Howling:Is the Bubble Universe really e-space?
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Could the Bubble Universe featured in The Doctors Wife actually be e-space? From the events of Logopolis we know that one of CVE's to e-space was left permanently open. Could this be the rift the doctor travels through in The Doctors Wife? The Doctor also describes the bubble universe as being like a plughole universe though which stuff falls through, which kinda fits the discribtion of e-space with the entropy being funneled into it. Timster1987 01:19, May 25, 2011 (UTC)
E-space may be smaller than N-space, but it is not as small as the bubble universe seemed to be. Also, as the Doctor has been to E-space he would likely have recognized it and called it by name. Even if Amy and Rory didn't know what he was talking about, he would have said something like "this is E-space. It's a different universe, with negative coordinates. Think of it like a bubble etc." Besides, when the Doctor fell through the CVE the first time, he didn't have to delete rooms to gain enough power to reach E-space. He never deleted rooms until 2 episodes after he returned to N-space.Icecreamdif 02:23, May 25, 2011 (UTC)
To add to what Icecreamdif said, the Doctor suggested that there are potentially lots of bubble universes, but there's just one E-space.* Also, whenever the technobabble has been a plot point that they wanted us to look back and say, "Ooh, how cleverly they set that up!", it's been simple and obvious. For example, in The Big Bang, all you need to know to understand that is the basic idea that there are cracks in time because spacetime is being torn apart; you don't need to compare and contrast the cracks to the Cardiff rift. Likewise, to understand the Master's plan in Logopolis, all you need to know about CVEs, BTCs, and heat death is the handful of words the Doctor told us; you don't need to work out how the BTCs would affect the lambda-CDM model.
* OK, I'm cheating a bit there; that's an inference from common sense, and common sense probably doesn't apply. In fact, if you really want to make sense of E-space: Negative coordinates are ridiculous in the Doctor's explanation (unless you think the Southern hemisphere is discontinuous from the Northern on our planet?), but they could be a Doctor-ish way of getting across the idea of T-duality to unsophisticated people like Adric (or possibly even the Doctor forgetting his Academy physics and remembering the metaphor he learned as a Time Tot). The novels establish that the 11-dimensional M-theory is a reasonably accurate description of the Whoniverse, which means you can choose lots of arbitrary D3-branes to be T-dual to the D3-brane we live on, and hence lots of E-spaces. But, while that's the kind of thing they might spring on you in a blistering string of irrelevant technobabble, it's exactly the kind of thing they'll never expect you to work out on your own. The Doctor said negative coordinates, and you only get one unique negative universe for one positive universe, so we're meant to expect there's only one E-space unless told otherwise.--99.20.128.35 07:47, May 25, 2011 (UTC)
Fair enough that all makes sense(kinda, lol). I like the idea that there is possibly many bubble universes. Also I get the fact that its meant to be much more complicated then we can understand, but the way it is explained is meant to be a rough understanding, like the doctor says "you know how you have a bubble with a smaller bubble attached, well its nothing like that" I love it when he says things like that! I am interested though to how this relates with parallel universes. Because e-space and the bubble universes are not parallel, I get that, But does this mean that other parallel universes have their own e-space and bubble universes? For example does the 'Pete's World' Universe have its own e-space to siphon off the entropy to survive, since it is very similar to own universe? Timster1987 01:18, May 26, 2011 (UTC)
- Yeah, I love it when 11 does that. It's sort of reminiscent of 2 and 4, but really it's uniquely him (while still being totally the Doctor). And funny as hell, too.
- Anyway, we obviously don't know how bubble universes, parallel universes, etc. are related within the Whoniverse, because they've never explained that to us. But to the extent that the ideas are borrowed from real-life physics, yes, it seems likely that each parallel universe should have its own bubble universes.
- To understand more, a good place to start is Max Tegmark's (non-technical) papers, or just look up all the fancy words on Wikipedia and follow interesting links from there. Anywhere, here's how I'd classify various Whoniverse concepts under Tegmark's system:
- Level 0: "E-space" if taken at face value (basically, no Time Lord ever went to the left of some arbitrary point on their maps) fits here. Basically, anywhere that's in your universe, but you haven't been yet. (Then a CVE is just a wormhole, and dumping entropy into them is basically like trying to keep the universe cool by running a refrigerator, which can't help in the long run.)
- Level 1: "Alternate timelines" go here if they're relativistic causal spirals. "Time looped" regions (and maybe "time locked" ones, but that isn't used as consistently) also fit here, but aren't as exciting. In fact, level 1 generally isn't a good place to find interestingly different universes if FTL (much less time travel) is possible, as in the Whoniverse.
- Level 2: "Bubble universes" (from chaotic inflation), "daughter universes" (either as in black hole theory or quantum foam), the EDAs' "universe next door" (neighboring branes from M-theory), and the "universe before this one" (as in Big Bounce cosmology) are all level 2, and would require going to a specific location and manipulating a lot of energy. You could also create a new bubble universe with enough energy. You can interpret some of the talk about "higher dimensions" as things like artificially-inflated bubbles, neighboring branes, or T-dual branes in M-theory (or in simpler terms in Kaluza-Klein theory). T-duality and other ideas from M-theory haven't directly been used in Doctor Who yet, but other SF (like Greg Egan's Diaspora) shows some of the possibilities, like going to a different universe (possibly even choosing from a huge variety of them) from anywhere at all, and that's what I tried to stretch "E-space" to mean. (Then a CVE is more like what Egan describes, and you could keep one universe running forever at the expense of others... but, as Diaspora points out, why bother when it's easier to just leave your run-down universe for a younger model?)
- Level 3: "Parallel universes" (straight out of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics, probably enhanced by decoherence and/or consistent histories, and maybe be quantum nonlinearity) go here. So do "alternate timelines" if they're degenerate or divergent parallel universes instead of causal spirals.
- Level 4: The idea that the Whoniverse's familiar reality was created through pure mathematical force in the Dark Times probably fits in here. "Block transfer computations" are probably related to this (especially if you go with Schmidhuber's constructivist take on Tegmark instead of the original). --99.33.24.89 04:16, May 26, 2011 (UTC)
One more thing that should go without saying, but just in case.... Doctor Who is science fantasy, not hard science fiction. They'll borrow cool idea out of real-life science, but the story always comes first. If they decide tomorrow that they need the Whoniverse to be closed for some plot reason, they're not going to care that bubble universes only make sense in an open universe. Not to mention that some writers are less scientifically inclined than others and completely misinterpret what some previous writer added to the Whoniverse, and generally their new interpretation becomes the reality in the Whoniverse, even if it makes less sense or has less connection to the real world (although Unnatural History, The Tomorrow Windows, and/or The Gallifrey Chronicles might offer a different way to look at that...). Still, it can be fun to extrapolate from what they tell us and see where it leads to. --99.33.24.89 04:29, May 26, 2011 (UTC)
- Are you sure a "bubble universe" isn't just where Lawrence Welk comes from? --12.249.226.210 23:25, May 26, 2011 (UTC)
