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Intresting property of Investiture, maybe.


Frustration

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So I've been thinking about this WoB lately

Spoiler

Questioner

Why does Stormlight make things cold?

Brandon Sanderson

It’s not the Stormlight, it’s condensation because something is going directly from a gas into a solid. The coldness is caused by that, it’s not necessarily that the Stormlight is making things cold, but that the Shardblade is condensing.

Boskone 54 (Feb. 17, 2017)

And something has really been bothering me about it.

Deposition is an exothermic process, so the area around a shardblade being formed should get really hot, not cold.

Therefore I propose that highly invested substances go through the states of matter in reverse order.

Starting as a gas and then becoming a liquid and then a solid as they are heated.

This is more ambient speculation than my more serious theorizing but I felt like putting it out there.

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Good idea! I personally don't know enough about states of matter and how they change (although  I really should) to say anything about this, but from your reasoning, that sounds about right. Maybe that would explain how the mists in Mistborn only came out at night? It got colder, so the maybe liquid form that they were in evaporated into gas. That would also explain why they didn't stay indoors. Indoors is warmer! Maybe they didn't disappear, just condensed into tiny liquid droplets. 

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I'm struggling to find the WoB, but I thought we had heard at one point that liquid was the most potent state of materialized investiture. It seems to me that if the order is different from normal materials, then the phase order would be gas -> solid -> liquid. Which is honestly really weird. But I definitely like the way you're thinking and you're probably onto something.

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38 minutes ago, HSuperLee said:

I'm struggling to find the WoB, but I thought we had heard at one point that liquid was the most potent state of materialized investiture. It seems to me that if the order is different from normal materials, then the phase order would be gas -> solid -> liquid. Which is honestly really weird. But I definitely like the way you're thinking and you're probably onto something.

I couldn't find that one, but I did find this about temperature, and it's . . . a thing.

Spoiler

BlackYeti

Can I ask you about the body of a Shard in the Physical Realm? About the different states of matter. What determines the state of matter that they are in? Because I've been reading the bits very carefully, and I haven't noticed much in terms of temperature difference.

Brandon Sanderson

The idea for me working on this was that they transcend-- They permeate everything, right? They permeate all life on all the Realms. And that there are manifestations of them that leak out, and it's kind of like they make-- they appear there in the various states but-- When you say that you've got the gas, you've got the liquid, you've got the solid: but you've also got inside of you, and inside of that plant, and like-- they're everywhere. And so what determines it? In my head it's just like when some of that power permeates, some of it distills, just like water. There's some water in the air, there's some that freezes: that's temperature. But it's not always temperature whether it's in the air, or whether it's falling. Imagine a Spiritual version of humidity, that is influenced by what's happening on the Spiritual Realm and the Cognitive, and that's what you'll get.

Manchester signing (Aug. 6, 2014)

 

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There's always the hacky solution of "energy is siphoned into the Spiritual," the eternal crutch for fudging cosmere physics.

I'm not saying that is the case here, mind, but that it's a possible solution.

I suppose the likeliest explanation is that Brandon got the physics wrong, given the answer.

However, the Blade should still be cold, ergo condensation should happen, even if we don't know what happens to the rest of the physics.

 

¤_¤

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6 hours ago, Frustration said:

There's some water in the air, there's some that freezes: that's temperature. But it's not always temperature whether it's in the air, or whether it's falling. Imagine a Spiritual version of humidity, that is influenced by what's happening on the Spiritual Realm and the Cognitive, and that's what you'll get.

And now every line by Fuzz makes twice as much sense.

Spoiler

“But yes, here. Like dew collects, my power gathers in that spot. It is natural. A cycle: clouds, rain, river, humidity. You cannot press so much essence into a system without it congealing here and there.”

Spoiler

“Yes, it congeals here,” Preservation said. “It has to do with the way men think, and where they are likely to pass. Somewhat to do with that, at least.”

Twice as much sense isn't much sense at all, sadly, but it's something.

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7 hours ago, Frustration said:

So I've been thinking about this WoB lately

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Questioner

Why does Stormlight make things cold?

Brandon Sanderson

It’s not the Stormlight, it’s condensation because something is going directly from a gas into a solid. The coldness is caused by that, it’s not necessarily that the Stormlight is making things cold, but that the Shardblade is condensing.

Boskone 54 (Feb. 17, 2017)

And something has really been bothering me about it.

Deposition is an exothermic process, so the area around a shardblade being formed should get really hot, not cold.

Therefore I propose that highly invested substances go through the states of matter in reverse order.

Starting as a gas and then becoming a liquid and then a solid as they are heated.

This is more ambient speculation than my more serious theorizing but I felt like putting it out there.

Deposition of physical gases into physical solids is exothermic in that  the thermal energy being pulled off has to lower the temperature of the gas enough to result in deposition. So, the exothermic heat removal is the cause and the deposition of gas into solid is the effect. I'm not sure that would translate directly in this scenario.

First, investiture is a separate <thing> in the Cosmere (Matter, Energy and Investiture) which would imply that gaseous Investiture is not entirely the same as gaseous matter

Here we seem to have the cause and effect reversed. The gaseous Investiture is "condensing" (Brandon's term which does not seem analogous to the state change of gas into liquid) into its solid form [cause], and there is a temperature drop in which water vapor condensation/deposition into droplets/frost (which does seem analogous to the natural condensation/deposition process) occurs [effect].

So, is deposition of Investiture endothermic as you suggest; or does the process merely convert Thermal Energy to help the investiture make a simultaneous physical state change and realmatic change (moving from SR to PR, while "condensing" into gas)?

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I think there are two different things going on here: Investiture 'pooling' in the Physical realm, and the mist -> solid Shardblade transition.

I think Fuzz/Leras/Preservation's "like dew collects" is talking about the first. This is mostly liquid Investiture, not solid like a Shardblade, but it is pooling in the Physical Realm at a Perpendicularity. Normally the Investiture belongs in the Spiritual Realm, but it is collecting in the Physical in this case.

I think that's what "some of it permeates, some distills" means. It starts in the Spiritual, permeating everything on Scadrial. But some 'distills' into the Physical, appearing as Mist/Ruin-mist, Well-liquid, or atium/lerasium.

The "Spiritual version of humidity" might be what causes that 'distilling' to happen- a certain Investiture threshold that creates a Perpendicularity that naturally causes Physical Investiture to form. It might also determine the state, at least liquid being more concentrated than gas.

Atium can probably be melted by conventional temperature, though, since malatium is an alloy of it.

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