THE TRACER PARADOX! | The SCIENCE!... of Overwatch

*clicking noises* Dear Blizzard, Hello, it's me! Austin! Can I be honest with you for a second? I've been trying not to swear too much. It makes MatPat cry and the beeps just aren't satisfying for me, it's like holding in a sneeze, there are no endorphins. There is no satisfying cascade of consonants and syllables that cut through the air and offend sensitive ears. Only an anticlimactic tone stole my spotlight. My heart hurts so I've been trying to do it less, but honestly Blizzard...WHAT #$@! WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WITH YOU? YOU MADE A CHARACTER LIKE TRACER, WHY?

WHAT ABOUT YOU?! YOU KNOW HOW MANY PEOPLE I HAVE IN MY ATHLETIC DAY AFTER DAY. DEMANDING THAT I MAKE AN EPISODE ABOUT HER! Do you think about how your actions affect anyone other than yourself, Blizzard? This week I will try coffee instead of alcohol, because it is important to change

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-enhancing drugs from time to time. Unique problems demand unique solutions and Tracer? Tracer is not the kind of thing that can be addressed with depressants. No, this problem. This last problem requires stimulants. Sweet caffeine, what would I do without you? I spend most of my time trying to debunk the SCIENCE of video games! because, as Cari so lovingly pointed out, I love ruining the things you love.

I am, secretly, a terrible person. I'm AUSTINN THE DESTROYERRR!! But this week I'm doing something a little different. Instead of "feeling nothing" everywhere today, I'm going to do my best to explain exactly how Tracer and her powers work, because the basic truth of the matter is that sometimes, sometimes

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confuses logic as we move forward. to understand it To understand how Tracer works, we will first have to look at its history. "Tracer", also known as Lena Oxton, was the youngest person ever recruited into the Overwatch flight program and was the first person to pilot a known teleporter fighter prototype. like the "Rebufo".

BUT! Of course, at the last minute things got complicated because of course they did and Tracer disappeared along with Slipstream. Everyone thought she was dead. And then KABLAM! Months later she reappeared out of nowhere. This is very, very easy to explain. When we think about teleportation we tend to imagine some kind of quantum entanglement, copying of quantum states, more on this later. But this accidental time travel to the future is actually simple. I'm not going to go into too much detail since we don't have time and everything else is more complicated. And I've already talked a lot about Einstein, but the gist is this.

Time traveling to the future is very easy to do. In fact, here's a guaranteed way to build a time machine to the future, right in your own home! DO NOT DO ANYTHING. I'm being a little cheeky, but it's true! Time always moves forward even when you are not doing anything, even while watching this video, your time travels into the future! It's a long-lost less epic original ending to Back to the Future. Marty simply stops at a cabin on the outskirts of town and becomes the regional alcoholic hermit. You'll go back to the future, uh, eventually, but no, I know this isn't what we normally talk about when we refer to time travel.

And this is obviously not what happened to Tracer in that Slipstream thing. She was not there. her just sitting for three months a few meters from where they expected her to be, waiting for someone to come pick her up. She disappeared completely and then reappeared months later. How the hell is this possible? Simple Moving Very, Very Fast When we've mentioned space-time so far in the show, we've talked a ton about the SPACE aspect, but not much about TIME. BUT! Both are united. Mass, like a planet, not only bends the curvature of space, it also bends time.

Gravity affects the passage of time, but not only gravity. "Relative velocity" or relative velocity does as well. For example, if you are simply sitting in a chair. Standing next to your friend watching this video, a second for both of you is exactly the same. However, if you get up and go to the refrigerator to get a Mountain Dew and it takes you a second to reach the refrigerator (taking into account that the average walking speed is 1.4 meters per second) and the refrigerator is very close to a zero point... 1 0 9 0 4 seconds pass for your friend Although, given the sugar and caffeine content of Mountain Dew, I'm not sure the 100 quadrillionth of a second you save is going to do much to prolong your life.

Knowing this, it becomes pretty obvious exactly how Tracer disappeared for literally months due to a small malfunction PLUS! It explains almost exactly how the Slipstream ship she piloted works. It's not a teleporter that actually dismantles the atoms and rearranges them somewhere else. Rather, it is a ship capable of accelerating to high fractions of the speed of light. Moving so fast, you could disappear at one end of the earth and reappear somewhere else in the blink of an eye. Faster, actually! And when you're going at these speeds, small mistakes can have exponentially dire consequences. For example, Tracer's hypothetical Slipstream craft could travel from California to New York City in just over a tenth of a second of our stationary or normal time, if it were moving at ninety-nine, point nine nine... two five six percent of the speed of light for just five hundredths of a second of Tracer's time.

We'll just ignore how it would take one point seven yottagrams of energy, or about one-fifth of the energy the Sun hits the Earth with each year, to accelerate. at speed. In any case, would this same ship, if it had some kind of miscalculation and say, fire for 30 seconds instead of five 100 millionths of a second? 30 seconds of Tracer's time would take her solidly three months into the future. Of course, you'd also move fast enough to reach the Sun and return to Earth more than 15,000 times, but who's counting? This is the danger of traveling near the speed of light.

Small errors and computer glitches can cause irreversible problems. And these types of random computer errors happen ALL the time. I mean, in 1998, NASA, some of the smartest people on our planet, burned up the Mars Climate Orbiter by accidentally sending instructions in pounds instead of Newtons. And as a result, the orbiter sank too far into Mars' atmosphere and burned up from entry friction. It's important to go over this Tracer accident even though it's just a backstory for the Overwatch main page. Because it gives you an idea of ​​how time relates to space and believe me. For the next part, you'll need all your training to understand that traveling to the future doesn't compare to the mind-blowing everyday superpowers that Tracer uses in every Overwatch game.

The reason I've hated doing a Tracer episode so much is because well... her powers are downright absurd. They defy logic and trying to figure them out gave me a splitting headache, but I'm channeling my inner Tyson, not Neil deGrasse. Mike and together we can solve this! Tracer has two key powers that he controls through his "Chrono Fabulous Oscillator" or whatever that thing on his chest is called. One, it's simple. Move about seven and a half meters in the blink of an eye, SUPER! But it is "Remembering" that distorts the mind. "Recall" is Tracer's signature power that allows her to go back in time in the middle of a fight.

HOW THE HELL IS THIS POSSIBLE?! You see, Tracer's recovery power is weird... SUPER WEIRD! It's not just time travel, like in Back to the Future, where she comes back and might accidentally run into her past self. NO! IT'S MUCH, MUCH STRANGER! Over the course of one second, Tracer returns to the exact location and physical condition she was in three seconds since she first activated her powers. That is, when she gets to where she was, she has effectively gone back in time 4 seconds. But she gets stranger. You see, time around her doesn't stop. Everything she did in those three seconds really happened.

He doesn't revert to her. Even more mind-blowing is that Tracer herself retains all knowledge of the events that occurred. Classically, if we're talking about Einstein, you travel into the future faster as you approach the speed of light. However, if it were possible to exceed the speed of light, she could travel back in time. Of course, this is impossible. To understand how Tracer does this, we'll have to leave Einstein at the door. Actually, we're going to have to partner with one of his biggest enemies... You see, Einstein likes things pretty simple and he was famously a skeptic of quantum mechanics.

Fortunately, in his mind special and general relativity or as clear as things could be. No weird stuff, like wave-particle duality here and then. On his 70th birthday, his friend Kurt Gödel presented Einstein with a solution to his formulas that was confusing and, even more irritating, would allow him to travel back in time. without exceeding the speed of light. "Closed curves in time" Kurt Gödel was something of a weirdo. He saw conspiracy theories and loopholes everywhere he went. He was like Neo, but instead of seeing the code in the matrix, he saw exploits in every system.

In addition to ruining the birthdays of mathematical geniuses, Gödel claimed to have found a loophole in the American Constitution that would secretly allow it to become a dictatorship without anyone noticing. No more comments from me on that (ಠ_ಠ) If video games existed in 1948, he would have been an incredible speed racer. Traveling faster than the speed of light for any object that has mass, and presumably for massless objects as well, is impossible. The energy requirements to reach the speed of light are infinite for reasons we won't get into today. Don't argue, just trust me. I am a scientist.

So even though in theory you could go faster than the speed of light to travel to the past, this is not possible, but Gödel discovered a way to do it that avoided traveling faster than the speed of light. With "closed time curves," Gödel realized that you can actually take advantage of the fluid nature of spacetime to travel backwards in time without having to reach ridiculous speeds. This works because it's not just speed that warps time but also gravity. if you were say near a strong source of gravity like, oh I don't know, a black hole, for example, and that source of gravity was spinning at a significant speed, the fabric of spacetime around it would be so distorted that it would actually could spin back on itself, creating what is essentially a wormhole in space-time going back in time, i.e. "a closed time curve." But unfortunately, none of this explains how Tracer herself travels back in time three seconds into the past without space itself around her. going back into the past.

After all, time and space are inextricably linked. If you go back in time, you're not just going back, you're traveling to an earlier point in space-time. Where things that happened in what was once the present have not yet happened. *sigh* haha... I'm not sure coffee was the right substance for this episode. But here I am! Sinking into my life choices... You see, the big problem I have with the tracker's trip to the past is that this violates causality and would mean that, in theory, there should be two trackers capable of interacting with each other. I also thought that maybe it was possible that what was really happening was the past that Tracer was traveling through into the future.

Well, that creates a whole host of problems like HOW THE HELL DOES SHE KNOW HOW TO DO THAT? AND HOW DO YOU HAVE MEMORIES OF WHAT HAPPENED IN THE FUTURE? I mean, this isn't just a problem postulated by game mechanics. If you watch the Overwatch "Alive" trailer, where Tracer fights Black Widow (The Widowmaker, dingus), you'll see that this is exactly how Tracer's power works in the narrative canon. also. It's not just a limitation of the game. But what if...? What if Technically Tracer doesn't travel back in time, but rather information? You see, if you watch my portal episode, you already know that things like wormholes and "closed time curves" require exponentially increasing amounts of energy depending on how long they exist and how big they are.

However, information, if sent fast enough, only requires very small spaces for very short periods of time to travel. And it's here that 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 wonder... The instant Tracer activates her "Remember" power, a rapid distortion of space is seen around his light lens. This is presumably the consequence of the creation of a small black hole that exists long enough to spin very quickly and connect with the past before it evaporates into nothingness due to Hawking radiation, although I hesitate to mention Hawking because, Like Einstein, he absolutely detests what is closed. time curvesBUT!

I digress... During this brief moment several things happen almost simultaneously. 1. Particles of the Present Tracer become entangled with the Past Tracer. Particle by particle "Past Tracer" and "Present Tracer" are linked in what is called BELL STATE 2. The molecules of the Present Tracer, and therefore its biology, run in reverse until their quantum state coincides with the quantum state of the past perfectly, as a result, ends up in the same place and physical state that it was in three seconds ago when the Retreat was enacted. Effectively, this is teleportation, but instead of teleporting from one place to another, Tracer of the Past teleports to the Present by copying her quantum state into Tracer of the Present through the closed time curve.

Teleportation actually works. The Niels Bohr Institute was even able to do it with one hundred percent reliability! Of course, this means that somehow Tracer's brain and nervous system are bypassed in this quantum teleportation, but somehow they also go back in time and... (wait a minute... wait a minute... ) Oh shit... THE NON-CLONING THEOREM!!! FOOLISHNESS! MOTHER #$@%*! The non-cloning theorem of quantum mechanics, the bane of my existence and the killer of Pokémon, states that while quantum information can be transferred from one particle to another, exact copies cannot exist. Let's say you have a Tracer A atom and there is a Tracer B atom.

You can make the Tracer B atom perfectly match the Tracer A atom but as a result, the Tracer A atom ends up being... I don't know the atom Instead,

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C. Totally spoils everything by meaning that, although we can ignore the requirements of matter since there are two Tracers, if the Tracer of the Present copies the quantum state of the Tracer of the Past, it would irreversibly change the quantum state of the Tracer of the Past. Best case scenario, you end up with some kind of megacancer or have all your memories erased. But what's equally likely is that her atoms will explode when she explodes because the particles no longer work in harmony like they're supposed to.

This also means that Past Tracer has changed irreversibly, which means that Present Tracer has changed irreversibly and when you go to use Recall you will be making a poor quality copy of a copy, which means that Past Tracer's quantum state will be messed up again, which means that Tracer's current quantum state is messed up again, which means that if she uses Recall, she'll be making an even MORE SHITTY COPY OF A SHITTY COPY, AND AUGGHH!!! I JUST CAN NOT! I CAN'T, BLIZZARD! I TRIED! BUT I CAN'T, I CAN'T DO THIS! CAN'T! YOU MADE A FREAKIN' CHARACTER WHO PLAYS JUMP ROPE WITH THE RULES OF QUANTUM MECHANICS AND THE SPACE-TIME CONTINUOUS AND YOU JUST LEFT ME DRY WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU?!

The best case scenario for Tracer is... HEY, GUESS WHAT? SHE IS DEAD. Why is this the BEST SCENARIO? Because the WORST SCENARIO is that you get stuck in an INFINITE TIME LOOP where she becomes progressively less recognizable as a human every three seconds until she's just a DROP on the ground. THAT'S WHAT YOU WANT BLIZZARD?! DO YOU WANT ANTS!?! BECAUSE THAT'S WHY I HAVE ANTS!!! *Austin blows a raspberry* I'm sorry... I just... no matter how hard I try. I simply cannot 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'm serious. Tracer doesn't make any damn sense. Sincerely, Austin Thank you all for watching my Tracer video! I really tried to make her understand, but she doesn't. not at all... But it's okay! Not everything has to make sense. I'm also tired of doing so many space-time things. And I'm sure you're tired of me doing the same thing, so next time I have something a little special for you. So if you're interested, be sure to subscribe. :) It's going to be amazing.