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Note: This is version 2.0, written in January 2017. It's primary purpose is to incorporate knowledge from the post-Bands of Mourning era, but I've also taken the liberty of re-writing/structuring some stuff, cleaning up a bit of phrasing, fixing the formatting/links that were hurt by the most recent site transition, etc. The original version of this post is in this archival post. Introduction: Time bubbles are fascinating. An essentially passive effect that has profound impacts on the very nature of reality. They're ripe for exploration and exploitation. But they're also complicated. Brandon isn't much of a physics/math guy, and he knows that; the passage of time is a pretty fundamental aspect to most physics and messing with it can get messy. Because of this time bubbles have a lot of asterisks and exceptions built into them. So our intuitions about what happens when you speed up or slow down a patch of space-time aren't going to align with what happens in the cosmere, and Words of Brandon are more necessary than usual. Though we have an unusually large reliance on authorial fiat for our fundamentals, we can use those building blocks to go far with our analysis/logic. Time bubbles follow their own consistent rules: There's no need to throw up our hands in despair just because we can't trust our initial intuitions. Now I'm an old bantha, but one advantage is that I kind of know... everything... about time bubbles. I'd be highly interested if anyone could come up with anything I didn't know we knew, at the very least. So in the interests of public knowledge, here is a thread that lays out everything I know (that I can remember I know) about time bubbles, along with some clearly-demarcated expansions into the theoretical where I think it safe. (xTc) Table of Contents: (you can word-search for sections by xY values) x0. A note on terms x1: Frame of reference x1.1: Anchoring x1.2: Hitting moving bubbles x1.3: Misc. x2: Entering and exiting time bubbles x2.1: How occupancy is determined x2.2: Jostling x2.3: Edge-case physical interaction x2.3.1: Occupancy of clothing and held objects x3: Bubble interaction x3.1: Subjective burn rates x3.2: Competing bubble effects x4: Reality of time bubble effects x5: Conscious control of bubble attributes x6: Effects of duralumin/nicrosil x7: Effects on various magics, aluminum x8: Faster than light (FTL) possibilities x8.1: How I think FTL would work with time bubbles x8.2: Mechallomancy and time bubbles x8.3: Disclaimer x9: Realmatics xCn: Conclusion xAr: WoB Archive (x0) A note on terms: I'm not too ashamed to admit that I've been responsible for creating/using some... unorthodox terminology over the years. Sometimes it's intentional as I develop a term to describe/clarify a new concept, other times I'm just mistaken. Nowhere is this more present than in my discussion of time bubbles: for example, no one in the books calls them time bubbles. They're all referred to as "speed bubbles", even cadmium bubbles. So here's a list of potentially problematic terms, including any canon ones that might be unclear if I come across them. This is a living list, so feel free to post asking me to add/clarify anything. Time bubble Also known in actual canon as a "speed bubble". The area of space-time affected by an Allomancer (or mechallomantic cube) burning either bendalloy or cadmium. Compression factor A term for the "speed" of a time bubble. Either how much it speeds up time (bendalloy) or how much it slows it down (cadmium) in relation to the normal flow of time. So a bendalloy bubble where every second on the outside corresponds to 10 on the inside would be have a compression factor of 10x, where the reversed cadmium bubble might be 1/10. Bubble anchors/anchoring Refers to the frame of reference that a time bubble is "still" relative to. Can refer to either an abstract frame of reference or a specific object the movement of which constitutes that frame of reference. Jostling Refers to how objects are jostled/refracted/deflected as they cross the borders of time bubbles. FTL Stands for "Faster than light", a term for viable interstellar travel mechanisms that bypass the need to spend years or decades going at sublight speeds through the vast emptiness of space Mechallomancy A term used to refer to the "mechanical allomancy" (/feruchemy) used by the Southern Scadrians, and first seen in Bands of Mourning (x1) Frame of reference: Frame of reference is one of the spots where things start getting weird with time bubbles. Time bubbles change both the flow of time and the way that objects move within their sphere of influence. The exact way they change these two factors, though, is dependent upon frame of reference. Look to this WoB, our earliest on the matter: Bubbles anchored by bond: It follows upon any degree of thought on this WoB that bubbles "not moving" actually means "at rest relative to the frame of reference of the surface of Scadrial where Wayne first cast it." That bubble is moving around the planet's axis at some absurd speed, around Scadrial's sun at some more absurd speed, around the galactic core at a different absurd speed, and outward from the origin of the universe at an even more absurd speed. And yet a Wax that is "moving faster" inside a speed bubble isn't all the sudden catapulted into space at a thousand meters a second. His movement through space is only accelerated relative to the the bubble's definition of "at rest". How the anchor that defines "at rest" is decided a key question, then. (x1.1) Anchoring: We've got a few WoB's on the question of how bubble frames of reference are determined, at least so far as how the bubble itself moves through space. Bubble anchor determined by what it cuts You'll notice that this stands in nearly direct contradiction to the other (much older, admittedly) WoB where a train was an example of where the bubble wouldn't stay anchored. Thus the tone of surprise on my part for this new WoB. In regards to how to reconcile the two, I'll quote myself: This new quote goes into quite a lot more detail, is unambiguous as to the bubble being on the train, and is newer, and so trumps the old one if they are in fact in conflict. I can't find it at the moment, but someone has suggested that a way to reconcile the two WoBs is that for the first Brandon was thinking of the big picture where the bubble is shortly ripped off the train by the "jarring". Reading the newer WoB, a charitable interpretation has "it's probably going to ruin your time bubble" occurring over the course of instants, rather than minutes or seconds. Myself I lean more towards this just being an evolution of how Brandon models bubble frame of reference, at least to some extent. Perhaps he got to thinking more deeply about why a bubble on the train intersecting the ground wouldn't work and decided to weaken a previous "well the ground intersecting the bubble would just instantly pull it out" to a weaker "the ground intersecting the bubble will just gradually pull it out", or the like. - Then we get into some other mechanisms for anchoring bubbles. Savants can anchor their bubbles to themselves Complexities of what affects anchoring We also got some nice in-book evidence from Bands of Mourning. So anchor-determination is complicated. We've got a combination of local cognitive polling, savantism, cognitive gymnastics, mass, and likely speed. I wouldn't be shocked if there weren't more factors at play. At a guess, I'd say that these factors are all in competition for each other. Perhaps a very fast but small object will beat out a somewhat-massive but slow one. Or a savant might have an easier time de-anchoring a bubble from a moving train than from the surface of Scadrial. The core takeaway here is that bubble anchors can be manipulated, through both gross physical interactions and more realmatically-based shenanigans. - It's implied in the scene where the gang is testing out the primer cube by tossing it around that the cube spits out a bendalloy bubble while its in mid-air, then proceeds to land on the ground near Marasi with the bubble still centered on it. This would imply that the cube either has some special ability to anchor bubble frames of reference or (as I'm about to suggest) that while the bubble was airborne it simply "defaulted" to being anchored to the cube, but when it landed it assumed a normal ground-based frame of reference. This supported by Marasi walking up and picking up the cube off the ground without any mention of the bubble shifting. This is by no means a sure thing, though, and also raises questions (which I will not attempt to address) about what would happen to Marasis if she's standing still on the ground and gets "hit" by a moving bubble. - As a general note, there is some possibility that the bubble's movement and its frame of reference could be de-coupled from one another. So a bubble could be moving North at 5 m/s while having a frame of reference that thinks it's heading South at twice that speed. This would do some fun things to the motion of captured objects, I think, but by "fun" I here mean "more complicated than I want to think about". I do not believe that this possibility is likely, from a purely literary standpoint, given the complications that would ensue from it and the fact that such de-coupling has never been suggested by either books or WoB. Also Occam's Razor. Assuming that the bubble gets its internal frame of reference from its own movement through space, we can simplify things by assuming that whatever anchor the bubble is "linked" to is what defines both frames of reference. So a bubble anchored to a spaceship (to choose an entirely random example...) would be exactly at rest from the frame of reference of the bubble; this would mean that the ship wouldn't travel faster through space, since the ship isn't moving so far as the bubble is concerned. (x1.2) Hitting moving bubbles So we have all this evidence that bubble-anchoring is a thing and that it's possible (if at least somewhat non-trivial) to manipulate a bubble's anchor using both realmatic and brute-force physical means. What does this mean for when moving bubbles intersect "still" (for certain definitions) objects? Moving bubble's effect on captured object movement: Aside: So this was a fun conversation to have with Peter. I broke out MSPaint more than once. Peter's answer essentially destroys some of my more high-level thoughts on what happens when something's hit by a moving time bubble. This thread of mine is wrong on more than one level. The first level is that I was wrong even within my model: by what I said then even bendalloy bubbles should shuttle objects backwards by some degree. The second level is my assuming relativity of reference frames, where from what Peter says it looks like there needs to be some other mechanism at work to decide how the cork is "really" moving. To summarize farther, if you toss a cork over a moving train that has a time bubble on it, then that cork's frame of reference essentially gets incorporated into the bubble's/train's. The cork is all "I'm moving straight across this here train" and the bubble is all like "okay, you do that". The cadmium bubble case is easiest to grasp here: upon intersection, it's as if the cork is caught in amber, slowly pushing its way straight north across a bubble of space at the same time as that bubble tows the cork farther and farther east. - By my reading, one interesting consequence of this lies in the path the cork takes over the top of the train. In a world without time bubbles, the train would be moving under the cork as it flew over it. So, looking from a vantage point above the train, we would see the cork cross over the edge of the train at point A, then over the opposite edge at some point B that's further towards the end (read: western part) of the train, as the train's been moving under the cork as it flew. So if it was high noon the shadow of the cork would have described a diagonal from south-east to north-west on the top of the train. But once time bubbles get introduced, things are a bit dicier. My own more relativistic model from before this WoB would show the cork following that same diagonal from A to B, just faster/slower than normal. So a speed bubble would see the cork popping at at point B before B drew level with the cork-thrower. This fell out as a natural consequence of the model. The new model we get from Peter doesn't allow such a thing. Read literally, the cork enters at A, then eventually exits directly north of that point at some point A' (with A' described by the intersection of the north part of the train with a line perpendicular to the edge of the train and intersecting A). The fact that the cork never ends up west of the train seems to necessitate that the cork exits at some point at or east of A'. This means that the lateral movement of the cork relative to the top of the train is eliminated by hitting the bubble. This has theoretically interesting consequences for projectiles (throwing a grenade to hit Miles in the face, accounting for the motion of the train, will fail if there's even a 1x compression factor bubble over him), but realistically deflection will probably play a larger role in such uncontrolled circumstances. The more relevant case here more controlled circumstances: could this lateral movement elimination property of time bubbles be used deliberately? An incredibly inefficient example that comes to mind (I believe I'm stealing this from someone else, but can't recall who) would be using time bubbles as a delivery mechanism for high-energy projectiles: Shoot a railgun into a very very slow cadmium bubble, then move the bubble's anchor to be right next to the enemy ship and once the railgun round wins free it's pointed exactly where you want it to be. -- I'm also a tad confused by Peter's "In fact, I think it's safe to assume that the train is always moving to the east faster than the thrower is throwing the cork to the north. In that case, both types of bubbles will always end up pushing the cork at least somewhat to the east" line. It seems logical that any non-infinite compression factor for a bendalloy bubble would result in the cork ending up at least a bit farther east than it would have without the bubble. I'm not sure what the relative speed of the cork/train really has to do with that. So either Peter misspoke or there's some deeper logic to relative speed of motion in the bubble vs. cork scenario so far as what frame of reference "wins". I'm inclined towards the former, myself. --- There is also the additional edge-case of what happens if that train-bubble intersected someone with their feet firmly planted on the ground, or if the cork had a string attached to it leading back to the cork-thrower. Both are beyond the scope I can address at the moment. - Here we have a later attempt of mine to get some more information on this front: Conservation of momentum on entrance tied to redshift-solution: I got nothin' here, just thought it was worth putting in. (x1.3) Misc.: There is also the issue of how time passes within the bubble. Regardless of whether an object's movement is changed, it's still going to experience the same weirdness with the passage of time. This introduces... weirdness as traditional models of movement as <unit of distance>/<unit of time> are a bit skewed by everything's experience of time flowing faster/slower with only passing relation to how their movement is affected. I'll discuss that weirdness further down. Beyond that, there are some small concerns for what the relativity of the passage of time has to say about all of this. I haven't addressed this directly in the past, but I don't think we need concern ourselves with it overmuch, as the scales of relative speed where this would matter are all such that objects are going to be almost immediately yanked out of the bubbles anyway. Not much time to experience a slightly altered flow of time. If I had to guess, though, I would imagine that time bubbles are frame of reference agnostic so far as the passage of time goes. So a speeding-by spaceship that experience 1 second for every 10 of ours would experience 10 for every 100 of ours in a 10x speed bubble anchored in our frame of reference, as opposed to 91 or something odd like that. (x2) Entering and exiting time bubbles: Ah, bubble-border problems. How I loathe them. This is still one of the less well-explored areas of time bubbles. Bubble boarders are... odd. This has been one of the more weirdish topics about bubbles since we first started talking about them. Gradually, though, we've been accumulating WoBs. Bubble borders static So borders are static and do not "distend" or stretch out objects or anything weird like that. You put up a bubble and that border is going to stay put as a nice little sphere, no moving or changing in shape or the like. This has some interesting impacts on some other aspects of time bubbles, particularly occupancy. As a general note, many of the oddities regarding how time bubbles behave have to do with transitions between being inside/outside of the bubble. Doylist rationale behind bubble mechanics: (emphasis added) This "loss of kinetic energy" is a general trend we can observe from the earliest days of time bubbles Loss of kinetic energy: -- Side note: Light. It's weird. But it's not weird for any good in-universe reason that we know of, and there likely isn't one. At core it's all a result of handwavium being burned because if you actually red/blue-shifted light properly really really weird and unhappy things would happen. Like microwaving people. Nothing more to see here, really. There is a bit more realmatic stuff coming out more recently, however. Bubbles changing speed of light considered, but not what happens: Light explanation a ways off So yes, there is a going to be a Realmatic workaround to make everything mechanically jive with the whole "let's not microwave people" thing, but we won't see it until we're all gray in the head. (x2.1) How occupancy is determined: So this brings us to talking about how we decide what's in or out of time bubbles. If you have half an object inside of it, is it going fast or slow or half and half? Excellent question. Glad I asked it . Bubble occupancy So objects are either in or out in their entirety. Moreover, this gives us that bubble occupancy is determined Cognitively, the whole "how an object views itself" shtick. If we're to follow the usual formula, the other "part" Brandon was talking about is just how other people view the object. This is interesting Realmatically, and also lets us get away with buildings not being torn down as their support beams shear off or stuff like that. Beyond that, it tells us that whether an object is included if its half-and-half really is "what sounds right", to some extent. It's a question of whether you/the object/observers would judge that an object is properly "in" some arbitrary space when parts of it are outside of that space's boundary. Beyond this Cognitive fun for determining "in-ness", living things are special: Living touch enough Included as soon as you touch: - These two sets of WoBs seem to run counter to each other. On the one hand, we're told that if a train is excluded from the influence of a bubble then the people inside of it are too. But the bubble isn't "distended" by the train—a fact we know because of the "static" WoB at the beginning of this section. So the people in the train are still technically in the bubble, still touching it. This should trigger the "if you're living and you touch a bubble you're included" clause. Given that the train is not holding the bubble out, it seems that just that being "in" an object which is not affected by a bubble is enough to keep an otherwise-wholly-encompassed person out of the effects of the bubble. Looking to the fact that "any living thing touching the bubble is affected by the bubble", then, it seems that in an important sense people within a train aren't "touching" the bubble. My conclusion from this, then, is that passengers in that case are not touching the bubble because they are counted as "part" of the train in the same way that the train's engines and individual cars are "part" of some larger train object. Like how there is both a bead for a door and a bead for a wall containing that door in Shadesmar. Actually, this needs its own thread to explore. Have a thread, with attendant conclusions: (x2.2) Jostling: We know that objects and people are "jostled" when they enter or exit time bubbles. It took us a bit (until Bands of Mourning, in fact) to nail down that both entrance and exit cause jostling for both types of bubbles, but through the first three Era 2 (AoL-era) books we got examples or in-text exposition that clarifies that "jostling" happens for both bendalloy and cadmium bubbles whether the object is entering or leaving it. Some book quotes on the phenomenon for reference, though references are scattered through the Era 2 books: There's also the possibility that jostling messes with sound, given this quote: In this case, there are several possibilities for why sound is disrupted, not least being that the incoming sounds just get their frequency messed with. Jostling is still a distinct possibility, though. - We know some things about how jostling works on a more general level. Jostling theoretically predictable, realistically chaotic: The deflection objects suffer when passing through time bubbles is also proportional to the bubble's compression factor: so a 1.5x time bubble would deflect objects less than a 15x one. Deflection proportional to compression factor of bubble Richochet effect Brandon's response to the punching question (which response I, of course, neglected to give my full attention to because of course) gives some hint as to what factors influence the jostling. His talk of "losing momentum" and use of the word "ricochet" both suggest that the effect is a function of the speed and/or mass of the object. One aspect of jostling we don't know is if the angle and/or force of this jostling is a function of the size or the speed of the exiting object. We also don't know if the angle that an object hits the edge of the bubble at matters. -- When all's said and done, we know frustratingly little about how jostling behaves upon that moment of exiting the bubble, or its deeper implications. We do have Brandon saying: Leaving bubbles causes unique/rare effect: He then laughed and said "That won't make any sense for 10 books" This leads me to believe that this might be related to the FTL travel. So something worth talking about is happening here. Something "unique or rare", in fact. (x2.3) Edge-case physical interaction: In terms of thought experiments, odd things happen when you have moving objects that are accelerated/decelerated by time bubbles when they run into objects that are too big to be included in them. What happens if you have someone on a train who's trying to "go" 10x faster because he's in a bendalloy bubble that the train doesn't acknowledge? Example 1: So Wayne is on a train, leaning against a wall in the direction that the train is traveling, going 60 mph. He casts a bendalloy bubble which takes the ground as its frame of reference. The bubble doesn't stay with him for long, but what happens while he's there is the concern. The bubble is tied to the planet, so it sees Wayne going 60 mph and tries to boost him to 600 mph relative to the rest of the world. Now the train is too big to be part of the bubble, so that wall Wayne is leaning against is still going normal speed, only 60 mph so far "rest" relative to the planet is considered. So bullet-Wayne is now trying to go 540 mph into a solid, unmoving wall for at least a few tenths of a second. Does he go kersplat? If he were in the bubble for longer (say it was bigger), would his corpse be actively pushing the train forward, what with it's non-slowing, continuous energy input? -- Now this example might not work because perhaps even a small bendalloy bubble within the train is still enough to trigger the train's "NO Wayne, don't go into the bubble!" response. So let's modify it: Example 2: So Wax is steel jumping along outside a train, going the same speed as it in an essentially straight line. Let's say he runs into a (stationary, relative to the planet) speed bubble. If he's above the train, then he'll zip along for a moment and fall out, having moved ahead relative to the train. Same if he's next to the train or far enough behind it. But what if Wax is, say, one foot behind the train at this point in time? If Wax were alongside the train, he'd find himself a bit ahead of its caboose when he exited the bubble. But in this case he's behind it, and now approaching the train at 60 mph. Is he going to faceplant into the train? It seems he should, really. And there's no justification to say he's "on" the train, since he's flying along outside of it has been for quite awhile. Yet it seems odd, as in the earlier example, for someone affected by a bubble to directly collide with an object not affected by it, where this occurs collision solely because Wax is being affected by the bubble and the train isn't. -- This problem exists in many forms, especially if you start going all frame of reference on it. I do not have rock-steady and fully satisfying solution, but I think my "belonging" thread generated by the Occupancy section up above (x2.1) might give some insight into a possible answer. The concept is that Wax doesn't get splattered as soon as he hits the back of the train because as soon as he comes into contact with it he counts as being "on" it, or at the very least as a part of it. If the train is big/weighty/rooted enough that it isn't affected by the time bubble, then it's also weighty enough to pull Wax onto it immediately and cancel out the effects of the bubble. (x2.3.1) Occupancy of clothing and held objects: This is likely the exact same way that clothing and/or held items behave for time bubbles. While I have my whole thread on the matter, I have yet to address what happens to clothing when people touch time bubbles. I think it intuitive and natural that their clothing is included in the speedup/slowdown as well. It wouldn't do to have a "pulled out of his socks" situation it a man poked a time bubble with his finger while running by. So perhaps the mans clothing is included in the direct, "this is part of the human's Cognitive aspect" sense. It's a bit more of an open question whether held-items (like weapons) would have the same privilege. However this "part of me"-ness is acquired, there's a good intuitive case to be made that it's near-instantaneous, at least so far as bubble occupancy is concerned. If Wax sticks an arm out to grab a gun a moment before the rest of him flies through the bendalloy bubble, we wouldn't necessarily expect that gun to rip itself out of his hand. We wouldn't expect individual nuts and bolts on a train to try and fly off as the they ran through a cadmium bubble just because they were put onto the train during maintenance yesterday. We wouldn't even necessarily expect spare parts lying on the floor of the train, still waiting to be installed, to have such a "fly off into the air" reaction. Another point to make is that I would think a man wearing gloves who touched the edge of a bubble with only the gloves might get included, as the gloves are a part of him. That one's a tad in the air, though, as to whether the "part of me" extends so deeply. We wouldn't expect someone whose shirt got cut by a Shardblade to feel pained by it, after all. (x3) Bubble interaction: Time bubbles can overlap each other. This results in... odd things. First of all, they overlap "like a Venn diagram": Overlap Venn diagram Cancelling only in area of overlap: Moreover, their timey-wimey effects are multiplicative: Overlap multiplicative There was also an interesting question relatively recently about whether nested bubbles directly interfered with each other's borders. It was RAFO'd, sadly. Nested bubble size interaction: Then we have the world's largest RAFO culled from reddit: RAFO on nested bubbles: So that's all fine and dandy. They overlap multiplicatively like Venn diagrams. This results in a little oddness with subjective burn rates (as expanded on just below), but it all makes a decent amount of sense on its own. The problem arises when bubbles don't share the same (approximately, at least) frame of reference. (x3.1) Subjective burn rates: In the normal course of events, Marasi is going to burn x grams per second of cadmium relative to her timeframe. So even if you put shuffle her in and out of various time bubbles, she'll always have the experience of burning cadmium at the same rate. Subjective burn rates There's still the question of whether bubblers somehow manage to get extra energy when they're enveloped by slow bubbles. Myself I would guess "yes" (call it feeding off the energy of the slow bubble or something), if only because Peter was so insistent on nothing "weird" happening in the other case. (x3.2) Competing bubble effects: Note: This subsection in particular is nearly all rampant speculation, so take it with a grain of salt. Overlap with regards to time is a no-brainer. Maybe relativity makes things a tad odd here and there, but as a whole you just multiply things together (~X/1 for bendalloy bubbles and ~1/Y for Cadmium) until you get the rate that time flows. Movement, though, is a scary story. Very scary. I have a big fat thread on the matter. It turns out that it's wrong in several of the details due to the PAFO-clarification WoP about the cork up above. The general idea is still sound, I think: I think it likely that how an object's movement through space is altered by time bubbles is a function of taking the movement vectors and compression factors of overlapping bubbles into account and multiplying them together to get a single vector of movement for the encompassed object. i.e., two speed bubbles with the same compression factor moving at right angles to each other will see an object moving off at 45 degrees as they try to drag the object along with them. Objects assume this altered vector of movement for as long as they're encompassed, and then resume their normal inertia upon exiting the bubbles. If they exit one bubble and are still within another, then simply stop accounting for that first bubble's effects on our object's movement. Keep doing this until you're not in any bubbles at all and congratulations, you're back in real time/space. This raises some questions in regards to how "real" the movement-altering effects of time bubbles are. Given all the talk we have from Peter and Brandon about time bubbles actually adding/removing kinetic energy from objects (like this one), we can fairly safely conclude that time bubbles actually quite actively invest and rob objects of kinetic energy going in various directions. This gives some credence, I think, to the idea that all we have to do is some vector math to figure out how overlapping bubbles parse it out. (x4) Reality of time bubble effects: It seems there is a subset of the community who have some degree of doubt over the "reality" of time bubbles, at least to some extent. Do time bubbles actually accelerate the passage of time, or do they just simulate it in part? If they just simulate it, to what degree do they do so? Myself I've always historically operated under the working assumption that the effects of time bubbles were fully "real" unless proven otherwise, but it's worth making sure of. Our first evidence of time bubble reality is Peter's age-old kinetic energy WoP, reproduced here for convenience: Loss of kinetic energy: This establishes the altered motion of objects within bubbles as "real" motion, not just some inertia-less scuttling about of objects. More recently, we've gotten a few more pieces of information. We know that the effects of aging and the passage of time can be accelerated by bendalloy bubbles: Accelerated aging (paraphrase): Watches need to be reset: The inverse also applies for cadmium bubbles. Cadmium hermit can time-capsule self: The most direct answer we have on the matter is sadly a paraphrase: Cadmium affects time, not perceptions (paraphrase): Together I believe these add up to a pretty firm weight on the "time bubbles really affect movement and time" side of the scale, but it's still and open question to an extent. (x5) Conscious control of bubble attributes: Exactly how much control "bubblers" have over their bubbles is a bit of an open question. We have a (somewhat vague, sorry about that, he was understandably tired/distracted and I was also tired) WoB addressing the matter directly: Degree of control, but only before casting My reading here is that Brandon's "not very much" at the beginning was directed at the "after the bubble is up" portion of the question, leaving us the still-not-very-promising "some discretion" at the end to apply to during the casting. Fear not, though! At the very least, this quote shows us that there is some degree of control over both compression factors and size at the moment of casting; added to this is the new fact that that "not very much" is a distinctly larger amount than "none" with regards to altering bubbles when they're up, though it's still in the air if it's entirely a matter of degree or if there's also differences in kind. Myself, I read the quote as saying that it's both, mainly with bubblers only being able to alter compression factors a bit via burn rate once the thing is up. - Later attempts to get more information bore little fruit. Bubble size/strength more controllable than shown, size not inverse to strength: - As a general overview, we know from the Era 2 books that bubbles don't (normally) move with their casters, and we also know that the bubbler leaving the bubble "pops" it. Moreover, both the Mistborn Adventure Game (a dubious source, but worth looking at) and the implications within the books suggest that the size of the bubble cannot be changed once it's been cast. So Wayne can't grow and shrink his bubbles however he pleases. The MAG would also have us believe that the "compression factor" of time bubbles—the factor by which they slow or speed time/movement—is set once the bubble is created. This is somewhat up in the air, though. This quote tells us that flaring the metal can give a greater compression factor. The question, then, is whether Wayne's bubble would have collapsed if he stopped flaring (going down to just a normal burn) or whether it's compression factor would simply have dropped. Myself I'm inclined to think that it's the latter. If not, though, then that tells us that bubblers can mess with their bubble's attributes, at least to some degree, even after casting them. I doubt this because of how "bubbler independent" these bubbles generally come across as, but it is a genuine possibility. Beyond being able to flare for increased compression factors, we have this quote about bubble size: Strength determines size This implies rather strongly that flaring could also be used to increase the bare size of bubbles as well as increasing compression factors. While originally I'd thought that there might be a tradeoff/inverse relationship between the size and compression factors of bubbles, the bubble size/strength WoB above looks to put the kibosh to that scheme. The possibility of misinterpretation/misunderstanding still leaves open the possibility of a super-small cadmium bubble being able to slow time to near stand-still or the like, but it's unlikely barring future, more expansive WoB. (x6) Effects of duralumin/nicrosil: Brandon has historically been suspiciously coy about what would happen when you use duralumin/nicrosil in combination with the external temporal metals. RAFO's are the order of the day. But we can extrapolate a bit from our above discussion of the extent to which bubblers can consciously determine the attributes of their bubbles. One thing to pay particular attention to in this context is how duralumin/nicrosil flares normally work: They compress all the power of the metal down into a split second. Not a singular point in time (because that's impossible and it would result in a hyper-steelpushing Vin exploding), but some very small interval during which the power rips out of the Allomancer all at once. Tied to this is the fact that burn rates are subjective to the bubbler, as discussed above. To get back to duralumin/nicrosil bursts, though, this information about subjective burning suggests quite strongly that a bursted-bubbler should only experience the normal "instant" of super-flaring. This means, for one, that we can't expect a nicrobursted Slider to get 10 hours on the inside to 100 on the outside or the like, since he'd have to be burning the metal for 10 hours subjective in that case. Besides running afoul of (reasonable, I think) interpretation of the subjectivity WoP, anything else would just be rather odd. Otherwise, we could end up with a time bubble that is no longer being sustained by the burning of metals, it seems, and the duration of which is oddly both too much in- and too much out-of the control of the Slider: he cannot stop burning bendalloy to cancel the bubble, yet he can still walk to the edge and "pop" it well before the bendalloy he's already burned has run its course. -Recall that, in the normal course of things, bubblers can just stop burning their metal at any time to drop the bubble. Not so in super-ultra-weird bursted bubbles that take a long time to run out subjective. - Assuming short subjective experiences, then, we have a few options to explore. In both cases, there are only two places all the extra energy from the duralumin/nicrosil flare can go to: increasing the compression factor or increasing the size of the bubble. Both are valid options, I would argue, because of what we've already seen about more powerful Allomancers making bigger bubbles, as well as flaring being able to increase compression factors. To avoid the "10 hour 'instant'" problem, any increase in compression factors must be... dramatic. For bendalloy, it'd have to be such that the Allomancer only experiences an exceptionally short interval. This means that you need to burn up all of the bendalloy in that short time and speed yourself up accordingly. This results in a situation where Wayne experiences 0.5s while the outside world experiences 0.00000000005s or the like. For cadmium, it'd be similar, though you can get a tad more utility out of it. Because the only time we have an upper limit on is the subjective experience of the bubbler, Marasi could experience 0.5s to 5000s on the outside, or the like. Alternatively, I think that we could maintain our usual compression factors (or at least something close to them) while pouring most of the extra energy into increasing bubble size. So you'd still get the usual 1:20 or whatever it is, but over a much larger area. Alternatively alternatively, the WoB about size not being inversely proportional to power could be generously interpreted to mean that you can expand both the size and the power of a bubble for the same flat rate, without any additional cost to do one as long as you're already doing the other. -- Theoretically bursting a bubble could be either an option between these two sets of results for the bubbler or Brandon could have it such that one of the results (either compression factor increase or size increase) is "locked in" and happens automatically when you burst. I am highly doubtful that it's the second case. We've seen Vin be able to have quite a bit of choice/nuance in her flare usage before, such as when she targets specific objects for steelpushes. If it is the second option, then I would wager (quite heavily) that we're locked into increasing sizes rather than compression factors. I don't know about you, but I find the idea of magically passing half a second while the rest of the world passes a millionth of a second to be... unimpressive. There's nearly zero utility for Sliders in the case where duralumin/bendalloy locks you into increasing compression factors. Besides my just saying "ugh that's not cool so it can't be true", I don't think Brandon would be so storming coy about the matter if the effect was this lame. So, in conclusion, I find it likely that using duralumin/nicrosil in conjunction with the external temporal metals results either in the bubblers being able to allocate the energy freely between increases compression factors and increased size or in the bubble being automatically expanded in size. (x7) Effects on various magics, aluminum: Time bubbles interfere with "almost all forms of investiture," it seems. Time bubbles interfere with investiture This makes sense from a Doylist perspective because things get weird and complicated very very quickly if you start talking about over-time steelpushes and the like. Realmatically... I suppose we can swing it easily enough, given that it's known how investiture tends to interfere with other investiture, and time bubbles are essentially a big fat mess of investiture altering the entirety of reality within their sphere (pseudo-intentional pun). It's possible that there's more to it than just investiture conflict, though... Some magics can bypass the interference of bubbles: Emotional allomancy works through bubbles because it's "over the top": This WoB is a bit unclear, but my interpretation here is that emotional allomancy operates on a Spiritual level, and in so-doing bypasses the timey-wimey effects of time bubbles. This is interesting because it implies that the way that time bubbles normally interfere with investiture is more a side-effect of their manipulation of time/space rather than a direct impact of the presence of the bubble. - We also we have this pseudo-RAFO on atium. Time bubbles likely affect atium in interesting ways Not much to see here, except the fact that it would be cool to see means that something likely happens besides just "oh the bubble interferes and you can't see anything outside of it." - Then there's aluminum. How exactly aluminum interacts with time bubbles is unknown, but it's generally a good bet that aluminum is going to do something screwy to just about any magic system, especially in Allomancy. We do have a bit on the matter. First, a RAFO: Aluminum RAFO Then a very confusing recording with an asker-approved paraphrasing: Aluminum creates dead space: (heavily paraphrased from a recording with approval by the question-asker, for clarity) If we're to take this WoB at face value, it looks like you could wrap yourself in aluminum foil and stroll through time bubbles without being affected by them. Which would be weird for essentially everyone involved, and suggests that aluminum bullets would also be unaffected. (x8) Faster than light (FTL) possibilities: Ah, FTL. The thing I tend to rant about the most. Brandon has stated multiple times that the third Mistborn trilogy will be a space opera where Scadrians have figured out how to get FTL using Allomancy/Feruchemy. Moreover, on later occasions (such as a WoB I'll be quoting shortly) he's narrowed it down to "Allomantic FTL". So we know that Allomancy is at the very least directly involved in enabling FTL, and it's quite likely that you can get FTL using only Allomancy and no Feruchemy. It remains to be seen whether the "mechallomancy" that they use on Southern Scadrial is at all involved, perhaps enabling bigger/more nuanced versions of known magical effects. --- Time bubbles are the natural place to look for FTL, then, because they change the nature of space-time, as many of the more plausible theoretical and sci-fi FTL-enablers do. The laws of physics in the cosmere are ours barring Spiritual shenanigans, so we still have to worry about relativity and can't rely on the infinite mechanical energy from Feruchemical iron or the like to get the job done. We have some quotes on the matter: Lost energy Several years later, Brandon PAFO'd the following question, leading to this eventual answer: Subjective burn rates How delightfully ambiguous of you, Peter. :\ Now Brandon had to initially PAFO the question, suggesting that this answer wasn't on the top of his mind and thus that it's not related to FTL. But there's also the possibility that yours truly simply managed to phrase it in a confusing manner. Brandon's initial PAFO was fairly fast, best characterized as "my give up" as the question was put to him verbally. Subjective burn rate PAFO: So it remains a possibility that these two answers are in fact linked as, as a first-blush look at their very similar diction suggests, and that this kind of subjective burn rate question is linked to FTL. Or not. Ambiguity. (x8.1) How I think FTL would work with time bubbles: I have multiple threads on this matter. The most recent (and only even possibly accurate one) can be found here. But I will summarize its points. Basically, you want to take advantage of how time and movement come uncoupled with time bubbles. You take a spaceship, accelerate it to some relatively fast but still reasonable speed (some very small fraction of the speed of light), and then do some shenanigans with time bubbles. What you want to do is encompass the entire ship in a bendalloy bubble which is anchored at a point moving, from your point of view, in a direction directly opposite that which you want to go. So if I'm moving from A to B, I want to start moving towards B and anchor my bubble on A. That'll get you accelerated movement. The ship will move at speed-relative-to-bubble-anchor * compression factor. Even if that gets you over the speed of light, the ship doesn't care because subjectively it's all good and not violating any physical laws or the like. You'll also need to encompass the ship in a cadmium bubble that, quite crucially, is stationary relative to the ship. This so that you can offset the extra time the ship/crew would normally experience in the bendalloy bubble. So now instead of the crew seeing the rest of the universe crawl by, they see it move by super fast. This works because the cadmium bubble shouldn't affect the movement of the ship through space at all (since it's anchored to the ship). Of course bendalloy bubbles are normally very small, so another thing I want to do is use nicrosil to increase their size for a second or so, just enough time for our ships to "teleport" (which is what this'll look like, essentially, from the outside) the length of the bubble. This being the effect of Allomantic nicrosil, as well as some ability to anchor bubbles at will and at different places depending on the user are both needed for this to work. - If Allomantic nicrosil fails us, we likely need to fall back to mechallomancy. So far as anchoring goes, I'm quite confident that out of all the options we have from up in the Anchoring portion of this post at least one of them will work out well enough. One example of anchoring that might work is the "cutting" WoB up above. Brandon was quite specific that the bubbles get their frame of reference from what they're cutting through: what the edge of the bubble is intersecting. So all we have to do is have the cadmium bubble intersect the ship and the bendalloy bubble intersect only the interstellar medium and we're golden. Some more thoughts on how the interstellar medium would perceive itself here, though most of our concerns on this score are actually overridden by a recent WoB stating definitively that (just about) all matter in the cosmere is at least a bit sentient, meaning that even little interstellar dust specks that no one's ever seen have some kind of Cognitive aspect: one that I would bet sees itself as "still" just like everything else in the universe acts like. - Here's Brandon's comment on the matter, insofar as I was able to ask him about it: FTL needs Nicrosil and/or time bubbles This is reassuring in that at least some part of my framework seems to be on track, but the "haven't figured it out yet" is troubling. In regards this "haven't figured it out yet" problem, we have a few other WoB's to look at. Missing big piece for FTL Quite awhile after this WoB, Aeromancer was kind enough to ask these questions: Unseen Allomancy required for FTL: Historically my hope here was that the missing Allomantic ability (that "very big important piece", it seems) was nothing more or less than something that enabled bubblers to anchor their bubbles in different locations. But given recent developments that suggest that it's fairly easy to mess with anchors, that might not be it. Another trick might just be using mechallomancy to manage bubble size/timing and the like, though the extent to which that represents "Allomantic abilities" is doubtful. (x8.2) Mechallomancy and time bubbles: As we saw in Bands of Mourning, mechallomancy plays very well with time bubbles. Marasi was finally able to live out her dream of trapping people in place in her slow-bubble as she laughed with glee, Wayne was able to toss his speed bubble around, etc. The question, then, is how this might interact with FTL. After all, what's a good sci-fi yarn without a redlined engine with exotic fuel, the sabotage of which leaves our intrepid crew stranded on a strange world? The immediate thought is the potential for different answers to the anchoring problem (might you be able to manufacture primer cubes that "think" they have one or another frame of reference?) or the potential to turbo-charge a cube for big/fast bubbles. Satsuoni, though, raised the interesting idea of just periodically tossing a bendalloy-primed cube out ahead of your ship as a way of getting a not-anchored bubble to travel through. Pick it up after you pass by, rinse, repeat. We have some more recent WoBs also suggesting at mechallomancy as a component of FTL. It's still unclear whether it's strictly necessary or just useful for practical applications (i.e., if you could zip along a life-boat sized ship with a team of perfectly trained Allomancers, but to do anything bigger/better you need some machine-precision/scale). Merger of magic and technology for FTL: Contemporary trilogy tech hints at FTL: (x8.3) Disclaimer: I would also like to note that I am not the only thinker in this field. Others have proposed theories talking primarily of using bubbles to achieve Alcubierre-style effects, and there are a few more out-there theories. Myself, I suppose an Alcubierre drive could certainly do the trick, it's just that my level of physics-brain, as well as my understanding of time bubbles, doesn't seem to imply that that's something you can get with time bubbles as we know them. ---- Fair warning that this section is by far the most "Kurkistan is a narcissistic monster" part of this thread—a thread which is already devoted to essentially saying "now listen up. I know everything so sit down and listen", so raising the level of egocentrism is an impressive feat. If you disagree with my conclusions here, then I wouldn't say that you're just going against the fundamentals of how time bubbles work. For the rest of the thread, though, I must say that I've yet to see any other cogent and plausible analysis of all the details. If only because I immediately jump at anyone who tries to develop one and spike-out their knowledge. (x9) Realmatics: Talk of Realmatics is for another thread, I think. I still have yet to really dig my teeth into this aspect of time bubbles (which is somewhat ironic coming from me), so most anything I put here would be new theorizing, not tested by time and thought/criticism as just about everything else in this thread has been. So, in short, we know that whether or not you're "in" a bubble is governed by the Cognitive on some level. We know that there's likely something Spiritual going on with how bubbles get "anchored," not least because "connectiony" things are nearly always Spiritual. There's also fairly good evidence that the movement-altering effects of time bubbles are "real" in the sense that sped-up objects actually have extra kinetic energy, rather than just sliding about due to magical shenanigans without any change in their intrinsic inertia, given Peter's comments on the matter. Whether this means that the change is Physical is not 100% clear, though. Most else, I think, is speculation that someone (probably me, given historical precedent) will get to at another time. (xCn) Conclusion: So thank you for your time. That's about all I can think of off the top of my head. I'll incorporate anything I missed if I think of it or someone brings it to my attention. In particular, please feel free to point out any parts of the original draft that I modified/excised inappropriately, if they catch your eye. If you came here because I threw a link at you in some random thread: Did I answer your question? (xAr): WoB Archive: For archiving purposes, here are all time bubble- and (possibly) FTL-related WoB's and WoP's I know of/can remember. Not all of these are referenced in the main body of the post. Change List: Re-wrote into version 2.0 after SoS and BoM - 1/09/2017 Added WoB on time bubbles affecting time - 2/11/2017