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Finally finished Portal. Best ending ever. Still Alive is amazing.

I came up with this idea when reading Elantris for the first time recently. I found some posts written in this forum that suggested the same thing, but no one has started a thread to really examine the topic that I could see. This isn't some super organized perfect theory like some of the posts I've seen here. I'm afraid I haven't yet come up with any definite idea as to how everything works. But I figured it couldn't hurt to post here anyways, and what other people think and if they can maybe fill in some of the gaps or figure out what I have not. Anyways... What makes me think Skai is Unity (or something similiar)? Well, for one thing, there are a lot of references to unity throughout the book and in the magic system. Let's start with the obvious: Shu-Keseg, Shu-Dereth, and Shu-Korath all preach unity in various ways. The Fjordil in particular seem obsessed with a forced unity, uniting the world underneath their rule. But let's consider AonDor. Based on it's name, one would assume that AonDor is associated with Aona, who held a Shard that was a synonym for Love. But oddly enough, there are a lot more associations with unity/oneness in AonDor than there are with love. There is the obvious fact that AonDor is based on the land itself, requiring that the Aons be drawn in such a way that they mimic the land. There is the fact that the users of AonDor, the Elantrians, are directly connected to and one with their city. There is the fact that Aons are based on constellations and the land of Arelon, meaning that either Arelon was shaped to resemble certain constellations or that the constellations were shaped after Arelon. There is the fact that the sheod only takes those in Arelon, and only those who have Arelish blood, and both Arelon and Arelish have the Aon "Are" in them, which means "Unity/Cohesion." Then there is the Dor itself, which is described as some universal force that is in everything and is everywhere. And it desires to make everything a part of it: "Raoden smiled; the explanation sounded too religiously mysterious to be useful. But then he thought of his dream, his memories of what had happened so long ago. When the Elantrian healer had drawn her Aon, it appeared as if a tear were appearing in the air behind her finger. Raoden could still feel the chaotic power raging behind that tear, the massive force trying to press its way through the Aon to get at him. It sought to overwhelm him, to break him down until he became part of it. However, the healer's carefully constructed Aon had funneled the power into a usable form, and it had healed Raoden's leg instead of destroying him." Elantris, page 276, mass market paperback. I realize my thoughts have probably seemed a bit rambling, and I apologize for that. As I said I'm afraid I don't have a good idea what all this means in the larger scheme of things. I suspect that AonDor has some connection between both Aona and Skai, but I'm not sure how exactly. Anyways, what do people think? Does my speculation have merit, or is it all a bunch of nonsense.

Ouch. Any discussion of the modern understanding of quantum mechanics is going to be wrong unless you are using extremely formal mathematics. Our natural languages just aren't up to the task of treating the concepts in it clearly. The words "particle" and "wave" are ill-defined at a fundamental level. What we call particles are actually self-sustaining excitations of interacting quantized fields. What we call forces are also excitations of quantized fields, but ones that don't propagate indefinitely. This is why forces are associated with particles in pop-sci books; sometimes you can excite the force-creating fields in a way that is self-propagating, getting something that is also a "particle". No, that doesn't mean much to me, either, but it gets the right answers, which is why we use it. What it does mean in terms of this conversation is that saying that a photon acts like a particle or a wave is quite wrong; what it acts like is a photon, and it always acts like a photon. This behavior does include the (to our minds) odd combination of superposing it's phase on top of itself while propagating undetected (creating interference patterns and other rather odd effects), while interacting with other particles as though at a single point, but the photon itself will gladly do both at the same time. Bizarre? Oh yeah. But what reality is apparently based on.