: The Codex is an infinite book, but it is of mundane size
: and only weighs 15lbs. And you can't know whatever you
: want from it because when you open it, it opens
: randomly to a page about someone or something usually
: having little or nothing to do with you. Mazzarin had
: a knack for opening it to a page near his own entry,
: though.
You know, if I was Alric, I'd have my monks transcribing random pages from it night and day. A finite, imperfect Codex copy which could be reliably opened to a given page would be exceedingly useful.
: As for fate and free will, it is possible to have free
: will and preordination at the same time. Ignoring the
: chaotic effects of probability, everything in the
: future is determined by things that happened before
: it, eventually being determined by things happening in
: the present, including the choices we make. But
: everything in the present, including our choices, is
: determined by things in the past. And since the past
: it already predetermined, so are the choices we make,
: and thus the future.
: So we're free to make whatever choices we will, acting as
: we would of our own accord - but our accord is
: determined by what kind of person we are and the
: circumstances we're in, which are already determined.
: And thus, so is the future.
Most people, however, don't define a person's choice as free if it's transparently obvious that, because of the sort of person he is, he'd make the choice that way. We don't blame alcoholics for choosing to drink themselves blind, because we don't believe the choice was free--there was no way they'd opt for temperance. Personally, I don't think "free will" has any real meaning. You're all puppets! Puppets!!
: The monkey wrench in this simple statement is that the
: Codex tells the future, meaning that the present is
: determined by the past and a small part of the future
: as well. So, knowing the future, you can change it.
: However, a couple of things make the Codex fit into the
: world without causing any paradoxes. The simplest one
: is the standard time-travel paradox-fixer: multiple
: timelines. So if you read about something in the
: future and then change that future, what you read
: about still happens, just in a different timeline
: where you didn't prevent it.
: But that's a cop-out excuse, since things told in the
: Codex seem to be the future of the one and only true
: timeline. Yet, since there are gods and magic and fate
: and such in Myth, the Codex can still fit in with the
: other standard time-travel paradox-fixer: causality
: loops.
: The fact that you read the Codex is factored in in what
: the Codex says to you. So if the Journal Writer hadn't
: read about the Summoner, maybe Soulblighter would
: never have known about him (the Baron had the Journal,
: and he could have told SB about the Summoner), and
: Myth II never would have happened - so the Codex
: wouldn't have told the Journal Writer about the
: Summoner. A causes B, B causes A, and so on.
: The only problem with causality loops is how they come to
: be in the first place; things in the past and future
: and alternate timelines have to be set out and
: coordinated by someone or something outside normal
: space and time. But that's no problem, because in
: Myth, we have the gods, who can do whatever they want
: and make causality loops to their hearts' content
: (presuming they have hearts). They could subtly
: influence events happening after the info from the
: future arrives, making sure that they happen like the
: info said.
Causality loops don't really have to "come to be;" you could simply postulate that one of the rules defining the geometry of space-time and the behavior of objects in it is that causality must be preserved. This isn't any more inherently unlikely than conservation of energy, or momentum (both of which, fundamentally, stem from properties of space-time).
BTW, a couple of different types of causal loops have already been shown to be possible under the rules of modern physics. General relativity allows an object to move along a trajectory which, from our point of view, is closed in spacetime--that is, the object eventually (in its own frame of reference) travels back to the same place in space and time (in our frame of reference) as it used to occupy. And in Feynman's description, the QED-governed production and annihilation of a particle-antiparticle pair is a causal loop; the particle travels forward in time, emits a photon, is knocked backwards in time by the "recoil," absorbs a photon, and heads forward again. What we see as an antiparticle is actually the particle on the backwards leg of its trip.
**is rushed by an angry mob of physicists and beaten to a pulp for his ridiculously simplified description of a process only truly describable by math he doesn't know yet**
: You know, this is kinda like wave/partical duality. For
: those who aren't into physics, a photon is the
: smallest unit of light. Note that I say
: "unit", not "particle". Because a
: photon doesn't always appear as a particle - sometimes
: it appears as a wave in space-time. Many other
: subatomic particles behave in a similar way. If you
: were to fire, say, an electron, toward two tiny slits
: in a lead sheet, with a piece of film behind them, you
: would get an image of two ripple patterns
: intersecting. That's because the wave of the electron
: passed through the two slits into two smaller waves,
: which intersected with eachother.
Actually, you'd get a dot. You only see the ripple pattern when you fire a whole lot of electrons through--the impact dots accumulate over time to form the pattern. It's a statistical process.
: HOWEVER, if you were to set up sensors to see which slit
: the electron really went through, you would just get a
: dot on the film behind the slit that the electron went
: through. When observed, it appears as a particle in a
: specific place; when unobserved, it appears as a
: probability wave, not anywhere in particular,
: undetermined.
: Now, with the Codex in Myth, it seems that reading about
: something in the Codex determines that that something
: will happen. If you don't read about it, it may or may
: not happen. But as soon as some info about the future
: arrives in the past, that future is destined to
: happen.
From a quantum perspective, this isn't quite true because the past is no more determined than the future. It's impossible to know whether or not a given radioactive atom will decay tomorrow, but it's also impossible to know whether or not a given radioactive atom decayed yesterday (although we happen to be a lot better at making an educated guess.) So you could read something in the Codex and then have it not happen--but then you wouldn't remember reading it after all. And, indeed, it wouldn't be there.
--SiliconDream (who does quantum physics because drugs are too expensive)
