|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I would also argue that captial T - Teleportation (as in magical teleportation not the quantum kind) is not FTL by default. Teleportation means moving from one point to another without crossing the intervening space. Travelling faster than light still involves travelling in some capacity, so to talk of Teleporting being faster than light is technically only to talk of functional equivalence, not a literal comparison.
Like judging who is the better athlete between two people in a race. one runs while the other takes a cab. They both left at point A, arrived at point B, and we can contrast the elapsed time to give us an answer. It won't be right answer, but without a suitably thorough examination of the mechanics of each racers means of locomotion.
Since your magic needs to reach your destination.That is not necessarily true.
Well nothing about magic is necessarily true. Correct.
Still fun to try and figure it out.The most basic of cantrips break thermodynamic principles and can reverse entropy in sufficiently localised systems. Expecting it to obey energy-mass equivalence and the implications there-of seems counter productive.
I'm not. Magic can do whatever.
But if you expect time and light to work as normal, then casting counterspell 6 light seconds will result in a paradox.
So really, the conclusion is probably that light and time don't work the same.
If time is universal, no relativity at all, and light travels instantly, then you won't get any issue.
Thus Teleport is not FTL because both it and light are instant.
|
|
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Well we know in Pathfinder that time is not universal. Its not even objectively experienced. From spells like Time Beacon and Freeze Time, to planes with different flows of time, to gods who can mess with it.
Time in the pathfinder universe is both mutable and pliable in several respects. You can send information from one plane to another and those planes can have wildly different time traits, erratic, static, Timeless, etc. But it all sort of "works out".
We probably don't need to throw out all sense of relativity, just understand that it isn't as objective as it is for us and understand that all this stuff is probably looked after by Bythos and/or Axiomites or an even more specalised type of Monitor. Mostly because the rules are pliable and have even been broken on several occasions.
The only real relativity in Pathfinder is narrative-relativity. A set of physics driven by the universe needing to keep itself coherent-to-itself, but not always consistent.
expecting it to work like physics just isn't going to work.
Like the vibes-based argument against things like quantum entanglement is basically "that seems like magic" (i.e. the ability of information to be transmitted instantly across any distance.) But nobody should object to magic seeming like magic.
...
My assumption is teleportation would use the "Now" = time I see + (distance / speed of light), calculated from point of departure.
So by your definition, teleportation would move you along the line of simultaneity for the frame of reference used for departure.
For your example, B (your target destination) is one such example. B will see you arrive at local-to-B Year 1 (one year after they sent their radio message), and will see you leave at local-to-B Year 2 (one year after you received their radio message). But if you teleport back, you are still returning after your departure. Many frames will observe the events out of order, but even with teleportation, they can't interfere with the events occurring.
Given your definition of 'now,' people can travel back in time and change events. If you can traverse space-like intervals then traveling back in time is possible. The math doesn't give you any way around that.
So here is an example that I made up in such a way that the numbers would work out nicely. I used Desmos to display a Minkowski diagram to illustrate the situation geometrically rather than clutter things up with a lot of calculations.
It's a little long, so I've put it behind a spoiler tag.
Meldor is a Wizard who lives on Golarion. He has a friend named Zoe who is living on a planet 10 light-days from Golarion. The relative velocity between the two planets is so small compared to the speed of light that we can treat them as being in the same reference frame.
A spacecraft passes by Golarion at a relative velocity of 0.8c, heading in the direction of Zoe's planet. We'll synchronize the ships clocks to Meldor's clock as they pass, and for simplicity, we'll label that space-time position to be (0 light-days, 0 days) in both Meldor's frame and the ship's frame.
From Meldor's perspective, the ship passed Zoe 12.5 days later and he got sick from eating bad shrimp at a picnic lunch 290 days after the ship passed by Golarion.
Ten days after the picnic, Zoe is looking at Meldor through a powerful telescope and sees him get food poisoning. To help him, she teleports first to the spacecraft and then to Golarion.
You can see a Minkowski diagram of these events as seen from Meldor's frame of reference here.
The blue lines are the space-time axes from Meldor's frame of reference and the green lines are the space-time axes for the spacecraft's frame of reference.
From Meldor's perspective, he gets sick at (0 light-days, 290 days), and the light reflecting off of him reaches Zoe at (10 light-days, 300 days). The space-time path of the light is shown in orange.
Lines of simultaneity within a frame of reference are parallel to the spatial-axis of that frame. Since Zoe is currently in the same frame as Meldor, the space-time path for her first teleportation will be horizontal (parallel to the blue spatial axis). You can see this path shown in purple.
From Meldor's perspective, she disappeared from the point (10 light-days, 300 days) and instantly appeared at the point (240 light-days, 300 days).
But now Zoe is in the ship's frame of reference, not Meldor's. So when she teleports to Golarion, the line of simultaneity is parallel to the green spatial axis of the ship's frame of reference rather than the blue spatial axis that she used before. This path is shown in red. You can see that in Meldor's frame of reference, this path moves backward in time.
In Meldor's frame, Zoe disappeared from the point (240 light-days, 300 days) and instantly appeared at the point (0 light-days, 108 days) which is 182 days before the picnic!
That gives her nearly 6 months to stop Meldor from going on the picnic.
-----
Note that we don't actually need Zoe in order to perform time travel. Meldor can do it by himself.
For example, he could wait 10 days to recover from his food poisoning then teleport to the ship and then teleport to Golarion.
He'll end up just when Zoe did in the previous example — 182 days before his picnic. That gives him roughly 6 months during which the older Meldor can try to prevent his younger self from going on the picnic.
-----
• Causality
• Relativity
• Faster-than-light travel
You can pick any two, but not all three. :)
To throw in my 2 cents, Teleportation is not moving FTL, there is no actual movement involved. Looking at just how the spell works, for a split second as it activates the caster of the magic exists in 2 locations at the same time, IE a wormhole. The spell completes and now the caster is now on the other side of the wormhole. No movement involved.
How would you resolve...
1: Cast a flashy spell like fireball, which kills some creatures.
2: Teleport 1.2 million miles away, the distance light travels in 1 round, next to an extremely powerful telescope.
3: you now can see the fireball from 1 round ago manifest.
4: cast counterspell to stop it.
5: The creatures, who are now alive in the past, kill you before you teleport.
6: since you didn't teleport, you never countered the spell and thus the creatures are dead.
Counter spell would fail, as you wouldn't be seeing the actual manifestation, but an afterimage. While this is true for everything we see, the delay is too miniscule to matter on a normal situation.