9Nov/098
Sympathy
by Jeff
Image text: Excellent recovery: ... which we could try to use to somehow save your original brother!
This comic is a play on the word "moment" from the first frame.
Obviously, the second frame is the correct was to respond to a grieving person. The third frame would be the physicist questioning the use of the word "moment".
In the fourth frame, causality in physics means that every cause has an effect.
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November 9th, 2009
I see the 3rd frame leading to the 4th where. In the 3rd frame, the physicist is asking if the grief appeared exactly at the moment the brother died. If it did appear instantly, it means that information traveled faster than light. Then, in the 4th frame, the physicist is now inquiring how many siblings are left, so the death of another can be used in an experiment where information traveling faster than would sent backwards in time (since it is traveling faster than light), thus violating causality.
November 10th, 2009
And if you think the fourth frame is actually konda logical, this strip is definitly what you needed.
November 10th, 2009
I think you’re a bit off here. Most of this comic is dealing with the Einstein’s theory of relativity. The theory goes into detail about what it means for 2 things to happen simultaneously. If information can only travel at the speed of light, “simultaneously” has more nuance than our general usage.
November 13th, 2009
Yes, it is based on relativity.
November 15th, 2009
I’m more used to this signalling mechanism being used to solve the longitude problem.
December 5th, 2009
As stated by some of the above posters, this comic is actually based on the theory of relativity. In that theory, no information can travel faster than the speed of light (hence the question in the third frame of whether the feeling was “instantly” transmitted or whether there was a delay due to the speed-of-light limit). The fourth frame refers to the fact that in the theory of special relativity, if information could somehow be transmitted faster than light, it is possible to witness violations of causality (as in effects occurring before causes) in a suitable moving reference frame. So the character suggests killing other siblings in an experiment to make use of this effect.
And the image-text suggests making use of these causality violations to go back in time and save the brother. Which is awesome. ^^
May 2nd, 2011
Subtle nuance here: The image-text describes saving the brother as an “excellent recovery” because the physicist – in true scientist fashion – is not actually concerned with the practical applications of his discovery. Being able to violate causality is enough of a goal in itself for the physicist – while violating causality to prevent the bereaved man’s tragedy from occurring is relegated to being an afterthought.
January 19th, 2012
An afterthought that hasn’t had much thought put into it, either, since it would invoke a causal loop:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predestination_paradox
IE If the physicist saves the person’s brother, then there is no reason for said person to express his grief to the physicist, meaning the physicist no longer saves his brother so the person now will express his grief, and so on.