Greg Egan

Just posting a follow-up comment to say that the interactive simulation is really the highlight of this set of pages. I was expecting a trivial demo widget, along the lines of the animated GIFs in the article, but it's actually a full 3D rigid-body simulation. Playing around with blocks and ramps in a browser does a great job of taking the mathematical analysis given in the article, and making it at least somewhat intuitively understandable. But on the other hand, it doesn't exactly make a convincing case that a world built according to these rules could ever be stable! http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/DICHRONAUTS/02/Interactive.ht…

Not exactly about the electron, but if you want good fiction about singularities and the like, find books by Greg Egan. /Incandescence/ is about a civilisation living near a black hole. When you read it, keep a paper and pencil handy. Egan's web is at http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/.

This is the second in a collection of notes by Egan on the physics of his Orthogonal trilogy (which I've just started, but which seems excellent as always). It may make more sense to start with the first, http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/ORTHOGONAL/00/PM.html .

I haven't read Permutation City yet, but virtualization in Diaspora is far more advanced. The default, as I recall, is ~800 times meatspace. I recommend reading Stephenson's Anathem first, however. Edit: The Planck Dive is a follow-on.[0] [0] http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/PLANCK/Complete/Planck.html

These were featured in Greg Egans fantastic book Diaspora [1]. I can't recommend it enough [1] http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/DIASPORA/DIASPORA.html

Egan also has a nice intro to real relativity: http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/FOUNDATIONS/index.html Also, Permutation City (deals with the philosophy of uploaded minds) and Diaspora (also related to some of the philosophy of uploading) are amazing novels. http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/DIASPORA/DIASPORA.html http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/PERMUTATION/Permutation.html

It's not the best sci-fi short story I've ever read, and I don't necessarily agree with all the views expressed, but I thought it would be interesting to HN. For those not familiar, Greg Egan writes some of the hardest science fiction you'll ever read. Check out Orphanogenesis, which stands alone but is also the introduction to his mindblowing novel Diaspora: http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/DIASPORA/01/Orphanogenesis.ht…

Sci-fi author Greg Egan has a disturbing short-story on similar themes, 'The Caress', part of the collection Axiomatic. (The full collection is just $2.99 via the author's self-published ebooks: http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/BIBLIOGRAPHY/Ebooks.html#Axio… It could make a great Blade Runner-like movie, and then that movie would be a perfect double-feature with Tim's Vermeer. And in digging up links about 'The Caress', I came across a cool word, ekphrasis, that also applies to Tim's Vermeer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekphrasis

This strongly reminds me of the first chapter of Greg Egan's Diaspora [1] (which I can't recommend enough) in which newly-formed AIs bootstrap their way to consciousness in part by connecting randomly to an online library and using the various data streams to build up an associative model of the world. [1] http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/DIASPORA/01/Orphanogenesis.ht…

Also worth considering is Dust Theory, from the inventive mind of Greg Egan, which adds a simulation layer and time/space independence to the Boltzmann paradox. http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2009/01/dust-hypothesis.html And the FAQ for those who have read Permutation City: http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/PERMUTATION/FAQ/FAQ.html

I'd ditto the question ;) Semi-recent thread with some interesting-looking suggestions, not sure of 'hard' scifi label though: http://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/1eyt3b/is_there_any_sf_book_t… I'd recommend other books by Greg Egan, though. Permutation City (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City) is particularly interesting and makes some very interesting conjectures dealing with computation, cognition, 'quantum ontology', etc. Character development is somewhat poor, but eh! (there's also a FAQ on the author's website: http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/PERMUTATION/FAQ/FAQ.html)

Greg Egan's Planck Dive short story is worth a read: http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/PLANCK/Complete/Planck.html

This is like asking whether god exists. Until there is some evidence one way or the other, it is pointless to consider the question seriously. Though it's worth noting that the total ignorance implied by the lack of evidence about the purpose of the universe implies that any specific speculation on the question is almost certainly incorrect. Fun to think about, though. Have you read Greg Egan's Permutation City or Diaspora? http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/PERMUTATION/Permutation.html http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/DIASPORA/DIASPORA.html

I'd re-read it, Greg Egan is perhaps the hardest Sci-Fi writer out there, everything is rigorously thought out. He used to be a software engineer and hacks on some of his more interesting flights of fancy - check out his website http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/ for some interesting stuff, Quantum Soccer anyone? http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/BORDER/Soccer/Soccer.html. If NH should have an official Sci-Fi author it should be him ;)

some of the older greg egan stuff (he was a programmer). i can't remember any titles, but a look at the summaries should make things clear (or his site - http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/) [edit: ok, so after looking there (ow my eyeballs!) permutation city is one i remember, and there was also a collection of short stories...]

I recommend three of them: Permutation City, Diaspora, and Axiomatic. Here's the opening chapter of Diaspora: http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/DIASPORA/01/Orphanogenesis.ht…

Yatima, an Orphan Mind of the Konishi Polisi is an excellent example of a Synthetic Intelligence as a main character. Ve's alien but you don't really notice cause the writing is so good. The remaining fields — where no changes to the seed had yet been tested, and no predictions could be made — were classified as indeterminate. Here, the one tried code, the known landmark, was shown as grey against white: a mountain peak protruding through a band of clouds which concealed everything to the east or west of it. No more detail could be resolved from afar; whatever lay beneath the clouds could only be discovered firsthand. Whenever the conceptory created an orphan, it set all the benignly mutable trait fields to valid codes chosen at random, since there were no parents to mimic or please. Then it selected a thousand indeterminate fields, and treated them in much the same fashion: throwing a thousand quantum dice to choose a random path through terra incognita. Every orphan was an explorer, sent to map uncharted territory. And every orphan was the uncharted territory itself http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/DIASPORA/01/Orphanogenesis.ht…

Here's a soild SF book that deals a fair bit with that question: http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/PERMUTATION/Permutation.html

BTW most of what I know about black hole physics is from Greg Egan's novel "Incandescence". Which covers quite a lot of science for a work of fiction (and overall extremely inspiring). http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/INCANDESCENCE/Incandescence.h…

Greg Egan's "Disapora"[1] (where most of us literally live in computers) and "Permutation City"[2] (living in a cellular automata). Similar themes in Roger William's "The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect"[3] (an AI accidentally takes over the universe). 1: http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/DIASPORA/DIASPORA.html 2: http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/PERMUTATION/Permutation.html 3: http://localroger.com/prime-intellect/

Greg Egan renewed my faith in Science Fiction. I just finished reading Diaspora, and I am now a fan. It's an incredibly well thought out extrapolation of the future of the human race, much less phantasmagorical and much more grounded in science than pretty much every other SF I know of, while still going off into mind-bending tangents. I think the most common critique of his work might be about the occasional digressions on physics. It's undeniable that they make the book a bit dense, but in fact, he appears to have restrained himself to keep it readable and entertaining, instead publishing the actual hairy details on his website: http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/DIASPORA/DIASPORA.html#CONTEN… PS: I'd like to thank HN for making me discover this author. Now I'm keeping with the tradition!

I noticed sci-fi author Greg Egan in the comments. Looks like he's still battling against Google using the wrong image for him when you google his name: http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/ESSAYS/GOOGLE/Google.html

For those who think that nanotechnology is too mundane, what about machines made from nucleons? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Femtotechnology Greg Egan speculates on femtotechnology in some of his sci-fi, mostly as insanely fast computers. (I mean, jeez, it takes SO MUCH TIME for an electron to whirl around the nucleus of an atom... it's so much faster when your computer is the nucleus.) An excerpt from a Egan short story: http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/SCHILD/00/SchildExcerpt.html More on femtocomputing: http://hplusmagazine.com/2011/11/01/femtocomputing/

This applet demonstrates why the technique cannot be used for FTL communication: http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/APPLETS/20/20.html

Topical: http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/BORDER/Complete/Border.html

What about the morality of simulating an environment where sentient beings are produced by a long agonizing process of evolution? Greg Egan points that out here: http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/PERMUTATION/FAQ/FAQ.html (question 6). "Post-humans" should have room for a much more robust morality that would preclude someone purposely creating the world we live in - unless we were an unintended byproduct of an unintended byproduct that no "post-human" has even noticed or something.