Timelike Infinity
Encyclopedia
Timelike Infinity is a 1992 science fiction
book by Stephen Baxter
. The second book in the Xeelee Sequence
, Timelike Infinity introduces a universe of powerful alien species and technologies which manages to maintain a realistic edge due to Baxter's physics background; it largely sets the stage for the magnum opus of the Xeelee Sequence, Ring (as opposed to Vacuum Diagrams, Flux, or Raft, which concern themselves with side-stories).
, a truly alien turbulent-liquid form of life, who now rule over the few star systems of human space - adopting processes from human history to effectively oppress the resentful race. Humans have encountered a few other races, including the astoundingly advanced Xeelee, and been conquered once before - by the Squeem - but successfully recovered.
A human-built device, the Interface project, returns to the solar system after 1,500 years. The project, towed by the spaceship Cauchy
, returns a wormhole
gate, appearing to offer time travel
due to the time 'difference' between the exits of the wormhole (relativistic time dilation
), with one end having remained in the solar system and the other traveling at near lightspeed for a century. The Qax had destroyed the solar system gate, but a lashed-up human ship (a great chunk of soil including Stonehenge
, crewed by a group called the Friends of Wigner
) passes through the returning gate, traveling back to the unconquered humanity of 1,500 years ago.
One of the crew of the Cauchy returns with the Friends, Miriam Berg. The Friends have a complex scheme, which does not include a simple military return-and-rescue - the 1,500 year technology gap makes this "risible". From the Wigner thought experiment
they have postulated an unusual theory on the ultimate destiny of life in the universe. They believe that quantum wave-functions do not collapse like the Copenhagen interpretation
holds, nor that each collapse actually buds off separate universes (like the quantum multiverse hypothesis holds) but rather that the universe is a participatory universe: the entire universe exists as a single massive quantum superposition
, and that at the end of time (in the open universe of the Xeelee Sequence, time and space are unbounded, or more precisely, bounded only at the Cauchy boundaries of "Time-like infinity" and "Space-like infinity"), when intelligent life has collected all information (compare the Final anthropic principle and the Omega Point
), and transformed into an "Ultimate Observer", who will make the "Final observation", the observation which collapses all the possible entangled wave-functions generated since the beginning of the universe. They believe further that the Ultimate Observer will not merely observe, but choose which world line
will be the true world-line, and that it will choose the one in which humanity suffers no Squeem or Qax occupations. However, the Ultimate Observer cannot choose between worldlines if no information survives to its era to distinguish worldlines- if the UO never knows of humanity, it cannot choose a worldline favorable to it. In other words, some way is needed to securely send information forward in time.
As a consequence of this necessity, they intend to turn Jupiter into a carefully formed singularity
and use the precisely specified parameters as a method of encoding information. Miriam Berg is more concerned over the immediate fate of humanity, with the threat of the future Qax, and transmits a 'help' message to the gate designer Michael Poole.
The Qax, naturally, panic a little at the escape to the past. A complex, unavoidably fragile species in their huge living Spline spacecraft, the few Qax present are somewhat at a loss. They decide to build their own Interface, with major human-collaborator assistance (headed by Ambassador Jasoft Parz), to create a link to their future to gain aid in resolving the problem - with more modern GUT
-engine spacecraft they can make a 500 year link in just eighteen months. A startling high-technology future vessel (in truth, one of the legendary Xeelee nightfighters, an advanced and long-range fast scout ship), with a future Qax comes through the gate. Its first act is to execute the Qax Governor of Earth and gather up Parz, before passing through the original portal after the Friends and all humanity. The future Qax takes two Spline ships (presumably leaving behind the nightfighter; this might be the nightfighter that is discovered by the crew of The Great Northern millennia later in Ring) through the gate and on the journey reveals to Parz the reason behind its desire to completely destroy the human race.
One such pilot was a man named Jim Bolder. The Qax had come into possession of a Xeelee nightfighter, and had modified it to support human control. Bolder's mission was simple: go to the Great Attractor
, the cause of most galactic drift, and find out why and how it exists. Bolder travelled to the bottom of the gravitational well, and found- the Ring. A torus
a thousand light-year
s in diameter, constructed of an unknown substance, rotating at a large fraction of lightspeed. The Qax goes on to speculate that the torus created a Kerr metric
, and that it allowed egress from the current universe, that it was in effect an escape route for the Xeelee. Before Parz, the Spline warship, and the Qax exit the wormhole, the Qax asks, "What do Xeelee fear, do you suppose?". Regardless, Bolder escaped the Great Attractor and returned to the Qax home system, where he was supposed to be taken into custody by dozens of Spline warships wielding gravity-wave based "starbreakers" and his priceless data on the god-like Xeelee's ultimate project secured. Bolder either did not, or somehow escaped; in the ensuing fight, the starbreakers were accidentally fired at the Qax system primary star, and true to their name, destabilized it, causing it to go nova
. The Qax were forced to hurriedly evacuate. Many died, and the power of the Qax trading empire (and by extension, their Occupation of Earth) ended.
. He is accompanied by a Virtual of his father, Harry. Together they elude the control of the Friends, whose project fails under the bombardment of the Spline's starbreaker beam. They commandeer the singularity cannon used to sculpt Jupiter, and fire some black holes into the Spline. Aided by Jasoft Parz's internal sabotage, Poole succeeds in ramming the Hermit Crab into the Spline, killing the sapience of the vessel. Harry takes over in lieu of the higher intelligence, and at the direction of Poole, steers it back into the wormhole: when inside, Poole intends to activate the hyperdrive, shattering the fragile dimensional warping of the wormhole, and of all wormholes connecting to it, thus saving humanity from further interference by the future.
Poole's audacious plan succeeds, but with an unexpected side effect. As the hyperdrive activates, it sort of shatters space-time, forming a long series of interconnected wormholes that hurl Poole 5 million years forward into the far future. Poole discovers a sad cosmos, in which the stars are guttering out; the Friends were wrong- intelligent life would not triumph and remake the cosmos, eventually leading to their Prime Observer.
His ship shattered and broken, Poole begins dying, but at the last moment, an "anti-Xeelee" (whom it is implied is a being created by the Xeelee to be like them, except traveling like a tachyon
backwards in time, the better to mold the Xeelee's early evolutionary history) takes a liking to Poole, and converts him into an intangible immortal being of "quantum functions". In this form, Poole travels the universe, but out of boredom, eventually begins to lapse into a quasi-coma- until an unexpected event occurs: a savage in a glass box, having traveled through a wormhole like Poole himself. "History resumed." (This final event is one of the early plot points of the Ring).
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
book by Stephen Baxter
Stephen Baxter
Stephen Baxter is a prolific British hard science fiction author. He has degrees in mathematics and engineering.- Writing style :...
. The second book in the Xeelee Sequence
Xeelee Sequence
The Xeelee Sequence is a series of novels and short stories by British science fiction author Stephen Baxter. The novels span several billions of years, describing the future expansion of Mankind, its war with its arch-nemesis , and the Xeelee's own war with dark matter entities called photino birds...
, Timelike Infinity introduces a universe of powerful alien species and technologies which manages to maintain a realistic edge due to Baxter's physics background; it largely sets the stage for the magnum opus of the Xeelee Sequence, Ring (as opposed to Vacuum Diagrams, Flux, or Raft, which concern themselves with side-stories).
Plot summary
Set thousands of years in the future (AD 5407), the human race has been conquered by the QaxQax (species)
In the Xeelee Sequence of future history created by Stephen Baxter, the Qax are an alien species created from chaotic forces...
, a truly alien turbulent-liquid form of life, who now rule over the few star systems of human space - adopting processes from human history to effectively oppress the resentful race. Humans have encountered a few other races, including the astoundingly advanced Xeelee, and been conquered once before - by the Squeem - but successfully recovered.
A human-built device, the Interface project, returns to the solar system after 1,500 years. The project, towed by the spaceship Cauchy
Augustin Louis Cauchy
Baron Augustin-Louis Cauchy was a French mathematician who was an early pioneer of analysis. He started the project of formulating and proving the theorems of infinitesimal calculus in a rigorous manner, rejecting the heuristic principle of the generality of algebra exploited by earlier authors...
, returns a wormhole
Wormhole
In physics, a wormhole is a hypothetical topological feature of spacetime that would be, fundamentally, a "shortcut" through spacetime. For a simple visual explanation of a wormhole, consider spacetime visualized as a two-dimensional surface. If this surface is folded along a third dimension, it...
gate, appearing to offer time travel
Time travel
Time travel is the concept of moving between different points in time in a manner analogous to moving between different points in space. Time travel could hypothetically involve moving backward in time to a moment earlier than the starting point, or forward to the future of that point without the...
due to the time 'difference' between the exits of the wormhole (relativistic time dilation
Time dilation
In the theory of relativity, time dilation is an observed difference of elapsed time between two events as measured by observers either moving relative to each other or differently situated from gravitational masses. An accurate clock at rest with respect to one observer may be measured to tick at...
), with one end having remained in the solar system and the other traveling at near lightspeed for a century. The Qax had destroyed the solar system gate, but a lashed-up human ship (a great chunk of soil including Stonehenge
Stonehenge
Stonehenge is a prehistoric monument located in the English county of Wiltshire, about west of Amesbury and north of Salisbury. One of the most famous sites in the world, Stonehenge is composed of a circular setting of large standing stones set within earthworks...
, crewed by a group called the Friends of Wigner
Wigner's friend
Wigner's friend is a thought experiment proposed by the physicist Eugene Wigner; it is an extension of the Schrödinger's cat experiment designed as a point of departure for discussing the Quantum mind/body problem.- The thought experiment :...
) passes through the returning gate, traveling back to the unconquered humanity of 1,500 years ago.
One of the crew of the Cauchy returns with the Friends, Miriam Berg. The Friends have a complex scheme, which does not include a simple military return-and-rescue - the 1,500 year technology gap makes this "risible". From the Wigner thought experiment
Thought experiment
A thought experiment or Gedankenexperiment considers some hypothesis, theory, or principle for the purpose of thinking through its consequences...
they have postulated an unusual theory on the ultimate destiny of life in the universe. They believe that quantum wave-functions do not collapse like the Copenhagen interpretation
Copenhagen interpretation
The Copenhagen interpretation is one of the earliest and most commonly taught interpretations of quantum mechanics. It holds that quantum mechanics does not yield a description of an objective reality but deals only with probabilities of observing, or measuring, various aspects of energy quanta,...
holds, nor that each collapse actually buds off separate universes (like the quantum multiverse hypothesis holds) but rather that the universe is a participatory universe: the entire universe exists as a single massive quantum superposition
Quantum superposition
Quantum superposition is a fundamental principle of quantum mechanics. It holds that a physical system exists in all its particular, theoretically possible states simultaneously; but, when measured, it gives a result corresponding to only one of the possible configurations.Mathematically, it...
, and that at the end of time (in the open universe of the Xeelee Sequence, time and space are unbounded, or more precisely, bounded only at the Cauchy boundaries of "Time-like infinity" and "Space-like infinity"), when intelligent life has collected all information (compare the Final anthropic principle and the Omega Point
Omega point
Omega Point is a term coined by the French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin to describe a maximum level of complexity and consciousness towards which he believed the universe was evolving....
), and transformed into an "Ultimate Observer", who will make the "Final observation", the observation which collapses all the possible entangled wave-functions generated since the beginning of the universe. They believe further that the Ultimate Observer will not merely observe, but choose which world line
World line
In physics, the world line of an object is the unique path of that object as it travels through 4-dimensional spacetime. The concept of "world line" is distinguished from the concept of "orbit" or "trajectory" by the time dimension, and typically encompasses a large area of spacetime wherein...
will be the true world-line, and that it will choose the one in which humanity suffers no Squeem or Qax occupations. However, the Ultimate Observer cannot choose between worldlines if no information survives to its era to distinguish worldlines- if the UO never knows of humanity, it cannot choose a worldline favorable to it. In other words, some way is needed to securely send information forward in time.
As a consequence of this necessity, they intend to turn Jupiter into a carefully formed singularity
Gravitational singularity
A gravitational singularity or spacetime singularity is a location where the quantities that are used to measure the gravitational field become infinite in a way that does not depend on the coordinate system...
and use the precisely specified parameters as a method of encoding information. Miriam Berg is more concerned over the immediate fate of humanity, with the threat of the future Qax, and transmits a 'help' message to the gate designer Michael Poole.
The Qax, naturally, panic a little at the escape to the past. A complex, unavoidably fragile species in their huge living Spline spacecraft, the few Qax present are somewhat at a loss. They decide to build their own Interface, with major human-collaborator assistance (headed by Ambassador Jasoft Parz), to create a link to their future to gain aid in resolving the problem - with more modern GUT
Grand unification theory
The term Grand Unified Theory, often abbreviated as GUT, refers to any of several similar candidate models in particle physics in which at high-energy, the three gauge interactions of the Standard Model which define the electromagnetic, weak, and strong interactions, are merged into one single...
-engine spacecraft they can make a 500 year link in just eighteen months. A startling high-technology future vessel (in truth, one of the legendary Xeelee nightfighters, an advanced and long-range fast scout ship), with a future Qax comes through the gate. Its first act is to execute the Qax Governor of Earth and gather up Parz, before passing through the original portal after the Friends and all humanity. The future Qax takes two Spline ships (presumably leaving behind the nightfighter; this might be the nightfighter that is discovered by the crew of The Great Northern millennia later in Ring) through the gate and on the journey reveals to Parz the reason behind its desire to completely destroy the human race.
The Ring
The future Qax tells Parz that over the centuries, the Qax had worn down humanity through constant oppression, and had eventually decided to completely eliminate its space-faring capabilities. But before they did, as economical traders, they wished to get as much value out of their human pilots as possible. So certain pilots were dispatched on a number of dangerous or quixotic missions.One such pilot was a man named Jim Bolder. The Qax had come into possession of a Xeelee nightfighter, and had modified it to support human control. Bolder's mission was simple: go to the Great Attractor
Great Attractor
The Great Attractor is a gravity anomaly in intergalactic space within the range of the Centaurus Supercluster that reveals the existence of a localised concentration of mass equivalent to tens of thousands of Milky Ways, observable by its effect on the motion of galaxies and their associated...
, the cause of most galactic drift, and find out why and how it exists. Bolder travelled to the bottom of the gravitational well, and found- the Ring. A torus
Torus
In geometry, a torus is a surface of revolution generated by revolving a circle in three dimensional space about an axis coplanar with the circle...
a thousand light-year
Light-year
A light-year, also light year or lightyear is a unit of length, equal to just under 10 trillion kilometres...
s in diameter, constructed of an unknown substance, rotating at a large fraction of lightspeed. The Qax goes on to speculate that the torus created a Kerr metric
Kerr metric
The Kerr metric describes the geometry of empty spacetime around an uncharged axially-symmetric black-hole with an event horizon which is topologically a sphere. The Kerr metric is an exact solution of the Einstein field equations of general relativity; these equations are highly non-linear, which...
, and that it allowed egress from the current universe, that it was in effect an escape route for the Xeelee. Before Parz, the Spline warship, and the Qax exit the wormhole, the Qax asks, "What do Xeelee fear, do you suppose?". Regardless, Bolder escaped the Great Attractor and returned to the Qax home system, where he was supposed to be taken into custody by dozens of Spline warships wielding gravity-wave based "starbreakers" and his priceless data on the god-like Xeelee's ultimate project secured. Bolder either did not, or somehow escaped; in the ensuing fight, the starbreakers were accidentally fired at the Qax system primary star, and true to their name, destabilized it, causing it to go nova
Nova
A nova is a cataclysmic nuclear explosion in a star caused by the accretion of hydrogen on to the surface of a white dwarf star, which ignites and starts nuclear fusion in a runaway manner...
. The Qax were forced to hurriedly evacuate. Many died, and the power of the Qax trading empire (and by extension, their Occupation of Earth) ended.
Defeat
In the past, Poole joins Berg on the Friend vessel shortly before the Qax emerges, having traveled aboard his ship, Hermit Crab, from the Oort CloudOort cloud
The Oort cloud , or the Öpik–Oort cloud , is a hypothesized spherical cloud of comets which may lie roughly 50,000 AU, or nearly a light-year, from the Sun. This places the cloud at nearly a quarter of the distance to Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the Sun...
. He is accompanied by a Virtual of his father, Harry. Together they elude the control of the Friends, whose project fails under the bombardment of the Spline's starbreaker beam. They commandeer the singularity cannon used to sculpt Jupiter, and fire some black holes into the Spline. Aided by Jasoft Parz's internal sabotage, Poole succeeds in ramming the Hermit Crab into the Spline, killing the sapience of the vessel. Harry takes over in lieu of the higher intelligence, and at the direction of Poole, steers it back into the wormhole: when inside, Poole intends to activate the hyperdrive, shattering the fragile dimensional warping of the wormhole, and of all wormholes connecting to it, thus saving humanity from further interference by the future.
Poole's audacious plan succeeds, but with an unexpected side effect. As the hyperdrive activates, it sort of shatters space-time, forming a long series of interconnected wormholes that hurl Poole 5 million years forward into the far future. Poole discovers a sad cosmos, in which the stars are guttering out; the Friends were wrong- intelligent life would not triumph and remake the cosmos, eventually leading to their Prime Observer.
His ship shattered and broken, Poole begins dying, but at the last moment, an "anti-Xeelee" (whom it is implied is a being created by the Xeelee to be like them, except traveling like a tachyon
Tachyon
A tachyon is a hypothetical subatomic particle that always moves faster than light. In the language of special relativity, a tachyon would be a particle with space-like four-momentum and imaginary proper time. A tachyon would be constrained to the space-like portion of the energy-momentum graph...
backwards in time, the better to mold the Xeelee's early evolutionary history) takes a liking to Poole, and converts him into an intangible immortal being of "quantum functions". In this form, Poole travels the universe, but out of boredom, eventually begins to lapse into a quasi-coma- until an unexpected event occurs: a savage in a glass box, having traveled through a wormhole like Poole himself. "History resumed." (This final event is one of the early plot points of the Ring).