Only tangentially related, but the lovely (quite) short story "I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility" is fantastic and kind of hits on simulating worlds, in a sense:
I've been thinking about writing a story with a very similar plot for a couple of years, but it had a big plot hole: computation overhead between the universes, and I hadn't thought about quantum computers as a way to solve it.
The other main difference with the story that I had in mind is that the characters would write a story about it, which would be "my" story, and they'd find a way to make it so that the ending would tell the reader the universe depth they are in, by creating a variable whose value is incremented by 1 for each universe.
For anyone reading this on HN, you're 8474771628371839 levels deep.
> Can't black holes already encode an infinite amount of information past the event horizon?
No, current physics has a bunch of hard limits on information.
> A new fundamental particle doesn’t necessarily make it soft sci-fi
Calling something a particle doesn’t matter here. It’s a fully formed computational device that happens to magically solve all problems.
Consider, how do you encode and read information from such a particle. Qubit’s are physical properties of something, such as spin. Is this particle supposed to have infinite properties which you can access with infinite precision? No, it’s just a magic macguffin that does whatever the author wants.
> No, it’s just a magic macguffin that does whatever the author wants.
As a general rule I consider this unfair. It's okay for science fiction to be set in universes that have different physical laws than our own. Hard or soft sci-fi has nothing to do with whether the rules match up to reality, only whether they're internally consistent and whether they are delved into in technical detail.
Sure, there is no known particle in our universe that could do this, nor is there any known way for such a particle to exist. Does that mean its existence in the story makes the sci-fi soft? Take a look at how it's described:
> They - by which we now refer to Tim, Diane, their eight colleagues, their two supervisors, four chemical engineers, six electrical engineers, the janitor, a countable infinity of TEEO 9.9.1 ultra-medium-density selectably-foaming non-elasticised quantum waveform frequency rate range collapse selectors and the single tormented tau neutrino caught in the middle of it all - represented the sum total of the human race's achievements in the field of quantum computing. Specifically, they had, earlier that week, successfully built a quantum computer. Putting into practice principles it had taken a trio of appallingly intelligent mathematical statisticians some 10 years to mastermind, and which only about fifty-five other people in the world had yet got a grip on, they had constructed an engine capable of passing information to and processing the responses from what could, without hyperbole, be described as a single fundamental particle with infinite processing power and infinite storage capacity.
Sure you could call it a MacGuffin, but it's not magic, it's clearly science (just within their universe). It's clearly explained to have been science. Maybe it's not explained in infinite detail, but it does not need to be. Nothing about this looks like soft sci-fi to me.
Nothing about qntm's other stories - Ra, Fine Structure, and a bunch of the short ones - seem like soft sci-fi to me either. I mean, seriously, Ra contains academic lectures[0] where the whole speech, parts of the equations, and the principles behind them are all actually explained to the reader in detail, not just glossed over. There is even an appendix where the actual in-universe mechanics behind the "magic" are explained.[1] And another one where a specific case of it is thoroughly considered and explained.[2] This is science. Fictional science, but that is what science fiction is. There's not really anything soft about it, imho.
I think you’re misunderstanding what the terms mean. Star Trek is filled with academic lectures, fundamental particles, etc but its underlying physics is soft.
Hard refers to science fiction that matches our understanding of physics, mathematics, etc. If they discover an unknown particle or effect not theorized to exist in scientific literature it’s by definition not Hard science fiction.
Operating at the unknown edge where we don’t know what it takes to make AGI so under or overestimating the hardware requirements is fine. Tossing away our physics and replacing it with whatever is needed for the story to function is the definition of soft science fiction.
Granted degrees of soft science fiction exist. Jurassic Park is close enough to the boarder of Hard Science fiction it’s a little debatable, where Star Wars is fantasy with shapeships.
> I think you’re misunderstanding what the terms mean.
I was going off the Google definitions, oops.
> Star Trek is filled with academic lectures, fundamental particles, etc but its underlying physics is soft.
Yes, that's true, and I agree. Star Trek isn't really fully internally consistent or rigorous because advanced/alien technology is simply the setting. Most of it is about the people, not the science.
> Hard refers to science fiction that matches our understanding of physics, mathematics, etc. If they discover an unknown particle or effect not theorized to exist in scientific literature it’s by definition not Hard science fiction.
Since when? From Wikipedia:
> The heart of the "hard science fiction" designation is the relationship of the science content and attitude to the rest of the narrative, and (for some readers, at least) the "hardness" or rigor of the science itself.
> One requirement for hard SF is procedural or intentional: a story should try to be accurate, logical, credible and rigorous in its use of current scientific and technical knowledge about which technology, phenomena, scenarios and situations that are practically or theoretically possible.
Existing in a different universe from ours doesn't make it automatically soft, if their current scientific and technical knowledge is still rigorous in the same way that ours is. As an example, their book "Ra" seems absolutely like hard sci-fi to me, even though there exists within it an actual concept of "magic" (!), because (without spoilers) the phenomenon called magic is fully defined, and there is no element of arcanity to it.
But I guess you're right that this specific story might not count as hard sci-fi; though I don't agree that it's because of the particle's existence but rather the way it is regarded: the point of the story is to explore the philosophical implications of such a machine existing, not to explore the actual science of the machine.
Their other stories, like "Ra" and "Fine Structure", certainly explore the science of their respective universes/situations, not just the philosophical implications, and I would count both of those examples as hard sci-fi, having read both.
The very first line: “Hard science fiction is a category of science fiction characterized by concern for scientific accuracy and logic.“ Scientific rigor might apply in a fictional setting with different laws, but accuracy requires a universe similar to our own.
One of the references linked from Wikipedia wants not some consistent set of laws but also facts about our universe like the moon not having an atmosphere. https://books.google.com/books?id=PiphRocVYRwC&pg=PA187#v=on... Thus a platypus should be closely related to mammals even though it lays eggs. In a different universe different genealogies are possible even with identical physics, but that doesn’t fit our science.
So by “rigor of the science itself” it’s in reference to our science not the stories universe because:
> Existing in a different universe
Any story could work in some theoretical universe. Olympian gods could exist with the right physics and any child learning how the world works is exploring that physics.
> if their current scientific and technical knowledge is still rigorous in the same way that ours is
I think what you’re looking for is Rationalist fiction which cares about the consistency of the setting’s internal rules but not how close the physics matches ours. ‘Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality’ fits as soft science fiction and rationalist fiction. The main character is definitely trying to understand how the world works and carries out many experiments, things just don’t fit our physics.
Meanwhile you can have Hard Science fiction with primitive humans exploring the ruins of our civilization who don’t have the slightest idea of the scientific method. That line between possibility and not is a meaningful line and we came up with words to describe it.
If you're going to accuse something of using magic, I'm surprised you didn't accuse Ra, which even has something called 'magic'. I've been reading Fine Structure this morning and it doesn't seem magical to me at all. It's about as magical as quantum physics would be, I guess.
I suppose even Ra still obeys the speed of light, though.
To deepen this tangent, I'll recommend Philip K. Dick's The Trouble With Bubbles which imagines 60s cocktail party guests showing off their miniature planet-scale terrariums.
I’m not sure I really know how to handle this. Do I just read the latest version linked at the top of the page? Or is the one offered by this like somehow more canonical or something? I’m not sure I’ve ever been faced with different versions of a fiction before. Just textbooks.
I really love thought pieces like this if you refrain from poking holes in the logic or physics. I love the idea of a multiverse where they’re all actually just identical so it’s mostly moot.
Sure you have, if you've ever bought an Nth edition of a book (where N > 1). Editions aren't always just an artwork/formatting change, they sometimes contain changes to the text too.
I just love how a world-class quantum computer scientist who just made a discovery that just blows up everything known to mankind is up to the very end is worried about missing a bus.
I remember watching a (wonderful) T.V. show[0] that came out within the last couple decades, and feeling like a certain scene was definitely a nod to this story. The drama, and physics (and resolution) was done differently, but it left me in a similarly, pleasantly pensive state. [0] I almost made the mistake of naming it, or the director - but caught myself, realizing the context of this comment alone could be a major "spoiler".
Maybe I've encoded the name in this comment (honestly though, I tried, and it's late - maybe search engines are good enough for it these days :) )
U+200E before letters spelling out show in my comment. Just noting that while I would have enjoyed the show very much even if I had this "spoiler", it certainly would have lost some "magic".
you could use a url shortener to hide the link to the show's wikipedia page. For those who don't mind spoilers, they can know what you're talking about.
https://qntm.org/responsibility