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.
When it comes to sci-fi “FTL drives”, there’s also typically an implication that the ship isn’t actually moving “faster than light”, at least in terms of its own reference frame.
With the “Star Trek” type warp drive, for example, or its real-world theoretical equivalent in the Alcubierre metric, what is happening is that the the ship has created a sort of “separated bubble” of space-time surrounding the ship. Space-time is allowed to move faster than light – this happens near black holes even – and of course anything occupying that part of space-time will move with it, in this case the ship.
In this manner, the ship never actually technically violates the lightspeed limit, but nonetheless covers distances that wouldn’t be possible otherwise. The real-world theory has several causality “complications” that get glossed over or handwaved in fiction, naturally. In fact, the ship’s physical velocity may even be close to zero – which would support Harem’s perception of not having any relative motion. It might be interesting to compare this to if she could teleport next to herself in a moving car or bus.
Other FTL takes, of course, usually involve other ways of getting around the “never actually moving faster than light” thing. Wormholes (like the aetherium portals Sydney makes), extra-spatial layers of reality (e.g. hyperspace), or the like.
Considering harem hasn’t had any problems teleporting to other parts of the world, from one hemisphere to another, it’s not really an issue. I mean, Earth is rotating about its axis and orbiting around the Sun which is in turn orbiting around Sagittarius A*, and the Milky Way to moving against the CMB as well. There’s an appreciable difference in angular velocity between LA and NYC in both magnitude and once resolved into linear velocity direction.
For that matter she shouldn’t be able to teleport out of trains and stuff.
There’s 2 ways to interpret this.
The first is that a teleporter’s frame of reference for teleporting is always the location they’re teleporting to. There’s no such thing as “stationary” in the universe after all, all momentum is relative to a reference point. In theory a bit of forced thinking could change what they’re maintaining momentum relative to (by like, using an airplane as a reference point to accelerate them to airplane speeds) but that seems like a good way to accidentally end up in space or vaporized.
The second is that teleporters have a secondary power that gives them full control over their velocity and direction when teleporting, and they subconsciously manipulate those two values to always teleport the way they expect to. Given the precision needed, it might not even register as a proper secondary power, and just be something any teleporter does when teleporting, without them being able to consciously control it even if they tried.
Food for thought I guess.
I do like how in the Honorverse novels they take Time dilation at least somewhat into account, with time passage on the ship being different than the rest of the universe while in Hyper or riding a Grav Wave and having to reset the ship’s clocks on leaving.
If Daphne *VORP*s next to herself in a moving car or bus, the result would be the same as if she simply exited: severe road-rash (or worse)
Except that the implication here is that she can, in fact, lock into her own frame of reference.
Which would explain why the alien xevo dude was so freaked out about her, sensing that she is a gigantic causality breach waiting to happen. (The further she gets from herself, the more the notion that information cannot travel faster than lightspeed gets dragged into an alleyway and beaten over the head with a sock full of quarters.)
Sometimes, dragging fundamental understandings of physics into dark alleys from which they’ll never return is what’s best for the universe. Sometimes, sacrifices must be made in the name of superpowers.
Somehow, I think Bria-Nth isn’t concerned about that. His single *step* took him across extra-galactic distances in zero time… So there’s a Solution if you’re Nth, and since the Superion-Field powering Supers seems to be “bespoke Nth techmagic”…
He’s not worried about the existence of such, but the ease of it. Remember, Nth Tech is also assumed to take MASSIVE amounts of power, requiring huge machines that are, themselves, far beyond what we can imagine. But these are living beings who are imbued with this field ‘naturally’. That’s going to get noticed.
– Nth Tech is also assumed to take MASSIVE amounts of power
No, replicating Nth tech effects by people without Nth tech takes huge amounts of power. The Nth don’t need that, or have small enough super-generators to effectively not care about power requirements at all.
The answer to the “paradox” of two particles moving towards each other at any appreciable fraction of c is that they can’t “see” or interact with each other *until* they are actually close enough to interact.
Until that point their relative speed is actually irrelevant.
You can, of course, add the vectors to get a “virtual speed” > c , but it doesn’t apply to the particles. At all.
Until they actually hit each other. Which is the point where both particles get annihilated, and the energy contained in both gives rise to new and interesting particles with each their own mass/vectors.
Which is what we basically do in the LHC and similar installations.
The Aetherium causeway Sydney can use actually also does funny things with momentum as well…
The likelyhood of Alar, where she gave the Beastie the ultimate 2-finger punch, and the Star Station she ends up at trying Grakz are *extremely* unlikely to have the same relative speed…
If her momentum was preserved, she could easily have been doing 10’s, if not 100’s km/s relative to the Station when she arrived.
Same for Earth and the Station when she taught Vehemence a little lesson about “trying to breathe vacuum”.
It’s likely something like “velocity is conserved relative to the local gravity well”.
How does that behave with ship gravity?
You can never have an observed speed greater than the speed of light. If you’re on a ship moving at .99c, and your scanners detect a ship approaching you from the front at .99c, it’ll just look like it’s moving at ~.999c.
However, you can have a “virtual closing velocity” faster than c. Let’s say you’re on a space station and see a ship approaching at .99c and another approaching from the opposite direction at .99c. You could say “these two ships are 2 light years away from each other, but will reach each other in a little more than a year” but you don’t see either of them moving relative to you at faster than c, and the technical definition of closing velocity means that the actual, physics professor will mark it right answer is the closing velocity between the two is less than c as well.
It’s not quite that simple. First of all, two neutrinos traveling in different direction can pass through the same point in spacetime and not interact at all. Plus, relative velocities aren’t strictly additive. If both neutrinos are moving in opposite directions at .99c relative to an observer, in the reference frame of one neutrino the other neutrino would be moving at ~.99995c
Also, with respect to massless particles, they do not experience the passage of time. That’s a consequence of time dilation. This means a massless particle will never undergo a change without interacting with another particle. This is how we discovered that neutrinos have mass, because neutrinos were observed changing from one type to another.
It’s quantum mechanics… it’s *never* that simple… If it was we’d have sussed the whole shebang out by now…
But my original statement stands…
The *observer* detects the two neutrino’s.. The neutrino’s themselves are blissfully unaware of each other and their relative quantum state, so any statement you make about one, may not apply to the other, and is, in fact, irrelevant.
Two separate entities doing their own thing without interacting with each other, *other* than through the putative Observer, who has in and of itself *theoretically* no effect on both by observing them.
Besides… I was talking about two particles with *intersecting* vectors. Which would make their maximum energy 2*mc²… Which is Scary Territory, and why we have Schmott Bois working at LHC to eventually translate that in Yaeger…
No, this is classical Einsteinian relativity, nothing quantum about it. Just comparing velocities in different reference frames, the neutrinos are there as placeholders.
The planet rotates, orbits, and the object it orbits around also orbits around an even bigger source of gravity. So nothing is ever really not moving, only when compared to another object. By which I mean Harem’s power always had to compensate in some way but when everything was still grounded on one planet it was easy to use the planet as the anchor point or frame of reference.
Super powers are always somewhat arbitrary, and in my thought, shaped by what the super themself actually believes. Take Hench Wench for example. It makes no sense that a scribble on a piece of paper would give or take away her powers, unless she believes that the only way to share powers with those she works for is via a legally binding contract.
Exactly, so it’s not that big of a deal. Humans suck at conceptualizing how complicated their everyday physics is, so it’s not surprising to me that Harem’s power both conserves and does not conserve momentum as she feels is appropriate.
It makes sense given the rule “Harem’s teleportation conserves momentum relative to her own body’s frame of reference”. (The rule itself doesn’t make much sense in terms of normal physics, but don’t ask me; I didn’t invent superpowers either.) That’s how the power stunts she illustrated on p309 work, and how she vorped from Earth to the ship where another instance of her was already on board without turning into mass driver ammo.
Kind of like Warhammer 40k Orks maybe.
lol I’m not awake enough for this conversation
I… I hope she doesn’t preserve momentum from here when she returns.
That would be a rather ‘impactful’ end to the series.
And to the planet
More worryingly, what could Daphne need from Sydney relevant for a womergency that no one in a more suited position than trapped and sleeping under several kilo’s of sleeping male woof with no reliable access to anything and anybody.
Abusive men in her surroundings: Sydney can’t do anything from her position.
Social circle troubles: Sydney is an external and trusted party with no influence on events, but so is whoever is keeping the ship running, also that can wait until someone is awake.
Love troubles: she can only give advice and Daphne knows like ten people more suited to advice these kind of matters and better position to give advice.
Some of her gender specific body parts aren’t behaving like they should. Ask a non-sleeping female team member on the base(the thing has to be guarded, just wait until a woman does it)
Some of her gender specific body parts is doing something embarrassing. Okay that one is possible and not problematic.
And why did it take teleporting a second copy to the ship? Why not just have blonde Harem ask? It can’t be a major secret; they’re having the conversation immediately adjacent to Frix. He is sleeping, and they are whispering, but there’s no way he doesn’t wake up with all this happening under him, including Sydney trying to escape from snuggle jail.
Perhaps blond Daphne is involved in something that she doesn’t want to stop doing hence the appearance of other Daphne. Given the fact that blond Daphne is on the ship and she is asking Sydney for advice it seem like there is one likely situation that Sydney has the relevant experience in…
Maybe….
Since this is a record breaking separation for Harem (Physically and mentally)
Her superpower is deciding that it’s time for an additional iteration.
Maybe she needs some of Sydney’s stretchy potion.
This is the first idea I’ve seen that ticks all the boxes… blonde Daphne is in the middle something with one of the aliens, realized there was a problem, and sent the other Daphne on an emergency potion run. I’m assuming Dabbler is unavailable back on earth, or maybe she couldn’t teleport the potion that far or something.
Not a bad guess, but why don’t just ask the alien in question. Harem doesn’t strike me a shy, and I am sure they keep some bottle around like others keep ‘protection’.
Or she doesn’t know that Syd got the stretchy potion from Dabbler?
My admittedly limited understanding is that the particles move relative to the rest of the universe, which is connected to them via gravity. So one of them is moving faster than the other relative to the rest of the universe, and that’s the one that undergoes time dilation relative to the other.
Also, any particle either has no rest mass (photon) and is constrained to move at C or has mass and constrained to move at less than C. A massless particle moving relative to another particle gains energy instead (and so gets blue shifted).
I’m not sure what happens to this “connected via gravity” if there is a “graviton” particle. Would it have rest mass? But then it can’t catch up to photons.
Yeah, the part where she says she’s just teleporting next to herself seems good. It would have to be familiar, since she can just see it. Not sure how familiarity and distance interact though. I guess we’ll find out when she has to teleport to the Starforge without having a body on it.
Gravity doesn’t move faster than the speed of light, so it’s not a big deal if the graviton particle exists, it doesn’t need to catch up to anything. Time dilation is more a state of being than a process. If two particles are moving away from each other at a high relative speed, they’re both experiencing time dilation, again relative to each other. The twin paradox only exists due to general relativity, in which case the time dilation sticks to whichever one turns around (i.e. accelerates, i.e. experiences a massive gravitational field).
With conversion of energy I think just teleporting 10 meters up could kill you.
TL;DR: I believe Harems teleportation powers are FAR more powerful than she realizes, but operate primarily by how she THINKS they work, and most limitations she has are unintentionally self-inflicted.
The sheer fact that Harem automatically teleports correctly oriented relative to her surroundings proves that there’s some aspect of her powers that can either cancel out certain momentum problems, are controlled (subconsciously maybe) by her expectation or perception or her abilities or her target surroundings, or ‘magically’ compensates for laws of physics she may not even be aware of.
Example: if Harem teleports from the North Pole to the South Pole, she doesn’t Vorp in upside down, her body automatically rotates itself 180°. This might not seem like a big deal, but there are SOOO many factors here that are automatically compensated for or nullified.
Just to name a few:
– if you consider that the universe has an absolute positional coordinate system (that there is literally a center of the universe with an x, y, z coordinate of 0, 0, 0 that everything is actually positioned to or moving relatively to) then her powers either A: ignore it and create a coordinate system relative to her local space (which makes sense on a planet with a primary gravitational center) OR intrinsically aware of her ABSOLUTE POSITION IN THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE (which would probably be needed to jump from said planet to a starship moving at ungodly speeds somewhere in the black of space she probably couldn’t even point to in the night sky). And technically, she’s aware of multiple of them in the case of her other selves. Either way, she can automatically calculate the position, orientation, and velocity of any other point in her chosen coordinate system to port in moving and oriented to her chosen surroundings.
– We know but she can teleport to the location of any of her other selves, so it seems that she can use them for at least absolute reference points to go from point A to point b, but since she can also teleport to places she can’t see, like how she bypasses Sydney’s door on the spaceship having probably never been in her bedroom, she’s demonstrating the ability to teleport specific distances without knowledge of the other side. And we know that she can teleport to places long distance where her other selves are not, like when she visited Deus long ago. Once she has a reference point, what kind of accuracy can she teleport to that location later? For example if she visited the space station where Sydney got rescued from, could she then teleport back to that space station at some point without one of ourselves being there? Because even though the station might have a relative fixed point in relation to its local surroundings like planets and stars, the fact that it’s also probably traveling several hundred thousand miles an hour in directions differently than the direction Earth is moving, in an ever-expanding universe, that means that she is not teleporting to an absolute point but can you use that space station as a beacon I guess to teleport exactly there as opposed to the space for that space station was 3 months ago? And if that’s the case, now that she has been on Cora’s spaceship, since she is familiar with its local environment, could she in theory teleport to that spaceship anywhere it was in the galaxy traveling? Would she only be able to jump to the space station because even though it is constantly moving to the Galaxy at crazy speeds it’s also technically parked in a spot around the planet or around a star that is relatively static by its local coordinates? On a more local scale, if she is familiar with a specific yacht owned by a friend or billionaire, can she only teleport to that yacht if she knows where in the harbor it is parked? Or is she able to teleport directly to that yacht anywhere in the world that it is because she’s familiar with the yacht itself and doesn’t need its absolute location?
– speaking of preservation of inertia: relative to what? An ultimate center coordinate? A gravitational source? Which direction she’s facing? If she’s jumps out of a plane and falls facing planetward towards the North Pole and teleports to the South Pole, we’d assume she would continue falling facing the planet. But technically she has rotated her orientation and has completely reversed her momentum relative to the planet in an instant. We know (I think) that she can teleport in facing any direction she wants, could she force the appearance to face away from the planet? Would that change the direction of her momentum so she would be ‘falling up’? Ignoring all other movement, the earth travels around the sun at roughly 66.6K mph. If she is facing the direction of orbit at the N Pole and teleports to the S Pole facing away from the direction of orbit, in theory her preservation of inertia would mean that she would suddenly be traveling at 66K mph AWAY from the planet (technically the two speeds would cancel out and she would be standing still as the planet moves away from her at 66K mph, but same observable effect). But this doesn’t happen, so it seems that her inertial preservation isn’t directional. But since she does completely reverse the direction she’s falling and orientation to the planet, does that mean that it’s referential to where she is or her understanding of gravity? The fact that she can teleport from the planet to a spaceship at an unknown location and arrived having completely compensated for all orientation, velocity, and position seems to means that she does have the ability to completely ignore absolute velocity in relation to a fixed point. So in theory if she’s falling towards the planet and then teleports anywhere, I believe that her powers would probably be able to completely nullify her inertia and allow her to teleport to the ground completely still and unmoving.
– I don’t even have the math to calculate the forces a body would feel being instantly spun around 180°. Let’s just say that it adds to the list of physical laws she’s ignoring or rewriting or compensating for without even knowing it.
Also, is the ship in “real space” currently? I don’t remember the FTL specifics from the past pages. If the ship is travelling in anyway that includes ‘hyperspace’ or ‘subspace’ or some alternative spatial plane or dimension, this means that her teleportation isn’t restricted to just the known universe. Seems like her powers might allow her access to Otherwhere (or whatever the Nthaniels’ extra-dimensional clubhouse was called).
Sorry for the novel. Honestly I had to stop myself from writing more. I have a thousand more questions and thoughts about her powers because teleportation is one of the superpowers I have spent a lot of time theorizing about. :)
The answer is “E”, All of the above.
the answer is technically ‘Platypus’. We just don’t know the actual question
There is no absolute universal coordinate system.
Her momentum is maintained relative to her orientation. She demonstrated that with her “I don’t take fall damage” trick.
Her momentum relative to what, is probably either the local gravity well, or just her perception of things.
Morbid version: It’s all just her teleporting to near herself.
When she visits a place, like anybody, she leaves a tiny amount of residue. We all do it, some of us more than others. But even if we don’t have dandruff and aren’t losing our hair, we still leave something behind, even if it’s just microscopic. She’s teleporting back to near whatever it was she left.
Ok, sure, a certain someone cleans his yacht, but her powers cause her bits to not get cleaned up with everything else. They just stay where they fell, a permanent beacon to her should she ever want it. And even though she can’t get enough sense from them to be consciously aware of what’s around them, she can get enough to be unconsciously aware, which is how her teleporting is always safe.
If this is how it works, not only will she be able to follow the yacht around, if a certain someone removes one of the beds they used from it, has it ground up into little bits, and then has it recycled into a bunch of other stuff which is then transported various places, she’ll be able to teleport to a whole bunch of places she’s never been, and she won’t know why unless she’s told.
It wouldn’t need to be something physically left behind, it could well be some changed to the supernion field or some minor magical beacon left in place.
Sorry, that was meant to be its own post, not a reply! And I don’t know how to delete it and repost.
Think about it this way: You can run up or down 10 meters of stairs quickly enough that you don’t dump the heat generated, and the heat generated that way is about 4 times higher than the energy involved in the height change, because muscle tissue is only about 25% efficient.
Would running up or down 10 meters of stairs kill you? Not remotely. According to Google Gemini, about a 0.03C temperature change assuming 100% efficiency, and that does sound about right. When I was younger I used to exercise by running sprints up stairwells, 20 stories without pause, and I certainly didn’t explode into a fireball.
She’d have to teleport most of a kilometer vertically to have temperature problems, assuming conservation of energy.
But the Superion field exists because the laws of physics have been hacked by the Nth, and conservation of energy is a law of physics… So it likely doesn’t apply to super powers. Or at least not in any simple local fashion. Maybe the Superion field incorporates some sort of energy buffer.
– According to Google Gemini
Why do people trust the talking parrot?
Well, to her point of reference, she’s not accelerating. It’s the same as we on earth are just moving really really fast around the galaxy and are standing still. The ship is really fast, but I doubt that it can go lightspeed, wormwholes and warpdrives are for that. The ship is transiting through the wormhole path at a speed that is slower than C, but to a third observer outside of the wormhole, it’s definitely going faster.
Also, as for time dilation, as something accelerating near the speed of light, the time it experiences is slowed… but that’s because you are always moving at C in the time axis, all the time. You can’t exceed C, so you exchange your velocity through for velocity through space.
She definitelly shoud had some inertia as all her atoms were moving in a certain direction relative to Earth, but I guess her powers can manage that automatically, she is existing simultaneously in 5/6 different bodies and is experiencing all that without any delay, even when she is light years appart fom herself.
Basically, she is a hyper dimensional energy being that manifests as solid most of the time in five locations at the same time. She can reabsorb the energy of one of her manifestations back into her matrix and manifest it in other locations she remembers or see’s.
FTL teleports are way secondary. Wear your darned mittens, Scoville!
Sydney is also making the critical mistake of assuming speed is a factor at all besides whenever the Harem’s are jumping/running relative to their environment.
Scientifically speaking, speed might be a factor in whatever kinds of teleportation is developed. But for a lot of superpowers? Teleportation is literally, simply, just instantly appearing from one place to another.
If speed mattered, then every teleporter, even assuming they only tried going across a room, would go careening into space because the earth itself is moving and spinning at very high speeds.
OOf, Snuggle Jail is totally a thing. A pleasant thing, but sometimes you got stuff to do.
Strictly speaking, assuming I’m not massively confused, everything is always moving at the speed of light in every reference frame. It’s just that in a shared reference frame, the vast majority of your velocity is pointed into the future rather than any of the three spatial dimensions. Time dilation is basically dragging that vector towards the spatial dimensions, thus causing your position on the time axis to change more slowly.
That’s pretty much right, to the extent I understand it.
Oh, and it’s SydQuil, thank you – the nighttime, twitching, idea-explaining, sitting-bolt-upright-in-the-wee-hours-of-the-night-right-beside-you-and-you-stay-asleep medicine.
There’s a simple explanation hinted at by Daphne in the comic. All the Harem’s are quantumly entangled. If one copy teleports locally and alone, it conserves momentum. If one copy uses another copy as a reference for teleportation, the teleporting copy adjusts to both the location and velocity of the reference copy before materializing. The teleporting copy dematerializes, syncs with the reference copy, then materializes.
So if she teleported from a standstill into a random moving vehicle she would explode out the back. If she teleported next to a copy of herself in that moving vehicle she would be fine.
I also recall a distance limit to solo teleportation, something like a few hundred KM. I haven’t done the math, but I think moving that distance horizontally along the earth’s surface in any direction would result in a noticeable but non-damaging change in relative velocity. Which may be why she has the limit. She could theoretically teleport longer distances, but has found that the farther she teleports the worse it feels when she lands, so she doesn’t go any farther.
The limits are 1)target location is a place she can see clearly or 2)the target location is familiar (Dabbler’s Science Corner #2). Teleporting to the location of another instance would fall under the former. She’s leveraged the latter by living and working in various places to establish more “familiar” locations (p491).
I think I’ve gotten most of the essentials into her GP Wiki entry (https://grrlpowercomic.fandom.com/wiki/Harem).
Thank you for working on the wiki.
I’ve been plugging away at it as I find time, hoping to get back to it later this month.
Sydney is entangled within her boyfriend while Daphne is entangled with herself.
Makes sense.
Things only look like they are not moving, from the vantage point of, anything “local” that is moving at the same speed, along a parallel vector.
The Galaxies move away from the center of the universe. Dwarf Galaxies, Magellanic Clouds, Star clusters, and Stars orbit the Galaxy. Planetary bodies orbit their Stars, and rotate. Smaller objects are affected by the few largest “Local” gravity wells.
The fastest any object can travel is the speed of light, 299,792,458 m/s, or 1 Planck-Length per Planck-second.
The faster you move the slower time passes.
The larger the gravity well the slower time passes.
At the speed of light, and/or at surface of a black hole, time effectively stops for outside observers.
With the multiple bodies of Daphne, and them being beside themselves quantumly, in both Space and Time.
The bigger question is the effects of time dilation on the crew of the starship, versus those on earth.
Time on earth should be passing much faster than on the starship.
though that might be negated by a Startrek style Warp Bubble, since the space-time inside the bubble should be considered to be standing still, relative to the space-time outside and within the event horizon of the bubble.
As much as Daphne says she doesn’t understand superpowers, I suspect she knows enough to suspect that there was a very real chance that her manifested copy would not only be instantly vaporized as it appeared, but also offload enough energy to destroy the ship Halo was in and everyone in it except maybe Maxima.
Though there’s a very real chance that her spontaneous multiple-times-light-speed teleportation would instantly unleash enough energy that even the expanding vapor cloud would carry enough force to easily penetrate Maxima’s everyday armor and vaporize even her before her brain realized that anything was wrong due to the shockwave of hyperrelativistic particles traveling at the speed of light.
And she willingly took this probably-double-digit-percent-risk of this happening to all her friends to deliver this message with specifically this copy of herself?
I think it likely that Daphne’s superpower comes with built-in safeties that prevent her from executing catastrophically-energetic operations. She did mention that she gets a warning if she is about to teleport into an occupied space. Although, technically, any space in Earth’s atmosphere is “occupied”, so there’s another mystery to ponder.
That might well be the case, but to her knowledge as far as she or anyone else knows this was completely untested territory with no prior experiments on uninhabited FTL ships to confirm that her powers sensor and warning system was up to the task of detecting this danger.
It seems to be a bit on the same level as Octavius doing self sustaining hot fusion experiments in the middle of a city for the first time instead of the middle of a desert. You think it will be fine but then shit happens.
Just say she “unteleported” that body, then Blonde-Her remanifested it beside her, rather than directly point-to-point.
How I see it is that Harem teleporting one of her to another of her localizes the arriving body to the local motion – otherwise, she can simply unteleport a body, and re-appear it next to another of herself at the receiving location.
She MIGHT have trouble if she were to try to teleport directly onto the space ship without having another of her already there.
Got it right about how Bodie managed to *VORP* next to herself on the ship
Now to find out why… after the jump-skip to see what Dabs is doing back on Dirt for the next two weeks :P
so if i’m understanding this explanation of daphne’s powers correctly, daphne-a could teleport to daphne-b, jump off of daphne-b in a particular direction, and then daphne-b could do the same thing to daphne-a in the same direction, and they could alternate like that and essentially a) fly, b) form a human accelerator cannon, and c) do a lot of what naruto can do with a small number of clones (ex. a daphne-tower, cracking a daphne-whip, etc)
Doesn’t Sydney herself have the ability to teleport? She can use here telepresence ball to project an image, then transport herself to the image. (It’s been so long since she used that ability, I nearly forgot about it.)
Anyway, she could experiment herself. Or at least teleport out from under Frix.
She could, but does she *want* to? She’s treating this like an unpleasant diversion from the important business of sleep & snuggle. (Also, unless the bit about Frix sedating himself into a coma with “Sydnex” isn’t a gag, having her suddenly dematerialize would probably disturb him).
The time dilation twin paradox relies on the fact that 1 of the twins accelerates and one doesn’t. I believe the original version doesn’t even have the traveling twin even accelerate up to C, it starts with them already going close to C, starting from a point near their twin. The important bit is when they slow down, stop, then turn around and accelerate back towards Earth. That causes the difference, otherwise both twins would be the same, either moving or not moving depending on the observer’s frame of reference. Motion is always relative, but acceleration is absolute.
Also with regards to Daphne “conserving momentum”, from the example from the older comic where she falls, warps upside down to “reorient” her momentum, flies up until she reaches the apex and stops, and then warps to the ground, technically Daphne does not conserve momentum but speed. Momentum is mass times velocity, and velocity is directional, so momentum is a vector, it has a direction. This is very important for momentum conservation. Things in motion don’t just “keep moving” in terms of speed, they also keep moving in the same direction. But if Daphne is able to change the direction of her momentum, then she isn’t really conserving it. She’s conserving her speed, maybe her kinetic energy, but not the direction and therefore not momentum.
You don’t even have to be moving close to c. The clocks in GPS satellites have to compensate for both motional and gravitational time dilation.
Enough of the armchair relatavism! I’m here to comment on Gaxgys painting. I think his style is reminiscent of Patrick Nagel. You can look that up if you aren’t familiar with his work, but if you’re of a certain age, you almost certainly are.
Particle Physicist here….
DaveB is correct that massless particles can (and do) move at the velocity of light (c). If a particle has ANY mass, no matter how small, its velocity must be less than c.
The interesting thing about photons and other massless particles is that in their speed-of-light reference frame, time stands absolutely still. To observe the velocity of another particle relative to you requires you to see its position change over an interval in time, so a hypothetical massless “observer” in a light-speed reference frame will never see the motion of other objects relative to it.
Fun fact: neutrinos were long thought to be massless since their measured velocities were (and still are) indistinguishable from c. However, the phenomenon of “neutrino oscillation” (neutrinos changing from one type to another) was experimentally and confirmed about 25 years ago. To oscillate from one type to another, the neutrino has to be in a reference frame where time changes (from “before” the oscillation to “after”). This is how we know that neutrinos must have some (tiny) masses. We still don’t know exactly how small, although we’re starting to have some idea about the relative masses between the three types…
Perhaps all the Daphnes we have seen are just projections of the one true Daphne. As projections of force, any appearance of mass is an illusion. An illusion that even Daphne herself cant see through. Sydney might be able to perceive it with her true sight or the Nth being might see it but for everyone else the projections quack so they might as well be ducks.
if true, it’s annoying that she can be convinced hard enough that one of her unsummoned self has a broken arm that she can only summon it back with said broken arm
Massive risk jump to ask Sydney about borrowing tampons.
you think it’s something as simple? she still has some of her selves on earth, she could go to any drugstore and get some then teleport herself with them to any needing clone
maybe her problem is that because of all the faster than light travel and relativity and stuff, her clones are desynced
or, maybe unrelated to space, maybe one of the clone got pregnant and she doesn’t know who to talk about it with
None of those ‘problems’ require talking to Sydney
So, no-one has spoken about the twin thing, so I’m just going to drop this here…
If the one twin flies away at relativistic speeds, then yes, from the perspective of the other, they will seem to not have aged.
However, if they stop, turn around and fly back, the process is effectively swapped / cancelled out. Both twins will be the same age again…
This doesn’t apply to orbits though. So stick one twin on a rocket ship and fly really fast orbits around the Earth – that twin can then come back to Earth and be younger.
The difference is that in the first, there is no difference between the first twin turning around and coming back, and the second getting on their own rocket and following. In the second, the first can return without relativistic effects.
I guess in the first, the rocket twin could fly back slowly, but they had better be immortal or they will never meet again.
Oh! The perceived distance travelled is not the same, due to Lorentz contraction. The faster you go, the shorter the distance! At light speed, there is no distance in the direction of motion.
I guess that is one way to make a three dimensional universe into a two dimensional one..
I really think they were docked… At a spaceforge… where they could just print anything…
I’m still confused why she hadnt been able to do the same thing when she was on Alar Prime.
When she was displaced two months into the future on Alar Prime, she was seriously disoriented by suddenly being in contact with two sets of herself (the “present” bodies on the other side of the wormhole and the “future” bodies on Earth), so she couldn’t do much of anything until she got home and got herself reoriented.
But even wherever she is now, she would be displaced in time. So even now there should be ‘too many Harems’ – I am assuming they are many, many, many light years away from Earth since they had gone to ‘warp’ in the first place.
So…. why is it possible now, but it wasn’t possible on Alar Prime?
My only guess is that she’s now USED to it. I’m not sure if that’s the correct answer though.
She was only displaced in time until she returned through the portal back to her original time and place, where she recovered from her disorientation (and sorted out the memories from her future iterations to the point that ARCHON could use them to prevent crimes/disasters — I’m guessing that her future memories described ARCHON doing just that so that everything fell into a consistent stable time loop).
But why was she displaced in time when she was at Alar, but not while in this new location, which is rather far from Earth as well (ie, 3000 light years). In both cases, there would be a time dilation effect from having moved at Faster Than Light speeds to get from Earth to here.
She was only displaced in time because the portal was malfunctioning, not because of having traveled a great distance instantly. Portals presumably don’t actually cause you to move through the intervening space, as thus you don’t actually “travel” faster than light.
maybe she tried and or the de link or crazyness caused the new clone or new body to form. which made her wonky
There was a book/ series whose name I forget where the MC was a teleporter with interstellar range. There were many such in this setting and they were the backbone of much interstellar commerce. Momentum vectors were dealt with by mentally (subconsciously?) reaching into hyperspace and adding or subtracting energy to match the desired vectors for when/ where they reappeared. MC might have been the first to figure out how to do this intentionally.
This shoe in my hand is now going [that way] at 200 miles a second. There were ways to block this power from teleporting away and someone used one on the MC. MC aimed his shoe at the wall of his jail cell. They could block the teleport but not the momentum transfer apparently.
Teleporters on this scale can destroy planets if their abilities have loopholes.
Various forms of electromagnetic radiation, ranging from gamma rays to radio waves, travel only at the speed of light. When it meets a medium other than pure vacuum, it will slow down or get absorbed, but c stays at 299,792,458 meters per second. The photon is the only member of the standard model that has no rest mass and always travels at c. When you apply the time dilation formulas to light, it turns out that time does not flow for light. So from the point of view of the light, it gets created and absorbed at the same time. The universe is infinitely wide and infinitely short in the direction of travel.
Anything with mass, including electrons and neutrinos, can travel very fast, but a little less than c. Time travels for these particles, maybe not very quickly, but it does happen. This is part of the reason we know that neutrinos actually have mass, not much, but it can not travel at c.
From the perspective of a massless particle such as a photon, every massive particle is going c in the opposite direction, but the universe has zero width on that dimension and time doesn’t exist, so “going” and “opposite direction” don’t actually mean much. Length and time dilation make a photon’s perspective quite degenerate.
So that new Daphne “me” is born, and miiiiight need a little session with one of the orbs for some reason.
… What?
All photons, within their time frame, move way faster than the speed of light. But to everyone on the outside they just look like they are going at the max speed (Speed of light).
Get. To. The. POINT.
Now Sydney knows what every one who has a conversation with her experiences :P
And it was Sydney who diverted the conversation in panel two
Another question –
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-dabblers-science-corner-2/
In Dabbler’s Science Corner #2, it was stated that “Harem’s range increases with familiarity. She can teleport back to the farm she crew up on hundreds of miles away, but this can create situations where she can teleport somewhere, but not back.”
Why would there be a situation where she cannot teleport back if she can just teleport to wherever one of her other Harems are located already? I realize the cab thing was for the lulz, but now the joke sort of doesnt make sense anymore. :) Unless all five Harems were in the cab.
Or maybe she unteleported the other 4 Harems, then teleported to her family farm, then even if she re-teleported the other 4 harems, they’d be next to her, instead of where they originally were located?
Am I close?
Pretty sure that Harem’s range limitations as described in that science corner are predicated on there being no other Harem present at either location.
If there is a Harem at the other location, her range is effectively unlimited, as we’ve just seen.
So what I said in the last paragraph then? Just checking.
If you can’t reach 2C how can the integral of that be the energy-mass conversion ratio? In what universe? Is this a brane thing?
I spent a good five seconds trying to figure out if an X-ray particle beam railgun made any sense before writing a comment that it didn’t before remembering who was saying it in the comic.
It makes sense if you consider a particle accelerator a railgun. I suppose you could, with a big enough capacitor bank and a long tube with tantalum bus bars running up it, accelerate a cloud of ions like a railgun and they’d produce x-rays when they hit. Um. Oh dammit, now I’m going to have to do the math on that. When I get a minute.
What is a particle accelerator if not a railgun? Apart from the pellet size being much smaller than a railgun and the electromagnetic rings are arranged in a loop instead of a line, in what way is it not one?
I ask, because most of the time people have explained to me what they are, they basically start off with a railgun.