not the spin. ζ-symmetry is the translation into symplectic geometry of this C-symmetry between matter and Dirac's antimatter. ζ-symmetry, in the 5-dimensional evolution space used in the Janus model, causes symmetry C (called q-symmetry in Janus model) in the space of the moment.
Together with positive energy photons, these first two species are the components of the universe known until now: it is the first sheet of the universe (a.k.a. the positive sector).
The 4 species of matter in the positive and negative sectors according to the Janus model.
3- The negative mass material (CPT-symmetry with respect to the first specie, with an anti-linear and anti-unit operator T), which is not very abundant with respect to the fourth specie. CPT-symmetry simultaneously reverses quantum charges, parity (the spatial image seen in a mirror) and time.
4- Negative mass antimatter (PT-symmetry with respect to the first specie, with a linear and unitary operator T). Using symplectic geometry, the Janus model demonstrates that this PT-symmetry is also a ζ-symmetry and a q-symmetry which automatically go together, so the quantum charges are also reversed.
The fourth specie, the so-called “Feynman antimatter”, is the primordial antimatter.
I could go on and on and write about the other stories the same way. There’s almost always a golden nugget buried there waiting to be discovered by the reader...
Show More
absorb what Egan's main drivers, which are ideas and concepts, and how they might work when extrapolated from current scientific knowledge to the nth degree. I'd suggest this as a great read to anyone with a degree or more in advanced physics. I think the average SF fan will be better off just reading the Wikipedia plot description.A few notes and rating on some of the stories and the Physics (or lack thereof) behind it:
The Infinite Assassin: Physics -> MWI/Parallel Universes (4 stars)
“The number of parallel worlds is uncountable infinite – infinite like the real numbers, not merely like the integers – making it difficult to quantify these things without elaborate mathematical definitions, but roughly speaking, it seems that I’m unusually invariant: more alike from world to world than most people are. How alike? In how many worlds? Enough to be useful. Enough to do the job.”
The kind of "multiverse" that the physicists are referring to when they discuss the cold spot is the Bubble Multiverse, which necessarily demands that each universe is a separate entity. The kind of "multiverse" quantum physicists mean is the Quantum Multiverse, in which a new and entirely separate reality is created each time something happens that could have happened differently due to probabilistic quantum events. While they may exist simultaneously, the existence of one, even if it were proven, does not attest to the existence of the other. What Egan is writing about here is not MWI but parallel universes.
There's a strange paradox with the multi-verse. If there's infinite universe and infinite possibilities, then there's an infinite amount of universes where someone has figured out a way to destroy the entire multi-verse. And even if they choose not to destroy it, there's an infinite amount of universes where they do destroy the multi-verse, and so we shouldn't exist anymore...
observable universe...
multiple observable universe...
multi-o-universe......
we should be calling it oniverse and multoverse :^3
The Hundred-Light-Year-Diary: Physics -> Time-Reverse Universe (5 stars)
“I climbed out of bed and started dressing, although I had no reason to hurry home [he’s shagging someone other than his wife]. Alison [his wife] knew all about us; apparently, she’d known since childhood that her husband would turn out to be a piece of shit.”
“The ignorance cults say that knowing the future robs us of our soul; by losing the power to choose between right and wrong, we cease to be human.”
The Time-Reversed Universe according to Janus model
The theory describes two sheets or parallel universes in CPT-symmetry interacting through gravity, both originating from the same initial singularity. In Janus model, four species of matter coexist:
1- Positive mass matter (baryonic matter). Baryonic matter refers to all matter composed of elementary particles called baryons. In practice, this corresponds to protons, neutrons, their constituents (bosons, quarks), to which leptons are implicitly added (such as electrons and neutrinos) and which compose atoms and molecules and all directly visible structures in the observable universe (stars, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, etc.).
2- Positive mass antimatter (C-symmetry with respect to the first specie). This is the antimatter according to Dirac definition which is not very abundant compared to the first type. C-symmetry reverses not only the sign of the electrical charge but also the other quantum charges qi including the baryonic number, but not the spin. ζ-symmetry is the translation into symplectic geometry of this C-symmetry between matter and Dirac's antimatter. ζ-symmetry, in the 5-dimensional evolution space used in the Janus model, causes symmetry C (called q-symmetry in Janus model) in the space of the moment.
Together with positive energy photons, these first two species are the components of the universe known until now: it is the first sheet of the universe (a.k.a. the positive sector).
The 4 species of matter in the positive and negative sectors according to the Janus model.
3- The negative mass material (CPT-symmetry with respect to the first specie, with an anti-linear and anti-unit operator T), which is not very abundant with respect to the fourth specie. CPT-symmetry simultaneously reverses quantum charges, parity (the spatial image seen in a mirror) and time.
4- Negative mass antimatter (PT-symmetry with respect to the first specie, with a linear and unitary operator T). Using symplectic geometry, the Janus model demonstrates that this PT-symmetry is also a ζ-symmetry and a q-symmetry which automatically go together, so the quantum charges are also reversed.
The fourth specie, the so-called “Feynman antimatter”, is the primordial antimatter.
I could go on and on and write about the other stories the same way. There’s almost always a golden nugget buried there waiting to be discovered by the reader...
Show Less