Catalog of the Weird Parallels

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by cptbutton

Of course with dozens of different conspiracies, I am now picturing a job fair for conspiracies, but how could that work?

Hilariously.

[PTTG]

Love is a detectable phenomenon. It causes the subject of love and the lover both to emit a faint EM signal. Those who share a bond have the same signal, wheras separate bonds have slightly different signals.

Love Detectors were invented in 1904. They required a couple of technicians to operate. By the 1930s, it was still a lab curiosity with little real effect, although carnivals often had them available for visitors (those were almost all phonies, rigged to always return positive results).

The development of computers finally allowed the technology to move out of the curiosity stage. A crude automated love detector was sold in the 1960s, and in 1972 the device was refined into a fully automated version that was as accurate as a human operator and cheap enough for many people to afford.

It was around this time that the devices are having a significant effect on culture and demographics. With concrete evidence of love's existence between any two people, it is possible to prove that socially stigmatized forms of love are nonetheless real.

At present (2009), cell phone can use their built-in antennas and software at basically any time.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by PTTG

Love is a detectable phenomenon. It causes the subject of love and the lover both to emit a faint EM signal. Those who share a bond have the same signal, wheras separate bonds have slightly different signals.

I actually think that proving non-accepted forms of love is an irrelevant effect. People assert these emotions are wrong, not that they don't *exist*.

Given that most people love and/or are loved by more than one person, actually sorting out the superposition of signals uniquely is a *very hard* problem. Can you really do that with 1904 signal processing?

Is the effect causal? Faint electromagnetic signals are of course subject to artificial generation and jamming. Are people who work near radio transmitters likely to fall in or out of love more often?

How does this effect work on non-humans? A lot of people claim to genuinely love their pets after all.

What about death? If the effect ceases with death, then love tests to see if somebody is actually dead may become an issue. If it doesn't then you have a proof of life after death (find somebody loved by a dead person but who didn't love him back and thus wouldn't be generating anything themselves, test for the loved one signal, if it's present then....)

[Flyndaran]

How will detecting pets' love for their owners affect society?

[ericthered]

The second sequnce was created by flipping the film so the right side was the left and vice-versa. Is this what happened to the Earth? If so the relative position of _nothing_ has been changed.

Imagine that the raider was not symmetrical. It has a oversized gun on its port side. The second shot shows all the things happening, and everything is in the same position relative to each other, but the two raiders aren't identical. No matter how you rotate them, they will never be identical, because chirality cannot be rotated out of existence. Not without invoking higher dimensional behaviors that happen to make an object symmetric ( a picture on paper preserves chirality when brought to 2D, while a cut out shape does not).

You're right in that the relative position of nothing has been changed. Except left and right. The whole point of the alternate is that everything is perfectly normal except for this weird, sweeping change that is very obvious to out-timers and next to impossible to explain to locals without blowing the secret. The point is to make the physicists go crazy figuring out how this happened.

Note that this does require that the Earth and possibly the whole Solar System to have been rotated through a 4th physical dimension of space.

well, it doesn't "Require" it. Similar effects have been achieved through mirrors, and the exact interaction between quanta and physical dimensions is not terribly well-defined, but it does raise some interesting questions, now doesn't it? And why do you assume its not the entire universe that has been rotated?

[malloyd]

Any social effects of an objective standard of love probably depend on what that standard *is*.

If the results are no different than you get when you ask people if they love someone, it clearly has no effect. If you lock your child up in a basement, where you regularly beat and rape them, and that still registers as love, it may be impossible to convince anyone your gizmo even *is* a love detector. For that matter if it only registers for people who'd be glad to suffer horrible torture to spare you discomfort, it's equally a tough sell, what with lots of perfectly happy couples not registering and a disproportionate fraction of positives presumably being in people who display other insanely obsessive personality traits too.

[cptbutton]

Originally Posted by PTTG

Love is a detectable phenomenon. It causes the subject of love and the lover both to emit a faint EM signal. Those who share a bond have the same signal, wheras separate bonds have slightly different signals.

Does it detect only mutual love, or one-way love? Can it determine the direction of a one-way love bond?

Originally Posted by malloyd

I actually think that proving non-accepted forms of love is an irrelevant effect. People assert these emotions are wrong, not that they don't *exist*.

It would address claims that they aren't as good as *real* love. And that the people claiming to have such feelings are either callous manipulative users or the dupes of such people.

Originally Posted by malloyd

Given that most people love and/or are loved by more than one person, actually sorting out the superposition of signals uniquely is a *very hard* problem. Can you really do that with 1904 signal processing?

Is the effect causal? Faint electromagnetic signals are of course subject to artificial generation and jamming. Are people who work near radio transmitters likely to fall in or out of love more often?

How does this effect work on non-humans? A lot of people claim to genuinely love their pets after all.

What about death? If the effect ceases with death, then love tests to see if somebody is actually dead may become an issue. If it doesn't then you have a proof of life after death (find somebody loved by a dead person but who didn't love him back and thus wouldn't be generating anything themselves, test for the loved one signal, if it's present then....)

One option is that the test only works with both subjects present. Recorded signatures won't match regardless.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by ericthered

Imagine that the raider was not symmetrical. It has a oversized gun on its port side. ? And why do you assume its not the entire universe that has been rotated?

Is the oversized gun port that was on the port side now on the starboard side?

If the entire universe has been rotated then no physical phenomenon will reveal that. An inherent sense of right and left that is aphysical would be required.

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

If the entire universe has been rotated then no physical phenomenon will reveal that. An inherent sense of right and left that is aphysical would be required.

The sense of left and right is the memory of the out timer. Its only weird if you've seen both the original and the mirror. That though will be preserved. Seriously, chirality is weird.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by ericthered

The sense of left and right is the memory of the out timer. Its only weird if you've seen both the original and the mirror. That though will be preserved. Seriously, chirality is weird.

"That word you keep using, I do not think it means what you think it means."