Saturday, August 21, 2010

"Peter And The Helpers" Page 13

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4 comments:

Rai said...

Ahh! Run! Run run run run run! They aren't helpers they are going to eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeat you!

August 21, 2010 at 8:01 AM
Cat said...

Eek!

Also, something I wondered about earlier, particularly when they were reaching out to grab shoes through the barrier: what would happen if one person stayed out in the hallway holding a rope while the other person went into the dark room with the rope tied around their waist (so they could always find their way back)? Would the rope being pulled into the room move super-fast? Or what if one person reached out from inside the room to drag in the other person?!

August 21, 2010 at 11:18 AM
Rubberduck said...

And here comes a Minotaur. Or perhaps a Timelord. Very much enjoying the setting - you've morphed it from fascinating to spooky excellently.

Cat: Either severe whiplash, or the magic of the hallway is transferred, like an electric current. Judging from the description of the action of the shoelaces I'm going for whiplash.

Huchth = The name of a demon responsible for the circle of Hell wherin people with annoying laughs go to atone for their misdemeanours in countless concerts by having to sit through an entire Marx Brothers film without cracking a smile.

August 21, 2010 at 1:14 PM
Darren said...

Rai -
Haha! Yes, that is probably true...

Cat -
I haven't worked that out entirely, but here's what I believe would happen:

1) On the rope from the hall to the room issue: say Peter has a rope and ties it around a Doll. He leaves the doll in the hall and goes into the room. Then he yanks the rope. The doll would probably move super fast, maybe around 100 mph - but as soon as it hit the dividing wall, it would probably slow down to regular speed.

However, being in the room doesn't give you super strength. If Peter did the same thing to Dill instead of the doll, and yanked Dill from the hallway into the room, I think it wouldn't have a terribly different effect. Peter would have a hard time moving Dill's weight in regular time, so he would have a hard time moving him from regular time to "fast time," too. However, there is the danger that if the rope was tied around Dill's waist, it could move so fast that it might break his back. Potentially.

Any physics geeks out there? I'm assuming that if fast time is 100 times faster than regular time, it messes up all sorts of physics equations.

And you have to deal with the boundary wall, too, which is a kind of event horizon.

From Wikipedia: "In general relativity, an event horizon is a boundary in spacetime, most often an area surrounding a black hole, beyond which events cannot affect an outside observer. Light emitted from beyond the horizon can never reach the observer, and any object that approaches the horizon from the observer's side appears to slow down and never quite pass through the horizon, with its image becoming more and more redshifted as time elapses. The traveling object, however, experiences no strange effects and does, in fact, pass through the horizon in a finite amount of proper time."

I figure that the wall is black because no light is reflected back from the room into the hallway. Not enough to be visible to the human eye, anyway.

I don't know. Maybe I shouldn't mix supernatural mumbojumbo with physics mumbojumbo.

2) As far as reaching out from inside the room to drag another person in, I think the dragee would move super fast until they hit the black wall - at which point they would lapse into the "room time."

Also, I figure that if a person straddles the black wall, if his head is on one side, that's the type of time he experiences. If he let the black wall bisect his head, he would perceive time one way or the other. Some people argue that time is just a construct in our heads, anyway, and that it doesn't really exist. That's what I'm basing the "straddling the black wall" theory on - your mind will perceive either hallway time, so things in the room move super fast, or room time, so that things in the hallway move super slow, but not both at the same time.

There is an issue that if your head is in the hallway but your body is in the room, wouldn't your blood move so fast that it would explode out your head? But wherever your head is, that's where your entire body experiences time. So your entire body would pump blood super slow - in fact, if Peter was in the room and Dill was in room but with his head in the hallway, Dill would continue to move super slow from Peter's perspective, because Dill is still stuck in hallway time.

If it all sounds contradictory, don't worry - it's going to get even worse in the future. (In future stories, that is.)

Rubberduck -
Or a bunch of Little People dressed in semi-medieval clothing!

http://www.kennybaker.co.uk/

(scroll down to the bottom)

Thanks, glad you're liking it!

August 21, 2010 at 7:14 PM

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