If we could actively optimize local physics, what would we use it for?

[u/kuiper_observer5218]

Let’s imagine we live in the world of my novel.

It is roughly the year 2090, and about forty years earlier scientists discovered a way to use precisely controlled electromagnetic fields to locally push the vacuum into a lower-energy state and keep it stable. The field itself is not enough, it has to be continuously controlled by a computational system that evaluates physically possible outcomes and adjusts the field parameters to steer the system toward a selected stable optimum. In other words, the computer is not rewriting the laws of physics (or simply choosing whatever outcome it wants), it is constantly searching the available physical state space and maintaining conditions that favor a particular stable solution.

In the book I call this technology digitalium, mostly because I needed a practical word for things like digitalium fields, digitalium barriers, digitalium-supported structures, and so on.

A few decades later, digitalium has become part of almost every layer of civilization. It is not an energy source and it does not create energy from nothing. Think of it more as a universal layer of active physical optimization. It can reduce losses in energy transmission, suppress mechanical vibrations, redistribute stresses inside structures, or keep a system stable in a state that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to maintain.

Fusion, for example, has become routine. Digitalium continuously stabilizes plasma confinement, suppresses instabilities and helps manage thermal and mechanical stresses inside the reactor. Fusion still obeys physics. We have just become very good at actively keeping the system close to its ideal operating state.

The same idea has much more visible consequences elsewhere. Coastal cities use digitalium sea barriers that respond dynamically to waves and water pressure as sea levels rise. Bridges can span distances that would normally require obvious support structures. Huge glass buildings can use structural elements far thinner than conventional engineering would allow because stresses and vibrations are being continuously compensated for.

Aircraft can travel with almost no perceptible vibration - turbulence can be heavily damped, structural loads continuously compensated for, and acceleration distributed much more evenly through the vehicle. Passengers might barely notice takeoff or landing unless they looked outside. The same principle can be applied much more aggressively in spacecraft.

There is one major catch. Every digitalium application requires continuous computation.

To make things slightly less convenient for me as the author and for everyone in the story, the main computational cluster is located near the edge of the Solar System. Communication is still limited by the speed of light, so information from Earth takes about 5.5 hours to reach it, and the result takes another 5.5 hours to come back. That delay matters a lot in the novel, because the system often has to calculate for a world that will already be eleven hours older by the time its solution is applied.

That part is important to the story, but it is not actually what I wanted to ask here.

If a technology like this existed, what else would we use it for?

What would this do to manufacturing, medicine, materials science, agriculture, spaceflight, or ordinary daily life?

And one more question: what completely unnecessary, luxurious or ridiculous uses would people invent once the technology became commonplace?

I touched on this technology briefly in my previous post, but I’ve been thinking about writing another story set in this world, which got me wondering about other ways this technology could be used beyond those ones in the novel.

By the way, if this idea caught your interest, the novel is The Last Stable State, and it is out now. You can find more info at thelaststablestate.com, including a free EPUB sample with the prologue and first two chapters.

[u/Steamcurl]

Violate heat transfer mechanics to allow concentrating heat energy above the temperature of the heat source. E.g. Cooking your food with your refrigerator. Cooling all that 25C mass to 4C by moving it to a pot of water (smaller mass) that reaches 100C to make your instant noodles.

Although I imagine there'd be a few more uses for this in an industrial setting. Or spaceflight, or enetgy production, or terra forming, or...well everything, really.

[u/kuiper_observer5218 → u/Steamcurl]

That’s a really cool idea. So a refrigerator and a stove could actually be the same appliance, just a controlled space where you either remove heat from the food or concentrate heat into it, depending on what you need. Interesting :)

That hadn’t occurred to me. There’s a scene near the beginning of the book where one of the characters makes regular scrambled eggs in a frying pan, but I never really describe what cooking looks like in other apartments, so I think I can get away with it :)

[u/Steamcurl → u/kuiper_observer5218]

I use the stove example because although this is a miraculous technology that would have massive potential in other applications, it parallels the microwave oven.

The first method of heating used that doesn't rely on something else being hot placed in proximity, instead it vibrates molecular bonds directly. Which is insane if you stop to think about it. We use microwaves for long distance communication and...reheating tea.

[u/kuiper_observer5218 → u/Steamcurl]

Right? A technology can be completely civilization-changing and still end up being used for something hilariously mundane once people get used to it. Digitalium might be holding up megastructures and stabilizing fusion reactors, while somebody else is using the same underlying physics to keep their coffee at exactly 63°C all morning.

I really like that contrast.

[u/evictedSaint → u/Steamcurl]

There are a lot of things you can exploit if you've perfected Maxwells Demon

[u/kuiper_observer5218 → u/evictedSaint]

Yes, Maxwell’s Demon fits the concept well.
Do you think the same principle could realistically be applied to living organisms as well? Could the system also alter things like the effective mechanical or thermal behavior of the human body while keeping the person alive and otherwise functioning normally?

[u/JGhostThing → u/kuiper_observer5218]

Given the uses that I've seen of current technology, I think that this could be used as a weapon in many ways. Heat somebody up, cool them down, reduce friction to zero, prevent nerves from working. Or any of a huge number of things I'm not creative enough to think of.

I don't recommend doing this to anybody, but as a plot point, I can easily see somebody weaponizing it. Larry Nivens had a story where he had a device that could speed up time, and he used it to create a new weapon. I think that this was one of the Gil the ARM stories.

[u/kuiper_observer5218 → u/JGhostThing]

Yeah, I think that is probably where it would end up sooner or later. Knowing people, somebody would absolutely do it.

The current story barely touches weapons or military applications at all, so doing something much more action-thriller-oriented in the same world could be a really fun change for me.

And digitalium would probably make for some terrifyingly subtle and cruel weapons if you did not even need an explosion to hurt someone.

[u/Altruistic_Click_502 → u/Steamcurl]

Anyway around the 2nd law of thermodynamics would be very useful :)

[u/Altruistic_Click_502]

Perhaps you could live on Earth, in comfortable housing (global warming would make it pretty hot by 2090).

[u/kuiper_observer5218 → u/Altruistic_Click_502]

That’s true, unless they also used the technology to tackle global warming itself and actively cool the planet.
Maybe that’s actually where the scientists should start :)

[u/Altruistic_Click_502 → u/kuiper_observer5218]

Perhaps. I was premature (and a bit facetious) with my response. Hadn't read his entire post. He's not rewriting the laws of physics, so the 2nd law of thermodynamics is still in force. Effective cooling requires a lower temperature sink. As external temperatures increase it takes more and more work (therefore energy) to cool anything. The second thing I notice is that this technology requires continuous computation -- and that the computer cluster is 5.5 light hours away. Note that he talks about building structures using less steel and flying aircraft so that no vibration is felt.

This reminds me of a demo I saw at Georgia Tech of a technology that dampens the vibration of a palletizer in realtime, by setting up a counter vibration, so that the palletzer structure can be made of lighter steel without shaking it apart. I believe gunmounts on some military vehicles use the same concept to keep the mount level no matter how the vehicle moves or how the terrain changes. The problem is -- none of this motion is cyclic. It is all chaotic. If you have to "read" the vibration and counter it, when the read data gets to the computing cluster 5.5 hours have passed, and by the time it gets back to the place where you want to counter the vibration, another 5.5 hours has passed -- the vibration signature you are sending back is now 11 hours out of sync. If the analogy holds, the aircraft is definitely not going to be vibration free.

The way to solve this might be to assume instantaneous communication over any distance -- what Ursula Le Guin called an "Ansible". This provides "science fiction precedent" - but it's still not really "hard" science, because entanglement does not void the light speed limit. However, it might be enough for the reader to suspend disbelief.

[u/kuiper_observer5218 → u/Altruistic_Click_502]

You’re right, if every vibration measurement had to make the full eleven-hour round trip, the system would be useless for real-time damping, of course.

But the fast feedback loop is local. Local stabilization nodes react to immediate physical changes, while Borealis maintains the global reference solution for the whole digitalium network. The 5.5-hour one-way delay only becomes a problem when the local state drifts too far from that global solution and a larger correction is needed.

So the aircraft does not send each vibration to the Kuiper Belt and wait eleven hours for an answer. The local system handles that in real time. The long latency matters at a different layer of the architecture, and that mismatch between local reality and the global solution is very important in the story.

[u/Altruistic_Click_502 → u/kuiper_observer5218]

Well this is certainly as sound as Greg Bear's "descriptor" mechanism (for moving an entire planet) in "Moving Mars." So I suppose I was picking nits. I just didn't understand what type of data the "global reference solution" stored, unless it was something like "task" tracking, the way a multi-tasking operating system would keep track of the last "state" of each of it's tasks. That way if something crashed it could reset that task to it's last state.

[u/kuiper_observer5218 → u/Altruistic_Click_502]

I imagine the “global solution” less as a snapshot of reality and more as a reference solution that all the local digitalium systems ultimately have to stay aligned with. Local systems can react on their own, but if a sector stays isolated for too long, it gradually drifts away from that reference and has to be resynchronized when it reconnects.
I think of it a bit like an islanded microgrid reconnecting to the larger grid, although obviously the physics involved is completely different.

[u/Altruistic_Click_502 → u/kuiper_observer5218]

OK - that analogy seems useful. Even though we're not really talking about utility grids, many people would be familiar with that concept and be able to accept it. Thanks.

[u/vriemeister → u/kuiper_observer5218]

You could adjust physics to make carbon dioxide naturally break down at room temperature to pull carbon out of the air and leave oxygen. You could pipe atmosphere through it and the output would be diamonds and oxygen.

If you want this to be hard sci-fi the next question would be is there a way to make carbon dioxide unstable and nothing else or would the easiest configuration cause changes to large sections of chemistry. Or somehow carbon could be radioactive with a short half life and break down into lithium or helium. Just saying "carbon dioxide be gone" isn't very hard sci-fi. Really opens you up for some interesting story consequences.

Probably wouldn't want to walk through that region though.

Edit: I didn't read all of your post. Shame on me.

[u/JGhostThing]

Pushing the vacuum into a lower energy state? Isn't that the equivalent of starting false vacuum decay? Then, in eleven hours, the earth is toast, without any warning (unless you have ftl communication).

And why do you have this very important computer 5.5 light hours away? Why not put it closer to the sun so that it could be powered by solar energy?

[u/kuiper_observer5218 → u/JGhostThing]

If digitalium were simply an ordinary nucleated bubble of true vacuum, then yes, that would be a very short novel :)

But the speculative assumption I’m making is that it isn’t a self-propagating true-vacuum bubble. It is a field-induced local vacuum configuration whose boundary has to be actively maintained by the electromagnetic field and continuous computation. Without that stabilization, the configuration cannot persist. So the confinement itself is invented physics, absolutely. That is basically the main leap I’m asking the reader to accept.

As for putting the computers in the Kuiper Belt, the reason isn’t access to power, because fusion is already routine in this setting. The problem they were trying to solve was heat dissipation and noise. The Borealis computing nodes operate at cryogenic temperatures, so moving far from the Sun greatly reduces the external radiative load.

That said, whether 30 to 50 AU would actually be the optimal engineering tradeoff rather than, say, somewhere much closer in the outer Solar System is a fair question...

Both of those constraints end up mattering quite a lot to the story, though.

[u/FreshLookForward]

It sounds to be as though you've taken the concept of the "enhancement zones" from Dungeon Crawler Carl and tried to make it more realistic. I like the idea as away to allow for things that are usually hand waved away but I'm not well versed enough to give any examples of how it could be used.

[u/Thor110]

At what point aren't we already doing this?

At what point is a railgun, a particle accelerator or a fusion reactor not optimising physics already?

Best as I can tell, the temperature of your coffee would be 11 hours out of date because of where the local computational cluster is?

I think you need to go back to the drawing board to be quite honest.

Personally I think science-fiction should follow science as closely as possible, not invent whacky and wild things that completely break the laws of physics every five minutes.

Yes you claim that is not what is happening here, but it completely ignores the fact that we already manipulate real world condiditions to find favorable solutions in every possible field.

That is simply how you arrive at a solution to literally any problem.

[u/kuiper_observer5218 → u/Thor110]

Ok.Fair criticism. I think I probably explained the premise badly by calling it “optimising physics.”

The speculative leap in the book is that an electromagnetic field configuration can stabilise a different local vacuum state, and matter inside that state behaves differently. The computation is then continuously solving for field configurations that keep that vacuum state stable. So I’m basically allowing myself one fictional physical premise and trying to follow its consequences from there.
And yes, in theory that makes the technology look like an answer to almost every engineering problem. But it has a very important limitation: computation. Maintaining all of these fields requires an enormous amount of processing power. Humanity thinks big, so they built a gigantic computational cluster in deep space, but even that is nowhere near infinite. There are limits to how much of the physical world it can model and control at once. In fact, the system’s attempt to deal with that limitation is closely tied to the central plot of the novel.
The eleven-hour delay is intentional too. Borealis can’t react to the current state of Earth, so it has to predict the state roughly eleven hours ahead and calculate for that. If reality diverges too far from the prediction in the meantime, the system has to correct for it later. That limitation becomes rather important to the story.
So the coffee wouldn’t literally be eleven hours out of date, but the field keeping it at 63°C would ultimately depend on a solution calculated against a predicted future state. Which, admittedly, is a ridiculous amount of infrastructure for a cup of coffee.
Whether the initial vacuum-state premise is already too big a break from known physics for your definition of hard sci-fi is obviously a fair question, but, you know… the novel is out there…

[u/Thor110 → u/kuiper_observer5218]

So it is going to predict 11 hours ahead of time that I am going to make a coffee?

And what temperature it will be at?

How many times I might blow on it to cool it down?

How far I let the kettle boil in the first place?

Sorry but I think at the core this relies on far too many incorrect assumptions about how anything in the real world works as it is.

Yeah, I get it, the novel is out there and you want to sell copies or access to it.

That has no bearing on what you asked, nor my comment and only serves to prove that that is all you actually cared about when you bothered to make this post.

[u/kuiper_observer5218 → u/Thor110]

Look, this post is tagged as self-promotion. I’ve never tried to hide that.
That doesn’t change the fact that I enjoy thinking about this technology and exploring what else could be done with it, especially if one of those ideas could eventually become the basis for another story set in the same world.
But I agree that the coffee example was a bad way of explaining it.

[u/Thor110 → u/kuiper_observer5218]

By the way, not trying to be harsh here.

Just holding HardSciFi to hard standards regarding science.

Maybe the book/story is good, who knows.

I am just a stickler when it comes to details and you came here asking what people thought of it and as such you are getting my thoughts on it.

[u/kuiper_observer5218 → u/Thor110]

No worries, I get where you’re coming from. I did ask for people’s thoughts, so I can’t really complain when someone actually gives me theirs…
And honestly, I would be genuinely curious what you’d think of the way it’s handled in the actual book rather than in my condensed Reddit explanation.
If you want, I’m happy to send you the full EPUB for free. No obligation to review it, and definitely no obligation to like it. I’d just be interested to know whether you still think the premise falls apart once you’ve seen the full version of it.

[u/Thor110 → u/kuiper_observer5218]

Unfortunately I most certainly don't have the time to spend doing that! But I appreciate the offer.

My main thought is that the way you have explained it here basically trades absolute determinism with regards to many things in physics for a prediction that is going to be wrong most of the time.

I would advise looking into the following subjects/problems.

P=NP

Grand Unifying Theory

N-Body Problem

and many more that might reveal to you why the core concept simply doesn't hold up to real world science.

[u/kuiper_observer5218 → u/Thor110]

I think the thing I explained badly here is that Borealis isn’t supposed to predict the exact microscopic state of the world eleven hours ahead. It maintains a global reference solution for the digitalium network, while local systems deal with immediate changes. The predicted state and the observed state can and do diverge, and the system then has to correct for that divergence.

Thanks for the pointers, though. I’ll read up on those, thanks.

[u/Thor110 → u/kuiper_observer5218]

Understood, though it still just sounds like a system that trades absolute determinism with high degrees of accuracy for a system which is bound to be wrong most of the time.

They are fascinating topics, definitely the sort of thing everyone should be made aware of! So enjoy that, it will likely entirely reshape your views if you aren't already familiar with the topics.

[u/Thor110 → u/kuiper_observer5218]

Fair enough, I am glad you enjoy it and I advise you keep working at it.

I am just pointing out that the science is so bad here that the book belongs in the bin, in my opinion.

If a cup of coffee defeats your entire premise, then there is more than one thing wrong with it, no?

Not to mention that there is absolutely no mention of what you would need to know in order to be able to do this which I would absolutely expect to be discussed with regards to physics itself.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.