*clicking noises*
Dear Blizzard,
Hi, it's me!
Austin!
Can I level with you for a second?
I've been trying not to swear too much.
It makes MatPat cry and bleeps just aren't satisfying
for me, its like holding in a sneeze, there is no rush
of endorphins.
There is no satisfying cascade
of consonants and syllables, cutting through the air
and offending sensitive ears.
Just one anticlimactic tone
stealing my thunder.
It hurts my heart, so I've been trying to do it less,
but honestly Blizzard...
WHAT THE #$@! AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WITH YOU!
YOU MADE A CHARACTER LIKE TRACER
WHYYY?!
WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH YOU?!
YOU KNOW HOW MANY PEOPLE I HAVE ON MY JOCK
DAY IN DAY OUT.
DEMANDING THAT I DO AN EPISODE ABOUT HER!
Do you think about how your actions affect anyone
other than yourself Blizzard?
I'm trying coffee instead of alchohol this week, because it is important to switch up
your science enhancing drugs from time to time.
Unique problems call for unique solutions and
Tracer?
Tracer isn't the kind of thing
you can tackle with depressants.
No, this problem
This final problem calls for stimulants.
Sweet caffeine what would I do
without you.
I spend most of my time
trying to debunk video game
SCIENCE!
because, as Cari so lovingly pointed out
I love ruining things that you love
I'm just, like, secretly a terrible person
I am
AUSTINN THE DESTROYERRR!!
But this week
I'm gonna do something a little bit
different.
Instead of "no-goddamn-sensing" everywhere
today
I'm going to try my
absolute best to explain exactly how
Tracer
and her powers work, because the
basic truth of the matter is that
sometimes, sometimes science confounds
logic as we've come to understand it
In order to understand how Tracer works
first we're going to have to look at her lore
"Tracer" a.k.a Lena Oxton
was the youngest person ever recruited for Overwatch's flight program
and was the first person to pilot a prototype teleporting
fighter known as the "Slipstream".
BUT!
of course, at the last minute things messed up
because of course they did
and Tracer disappeared
along with the Slipstream.
Everyone thought she was dead. And then
KABLAM!
Months later she reappeared out of nowhere
This is really, really easy
to explain.
When we think of teleportation
we tend to imagine some sort of
quantum entanglement,
quantum state copying,
more on that later.
But this accidental time travel to the future thing
is actually straightforward
I'm not going to get
into too many details since we don't
have time
and everything else is more complicated
AND I've talked a hell of a lot
about Einstein already but the gist
is this.
Time traveling to the future is
super easy to do.
In fact, here's a guaranteed way
to build a time machine to the future,
in your very own home!
DON'T
DO
ANYTHING
AT
ALL
I'm being a little bit cheeky here
but it's true!
Time is always moving forward
even when you're not doing anything
even while watching this video your time
traveling to the future!
It's a long-lost less epic original ending for
Back to the Future
Marty just holds up in a hut
outside of town and becomes the regional
alcoholic hermit.
You'll get back to the future
eh-ventually
but no, I know
this isn't typically what we're talking about
when we mean time travel
And this obviously isn't what happened to Tracer
in that Slipstream thingy
She wasn't just sitting around for three months
a few feet away from where they were
expecting her to be, waiting for someone
to come pick her up
She completely vanished and then reappeared months
later.
How the heck is this possible?
Simple
Moving really, really fast
When we mentioned space-time so far on the show
we've talked a hell of a lot about the
SPACE aspect, but not a lot about the
TIME one.
BUT!
They're both linked together.
Mass, like a planet, doesn't just
bend the curvature of space
it also bends time
Gravity affects the passage of time
but not just gravity
"Relative velocity" or relative speed does too
For example, if you're just sitting in a
chair next to your friend watching this
video one second of time for the both of you
is exactly the same.
However, if you get up and go to the fridge to get a
Mountain Dew and it takes you one second
to get to the fridge
(taking into account that the average walking speed is 1.4 meters per second)
and the fridge is really close
one point zero... 1 0 9
0 4 seconds passes for your friend
Although given the sugar and caffeine
content of Mountain Dew, I'm not sure
that the 100 quadrillionth of a second
that you save is going to do much to
extend your life.
Knowing this it becomes pretty obvious
exactly how Tracer
disappeared for literal months because
of one tiny malfunction
PLUS! It explains
almost exactly how the Slipstream craft she was
piloting works.
It's not a teleporter
that actually dismantles the atoms and
rearranges them elsewhere.
Rather, it's a ship
capable of accelerating to high
fractions of the speed of light
Moving this quickly, you could disappear
on one end of the earth and reappear
elsewhere in the blink of an eye.
Faster, actually!
And when going these speeds
small mistakes can have exponentially
terrible consequences.
For instance,
Tracer's hypothetical Slipstream ship
could travel from California to New York City
in a little over a tenth of a second
of our stationary or normal time,
if she moved at ninety-nine, point nine
nine...
two five six percent of the speed of
light for only five 100 millionths of a
second of Tracer's time
We'll just casually ignore
how it would take one point seven
yottagrams of energy or approximately
one-fifth of the energy the Sun hits the
Earth with every year, to accelerate
to the speed.
In any case,
This same ship, if
it were to have some sort of calculation error
and say, fire for 30 seconds
instead of five 100 millionths of a second?
30 seconds of Tracer's time
would solidly land her over three months in the future.
Of course, you'd also be moving quickly enough
to reach the Sun and return to
the Earth over 15,000 times,
but, who's counting?
This is the danger of traveling
near light speeds.
Tiny mistakes and
computer glitches can cause irreversible
problems
And these kind of casual
computer errors happen ALL the time.
I mean in 1998, NASA, some of the smartest
freaking people on our planet
incinerated the Mars Climate Orbiter
by accidentally sending instructions in
pounds instead of Newton's.
And as a result,
the orbiter dipped too far into
the atmosphere of Mars and was burned up
by entry friction.
It's important to go over this accident of Tracer's
even though it's just backstory for the main
Overwatch page.
Because it gives you a
taste of how time relates to space and
trust me.
For this next part is going to
take all of your training to understand
because traveling to the future doesn't
hold a candle to the mind-bending
everyday superpowers Tracer uses in
every single Overwatch game.
The reason I've been so loathed to do an episode
on Tracer
is because well... her powers are
frankly absurd
They defy logic and
trying to figure them out gave me a
splitting headache
but I'm channeling my
inner Tyson
Neil deGrasse not Mike
and together we can crack this!
Tracer has two key powers
which she controls through her
"Chrono Fabulous Oscillator" or
whatever the hell of a thing on her chest is called.
One, is straight forward.
She zips forward about seven and a half meters
in a blink of an eye
SUPER!
But, it's "Recall" that bends the mind.
"Recall" is Tracer's signature power
that lets her zip back through time
in the middle of a fight.
HOW THE HECK IS THIS POSSIBLE?!
You see, Tracer's recall power is weird...
SUPER WEIRD!
It's not just time travel,
like in Back to the Future, where she goes back
and might accidentally run into her past
self.
NO! IT'S SO,
SO MUCH WEIRDER!
Over the course of one second, Tracer moves back
to the exact place and physical
condition she was in three seconds from
when she first activated her powers.
That is, by the time she
arrives wherever she was,
she has effectively traveled back
in time 4 seconds.
But it gets weirder.
You see,
time around her doesn't stop.
Everything she did in those three
seconds actually happen
They don't get
reversed along with her.
Even more mind-bogglingly,
Tracer herself retains
all knowledge of the events that
transpired.
Classically, if we're talking Einstein
you travel to the future
faster as you approach the speed of light.
If, however it were possible to
exceed the speed of light, you'd actually
be able to travel into the past.
Of course, this is impossible.
In order to understand
how Tracer does this we're
gonna have to leave Einstein at the door.
Actually,
we're gonna have to partner with
one of his greatest
enemies...
You see, Einstein like things
to be pretty cut and dry and he was
famously a skeptic of quantum mechanics
Thankfully, in his mind special and
general relativity or as clear-cut as
things could get
No wacky stuff, like
wave particle duality here and then,
on his 70th birthday, his buddy Kurt Gödel
presented to Einstein
a solution to his formulas
that was messy, and
even more irritatingly would allow traveling to the
past without exceeding the speed of
light.
"Closed Timelike Curves"
Kurt Gödel
was kind of a weirdo
He saw conspiracy theories
and loopholes everywhere he went.
He was like Neo, but instead of
seeing the code of the matrix he saw
exploits in every system.
Other than ruining the birthdays of mathematical
geniuses, Gödel claimed he found a
loophole in the American Constitution
that would secretly allow for it to
become a dictatorship without anybody
realizing it.
no further comment from me on that
(ಠ_ಠ)
If videogames existed in 1948
He would have been an amazing speed runner
Traveling faster than the speed of light
for any object that has mass, and
presumably, also massless objects is
impossible.
The energy requirements to
reach the speed of light is infinite for
reasons we won't get into today.
Don't argue, just trust me.
I'm a scientist.
So, even though if you could theoretically
go faster than the speed of light to
travel into the past
This isn't possible
but Gödel discovered a way to do this
that avoided having the travel faster
than the speed of light at all.
With "closed timelike curves" Gödel realized
that you can actually take advantage of
the fluid nature of space-time itself to
travel back in time without having to
reach ludicrous speed
This works because
it's not just speed that deforms time
but also gravity
For instance, if you
were saying near a strong gravity source
like, oh I don't know, a black hole for instance
And that gravity source
were spinning at a significant speed the
fabric of space-time around it would be
so distorted that it could actually
swirl back on itself
Creating what is essentially
a worm hole in space-time
that loops back in time
i.e. "a closed timelike curve "
But unfortunately none of this explains
how Tracer herself travels
back in time three seconds into the past
without space itself around her also
reversing into the past.
After all,
time and space are inextricably linked .
If you go back in time, you're not just like
rewinding yourself you're traveling to a
previous point in space-time.
Where the stuff that happened
in what was once the
present hasn't happened yet.
*sigh* haha...
Not sure coffee was the right substance for this
episode.
But here I am! Sunk into my
life choices...
You see, the big problem
I have with tracer travelling back into
the past that well this violates
causality and it would mean that there
should in theory be two Tracers capable
of interacting with one another
I also thought that maybe it was possible that
what was actually happening was the past
Tracer was traveling into the future.
Well, that creates a whole series of
problems like
HOW THE HELL DOES SHE KNOW
TO DO THAT? and
HOW DOES SHE HAVE
MEMORIES OF WHAT HAPPENED
IN THE FUTURE?
I mean this isn't just a problem
postulated by in-game mechanics
If you watch the Overwatch Trailer "Alive" where
Tracer is fighting Black Widow (The Widowmaker you dingus) you see
that this is exactly how Tracer's power
works in the narrative canon as well.
It's not just a limitation of the
gameplay.
But what if...
What if Tracer isn't technically
traveling into the past
but rather
information is.
You see if you watch my portal episode you
already know that things like wormholes
and "closed timelike curves" require
exponentially increasing amounts of
energy depending upon how long they
exist and how large they are.
However,
information, if sent quickly enough
requires only very small openings for
very short periods of time to travel.
And it's here where quantum mechanics,
Kurt Gödel and Einstein's migraine finally
harmonize to explain exactly how
Tracer's powers work
And boy, oh boy...
It's a doozy...
The instant Tracer activates her "Recall"
power you see a quick distortion of
space around her lensing of light.
This presumably is the consequence of the
creation of a tiny black hole that exists
just long enough to spin really fast and
connect to the past before it evaporates
into nothingness due to Hawking radiation,
although I hesitate to mention
Hawking because he like Einstein
absolutely loathes closed timelike curves
BUT! I'm getting off track...
During this
brief instant several things happen
almost simultaneously.
1. Tracer of the Present's
particles become entangled with
Tracer of the Past.
Particle for particle
"Tracer of the Past" & "Tracer of the Present"
are bound in what's called a
BELL STATE
2. Tracer of the Present's
molecules, and therefore her biology,
run in reverse until her
quantum state matches the quantum state
of the past perfectly
as a result she ends up in the same location
and physical state she was three seconds
from when she enacted the Recall.
Effectively, this is teleportation but
instead of teleporting from place to place
Past Tracer is teleporting to the
Present by copying her quantum state
onto Tracer of the Present through the
closed timelike curve
This is actually
more or less how quantum teleportation
actually works.
The Niels Bohr Institute
was even able to do this with a hundred
percent reliability!
Of course this means
that somehow Tracer's brain and nervous
system is omitted from this quantum
teleportation, but somehow also moves
back in the past and and...
(wait a minute... wait a minute...)
Aw, crap...
THE NO CLONING THEOREM!!!
CRAP! MOTHER #$@%*!
The No Cloning Theorem of
Quantum Mechanics
The bane of my existence and
the killer of Pokemon, states that
while
quantum information can be transferred
from one particle to another
exact copies cannot exist.
Say you have atom of Tracer A
and there's atom of Tracer B
You can make it so atom of Tracer B
perfectly matches atom of Tracer A but
as a result,
atom of Tracer A ends up
being... I don't know atom of Tracer C instead.
It totally messes up everything
which means even though we can ignore
matter requirements since there are
two Tracers,
If Tracer of the Present copies
the quantum state of Tracer of the Past
she would irreversibly change
Tracer of the Past's quantum state.
Best-case scenario,
she ends up with some sort of
mega-cancer or has all of her memories
erased.
But what's just as likely is that
her atoms blast off as she explodes
because the particles are no longer
working in harmony like they're supposed
to.
This also means the Past Tracer is
irreversibly changed which means that
Present Tracer is irreversibly changed
and when she goes to use Recall she'll
be making a crappy copy of a copy
which means that Past Tracer's quantum state
will be messed up again which means that
Present Tracer's quantum state is messed up again
which means that went she uses Recall
she'll be making an even
CRAPPIER COPY OF A CRAPPY COPPY, AND
AUGGHH!!!
I JUST CAN'T!
JUST CAN'T, BLIZZARD!
I TRIED!
BUT
I CAN'T
I CAN'T DO THIS! I CAN'T!
YOU MADE A FREAKIN' CHARACTER THAT PLAYS
JUMP ROPE WITH THE RULES OF QUANTUM MECHANICS
AND THE SPACE-TIME CONTINUUM
AND JUST
LEFT ME OUT TO DRY
WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU?!
Best-case scenario for Tracer is...
HEY, GUESS WHAT?
SHE'S DEAD.
Why is this the BEST-CASE SCENARIO?
Because the WORST-CASE SCENARIO
is that you get
stuck in an INFINITE TIME LOOP where she
gets progressively less recognizable as
human every three seconds
until
she's just a BLOB OF GOO on the floor!
IS THAT WHAT YOU WANT BLIZZARD!?!
DO YOU WANT ANTS!?!
BECAUSE THAT IS HOW WE GET ANTS!!!
*Austin blows a raspberry*
I'm sorry...
I just... no matter how hard I try.
I just can't justify or explain Tracer,
she
defies logic
she defies reason
she defies everything we know about
SCIENCE!
I'm sorry to say it, but
from the bottom of my heart, Blizzard.
I do mean it.
Tracer makes
no
god
damn
sense.
Sincerely, Austin
Thank you everyone for watching my video on Tracer!
I really did try to make her make sense
but
she doesn't.
at all...
But that's okay!
Not everything has to make sense.
also I'm tired of doing so much
space timey-wimey stuff
And I'm sure
you are tired of me doing the same
so
next time I have something a little special for you
So, if you're interested be sure
to subscribe. :)
It's gonna be awesome.