Schild's Ladder

by Greg Egan

‘Whoever first gains the power to impose their own view decides the issue? Isn’t that the definition of barbarism?’

‘Everyone’s wise about the accident after the fact.’

an ancient principle known as Lorentz invariance, dating back to the abolition of the aether.

Once it had become possible to put the new theories to the test, the only ones that hadn’t been falsified were those that remained too ill-defined to offer clear predictions.

Yann replied affably, ‘My earliest memories are of CP4 – that’s a Kähler manifold that looks locally like a vector space with four complex dimensions, though the global topology’s quite different. But I didn’t really grow up there; I was moved around a lot when I was young, to keep my perceptions flexible.

Classic Egan :D

Transcendence was a content-free word left over from religion, but in some moribund planetary cultures it had come to refer to a mythical process of mental restructuring that would result in vastly greater intelligence and a boundless cornucopia of hazy superpowers – if only the details could be perfected, preferably by someone else.