ataraxion | [voice]

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[voice]

[The broadcast is audio only, and the voice that comes across is quiet and more than a little bit ragged. But he speaks evenly.]

Good day. This is Miles Edgeworth.

These past days have been chaotic, and as such it has been easy to lose track of time; however, it must be remembered that in spite of everything that has happened we have received no indication that the jump will not go forward as scheduled. It will occur in five days. Please bear this impending deadline in mind; there will be more reminders as we approach the event, but be sure that you are prepared.

I manage a service, in which I recommend that all individuals on board to take part. It is a "buddy system," in which you are assigned someone to check to ensure that you have made it safely to the jump. For more details, please inquire here.

Additionally, if any are interested in joining the security force, please speak with me; I should be glad to direct you the right way.

[A slight pause. He's searching frantically for distraction, but this isn't enough - so he adds more.]

What languages does everyone speak? I should like to find a conversational partner; my skills are becoming rusty.

[And:]

I should also like someone with whom I might be able to discuss certain aspects of physics.

[And then another pause, and then quietly:]

Quite.

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[ did somebody say physics?

connor's voice, comparatively, is also a bit ragged—but it's worn with tired curiousity, not exasperation. a few days holed up in engineering trying to fix an unfixable problem can really get to a bloke, especially when sleep comes about fourth on his immediate to-do list. (plus the whole... mask... thing, but at least he's attempting to pick and choose what weighs most on his mind. distractions: really, really key technique here.) ]

What sort of aspects did you want to know about?

[ because there are a lot. ]

[He clears his throat, and because he's not entirely comfortable because he's already sort of been chided for his interest he asks:]

Can you perhaps make this private?

[ that's fair. plenty of nosy people poking about, ready to point fingers. not exactly an uncommon occurrence. ]

Yep, no problem. Hang on a sec.

[ doot doot and... done. ]

Right.

[He girds his courage.]

How do we know the universe is expanding? The explanation given was poor.

[ right-o.

he's not going to ask about the previous explanation, but it's a pretty basic question, all things considered, with relatively easy-to-explain answer. ]

Well—when an object's moving, the frequency of its electromagnetic waves shift. Low-frequency light waves are red, and high-frequency light waves are blue. If something with a light source is moving away from an observer—so, us, for example—it'll have shifted to the red end of the spectrum. That's what astronomers call a redshift.

Things that are moving away from us at an extremely rapid rate are gonna appear way more red than stuff that's really close; we know the universe is expanding because the galaxies furthest from us are almost completely redshifted. Some even shift past entire visible spectrum and into infared. [ supercool, eh? ] Redshifts aren't the only way to explain it, though—there's also cosmological time dilation of supernova luminosity curves, the Tolman surface brightness test, galaxies densities, the temperature of the cosmic microwave background—all stuff based on Einstein's theory of General Relativity.

Basically, we've a lot to go on. [ connor pauses, looking slightly apologetic. he knows he can ramble. sometimes. ] Why?

[Edgeworth frowns as he listens to that explanation, thinking hard - and, yes, he does understand it. He naturally ignores that last question - ]

Forgive me if this seems to be shifting topics abruptly - but would you go into detail on the Theory of Relativity?

No, it's alright. Um, it's—d'you want to know about general relativity or special relativity? Sorry, it's a... really big topic. It'd help if I knew specifics.

[ like. why. you want to know. ]

[...Well, fifty-fifty chance on which one is better to learn first, and he'll be damned if he's going to ask advice.]

General.

[ connor inhales, thinking. ]

Right, well, it's sort of an extension of special relativity what Einstein already theorised earlier in his career, but it's more to do with gravity. General relativity says basically that gravity affects spacetime's measurements by warping it, rather than being defined as a natural force; the forces caused by gravity and acceleration are equivalent. That's called the equivalence principle.

[ how to explain this without switching to video and drawing a diagram. no, connor. PUT THE PEN DOWN. ]

Therefore, space is curved. [ to put it simply. ] And since it's curved, objects don't necessarily always move in straight lines. So, it's like—if you put a bowling ball on a trampoline, the bowling ball's gonna make a depression. If you put another ball next to it, the ball is gonna roll towards the center, because the heavy object's shifting the angle of the plane it's on. The heavier the bowling ball, the stronger the attraction is gonna be for the smaller object.

[ the sound of a biro scratching against notebook paper can be vaguely heard as connor continues, because visuals help, and he's a helper. ]

That's what the Earth does. Around the Sun, obviously—along with other planets in other solar systems, and with galaxies and black holes. Earth doesn't move in a straight line because the Sun's warping the spacetime around it, making it move elliptically. [ he makes an unseen circular motion. ] In an orbit.

[ BRB, SWITCHING TO VIDEO. ]

Edited (SPELLING IS HARD) 2012-11-06 01:48 (UTC)

[ connor, looking about as tired as he sounds, holds up a battered notebook with a small doodle on it—illustrating the concept behind what he'd just explained. ]

I'm paraphrasing a lot of this, but... there's a lot of ground to cover. [ seriously, anything specific. anything. ]

But -

[He starts to object, then frowns at the diagram and presses his hand to his mouth, studying it a moment. Slowly - ]

I was going to...protest that the analogy couldn't work, since the trampoline is solid matter while space is not, but..."Solid" and "liquid" and "gas" are all sort of...arbitrary anyway, aren't they? If matter displaces mass, it displaces mass, no matter whether it's like the trampoline or whether it's gas...Am I right?

[ his eyebrows go up, and he nods, tucking the notebook away again. ]

Basically, yep. The trampoline analogy isn't perfect, but it's a quick and easy way to explain gravitational attraction without having to reference stuff like field equations. The universe is made up of all kinds of matter we don't know anything about, but billions of high and low-mass objects are all sort of thrown together into it anyway—even space has a density of, I dunno, I think it was... something like one hydrogen atom per cubic meter? But mass displacement happens with everything, no matter how tiny the numbers, because everything has its own gravitational pull.

I see.

[He thinks about this a little while longer.]

So then when the ship is being flown...Do the pilots have to navigate around planetary pulls and the like?

[ ... oh, so this is where it's going. is it where it's going? it's going, at least. ]

I'm not sure how the ship is piloted [ he's not sure about a lot of the ship, actually ] but I suppose so. We'd have to avoid entering anything's orbit, or getting dragged into a black hole. That's kind of Sci-Fi 101.

I think we're in pretty deep space, though. So there's not... much to navigate.

[But it's not really where it's going.]

So then what's special relativity?

[ yes, because that is much simpler. ]

Essentially, you've got three dimensions you can move in. Up and down, side to side, and forwards and backwards. But you've also got a time dimension—the fourth dimension—in order to unify space and time, creating the space-time continuum. Special relativity's more to do with relative motion between objects using the space-time continuum. [ for example... ] If you were traveling in a car, and your friend were also traveling in a car, and you guys wanted to compare what you saw out the windows—all that really matters is how fast you're moving with respect to one another, and how that affects what you see. But it only applies to constant motion—that's why it's called special relativity, because it's a special case. As soon as you stop traveling in a straight line at a constant speed, the "special" part doesn't apply anymore. You'd want general relativity to explain curved or accelerated motion.

[ and yet.

he looks down, biting the inside of his cheek. principles first, details later. ]

Relativity's based on two important things. First, being that the laws of physics don't change at all for the two objects moving. Second, that the speed of light doesn't change to an observer, no matter how close they are to the source of that light. Basically, two principles what've held scientifically steady up until today. [ pause. ] Well, mostly. I'm still trying to figure out how this ship moves through spacetime when it jumps, but that's... yeah, totally different. I'll just not get into it. [ casually nopes out of that line of thought for now, aaand: ]

—On second thought, the car analogy's isn't all that great. Warped perceptions of light or other observations you and other people make about spacetime are pretty much only affected if you're moving really fast, like—approaching the speed of light fast. Physicists have done some experiments that prove time dilation, but nobody's actually seen it with their own eyes, because there's only so fast a human being can go before our bodies just... can't take it anymore.

[ is there a quick and easy example to give AH YES. ] If you've heard of the Global Positioning System, that's a constant experiment in special and general relativity, specifically time dilation—the clocks in orbit around the Earth have to be working at the same rate as the clocks on the surface, so the GPS constantly compensates for time dilation effects. The closer you are to the source of a gravitation pull, the slower time goes. So, for example, the closer you get to a black hole, the slower time passes. The closer you are to the core of the Earth, the slower time passes. And if you're in orbit, like Earth's satellites, time's gonna go a tiny bit faster.

[ connor takes a moment to drink from his (now lukewarm) cup of coffee; he makes a face, but downs the rest of it anyway. ] Sorry. I've had, like... I dunno how many. Lots. Work.

Anyway, where was I—oh, okay, you've probably heard of E=mc2, right? Energy equals mass times acceleration to the speed of light. That's Einstein's most famous equation. Basically, the more you try and accelerate an object to the speed of light, the heavier it becomes. Its mass will increase the faster it goes. That means it's physically impossible to make anything but massless particles go the speed of light, because anything else's mass will get too difficult to speed up.

[ he sets the now-empty cup down with a small tink and gazes off somewhere in the direction of the coffee maker, before returning his eyes to the feed. and then, down to his other scattered papers, covered with equations. sometimes, he has to remind himself that currently-accepted physics—especially the ones he's been trying to bend, recently—are only a jumping point into the rest of the unknown universe.

not that he's going to go on a rant about that to edgeworth. just explaining the simple things is more difficult than it should be.

science. ]

So, um. [ yeah. ] That's about it.

[He's quiet for a moment, sorting through all that. After a moment:]

The jumps. Are they at the speed of light?

[ connor sighs, shaking his head. ]

Honestly, mate, I've no idea. I've got a couple of theories, but I've not seen the jump drive. I don't even know how it works.

[ so that's... a half truth? he could mention wormholes (and probably will, at some point), but truth is, he's worked with holes in spacetime before, and he's got something of a working theory on how the jumps occur. ]

That's why Chapel and I are working on the particle collider, in the science department. We're tying to make some sense of it all.

Edited (oh my god words) 2012-11-07 06:22 (UTC)

[He frowns thoughtfully.]

If you could get in to see the jump drive...That would clarify things?

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