Old Jedi Never Die

It was a moral victory. Sure, by the numbers we were in a race for last place, but morally we were winning. We'd spent all weekend writing the AI for a programming contest, stayed up late, woke up early, and still hadn't managed to get the physics of the system working. See, it was a 2D torroidal universe with a really sweet physics system--our starships /kept/ /moving/ in the direction they were going. Wonderful theory, but it was harder than we expected to get the math. So we didn't really have much time to work on our AI.

Our goal was to design the AI for a fleet of four spaceships, to retrieve the most useful asteroids from an asteroid field. And to not die in the process. But when it got down to the last couple hours of the competition and we were still having problems refraining from appearing to have drunken starship pilots, I decided it was time to try something else. For the system of course also came with trash-talking capabilities.

So being set in space, we based our ships on the Star Wars universe. Palpatine, Vader, we had a fleet of four (very nimble) SSDs (Star Destroyers). Apparently all of the captains had been drinking the night before, but at least it was /synchronized/ drunken flying.

And then there was Thrawn. Generally a quiet guy, get him drunk and he's very talkative. Or at least he'd like to be talkative, if he could think of anything to say. Instead, the trash-talk part of the simulation just read:

Message from Thrawn:
Message from Thrawn:
Message from Thrawn:

Repeated about a bazillion times, anyway. But the audience loved us. One of our ships would accidentally pick up an asteroid and get bumped into the base, and we'd get a room full of cheers. And then, of course, there was Thrawn. His ship was down to the last of its health (drunkenly bumping into too many asteroids), and he saw his doom approaching.

Message from Thrawn: Old Jedi never die.. they just fade away.

And then his ship was no more. No more messages from Thrawn, but the crowd wouldn't have heard them anyway. It was a moral victory.

You Can't Live With 'em...

Dude, I'm a physicist. Nothing can surprise me.
Dr. Guess, _The Computer Connection_ by Alfred Bester

Reading this, I wondered how many physicists would believe that nothing could surprise them. I also wonder why a physicist might think that nothing could surprise them.

Now, first off, I know that even though he may claim that nothing can surprise him, at this point in the book he's had a couple of major surprises, throwing him into massive shock requiring specific treatment to get better. Including killing him to force him out of his shock. And I'm fairly sure that there are many things that /would/ surprise the general physicist.

But knowing How Things Work has got to remove a lot of the mystery in the world. Of the people that would bother to think (if you don't think about something, it can't well surprise you), I'd guess that those that understand at some level the workings of the universe would live with much less surprise. A magician's assitant isn't amazed by his ability to levitate an angry tiger once they know it's really just a rabbit hanging onto some fishing line.

But without the people that understand at least the basics of How Things Work, very little progress can be made. So I'm willing to accept their little foibles, I will let them continue to believe that they cannot be surprised, as payment for them improving my way of life.

I'm still debating introducing them to Zifnab, but I fear the possible resulting explosion of anti-probability or such.

Do I Believe in Me?

You've lost faith in yourself! Isn't that rich? A god who has become a self-atheist!
Baba Yaga, _Enchantment_ by Orson Scott Card

The ancient world had oodles of gods. Between the Romans and Greeks, there were gods to cover anything imaginable. Apparently there was even a god for mildew. But in most of the stories about large pantheons, the power of a god comes from belief in the god; once people cease believing, the god ceases to exist.

So that causes one to wonder, is a god's belief in itself enough to keep them going? (It also begs the question of which came first, the gods or the people that believe in them? I think it was the chicken.) Or does another god's belief in it keep it going? Could the gods form a coalition of powerful beings, a group of mutual belief, keeping them going for centuries after mortals cease in believing?

Would the gods then be powerful enough to create new gods, just by believing in something that didn't exist yet? Would they actually care about people believing in them? Would this be a source of infinite power? Could they then make unlimited rice pudding?

One would assume not. Otherwise they wouldn't have sold out to so many writers, allowing themselves to be used in horrible novels, just to be remembered. They should have at least held out for made-for-TV movies!

I do Believe in Wizards

Say that we're moving at the speed of light... Impossible, of course, if you believe physicists. Which I don't by the way. Physicists don't believe in wizards--a fact that I, being a wizard, find highly insulting. I have taken my revenge, therefore, by refusing to believe in physicists.
Zifnab, _Elven_Star_ by Weis and Hickman

I always wondered, if there are so many wizards in so many stories, why have I yet to meet one in real life? There were only two possibilities that I could see. Either wizards are still living, having learned to hide themselves to keep their abilities from being used by others, similar to superheros keeping their powers secret to protect the people they love. Or they've all died out.

Now, I always hoped that it was the former, that wizards continued to exist. But I never really believed it was true, for in any large-enough group of people, no matter how select or secretive, there will always be a bad apple. There will always be someone that uses their position for personal gain, someone that decides to let the cat out of the bag. And I've not heard of many strange occurrences, seen any fireballs flying through the air. With all that power, someone would want the world to know. So I'm sure that wizards truly don't exist any longer.

While I hoped they were around, I've also always tried to find out what happened to them, why they're gone now, and why I can't find a school to join where I can become a wizard too. (Like no muggles would ever think something really, really odd was going on.) No, I'd always wondered why there were wizards no longer. Until I read the books by Weis and Hickman. Until I realized, wizards are like fairies. Whenever someone doesn't believe, a wizard dies. And none of them physicists believe.

And now, it looks like it may be too late, it appears that wizards are beyond hope. But maybe they're not, maybe there are a few left, but they're dying out quickly. So, please, before they can become extinct, help me. Clap your hands, and say you do believe in wizards! Or join in the battle and refuse to believe in physicists, too.