General Writing

[fauxsquared]

[noodles]

I want limited animations!

[Trifkin]

[beekee]

Well! The writing has been coming along, and now I daresay I feel rather good about it. I have a solid outline for my book and for the first chapter.

For each character, I aim to have the following established in my mind:
Motivation: What does the character want?
Complication: What gets in the character's way?
Choice: What does the character have to decide?

I write stream-of-consciousness as the character until I come up with ideas for these. I have them envisioned for one character, but the Choice for the other is a bit unclear. I'm not sure if I should take more time to brainstorm for him, or if I should simply jump into my draft and let his problem come through in the story.

Even if this one only ends up being practice, I'm excited about it and it should be a good experience.

[Skele Von Mann]

Just curious, in a "realistic" application of time stopping, would it lead into A) Being blind (no moving light), and B) Getting shredded to bits from all the air molecules (or at least, not breathing at all)?

[Doktor_Q]

Stopping time would basically be the same as accelerating yourself to infinite speed, outpacing literally everything else, and basically exploding from the first time you contact another particle.

[Skele Von Mann]

Ooh, that makes it even more fun. Human missiles.



Any other neat tricks in time manipulation?

[Drathi]

Well, you could watch that movie Time Stoppers for som ideas... I'd still kill to have a watch like that. XD

[Doktor_Q]

"Missile" implies you move. The moment you touched an air molecule you'd break apart. Of course, it would actually probably just end the world, because infinite speed = infinite energy, imparted to whatever it was you hit, chain reaction, infinite entropy, world ceases to exist in, technically, zero time.

So yeah, you need some extra work arounds to deal with time stopping.

[Skele Von Mann]

Even better, instant apocalypse button.

[scy]

So am I the only one chuckling at the idea of "realistic" time stopping and the notion of infinite speed being realistic?

Maybe it's just me.

[spoiler]Not that I can really argue against the theory of infinite speed being defined as approaching time stopping (from the perspective of the observer; time doesn't ... actually stop).

Heightened reflexes to the point of slowing the perception of time (i.e., the rationale behind "bullet time") being taken to the extreme perception of frozen time is a bit more "realistic" than the idea of infinite speed I'd imagine.

But I guess it depends on where you fall in the "so we're going 5 times the speed of light" logic.[/spoiler]

[Drathi]

But if your going to go witht he "5 times the speed of light" logic, you wouldn't just be stopping time, you'd be dialating it, wouldn't you? Or does that only apply to space?

[scy]

Either my understanding of quantum mechanics is off or yours is or I'm just not really sure what you're asking.

Incidentally, my "where you fall on 5 times the speed of light logic" was more on the concept of exceeding the speed of light. Which you'd have to for this time stopping effect (which, again, is only from the point of the observer, not an actual literal time has frozen effect).

[Skele Von Mann]

Just wanted to know about the workings; Kinda like realistic mecha in a way I guess.

[scy]

Yeah, I get that. Was more of a "how would this work, realistically?" being responded with "something unrealistic is how!" made me chuckle.

Also, again, this isn't stopping the passage of time like you originally outlined. It's altering the perception of time from the point of the being sped up and something not. The ebb and flow of time itself isn't altered here. That is, accelerating to speeds approaching infinity doesn't make time stop. It makes everything appear to have stopped.

[spoiler]If we also want to get super technical, there's a host of other things needed. The aforementioned "how do you deal with normal forces at hyperspeed?" issue, the strain that is stopping at those speeds, the nervous system to support that kind of rush of stimuli, and so forth.

Hence why a mental speeding up of the senses, to me, is "more realistic." To put in laymans terms, the difference between sampling 1 time, 10 times, a million times, and an infinite amount of times per second. The same span of time but a different measurement; speeding up just the nervous system to react to to each increment of the sampling.

I guess in super layman's terms "A million actions per second versus one."

It's something we're familiar with in a sense what with rushing of adrenaline and all that where time appears to move slower; rather, our processing per second increases so we appear to "do more" in the same interval of time.[/spoiler]

Resolving the twin paradox and other things isn't really something I think/want to get into, if only because it hurts my brain and it's been years since I've done anything with relativity to an extent of still being capable of thinking it through.