Was it ever explained how this stuff works? I’m listening to the audiobooks of the Forerunner trilogy again, and it got me wondering if anyone recalled the details on it. I don’t mean the principles the Precursors had, I mean like how they made their stuff indestructible, and how they made their stuff at all in the first place. Did they create Neural Physics machines to make bigger Neural Physics machines, or did they just sorta… poof it into existence? I’m super hazy on this part of the lore honestly, it’s been so long since I’ve read/listened to these books.
Are we just in the dark on how they (Precursors or Flood,) made things with it?
How the Precursors made their devices indestructible, how they worked, how they were created, and how they manipulated space and time itself was one of the great mysteries of the Forerunner era. No race, no matter how advanced they became, were able to understand the nature of Neural Physics, and the inner workings of the Star Roads, Unbending Filaments and the Orbital Arches. And only a race that had evolved to a state of Transsentience could utilize their devices; the Precursors and the Flood were the only races known in the Halo Universe to be Transsentient.
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> Were the Flood able to utilize it to the same extent? We see them controlling structures, but I don’t ever recall them creating something.
They were able to use the Star Roads to bypass Forerunner defenses along the Maginot Line, but I don’t think the Flood were interested in creating anything. They simply saw the Precursor Mega-structures as a way to swing the war in their favor. The Flood’s goal is to assimilate, not create.
Neural Physics is the concept that thought and matter/reality are inexplicably linked. The Precursors created their “technology” out of thought. It seems they could literally think stuff or races into existence and bend/warp reality to their will as they saw fit. It’s seems to be basically Halo’s version of the Force or magic(might as well be) given it’s utterly incomprehensible and defies all the known laws of physics in both the real universe and the Halo universe. At that’s my opinion.
They could create through thought. No law was a restriction to them the world would bend around their favor. Their will becoming bent space and shattered time IT was how they wished and so IT was.
If it might help anyone, I asked Greg Bear about it and he does relate Neural Physics to other works in which races are able to materialize structures/objects via thought. I suppose this could be considered direct confirmation that they did indeed create structures purely through their own minds, but I’ll admit that the wording he gave still leaves room for a little interpretation for those of us who’d like to speculate further. Link for those interested.
Ok, so this is partially me filling in gaps with logical conclusions but based off of what the ur-didact said in silentium the physical stuctures (star roads ect.) were material adaptations of space time itself that exists on all dimensional planes. accordingly the domain is the culmination of all knowlage across the multiverse and directly connect to all neural structures. therefor when a being reaches transentience they become aware of all dimensions through the domain and can manipulate it through their mental connections to it. put simply, precursor architecture is literally material spacetime that connects to transentient beings through the domain. The halos disrupt neural pathways so it affects physical neural physics structures because they are literally living thinking embodiments of spacetime curtosy of the domain. I suggest learning about 10 dimensional phisics and space time to try and make sense of it but it is officially beyond comprehension.
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> Ok, so this is partially me filling in gaps with logical conclusions but based off of what the ur-didact said in silentium the physical stuctures (star roads ect.) were material adaptations of space time itself that exists on all dimensional planes. accordingly the domain is the culmination of all knowlage across the multiverse and directly connect to all neural structures. therefor when a being reaches transentience they become aware of all dimensions through the domain and can manipulate it through their mental connections to it. put simply, precursor architecture is literally material spacetime that connects to transentient beings through the domain. The halos disrupt neural pathways so it affects physical neural physics structures because they are literally living thinking embodiments of spacetime curtosy of the domain. I suggest learning about 10 dimensional phisics and space time to try and make sense of it but it is officially beyond comprehension.
So if the Precursors did come back (unlikely, since they all died, but that’s what they said about the Forerunners) then they’d be nowhere near as advanced as they were due to the Halos damaging the Domain.