Ask HN: Is there any fiction that's based on a world with different physics? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is there any fiction that's based on a world with different physics?

18 pointsslmjkdbtl27 comments

E.g. a world where momentum is not conserved, perpetual motion is possible, decreasing entropy etc

Greg Egan wrote a few of those.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthogonal_(series)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(novel)

Diaspora starts in this universe but ends up somewhere else.

Greg Egan is great. Strongly recommend Permutation City. Predating The Matrix, they build simulated worlds which then bootstrap themselves into alternate realities. The physics are not the same as our physics but similar.

I am surprised nobody has mentioned Flatland

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland

Flatland is amazing! Without giving anything up, its a short-story that takes place in two dimensions, where men are polygons and women are lines. It's a brilliantly written satire of Victorian culture and an interesting thought experiment.

Not exactly this, but "Dragon's Egg" by Robert Forward takes place on a neutron star with a surface gravity billions times that on Earth.

The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov explores this very idea of what would happen if two parallel universes were to interact but had different laws of physics.

Some of Greg Egan's novels are based on very novel Physics I believe. His more "accessible" novel Permutation City is a HN favorite.

"The Void Trilogy" by Peter F. Hamilton has a "constructed" subuniverse where you can alter matter with thoughts and it has different temporal flow.

Bob Shaw wrote a duology "The Ragged Astronauts" & "The Wooden Spaceships" in which the ratio of a circles circumference to it's diameter is 3. As far as I can tell, the only reason this factoid is included is to defuse any arguments about the plausibility of other elements of the setting (a binary planet with a shared atmosphere such that it is possible for a feudal society to stage an invasion from one to the other using balloons).

Celestial Matters by Richard Garfinkle has Ptolemaic cosmology and Aristotelian physics.

The Planiverse: Computer Contact with a Two-Dimensional World by A.K. Dewdney is sort of a modern take on the classic Flatland by Edwin Abbot, and manages to improve upon it considerably.

The Long Earth series by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter posits an infinite set of parallel Earths that can be reached with a trivial but unorthodox electronic device. You have to travel to them incrementally, one sideways step

Nightfall by Isaac Asimov, while not exactly different physics but it's in a totally physical "universe."

The science-fantasy novel Celestial Matters is based on ancient Greek physics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Matters

Raft by Stephen Baxter comes to mind. It's his first book, so it's far from perfect, but it's quite interesting.

Some of his other books the physics are the same as ours but the locations are so exotic that they might as well qualify.

That's the basis of a story currently being written by a Dutch physics teacher:

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/21844/i-am-going-to-die-in...

There are no advanced concepts or deep hard scifi explorations, but the various worlds each have unique physics systems that are macro-consistent.

This is subtly present in Neal Stephenson's Anathem, late in the book it's a plot device that comes up a few times.

Can't say I've heard of anything like this _explicitly_, but Star Trek _kinda_ skates around the edges of that with the whole "warp drive" thing to some degree. Not an expert in ST lore by any means, but that whole franchise's physics world would have to be different than ours for the idea of a "warp field" to exist.

As far as we know transporters and rigid force projections such as force field starship windows also violate our physics.

Not really for warp: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0264-9381/11/5/00...

But yeah for the other Trek technology

Redshift Rendezvous (I forget who wrote it) has alternate physics you can step into where the speed of light is 30 m/s. You can get relativistic effects while jogging. (I mean, I guess that's just the same physics with one of the parameters changed, but it changes quite a bit...)

>You can get relativistic effects while jogging

and you have to aim a flashlight like a water hose. +1 for the appendix at the end that explains the conceit and lays out the equations used!

One of my favorites, written by John E. Stith.

“The Inverted World” by Christopher Priest involves a world that appears to be based on hyperbolic geometry I believe.

In this series, most modern technology stops working, due to aliens tweaking the laws of physics on earth

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emberverse_series

Check out The Machineries of Empire series by Yoon Ha Lee. The first instalment (Ninefox Gambit) is one of my favorite books. The physics of the world is based on an interesting "calendrical" system which relies on the population's faith in the calendar to persist.

The Emberverse series by SM Sterling. The laws of physics change such that technology no longer works and is no longer capable of working. Ex: water couldn't boil enough to power a steam engine.

The first book is the best - subsequent books are almost pure fantasy.

Every fantasy with magic goes against the three laws of thermodynamics.

Ringworld

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringworld

The Practice Effect, David Brin

On, by Adam Roberts.

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