Alt.Will, Alt. Lyra

[jessia]

i think she means it was like our world's past, in terms of victorianish things.

And in the past the church wasn't merciless

uhh...

[Lyra_B_S]

i think she means it was like our world's past, in terms of victorianish things.

Yes, there are many similar things and many differences as well.
I remember that in the SK,- -in Will's world- Will didn't know how Sir Charles's doorbell was working, because it was old-fashioned, but Lyra knew, cause they were using the same in her world.

[Lyra&Pan]

I agree with Lyra_B_S. Remember that Lyra found that stone in Will's world, which had written SP on it, like Lyra's friend, Simon Parslow, had written the same letters in L-world.

[daemonpurra]

Oh okay. That is kinda wierd really. I mean if that happened to me I would go mad. But if it were nonfiction I would destroy somthin with a nuclear bomb and it would happen in every world there was an alternate for me

[moyeongsu]

I always kinda imagined Lyra's world like something outta the 18/1900s with a few futuristic and mystical things here and there. Victorian style, as said before

[shruikan_shade]

Just my two pence.
Looking at Will and Lyra's worlds it does not appear like they split just before their birth...with all the differences going on. It split at least before Calvin (Pope Calvin) but most likely even way before that, because in our universe there was zero chance Calvin would be Pope, but not much earlier, or the differences would have been so great there would've been no Calvin.
(If the split was, say 100 years before that, that's 3-5 generations, what are the odds of the all the parents getting together the same way?) So we can safely assume the split was around then, BUT that can never be true. Just because of daemons.
Even in the Bible they speak of daemons. The bible having been written around 100-300AD (historically) or around 0AD(Christian view), and the old testament even before that. So that evidence points to a split before even around 0-300AD. Calvin was born around 1500. That's 1200-1400 years, or 6000-8000 generations, making it virtually impossible that Calvin would have come to exist in that world as well as ours.
But these works are just fiction, anyhow, so let's ignore that. Say the split occured around the time of Calvin, for we know that the histories of the two worlds really went different from then. That makes for almost 500 years from the split to the story and births of Will and Lyra. That's 2500 generations.
The odds of there being either an alt. Will OR alt. Lyra are as close to zero as you can get.

And now to take all my own powder: with multiple universes EVERYTHING is possible, quite literally. There are infinite worlds exactly like ours with differences you are I could never spot, say grains of sand dispersed differently at the bottom of the deepest ocean. So in fact there HAS to be infite worlds with infinite Wills and infinite Lyra's who all went through the same ordeal, and in some there will be alt. Lyra's and Wills. And some will have to meet. In fact there will be infinite worlds with Will and Lyra who went throught this whole adventure, with in all these infinite worlds alternate Wills and Lyras, and in an infinite number of these worlds they will meet. Now notice the first infinite is infitely larger than the second, which is infinitely larger than the third.

So in fact what you state HAS to occur, BUT to be realistic the chances of us having read the story of those Wills and Lyras is infinitesmal. But then again, the chances of us having followed the Will and Lyra we followed is even smaller. .

Are you confused? You should be...

This is exactly how i see it (no sarcasm intended). The fact is that Lyra & Will have met alts in an infinate number of universes and have not met in an infinate number of universes. The only way to make sense of this is to pretend there is a fixed number of universes, and imagine than in half of them Lyra & Will have met each others alts, and in the other half they have not. Now this is obviously wrong because the number of universes is not fixed, but infinate, this is just a way of making sense of the whole thing. In some of these universes, the alt Will/Lyra will not have experienced what 'our' Will and Lyra have, so they will not interact, except for our Lyra/Will being very surprised if they see the alt. In others, they will have all been through the same experiences, and will therefore from there on. However, you can imagine how weird it will be for Lyra/Will...the alt that they meet would not be the same as the person they had left, even thought they are the same person.

Also it is necessary to note that in Lyra's world there is no Will as we know him and vice-versa, as the worlds are completely different. They are unlikely to have stemmed from the same universe...as one has daemons and one does not, so what would the 'parent' universe have had?

P.S. I know that im talking (technically typing) as if this will actually happen, yet with a multiverse, it will happen, and if indeed there is a multiverse, it will all occur in some universe. I like to believe there is a multiverse, (even though people have blasted me with scientific reasons why its impossible) so i like to talk/type to show my opinion that all this has at some point, is right now, or will happen.

[Iggy the Iguana]

I don't think that lyra would meet a will in her world because the multiverse theory is so complex, that if something went differently in one world, it would turn out to be extremely different than another world, after time and advancement. so lets say that wills mother never signed him up for piano lessons, he would have never met mrs.cooper probably and therefore would have had to deal with the problem differently. but that didn't happen in the will that we know of world.

[Chris80]

Just my two pence.
Looking at Will and Lyra's worlds it does not appear like they split just before their birth...with all the differences going on. It split at least before Calvin (Pope Calvin) but most likely even way before that, because in our universe there was zero chance Calvin would be Pope, but not much earlier, or the differences would have been so great there would've been no Calvin.
(If the split was, say 100 years before that, that's 3-5 generations, what are the odds of the all the parents getting together the same way?) So we can safely assume the split was around then, BUT that can never be true. Just because of daemons.
Even in the Bible they speak of daemons. The bible having been written around 100-300AD (historically) or around 0AD(Christian view), and the old testament even before that. So that evidence points to a split before even around 0-300AD. Calvin was born around 1500. That's 1200-1400 years, or 6000-8000 generations, making it virtually impossible that Calvin would have come to exist in that world as well as ours.
But these works are just fiction, anyhow, so let's ignore that. Say the split occured around the time of Calvin, for we know that the histories of the two worlds really went different from then. That makes for almost 500 years from the split to the story and births of Will and Lyra. That's 2500 generations.
The odds of there being either an alt. Will OR alt. Lyra are as close to zero as you can get.

And now to take all my own powder: with multiple universes EVERYTHING is possible, quite literally. There are infinite worlds exactly like ours with differences you are I could never spot, say grains of sand dispersed differently at the bottom of the deepest ocean. So in fact there HAS to be infite worlds with infinite Wills and infinite Lyra's who all went through the same ordeal, and in some there will be alt. Lyra's and Wills. And some will have to meet. In fact there will be infinite worlds with Will and Lyra who went throught this whole adventure, with in all these infinite worlds alternate Wills and Lyras, and in an infinite number of these worlds they will meet. Now notice the first infinite is infitely larger than the second, which is infinitely larger than the third.

So in fact what you state HAS to occur, BUT to be realistic the chances of us having read the story of those Wills and Lyras is infinitesmal. But then again, the chances of us having followed the Will and Lyra we followed is even smaller. .

Are you confused? You should be...

This is very similar to how I viewed the issue. To take it one step further, in the theory of infinite multiverses, splits occur all the time when decisions are made/actions are taken, creating different universes/worlds/dimensions with alternate timelines. In this particular case, I wonder, what would be the outcome if an alternate world was created/split where Lyra and Will were selfish, and allowed multiple windows to exist so they could see each other? Since their decision to only leave the one window open affected ALL worlds, the alternate world with multiple windows open could not exist, in theory, unless there were multiple timelines that each held their own set of infinite universes. So basically there would have to be infinite sets of infinite universes.

My brain hurts.

[Bellerophon]

Anybody on the board read Spanish? If so, you're no doubt aware that Jorge Luis Borges wrote the most astounding multiverse fiction man has produced . . . before WWII.

For you Anglophones, here's a mediocre translation of El jardin de senderos que se bifurcan:

http://www.coldbacon.com/writing/borges-garden.html

Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures . . .

[Enitharmon]

Anybody on the board read Spanish? If so, you're no doubt aware that Jorge Luis Borges wrote the most astounding multiverse fiction man has produced . . . before WWII.

Well, absolutely. Borges is readily available in English too - Labyrinths is a good collection.

Philip Pullman is known to be a fan and I, who generally dislike 'fantasy', always did feel that HDM was closer to Magic Realism.

[Bellerophon]

Yes, Borges had been translated into English by 1948. I meant only to suggest that he's not universally known among Anglophones.

Fans of HDM who are interested in the metaphysics that underly the multiverse concept should certainly consider his work.



[/i]

[Leif]

Anybody on the board read Spanish? If so, you're no doubt aware that Jorge Luis Borges wrote the most astounding multiverse fiction man has produced . . . before WWII.

For you Anglophones, here's a mediocre translation of El jardin de senderos que se bifurcan:

http://www.coldbacon.com/writing/borges-garden.html

Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures . . .

I've only read two works of Borges - El Sur and El Otro - but I absolutely loved them. I'd much rather read El Jardin... in Spanish, do you happen to have a link of the original story?

[Bellerophon]

Leif, click the link below for the story. The full collection can be accessed through the menu under obras>>>ficciones. I recommend also La loteria en Babilonia. That story blew my mind.

http://www.literatura.us/borges/jardin.html

[Iggy the Iguana]

This is very similar to how I viewed the issue. To take it one step further, in the theory of infinite multiverses, splits occur all the time when decisions are made/actions are taken, creating different universes/worlds/dimensions with alternate timelines. In this particular case, I wonder, what would be the outcome if an alternate world was created/split where Lyra and Will were selfish, and allowed multiple windows to exist so they could see each other? Since their decision to only leave the one window open affected ALL worlds, the alternate world with multiple windows open could not exist, in theory, unless there were multiple timelines that each held their own set of infinite universes. So basically there would have to be infinite sets of infinite universes.

THAT is extremely good stuff, love it.

[Jaya]

unless there were multiple timelines that each held their own set of infinite universes. So basically there would have to be infinite sets of infinite universes.

THAT is extremely good stuff, love it.

Ah, but the problem there is that if you have infinite universes then you can't have a 'set' of them because that implies a finite amount. Infinite is infinite, surely?

[Enitharmon]

Lyra's world is like Will's world in the past. So...

No it's not. It's like Will's world would be if it were governed by an authoritarian theocracy with no consumer culture to speak of. They have technologies as advanced as Will's world ("atomcraft") and perhaps more advanced (gas engines, which I take to be hydrogen engines but at least something we know to be less polluting than the internal combustion engine)

Lyra's England (no Civil War, no Act of Union) is nothing like Victorian times in W-England, which was full of challenges to established theology.

[Somewhat]

Lyra's world is like Will's world in the past. So...

No it's not. It's like Will's world would be if it were governed by an authoritarian theocracy with no consumer culture to speak of. They have technologies as advanced as Will's world ("atomcraft") and perhaps more advanced (gas engines, which I take to be hydrogen engines but at least something we know to be less polluting than the internal combustion engine)

Lyra's England (no Civil War, no Act of Union) is nothing like Victorian times in W-England, which was full of challenges to established theology.

But I imagine the Industrial Revolution, which was the biggest boost to technology since the Renaissance, was on a considerably smaller scale, with the advances never reaching the general public. So the technology available, even if it were more advanced, wasn't as used as it is in L-world.
I wonder, did the Renaissance even happen in L-world? Or was there just a very gradual progression from the Middle Ages?

[Chris80]

unless there were multiple timelines that each held their own set of infinite universes. So basically there would have to be infinite sets of infinite universes.

THAT is extremely good stuff, love it.

Ah, but the problem there is that if you have infinite universes then you can't have a 'set' of them because that implies a finite amount. Infinite is infinite, surely?

I had this exact same discussion yesterday with a co-worker after thinking about it for a little bit. I think you can have sets of infinites, and for a more concrete example, take numbers.
There are infinite integers, right? But there are even more numbers that integers, theorectically. The "set" of integers is one infinite set, and the "set" of all numbers is another infinite set. With numbers, you have infinite sets of infinite numbers. I think the same principle can be applied to universes.

Cantor defined two kinds of infinite numbers, the ordinal numbers and the cardinal numbers. Ordinal numbers may be identified with well-ordered sets, or counting carried on to any stopping point, including points after an infinite number have already been counted. Generalizing finite and the ordinary infinite sequences which are maps from the positive integers leads to mappings from ordinal numbers, and transfinite sequences. Cardinal numbers define the size of sets, meaning how many members they contain, and can be standardized by choosing the first ordinal number of a certain size to represent the cardinal number of that size. The smallest ordinal infinity is that of the positive integers, and any set which has the cardinality of the integers is countably infinite. If a set is too large to be put in one to one correspondence with the positive integers, it is called uncountable. Cantor's views prevailed and modern mathematics accepts actual infinity. Certain extended number systems, such as the hyperreal numbers, incorporate the ordinary (finite) numbers and infinite numbers of different sizes.

Our intuition gained from finite sets breaks down when dealing with infinite sets.

[Enitharmon]

There are infinite integers, right? But there are even more numbers that integers, theorectically. The "set" of integers is one infinite set, and the "set" of all numbers is another infinite set. With numbers, you have infinite sets of infinite numbers.

Ah, yes, Eddie Cantor's theorem

[Will]

Lyra's England (no Civil War, no Act of Union) is nothing like Victorian times in W-England, which was full of challenges to established theology.

It's Brytain, ent it? I don't remember any references to England in the book.