“The Vacuous Megaparsecs” – Companion Booklet

And physics updates.

Original Text	FW EN	FW DE (With GPT Inputs)
我看到了我的爱恋	I saw my love.	Ich sah meine Liebe.
我飞到她的身边	I flew to her side.	Ich flog zu ihr.
我捧出给她的礼物	I offered her my gift,	Ich reichte ihr mein Geschenk,
那是一小块凝固的时间	a small piece of crystaline time.	ein kleines Stück kristalliner Zeit.
时间上有美丽的条纹	It bore beautiful stripes — Soft,	Es trug wunderschöne Streifen — weich
摸起来像浅海的泥一样柔软	As silt in the shallow seabed.	wie der Schlamm des seichten Meeres.
她把时间涂满全身	She smeared the time across her skin	Sie strich es über ihre Haut,
然后拉起我飞向存在的边缘	Then took my hand, and we flew to the edge of existence.	dann nahm sie meine Hand, und wir flogen zum Rand der Existenz.
这是灵态的飞行	it was a flight of spirit:	Es war ein flug aus Geist:
我们眼中的星星像幽灵	The stars, in our eyes, were ghosts	Die Sterne, in unseren Augen, waren Geister
星星眼中的我们也像幽灵	And we, in theirs, the same.	Und wir, in ihren, nichts als Geister.

A folk song murmured by an alien [Spoiler] as they casually [Spoiler] the [Spoiler].

Liu Cixin – The Three Body Problem Book 3.

Free Streaming

That’s an unfortunate pun.

An Exercise in Arpeggio

It was a spontaneous project from the Iridium Point Ideas Dump Bin.

The basic chord progression and piano roll patterns came from a different time¹. I think not long after the 2021 New Zealand lockdowns. That year my trusty composition app Klimper (which happened to be German in origin) just announced its desktop edition. The Vacuous Megaparsecs (TVM) began as a rough sketch from that first session, one of many musical fragments that almost got left behind.

The song originally was envisioned to have more complex dynamics in the lead synths, but the version you are about to hear stays with the first eight bars and sets up camp, repeating them throughout the whole track. Emotion and narratives are relegated to more traditional Iridium Point textures, like an organ and live (iPad, finger) drums.

The title, TVM, came early — almost with the melody itself. It was meant to evoke the vast, indifferent void of intergalactic space.

60 Megaparsecs and 17,000 Kilometres and 6 Metres

In the late stage (i.e. last 20 months) of my PhD studies, I dreamed of running high-performance, high-fidelity structure formation simulations with novel dynamics. My current chosen playground: a 60 comoving megaparsec box. I had crossed the planet and twiddled my thumbs for another year to make it a reality. I like the contrast between the scales — the cosmic and the personal.²

One of my first correct™ simulation snapshots became the cover art for TVM, as both explore comparable aspects of my vision and philosophy. I randomly sampled two million N-body particles from a billion, gave them emission shaders, and placed them into a dispersive glass environment—each particle representing a handful of galaxies or a small cluster. The result: something like a cosmic snow globe.

In that, the project takes on the mythical hue of the poem above. It is a gift—
to cosmology, the field where I’ve found a home. And perhaps to someone else, too. My crystalline time³.

To me, Love is fundamentally more than Narcissus’ mirror watching from another person’s eyes. It’s about two individuals exploring hidden degrees of freedom, dimensions of experience, through trust and reliance, forming a larger and irreplaceable self through a little bit of “not being themselves”.

TVM is rather obviously written to echo how I have perceived love. It starts with a distant synth that sings back to the main Leitmotif, but weaves into a complex and groovy dance number half way. The two instruments break free, and reache the ethereal and surreal by the third quarter mark, and ultimately they return to the original melody but with renewed determination, emotional intensity and firmness.

Notes

1. while usually I am not, like some technopessimists, referring to times before ChatGPT as the low-background era of the human Internet, I feel the need to clarify that this creative endeavour is all mine with no bot intervention. ↩︎
2. By some measures this would be the most precision-oriented work I’ve led so far. Arxiv soon. Really. ↩︎
3. Unsurprisingly, given Three Body’s vast impact on me around the time I declared Physics to be my major, Crystalline Time is indeed the title of another unpublished Iridium Point musical scrap. ↩︎