CD-RTD06 (Mar 24, 1996)
Puzzle
“Relatively speaking, time can be such a drag. Better to keep on spinning than to cause a global violation.”
Research | 2 Words
Clue
Hover over the clues if you require!
Clue 1: Try to link relativity to 'drag' and 'spin', in the physics sense of the term.
Clue 2: The concept of frame-dragging, linked to some sort of effect on time.
Clue 3: Or, more accurately, a global violation of causality.
Answer and Explanation
Answer: Tipler Cylinder
Explanation: A Tipler Cylinder originates from the paper 'Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation', while the words 'relative', 'drag' and 'spin' bring to mind the concept of frame-dragging. From there, factoring in the word 'time' leads us to a similar concept, the Kerr metric (which involves spacetime), both of which are used to create a hypothetical Tipler Cylinder.
Summary of Receipt
Summary
Transcript
RECEIPT #006
FILED UNDER: AND-RTD
DATE: 3/24/96
EMPLOYEE #62
I’m still struggling to believe it myself, and I can’t tell if that is simply the magic of the veil or my own disbelief that anyone would try and bring Madeline back from the dead. #17 has done a decent job covering the “hiccups” one would face in bringing her back. Her evaporated body and “missing” soul are the main ones. Though… #17 made it seem like her soul was somewhere entirely unknown. That isn’t exactly the case. Her soul is likely still trapped inside Dr. Crow’s Temporal Torus, which would mean it’s lost amidst the transient Dracula Drive.
Being within the Temporal Torus, whatever Madeline “was” would be, I assume, digitized, at least to some extent. It’s really hard to say, as Dr. Crow’s unholy union of science and magic certainly crossed quite a few boundaries of what should be. Then again, any sufficiently advanced technology is more or less magic. I’m sure there’s an equally baffling “Soul Rock MacGuffin” somewhere in the Otherside that can also trap and store souls, reducing them to no more than 1s and 0s. The fact that Dr. Crow happened to do so using Othertech hard drives is, I suppose, beside the point.
Even if we had a body to put Madeline’s soul back into, it would be an extremely bad idea. She was practically about to explode (implode?) with negative energy before Dr. Crow attempted to use her to power his Temporal Torus. And I don’t mean she was in a bad mood. I mean her gravitational powers were reaching the point where she would probably have created a pit big enough to move all of the Hot Bed somewhere else. And you can’t just send a piece of the Flipside into a wormhole and expect it all to just work out, can you? She became another apocalypse we had to stop. And it looks like we might need to stop her again.