FTL allomancy

[Thrand_Antharo]

I was reading the windrunner vs steel Inquisitor thread and it got me thinking. Light is able to move at the speed of of light because it has no mass. An iron Ferring could theoretically reduce their mass to nothing, if they had some way to accelerate themself they could reach the speed of light, given enough time. Also if iron Ferrings can go into negative mass they might be able to go faster than light. This would be impossible to to do in an atmosphere(air friction) but it would be possible in space. Could we see this in a sic-fi mistborn book?   

[Storming Radiant]

43 minutes ago, Thrand_Antharo said:

Also if iron Ferrings can go into negative mass they might be able to go faster than light.

I don't think iron ferrings can reduce their weight to a negative.  They are storing their weight, and you can only store what you have. We actually don't even know (last I checked at least...) if they are actually reducing their mass or if they're just weakening the gravitational pull on themselves.

[Thrand_Antharo]

I just looked it up and Brandon has confirmed that there is a way to go FTL "Yes, the FTL is built into the magic systems and so there will be something where they figure out how to do that with the magic and spaceships will be propelled using that."

[Tsidqiyah]

Era 4 of Mistborn will deal with FTL. This much has been confirmed.

Era 2 i think gives us some hints on how to do it, but Sanderson refuses to give us too much.

I suspect aluminum factors in some how; as well as iron, steel, and both time bubbles.

 

 

Also it was confirmed that you can't even reach zero while storing weight.

Edited June 20, 2017 by Tsidqiyah

[Kurkistan]

They're reducing mass. I try not to do this, but word-searching "mass" on the Feruchemy Theoryland search should provide ample background. I can't find it at the moment, but I'm also pretty sure we have a direct quote on it not being able to go negative, since ,as Storming Radiant said, you can generally only store what you have.

Section x8 here has a bit about FTL possibilities, with a focus on time bubbles, if you're interested.

Edited June 20, 2017 by Kurkistan

[The One Who Connects]

4 hours ago, Storming Radiant said:

We actually don't even know (last I checked at least...) if they are actually reducing their mass or if they're just weakening the gravitational pull on themselves.

Higgs Field.

Quote

I asked Brandon about Iron Feruchemy at the release party, though. I have had a pet theory about Feruchemical iron for a while - that it messes with the person's connection to the Higgs field. Brandon confirmed it in the signing line. Exact words will, I'm sure, be on the transcript, but I asked specifically if it involved Higgs field stuff, and he said yes.

[ZenBossanova]

For FTL, negative mass will not work. You need pure imaginary mass. This is an elementary consequence of Special Relativity. 

It really depends how creative you are allowed to get in storing your mass. 

[Kurkistan]

I wouldn't bet too heavily on being able to get creative with storing mass, given Peter's reaction to a Tor article's talk about it.

[ZenBossanova]

3 hours ago, Kurkistan said:

I wouldn't bet too heavily on being able to get creative with storing mass, given Peter's reaction to a Tor article's talk about it.

That is probably good, because Tachyons (particles with imaginary mass) have a number of other properties that make them... unusual. For instance, they like to speed up infinitely fast. So warp 5 isn't an issue. Doing anything less than warp 20000  is. Astronomically speaking, the Cosmere isn't all that big, so that would be grossly overpowered. 

[jjh]

On 6/20/2017 at 9:33 AM, Kurkistan said:

I wouldn't bet too heavily on being able to get creative with storing mass, given Peter's reaction to a Tor article's talk about it.

I think a big hint might have been given in Bands of Mourning, when Khriss (I think?) asked Wax about how modulating his mass changed his speed.  The example given then was of increasing his mass, which slowed him, but the obvious implication is that it works the other way too.  The importance of the characters involved, and the obvious lesson in allomantic-affected physics, seems like a pretty big easter egg/foreshadow plant.  

The ability to control one's mass is especially important when approaching the the speed of light, as the object being accelerated actually gains mass (from a resting observer's viewpoint), which assymptotically retards further acceleration.  Basically (to my understanding), the observation from particle accelerators is that an object's mass approaches infinite as its speed approaches that of light, which makes further acceleration more and more difficult.  BUT... if you could somehow siphon off (or better, "store") the extra mass imparted by acceleration, then, yeah I suppose you could make the case that you could get faster than lightspeed.  Potentially multiple times faster, as dividing your mass your mass by n would either n-times your speed (by conservation of momentum) or multiply it by the square root of n, depending on which conservation the author decides is more fundamental (I'm guessing momentum).  And of course if you can reduce mass to near zero, you get near-instantaneous travel, which is a convenient thing to have in fiction.  Plus near-infinite "stores" of mass, which could be useful in a number of ways.

Note that in his comment, Peter didn't say that the Tor theory was wrong, only that the reasoning was a bit sloppy.  With all respect to Peter, I wonder if it's possible he's obfuscating a bit?

One last point-- accelerating by storing mass wouldn't be very useful for Wax in atmosphere, as the reduced mass would likely make him more susceptible to drag, so it's plausible to have them "discover" this rather obvious trick only later in the series...

[Calderis]

@jjh the main problem I see with that application is that while your mass continues to multiply exponentially, storing would need a larger and larger amount of metal as you'd be filling it exponentially faster.

If you were at FTL speeds and suddenly stopped storing due to your ironmind being full, the resulting mass increase would be catastrophic. 

[jjh]

Good points!  In defense of my (fake) physics conjecture, let me make a couple of extrapolations from real relativistic behavior (with the caveat that I am kind of an armchair relativist)

1. @FiveLate The increase in a particle's rest mass is a percentage of its "current" mass, which under relativistic acceleration can get big fast.  The result of this compounding mass increase is where the "infinite mass" result comes from-- the integral diverges at light speed.  However, if you stored just the "extra" mass increase from acceleration, the total mass increase wouldn't suffer this self-compounding effect and would therefore be much more manageable (non-infinite, anyway).  Now if you further reduce your mass below whatever it is at rest, the "extra" amount you have to store can get pretty small.
2. @Calderis To my understanding, the increase in mass comes from the acceleration, not actually being at the speed itself (this is of course can be seen as a relativistic effect, and is related to time slowing down for the traveler, etc.-- the changing of the rate of time results from the acceleration rather than the speed directly).  Simply being at a certain speed doesn't confer extra mass to my understanding.  Slowing down might also be view as an acceleration of course, and could have mass-gaining implications of its own, but it could be dealt with as in #1.
3. Of course this is all hooey, the impossibility of FTL travel is the starting-point assumption of relativity, not its result.  Therefore, we have to break the system in some way in order to have it (excepting capital-G Godlike powers to effect an Alcubierre drive).  Really, my strongest point in believing FTL in the Cosmere arises from playing with mass is from the incredibly strong hint given in BoM, rather than in my hand-waving physical argument that even I know is full of holes.  FTL has to be impossible if relativity holds.  Therefore the question is: in what way is Brandon planning to violate relativity?  I think the BoM scene between Wax and Khriss gives an indication on which way he's leaning.

Edited June 27, 2017 by jjh

[Yitzi2]

On 6/20/2017 at 5:24 AM, Thrand_Antharo said:

I was reading the windrunner vs steel Inquisitor thread and it got me thinking. Light is able to move at the speed of of light because it has no mass. An iron Ferring could theoretically reduce their mass to nothing, if they had some way to accelerate themself they could reach the speed of light, given enough time. Also if iron Ferrings can go into negative mass they might be able to go faster than light. This would be impossible to to do in an atmosphere(air friction) but it would be possible in space. Could we see this in a sic-fi mistborn book?   

The way the math works out, "no mass" translates instantly to "speed of light", but "negative mass" would not translate into FTL (it's like how dividing 1 by 0 gives infinity, but dividing 1 by -0.001 doesn't give more than infinity).

That said, I think Brandon has been pretty clear that storing iron does not primarily reduce one's mass, but rather the effect of gravity.