Grrl Power #1423 – Hop, skip and a Vorp
What Daphne said in the bottom middle panel is essentially correct, although simplified for space. And by “simplified,” I mean the details are important. It’s not “maybe one particle is moving and another isn’t,” it’s that there’s no difference. One of them is moving, or the other one is, or they both are. At lightspeed, it doesn’t matter, because due to relativity, two particles moving toward each other at lightspeed are still only going C relative to each other, not 2 C.
That’s for massless particle. I’m actually not sure how that works with massful particles, but if a massless particle is going C, then from its perspective, the massful particles are going C and Mr. Massless is holding still. Except massful particles can’t go C. So I guess it’s one of those “One of two twins gets into a ship that accellerates toward C for 5 hours and when he gets back 50 years have passed” things. Time dilation, fine. But what I mean is that while the one twin is approaching C, and spends only 5 hours doing it, but to the twin on the ground watching, this “high speed flight” took 50 years. The distance traveled is the same, but from the ground twin’s perspective, space twin didn’t get anywhere near lightspeed. So I guess massful particles are just trundling along, but also going C from the perspective of the massless particle that’s actually going C, except everything is going C?
I don’t know relativity well enough to understand most of the details, but whoever invented Superpowers definitely did.
Here’s a time Harem conserved momentum.
Here’s one of Gaxgy’s in progress shots of the painting Maxima promised him. Weird how he draws almost exactly like me.
Seriously though, I’d like to try to do a version of this that actually looks oil painted when it’s done, and preferably not just a Photoshop Oil Paint filter. I bought a paint program called Rebelle, that’s like a paint program. Like Corel Painter, it’s all about simulating natural media. I’ve had it installed for like 6 months and I’ve maybe used it for a total of about 12 minutes. If I was smart, I’d spend 30 minutes every morning painting along with the Bob Ross YouTube stream to familiarize myself with the program and painting techniques in general, but I know I’m not going to do that, so we’ll see how repainting the finished version of this goes.
Patreon doesn’t have a nude version yet, but I’ll try and update this each week until it’s done.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
So, just like Star Trek? Daph was born, like a person (I’m assuming ‘the old fashioned way’) and then THAT was her ultimate frame of reference. So, when she made all the other bodies, and they spread out around the world, her one mind was in control. Then the blond went to space got going fast, but when the purple teleported she dematerialized on earth and because the blond was already in motion just formed next to herself. The mind is always the same so no biggie. I get it. Probably.
Yeah, that’s about it: she didn’t *VORP* to the ship, she materialized next to herself, and as long as herself is stationary she will be as well
Has she tried doing that while in freefall?
DaveB, I’m sorry but your misunderstandings of physics are sometimes painful to read. If you’re gonna go on physics tangents, please ask someone who at least has a physics degree to give you feedback.
There’s no such thing as motion relative to a massless particle or particle moving at c. Photons and the like have no rest frame, and the calculation for Lorentz Transformations has a division by zero if you put in c (in other words, if a reference frame is moving at c relative to your reference frame, it makes no sense under special relativity to ask what your motion is relative to that frame).
The explanation is dubious in terms of actual physics, but it’s right in line with the usual standards of handwaving physics to accommodate superpowers. Looking at it from that angle might make it less painful.
If he just handwaved the physics, even just with what Harem says in the panel, I’d still be disappointed but wouldn’t have any complaints since characters can be wrong and, that aside, a fictional universe’s physics can just be nonsensical (this isn’t trying to be hard scifi). It’s just the detailed non-diegetic nonsense in the off-panel description that’s painful to read, since it is written as if he is so confident that it’s actually correct in broad strokes that he will expound on it to his audience as an explanation. It’s that confident incorrectness that is painful to read, especially knowing there’s an audience for it.
Handwaving the usual momentum transfer without eye-rolling misunderstandings is easy too. He could just make the momentum that gets transferred be the momentum relative to the immediate environment or relative to the speed Harem experiences (or he could just have that momentum only transfer if she directly teleports and not if she teleports out to nowhere then teleports in from that stasis, then explain that she did that). That would all be handwaving physics for suspension of disbelief in a superhero comic without asserting nonsensical physics (in or outside the comic).
Just consider that if she knew what she was talking about, she wouldn’t have said “massless”, and she would have said “NEAR lightspeed”.
Relativity makes no sense at or above lightspeed, so the existence of FTL means that relativity is wrong, or irrelevant. Of course, so do superpowers.
I take anything any web comic author says confidently about how physics works to mean “in their comic universe”. It’s just simpler that way. Mind you, I’m doing this defensively because I don’t want to get a more mistaken idea of how our world works than I already have, rather than a need to think that somebody on the Internet is not that wrong, so it’s a bit different.
That having been said, there’s always that Time Cube guy on the Internet, so the amount of somebody being *that* wrong on the Internet is pretty much always at least 1…
The “wisest man” that devised the time.cube passed away sadly.
The simplest explanation is that all the copies of Harem are motionless with respect to each other, through whatever dimension she uses to share consciousness. Her mind is effectively a wormhole. It doesn’t make any difference what speed or acceleration each exit is going with respect to the universe outside the wormhole tunnel, they are motionless with respect to each other.
Sydney’s Orbs: “5 more minutes. Zzzzzzzz.”
Wait based on previous travel, sydney experienced only a few days of time while the earth experienced months. How does Harem feel with the time differences, does the harem on the ship notice the time differences comparing herself to the harems on earth? To her on earth is space her thinking slower and moving slower and vice versa is space her feeling her earth variants are too fast?
Does her periods get desynced? Like if she spends a day in space, but half a month on earth does her bodies experience biological function differently?
Previous travel to Primal Alari, they went forward in time due to the portal getting screwed up
No the portal being messed up was what made the portal unstable and moving on the endpoint. The distance between Earth and Alar was what caused the time difference.
And what makes you believe that? What was stated in the comic or by the author that supports that theory? How come everyone who returned through the portal returned to their original time? Within the comic, aliens regularly travel such long distances without experiencing “time difference”, and Sciona was surprised when it happened with her portal.
Yes, it was specifically stated in the comic.
1) According to Dabbler, it’s event horizon is not contained anymore and was now a runaway wormhole (it only closes because the sigil on the other side gets destroyed) – https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-635-i-hope-their-passports-are-up-to-date/
2) According to Dabbler, the reason they were suddenly so far from the portal is because it’s unstable – https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-642-screwed/
They were almost instantly so far away that even with them moving at about 100 mph, it was taking a while to get BACK to the portal, which had therefore moved quite a distance from where it dumped them out onto Alar.
I’ve decided to trust that the genius in the comic who’s intelligence cannot be measured on a human scale probably understands what happened, especially since it was stated as such twice and the action of them having to suddenly fly at top speed to try to get back to the portal means that the portal endpoint had moved. Because it was unstable.
The portal moving in space doesn’t preclude it moving in time.
When Harem Stepped through she noticed duplicates she looked to be suffering and then later explained there were too many off herself, and Dabbler then uses this in some other chain of thought: https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-651-obtuse-loop/
Remember: Dabbles is smarter than (almost) everyone on Dirt, but that doesn’t mean she knows everything (she is often wrong)
The point of portals and wormholes is to travel that distance near instantly, other wise, why do it?
No, I meant your theory that the temporal displacement was due to the distance between Earth and Alar. That’s not supported by your references.
You are correct about the wormhole being unstable and moving. You are incorrect about the time dilation. It’s explained in the author’s comments in #727. The unstable portal shifted them 51 days into the future. There were suddenly twice as many Harems in two different time periods (which is why she was discombobulated). Then it took 2 earth days for Sydney to fight the things on Alari Prime, portal to Fracture Station, wander around for several hours (time for Cora to catch up, land, and find her), then travel home on Cora’s ship. Whatever FTL travel method is being used in this universe it is clear that time dilation is not a factor.
I’ve decided to trust that the genius in the comic who’s intelligence cannot be measured on a human scale probably understands what happened, especially since it was clearly stated in his notes on that page.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-727-a-timely-prank/
Daphne’s thing is pretty easy to explain away, since she’s all one person you can just say she can pick between whichever of her various inertial frames she wants to use at the moment of teleportation. If she’s just teleporting one of herselves to a given location, she has to use that self’s inertial frame. But if she’s teleporting Self A to Self B, she can pick between the inertial frame of A or B.
We’ve established that she can UN-exist her copies. so this kind of teleport is unexisting the copy and then re-existing it in the inertial framework of the other body.
Did we just see major character growth? For Sydney to be the one who brings the conversation back to the point at hand feels… Monumental?
Oh wow I *just* noticed this harem’s shoulder tattoo lol
There’s no such thing as a massful particle going lightspeed. NEAR lightspeed, sure.
Placing my bet on Harem asking Sydney about how she got the size difference potion.
Snuggled, sexually sated Sydney stops somnolescence, surmounts self-started semantic sidequest.