Bigger On The Inside

Samloyal23 · Jan 10, 2019

In a purely fantasy setting, this sort of thing is easy. I am working on a campaign setting where one city-state is nothing but permanent Magnificent Mansions spells enchanted into trees and rocks. You can walk through the area and have no idea you are in a city, seeing nothing but well trod walkways and a few statues and fountains. Stable dimensional pockets would create whole new avenues of development for our civilisation. Think about how much room we would have for agriculture and parks if you could fit a skyscraper's worth of offices and apartments in the space of a door frame.

Dioltach · Jan 10, 2019

Ryanair flights would probably still be cramped, though.

Janx · Jan 10, 2019

Umbran said:
I can't say that something is *impossible*. But, to be frank, it is not "fantasy" to think that there are limits. Warping space requires energies on par with the mass-energy of a thing that would produce similar warping. Individuals carrying around a power-pack equivalent to the mass-energy of mountains and small planets? Highly unlikely. The darned thing would be prone to collapse into a singularity.

It annoys my wife when she loses a lipstick in the bottom of her purse. Losing it down a black hole? Not an improvement

But then, interstellar travel is itself highly unlikely, so the finding lost civilizations and meeting extant ones? Similarly unlikely.

In the past (like, when Flash Gordon was first a comic series), we thought of flying cars, flying belts, death rays, and all - all of these things required revolutions in *energy* to make happen. And none of them did, because we didn't get an evolution in energy, we got a revolution of *data*. And there's probably physical reasons for that. The energy densities available to beings made of normal matter are... limited.

This smells like the secret reveal to a story about a super-science society. Especially this ominous part "The energy densities available to beings made of normal matter are... limited."

Olgar Shiverstone · Jan 11, 2019

Drive a Honda Fit/Jazz. They are bigger on the inside than the outside.

Blue · Jan 11, 2019

Could the "bigger on the inside" paradigm also cover where the things on the inside are actually smaller so more fit? [Dons Jordy visor and spouts trekno-babble.] Decreased space between atoms, or tighter electron orbits?

Eltab · Jan 12, 2019

The 4e Forgotten Realms Campaign Guide included a city-state with lots of interior dimensional spaces. I don't know if anybody ever took that idea and ran with it.

freyar · Jan 12, 2019

Mustrum_Ridcully said:
I recently watched a talk for novices on black holes. An interesting aspect is that it could be that when a black hole is growing, it might be that it's only growing inward, since for the observer outside, everything that falls into the black hole looks as if it's basically stopping in time just as it hits the event horizon and never really gets inside the black hole. (Of course, any light you get from it will also be extremely redshifted, so to the naked eye, you probably wouldn't see anything.)

Yeah, black holes are weird like this. So you're talking about a time dilation/redshifting effect. If we're far away from where stuff is collapsing, as the stuff collapses just small enough to form the black hole horizon, time near the black hole slows down enough that it looks to us that the black hole actually takes an infinite amount of time to form. But the light gets more and more redshifted. So what we see is the stuff collapsing but never quite getting inside a black hole but still getting dimmer and dimmer. Anything else that falls in later does the same sort of thing, catching up to the originally collapsed matter. On the other hand, according to general relativity, anything falling in doesn't even notice it's passing a horizon (other than tidal forces) but then is suddenly inside a black hole. (There are some theories about quantum gravity that suggest passing into a black hole could be more violent, at least some of the time. This is related to Hawking radiation.)

Regarding the larger inside business, how large something looks from the outside is usually something we figure based on surface area. From the inside, we're measuring the volume, and we're used to a particular relation between area and volume, roughly volume proportional to area to the 3/2 power. This is commonly violated in relativity, though we do need to be a little careful about how we measure/define area and volume. But, for a black hole, there is a sensible definition where the surface area is constant but the interior volume actually continues to grow for a long time.

Samloyal23 · Jan 14, 2019

Richards said:
I always thought it would be cool to buy a plot of land, build an underground house, and have the main entrance be an elevator to the surface whose exterior looked like the TARDIS.

Johnathan

Have the inside be a slow, extremely quiet elevator, so guests will not realise they are descending to a lower level, then when you hit the basement level just suddenly open a door to a huge room.