25 KiB
Artemis Fowl is irrational
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Author: u/None *
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/7nmbxi/artemis_fowl_is_irrational/
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Score: 24
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Created: 2018-01-02T13:10:56
Post:
I'm a fan of Artemis Fowl, and I once heard HJPEV being compared to Artemis Fowl character-wise. But recently I've been re-reading the first book of Artemis Fowl and I've realized some parts of it are hardly believable:
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Artemis discovered fairies from rumors off the internet. Isn't there a scientific way?
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The most unbelievable part is the "Time-stop" put around Artemis' mansion, which makes Artemis' watch stop working, and supposedly "traps him in the past". so that "anyone entering the building would find it deserted", although somehow in the plot that occurs afterwards time seems to go at the same speed for both Artemis and the fairies.
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Oh yes, and the way the fairies supposedly vibrate to become invisible. They'd have to vibrate at something greater than their body width, or light wouldn't pass through. Not to mention it'd be very noisy.
I hope that someone writes a rational Artemis Fowl.
But in the meantime, what do you think would be a scientific way to test the hypothesis that secret fairies exist?
Comments:
u/CeruleanTresses [+80] (5 minutes later)
I mean I think going out and successfully kidnapping one could be considered a test of that hypothesis
u/kaukamieli [+22] (9 hours later)
And he is what, ten? He is allowed to play. I feel like after the "hey damn, I actually got a goddamn fairy" is the point where he should start thinking scientifically.
u/None [+4] (7 hours later)
true dat
u/rhaps0dy4 [+57] (20 minutes later)
Artemis discovered fairies from rumors off the internet. Isn't there a scientific way?
I don't see what's wrong with using whatever evidence Artemis has available. What kind of "scientific method" do you want to see here? The experiment "test whether fairies exist" involves going looking for what the rumours say and he did that.
vibration to become invisible
That might work, though they would need to vibrate at ultrasonic frequencies to be inaudible as well (edit: though see comment below pointing that this source also says this is infeasible). Also, because of temporal aliasing, the fairies would likely be visible in cameras that sample at 30 Hz, or on cameras that sample at 29Hz, or at some frequency.
The most unbelievable part is the "Time-stop" put around Artemis' mansion, which makes Artemis' watch stop working, and supposedly "traps him in the past". so that "anyone entering the building would find it deserted", although somehow in the plot that occurs afterwards time seems to go at the same speed for both Artemis and the fairies.
I agree. Some of the parts it you can explain: the fairy police van is also inside the time stop. "anyone entering the building [...] deserted" seems fine though, if we accept that the fairies can do some sort of time stop area magic. Bodily functions and watches being suspended while everything else isn't is quite weird. Still, you can accept this as a rule of the magic, and the fiction's internal world does not become inconsistent because of it.
Ultimately, I think the first book of the series is pretty rational. Characters (mostly, I won't go read the book again to check that it always holds) do things because of their beliefs and values; neither the fairies nor the Fowls are good or evil; characters try to solve things through the intelligent application of their knowledge and resources; and the rules of the world are consistent.
I'm not sure whether this still holds in the rest of the books, for example I think I remember that ; and the rules of the world might be at some point bent or expanded (perhaps they revived someone with magic? Is that actually forbidden?)
It is certainly not rationalist fiction though.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+23] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (an hour later)
That might work, though they would need to vibrate at ultrasonic frequencies to be inaudible as well.
The page you linked to doesn't support this. As noted by the OP, they would need to vibrate with an amplitude greater than their body width, and the linked page concludes that would basically reduce them to paste within fractions of a second.
u/gamedori3 [+2] (4 days later)
because of temporal aliasing, the fairies would likely be visible in cameras that sample at 30 Hz, or on cameras that sample at 29Hz, or at some frequency.
Fun fact. You can see the same effects with the naked eye in a room iluminated by fluorescent bulbs on AC mains.
u/rhaps0dy4 [+3] (4 days later)
Is that because fluorescents are 50Hz stroboscopic lights? :)
If I can see the fluorescent tube flickering very fast with the naked eye, is it because my fluorescent is crap?
u/None [+39] (3 hours later)
You have a problem with fairies vibrating to become invisible, but not with HJPEV having an invisibility cloak that doesn't render him blind? Come on, you have to make some allowances for fantasy. Even HJPEV does (after ranting about witches turning into cats).
After all, if the author knew an actual, scientifically sound method to become invisible, he would be pioneering its development instead of writing about it (according to Lucius Malfoy atleast).
u/DTravers [+18] (7 hours later)
Come on, you have to make some allowances for fantasy.
But there's the problem, while in HPMoR magic's left as a black box for HJPEV to explore, Artemis Fowl goes out of its way to explain magical effects...and does so poorly. Shielding, the vibration-to-be-invisible effect, was even explained as a biological phenomenon by fairy hearts pumping blood really fast and making their bodies shake.
Also tag /u/seylerius, since their explanation is unfortunately contradicted by canon.
u/seylerius [+5] Lord Inquisitor (7 hours later)
Pity. A dude can only try his best at rationalizing a book he's never read—if canon decides to fuck it up, ain't much I can do about that. If I really wanted to stretch it, I could try saying that the fairies are multi-dimensional in nature, and enough of their vibrations happen to be taking them out-of-phase to limit their opacity, but that's a reach. Well, really the whole thing was a reach to begin with. Oh well.
u/Frommerman [+11] (10 hours later)
What if they vibrate in such a way that their surface sort of bunches up into a visible light metamaterial? Like a standing wave across their entire skin which causes it to route light around them somehow? Almost certainly impossible, and if it is possible it would require truly staggering amounts of processing power to figure out exactly how to vibrate varying parts of the body to constantly produce the effect, but it at least uses known physical phenomena.
The one upside of this is that magic is already shown to have insane processing power and the ability to affect nanoscale physical changes. Healing someone back to life from cryonic stasis would never work otherwise. Actually, that suggests an additional mechanism of action as well. The magic could just be physically manipulating the skin and carried objects of the subject to create the metamaterial effect, and it just feels like vibration due to rapidly shifting skin/other surfaces.
u/seylerius [+5] Lord Inquisitor (a day later)
That's an interesting theory. When magic's shown to have absurd processing power and precision, having the suspiciously-capable artifacts operate on things that are only impossible for the lack of such is great.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+4] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (10 hours later)
the vibration-to-be-invisible effect, was even explained as a biological phenomenon by fairy hearts pumping blood really fast and making their bodies shake.
Wut?
u/DTravers [+13] (10 hours later)
Yeah. It was in one of the later books, and honestly the neutering of magic is something I never liked in the series. In the first one, it's strongly implied that fairies have lots of powers and the two that Artemis runs into are on their last dregs of magic, almost running on empty. After that, it's stated that the three or four we saw are the only ones. It takes several books for warlocks to be introduced, and after that the only warlock character is kept to the side for being too powerful.
u/earnestadmission [+1] Singular "they" user (a day later)
Cite, please. I believe that this is mistaken, because in book 2 Holly is so drained of magic that she is unable to muster up the Shield in the human diner at the beginning of the book.
u/seylerius [+19] Lord Inquisitor (5 hours later)
The difference is between handwaving it and providing a verifiably bad explanation. Only way the vibration theory holds up is if it's a multi-dimensional vibration that pops them in and out of phase with 3D reality, I'd wager, but that would create other problems. With the handwave on the cloak, you're free to sub in different ideas until one works. Maybe the cloak duplicates photons temporarily? Maybe it teleports all photons except the ones which would hit your eyes, and duplicates those for you to see with?
u/kaukamieli [+8] (9 hours later)
Magic. Death gave the Peverrel guy the cloak with the specs he asked.
u/seylerius [+4] Lord Inquisitor (a day later)
This is precisely the point I was making: by not specifying the mechanism and leaving it at "magic" or "Death did it", we're free to sub in whatever mechanism the magic's using to get the job done until we find one that actually makes a semblence of sense.
u/None [+2] (5 hours later)
I don't know how Harry's cloak works, but I imagine it works by bending light around him, which scientists are already doing in real life. I imagine a rational version of Artemis Fowl, at least if I wrote it, would say that fairies used their magic to bend light around them.
u/DCarrier [+5] (11 hours later)
that doesn't render him blind?
If light moves around you, you won't be able to see.
But I think the bigger issue here is that we don't know how the cloak works, only what it does. We are told how the fairies are invisible, and it doesn't make sense.
u/CCC_037 [+3] (a day later)
I recall a TV series ("The Invisible Man") which solved this issue rather neatly; the invisibility in that story was provided by a material which bent visible light around the person, while at the same time allowing him to see by converting ultraviolet light to visible for his eyes.
(The protagonist could also be seen in either ultraviolet or infrared while invisible).
u/None [+1] (11 hours later)
If light moves around you, you won't be able to see.
I don't suppose one could let just a bit of the light in and then amplify that with goggles? You could only just do it for light coming in from the front, then there would only be a slight dimming if you view the invisible person from behind.
u/DCarrier [+1] (11 hours later)
Yeah, but I get the impression that the cloak is supposed to be more impressive than that. It's not just hard to see. It's next to impossible. All the fanworks I've seen that talked about tracking it did so by tracking the area of nothingness because the cloak was too good. Also, you can have three different people under the cloak looking in three different directions and still see out.
u/serge_cell [+2] (a day later)
cloack is tachyon antenna, convert tachyon images into neural signals and project them into optic nerves of all sentients under the cloak. Golem under the cloak would be blind if golem mode is not turned on by owner.
u/None [+1] (12 hours later)
maybe it just amplifies the light.
Testing the cloak under different parts of the spectrum would be useful. Does the cloak block infrared? Does it make you invisible to ultraviolet light? Can you be picked up on radar?
u/DTravers [+17] (38 minutes later)
Artemis discovered fairies from rumors off the internet. Isn't there a scientific way?
This is retconned later in the series, for what it's worth.
The most unbelievable part is the "Time-stop" put around Artemis' mansion, which makes Artemis' watch stop working, and supposedly "traps him in the past". so that "anyone entering the building would find it deserted", although somehow in the plot that occurs afterwards time seems to go at the same speed for both Artemis and the fairies.
This is something I had to think about for some time. The only conclusion I could come to is that it works by packing a lot more time into the area (including the LEP command post), so an hour around the mansion is a few minutes outside. This matches up with the clouds zooming around outside, and Mulch being available very quickly after Root ordered it even though it took hours from his point of view.
[EDIT: No, wait, that doesn't make sense - it should be the other way around, with the outside world being relatively frozen from the inside's point of view. The best I can come up with, then, is that it somehow splits the area off into its own reality (like Mother of Learning), then merges it back afterwards.]
The comments re. the mansion being deserted afterwards, have to be justified as the narrator talking around what the Council was really planning to do after Holly was free, i.e. kill everyone and clean up.
u/Frommerman [+9] (12 hours later)
It's shown that magic in this series has access to stupendous amounts of processing power and the capacity to affect nanoscale changes to reality over a wide area. If this were not the case, healing magic would not be possible. This suggests a possible mechanism of action for the time stop: simulation.
I propose that the time stop spell really takes a snapshot of everything inside the field and simulates everything which goes on in the "time stop" at a 1:1 timescale with the outside world. This solves the problem with all of the mechanics of the time stop seeming really wierd: they operate based upon the expectations of the mages who created the spell however long ago. People don't digest food but are capable of moving or bleeding out because they wanted to create a spell with those exact properties.
The simulation continues until the field collapses, at which point the magic applies all of the changes it simulated to reality inside the field. This mechanism allows for the time stop field to be impenetrable from the inside while also allowing things to be inserted from the outside at any point along the time stop: the simulation just makes it so. However, this makes the whole "change your state of consciousness to escape the time stop" bit seem really silly. Therefore, I propose that this is meant as a sort of failsafe. In case something happens in the field which means you need to escape, you just find a way to knock yourself out to leave it.
Of course, that leaves the question of how Fowl figured out the failsafe and why nobody else knew about it, but considering how insane all of this is to begin with I imagine nobody has bothered to really explore what the time stop spell does aside from finding means of extending the effect.
u/AnonymousAvatar [+3] (a day later)
I like this explanation.
The thing that marks Artemis as not a "rationalist fiction" protagonist is not that he looks for fairies, it's that his entire plan hinges on a desperate supposition like this sleeping pill trick, with no testing beforehand or alternatives in case of failure. It would serve as a last ditch effort to escape if everything else has failed, but he should have had a better plan or at least a few options to try first before knocking himself out.
u/Jaijoles [+1] (2 months later)
I realize this post is old, but I’m just seeing this thread. Artemis did test the sleeping pill trick on his mother, and she vanished from the time stop. He tells Butler later that if it hadnt worked he would have surrendered.
u/kaukamieli [+2] (9 hours later)
Yea, it's possible even the people who explained it don't actually know how it works.
u/DTravers [+6] (9 hours later)
That's actually that I think happened, it was a really old spell - it was created by an elf that caused the legend of Santa. The technician claimed it had been heavily refined to make it more efficient and squeeze out more power, but I don't think anyone bothered to explain what it actually did to the narrator.
u/rthomas2 [+16] (10 hours later)
imo, Fowl’s arrogance is maybe the major theme of the entire series. His actions usually do major harm, despite his attempts to think things through perfectly—mostly because he doesn’t even think of wiser options due to aforementioned arrogance.
That, and being a child. Without Riddle brain-patterns to draw from.
So yeah: definitely not a flawless or even mostly-flawless rationalist. Which seems to be the point. The universe as a whole does start out fairly rational, but gets less and less so as the series progresses, which is a shame.
I loved the books for the emotional throughline, and did enjoy that they were unusually smart, and usually punished/rewarded the characters for rational reasons; that, and a tunneling gnome fighting an 8ft. master martial artist in a suit of armor, using only his speed and dirt-fueled super-flatulence, was incredibly fun. There’s definitely a reason the author got picked to pen a final Hitchhiker’s book.
u/EthanCC [+5] (10 hours later)
I remember AF as being the first time I noticed a "smart" protagonist not actually being smart. There are a lot of convenient/unbelievable coincidences, and if even one of those failed he would be left looking a lot less smart and a lot more dead. Like if he was wrong about in the first book, his method of escaping being something that makes no sense from a physical perspective. It's a shame, because the premise is similar to a rational work.
u/MultipartiteMind [+5] (15 hours later)
Agreed. I've only read the first book, but I remember being frustrated by that induction chain:
I remember being unsatisfied by other aspects of the book, but my memories have blurred too much to remember anything concrete. A theme I see running through (some of) the comments under-this thread-starter: the question of whether pseudoscience is incompatible with a work being rationalistic. Let's see... Deus ex machinas are an issue, when the non-character world itself behaves abnormally for no (/or a narrative-driven) reason. Other than that, for a world treated as consistent, I've thought of rationalism as dealing with the choices characters make within that world. Pseudoscience can put one's teeth on edge, but if we treat it as the narrator reaching into the world and the minds of the characters like Descartes's demon--or, put it another way, if we treat the world as a similar-but-very-different alternative universe where the pseudoscience is actually how that universe's physical laws work--there isn't much difference between it and a black box, or rather the blackness of the box just hides from our eyes what the author might unsatisfyingly choke on otherwise... it's of course preferable when an author can write an internally-consistent system which is elegant in its simplicity, but an internally-consistent system which makes no sense can still be navigated by reasoning characters, whether noticing themselves that it makes not sense or inured to it through familiarity. Once the system stops being internally consistent, something which worked once not working (for no reason every discovered/explained) that's a problem with the world's rational-fiction status, and if the system has allowed something which characters then never make use of again despite a need for it then that's a problem with the characters...
Considering now that one could arguably have enjoyable fiction with rational characters trying to survive/progress in a crazy nonsensical world, trying and failing to make sense of anything (and maybe giving up), but the 'enjoyable' part would be very hard due to the inherent frustration and/or futility, depending on whether there were any dependable rules that the characters could cling to and leverage. (Even rules about what happens to other rules...)
u/gamedori3 [+3] (4 days later)
That series had a lot of scientific issues.
There was a later book with a space station falling out of the sky because they put too many modules on it, which doesn't follow orbital mechanics. And where is the fairy homeland?
But what really would make it rational fiction would be the characters.
u/MultipartiteMind [+3] (16 hours later)
(The description of checking rumors on the Internet as an unscientific way to make a discovery brings to mind a passage, quoted below, from Lovecraft's 'Out of the Aeons'.)
"As matters stood, they pointed out that the man who had held the hieroglyphed scroll—and who had evidently thrust it at the mummy through the opening in the case—was not petrified, while the man who had not held it was. When they demanded that we make certain experiments—applying the scroll both to the stony-leathery body of the Fijian and to the mummy itself—we indignantly refused to abet such superstitious notions. Of course, the mummy was withdrawn from public view and transferred to the museum laboratory awaiting a really scientific examination before some suitable medical authority."
u/ArgentStonecutter [+2] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (an hour later)
I started reading AF recently after hearing people going on and on about it, and I couldn't get through it at all. It was like reading something from a '20s action-adventure pulp with all the anachronistic racism intact.
Maybe the first book is a bad example, should I skip to one of the later ones?
u/AnarchistMiracle [+14] (2 hours later)
No, the first book is the best one. Like OP, I did a reread and was also disappointed. They're great as YA books, but not very satisfying as an adult.
u/SkyTroupe [+8] (5 hours later)
The butler is the best part to be honest. He's the best straight man Ive seen in a YA novel.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+2] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (10 hours later)
Like Jeeves in Wodehouse's "Bertie Wooster" stories?
u/mwh545 [+6] (15 hours later)
A bit, if Jeeves was also 6' 10", built like a gorilla, knew his way around the international underworld, and was very handy in combat.
u/SkyTroupe [+1] (10 hours later)
I've never read that so I would not be able compare
u/CouteauBleu [+3] We are the Empire. (8 hours later)
Yeah, this series did not age well for me.
u/CeruleanTresses [+6] (10 hours later)
There's racism in it? I haven't read it since I was a kid, when I almost certainly wouldn't have picked up on that unless it was blatantly obvious.
u/GaBeRockKing [+3] Horizon Breach: http://archiveofourown.org/works/6785857 (11 hours later)
He might be referring to the fairy racism.
u/CeruleanTresses [+2] (11 hours later)
It's been a while since I read it--are we talking, like, depictions of in-universe fantastical racism, or is this the kind of thing where the fairy subspecies uncomfortably reflect human racial stereotypes?
u/GaBeRockKing [+2] Horizon Breach: http://archiveofourown.org/works/6785857 (12 hours later)
I'm in the same boat, but I would guess it's the whole "fairies call humans mud men all the time" thing. Plus explicit casual racism between the fairie varieties.
u/MaIakai [+1] (9 hours later)
i started reading it a few months ago. I got 3/4 the second book and gave up.
For how much they played up Artemis he is barely in the books, its all world building fairies and goblins.