From: bhv@areaplg2.corp.mot.com (Bronis Vidugiris)
Subject: Re: Axioms
X-Gated-By: The Black Marble Wombat@morticia.cnns.unt.edu
X-Gated-From: torg mailing list
Organization: University of North Texas
X-Gatemail-Version: 1.0b
Date: Thu, 16 Apr 1992 06:46:13 GMT

Sean writes:
> But does this change the _universe_? If the Haitians believed that the
> world was flat, or that the Sun orbited the Earth, would that make it
> true in Haiti? Would the world become flat if you travelled from the
> US to Haiti?

..

> Suppose you are in
> Madrid in 1600. It is known there that the Earth is a sphere orbiting
> the Sun. You travel to India, where it is likewise 'known' that the
> Earth is a flat disk supported on the backs of four elephants standing
> on a turtle (and "it's turtles all the way down!"). Has the Earth
> changed because you made this journey, and if it has, why were _you_
> the focus for it changing? Why wouldn't some other traveller arriving
> in India have already transformed the Earth into a flat disk, and why
> haven't the people in Madrid noticed this?

An intersting question.  As a sometimes logical positivist, I would answer
that you have to define how you know whether the earth is flat, or orbiting
around the sun, before you can answer it.

It would actually be relatively subtle behaviors of geometry that would
reveal locally that the earth was round, though it is possible to determine
this (time of noon/shortest shadows comes to mind). There is precedent for
some amount of subtle changes in reality within a cosm - as for example
voodoo working in Hati but not elsewhere.  So perhaps these subtle behaviors
could be different in India.   But it probably wouldn't happen, IMO.  I'd
say that the people in India really mostly knew down deep that they 
didn't _know_ about the state of the earth (if that makes sense) even if
they weren't aware of it.  [How's that for rationalizing? :-)]  Or one could
say it would be far to much trouble for the GM to have the world flat and
non-flat - that'd probably be closer to the truth.  You could manage it if
you really wanted to, though.  (As I said, all the subtle behaviors in
India would act as if the world were flat - but elsewhere they would not
act that way.)  The meta-laws describing how much reality can vary in Torg
are vague - but it's clear that major variations are not possible within a
cosm, though minor variations are.   The question of how much variation there
is between different solar systems in a cosm is an interesting question - but
until interstellar travel of some sort is possible, an unanswerable question
by experiment, even in the real world.  Perhaps major variations are possible
on an interstellar scale - and then again, maybe they aren't.  If major
variations are possible, interstellar travelers would have serious problems
(unless they were possibility rated), as their stardrive might just stop
working as they attempt to move around!  (Neatly solving the problem of why,
if there is other intelligent life in the universe and interstellar travel
is possible nobody has yet visited Earth.)

It's not clear that the earth orbiting the sun or vice-versa makes any
observable differences.  [Ramblings about General Relativity and the
non-preference of inertial frames deleted for brevity.]
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