Posted June 9, 2014 (edited) 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: Quote Q.Zas678- I’ve got a question kind of based off of the train fight. If you have a time bubble, and you were to make it while you are on the train, would the time bubble move with the train, or would it stay at the same spot relative to the planet? A. Time bubbles don’t move, so it would pull you out of it, then it would vanish. Q. (Mi’chelle)- If you were to pop up a time bubble and someone were to be stuck halfway in and halfway out, would they go splooch? A. No, they would be in the time bubble. The time bubbles will move with the planet but not with the train. Q. Yeah, I always thought it was relative to the person creating the time bubble. A. No, you’ll see Wayne create one, then he’ll walk up to the perimeter, but if he leaves it, it ruins the time bubble. Q. Zas678- So is that because it’s linked up to the spiritual gravitational bond between the planet? A. Yes, and you’re digging very deeply into stuff that I now can’t answer. Time bubbles have some weirdness to them that I don’t want to dig in too deeply, but yes. 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 Quote Kurkistan: Okay, so I'm contractually obligated to ask about time bubbles one more time [this is a lie]. Brandon: Yes. Kurkistan: So what's up with frame of reference for time bubbles; in that obviously if you make a bubble and it's still it's not really still, like time moves differently but- Brandon: We deal with that a little bit in Era 2 Book 2 [shadows of Self], where we talk about the fact that you know- obviously the bubble is moving with the planet. So they're not- the frame of reference is not absolute. Kurkistan: Yeah. Brandon: And so we talk about sorta' the idea of mass and momentum and time bubbles and things like that. Kurkistan: Okay <Fun fact: at this point I was content to go home (actually to a hotel because I didn't feel like falling asleep at the wheel on the way home, but that's another story), but then Brandon just kept talking, and saying very interesting things. > Brandon: For instance you can make a time bubble on a train. Kurkistan: Oh and it _stays_ on the train?! Brandon: Yes, but when you start catching stuff off of the train, it's gonna' _jar_ each time, and it's probably going to ruin your time bubble, right? Kurkistan: So does it get it's "anchor" from- it's asking all the things that are within it what they think "still" is? Brandon: Yes. That's a good way of looking at it. Frame of reference for the cognitive things around. Kurkistan: Okay; the things around or the things within it, specifically? Brandon: The things that it's cutting into, specifically, but yeah. 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 Quote Friend: So my quick question: Can you use Identity (I love the speed bubbles!) to anchor speed bubbles to yourself? Brandon: Uh, this is possible. That’s less a matter of Identity. What’s gonna happen there, like, the more someone uses the powers, the more familiar and intermingled with their soul the powers become, and they are able to accomplish things that others can’t. This would be like a mistborn learning to hover a coin, right, which they can do, but most think you can’t. That’s the sort of level we’re going with. Necarion: So a savant could? Brandon: A savant could totally do that. The problem is, things moving in and out of a speed bubble, there’s a transference of energy. This is how we keep speed bubbles from irradiating people when light moves through them, right, red shift. And so there’s a transfer of energy directly from the spiritual realm, which means that moving with a speed bubble, you’re gonna run into that, and it’s gonna be, it’s gonna cause all kinds of problems, but it would be possible Complexities of what affects anchoring Quote Q: Speed bubbles- A: Ehh these are the hardest ones... Q: We’ve seen them work and move with trains, we’ve seen them not work with carriages: is there a size requirement, or is it how they view themselves…? A: That’s a good question. So I build in this thing, right? I’m like “eh speed bubbles! Speed bubbles are cool!” but the Delorean problem, right? You’re like “I’m going to go back in time: to the middle of SPACE”, because the planet is in the same position, right? This is stuff that science fiction writers have been having fun with since the silver age of science fiction. So I’m like “alright, I need to deal with the Delorean problem.” And so I’m like alright, we’re going to have to say that frame of reference is a big part of it: so perception and frame of reference is a big part of it; and also _size_ of the thing that you’re on. So it would be _possible_ to use kind of cosmere cognitive training to get that speed bubble moving with you- and someone asked me a question about this on tour, I believe, so it would be in one of the reports—not this exact same thing, but “could they learn to move their speed bubble with them?”: and yes you can. Q: So it is how the allomancer views it, not how the thing views itself? A: That’s a _part_ of it. Partially how you view yourself, partially <garbled>. It’s really also mass. Big things- The speed bubbles required all kinds of physics-gymnastics—I’m sorry physicists—but once you start playing with time the stuff you gotta’ do… just crazy stuff you gotta’ do. We also got some nice in-book evidence from Bands of Mourning. BoM Ch 17 said: [Marasi tests the primer cube with cadmium on the moving carriage] “Marasi used a speed bubble while we were moving,” Waxillium said. “We hit the threshold and towed her out of it, popping the thing and lurching us from one time frame to the next.” “But, she used it on the train,” Steris said. “Speed bubbles move with you if you’re on something massive enough,” Waxillium said. “Otherwise, the spinning of the planet would pop you out of every one you made. The train was heavy and fast. The stagecoach is small and just slow enough. So—” “So I should have known better,” Marasi said, blushing. “I haven’t done that since I was a kid. But Waxillium, it buzzed.” 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. BoM Ch 17 said: They did as directed. Wax stood back. When Wayne ignited his metals, he suddenly became a blur inside his speed bubble. The cube zipped out an eyeblink later and soared through the air toward Marasi, deflected somewhat but still moving in the right direction. It engaged just before reaching [Marasi], and she became a blur, zipping over to pick up the cube, then zipping back. It took a count of ten before the cube stopped working, dropping her into ordinary time. 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: Quote Kurkistan: Kurk: So when that cork [in Bands of Mourning] was thrown above the train, if the cork had been thrown by someone who was standing _besides_ the train, what would have happened when the bubble hit [the cork]? So the bubble's moving at 60mph and the cork [is not moving laterally relative to the bubble] and gets hit by a bubble... Brandon: Right. Right right right... So... this one's complicated. Let me see if I can... So anything that touches the bubble will be immediately lodged into the bubble, and be hit by that... So say you throw something up, the bubble hits it, is that what you're asking? Q: Yeah. A: But it does not have "momentum" the same as the thing? So it would probably be in the bubble for a short time. Q: So if I threw the cork straight, and then the bubble came from the right, the cork would shift to the right within the bubble as the bubble thought it was moving or something? A: <thoughtful noises> Q: So the bubble thinks the cork is travelling like 60mph North, the cork thinks it's not moving at all... A: Yeah... Q: So does the cork move the opposite direction of the bubble or something? A: Ask Peter the math on that one, and I'll have him run the math. That one's kind of... it's kind of like the time travel train experiment stuff, with the flags and things. So let's go ahead and PAFO that one. Kurkistan to Peter: To restate the scenario in more understandable terms (phase 2 is to use diagrams, if it comes to it and I still don't manage to get it across): Say Cory the cork-thrower is standing besides a train track. Cory is facing North and the train is running from West to East. Cory tosses a cork North up over a passing train. Normally, this cork would go over the train and land on the ground directly opposite Cory to the North. From the frame of reference of Cory and his cork, the train is moving West->East. From the frame of reference of the train, the train isn't moving at all and the cork is moving both South->North and East->West (i.e., Northwest). So if we were to draw a line describing the cork's movement, Cory's line would have the cork moving South->North over a moving train. The train's line would have the cork travelling Southeast->Northwest as it described a diagonal across the train. If there's a bubble on the train, that's where things get complicated. When the bubble hits the cork, does the train's frame of reference "take over" so far as it's direction of travel goes? So far as the train is concerned, nothing really changes: the cork is still describing that same diagonal, just more quickly/slowly. But so far as Cory and his cork are concerned, all the sudden the cork is moving laterally (East->West) corresponding to the train's frame of reference. The question, then, is where the cork lands when all's said and done: does it still land directly North of Cory after it passes over the train, or does it land a bit to the West or East as well? ----- My thoughts/model on this would be that it also lands West/East. If the bubble was a bendalloy bubble, then the corks diagonal passage would be accelerated, meaning that it pops out of the bubble off to the West of where it would have otherwise. A cadmium bubble would still move the cork to the West according to its frame of reference, but because of how [the slow bubble] itself is in motion the cork would still end up East of Cory. Peter: The bubble's frame of reference would take over while it's inside. But you also need to include the fact that bubbles deflect things. The cork would be deflected both when it enters and when it leaves the bubble. So you can't completely predict the path it will take. - <At this point the conversation kept on for a bit as things grew... complicated. We misunderstood one another [which I take the blame for] on several crucial fronts and ended up talking past one another. Long story short is that I'd been implicitly assuming absolute relativity of reference frames in the cork-bubble system—so while both types of bubble would drag the cork along for a bit, that dragging would also be offset (to varying degrees based on bubble type/compression) by lateral movement of the cork within the bubble. This is wrong.> -Peter: If the train is moving east, and he throws the cork over the train, a bubble that slows the cork down will mean the cork ends up east of him. If the train is moving east, and he throws the cork over the train, a bubble that speeds the cork up will mean the cork ends up on the other side of the train faster than it would have with no bubble. It doesn't move west. If the speed bubble only very slightly increases the flow of time, then the cork could even end up slightly east of him, depending on the speed of the train. So depending on the speed or slowness of the bubble, and the speed of the train, the cork will either end up exactly where the thrower expects it to, but more quickly, slightly east of where he expects, but more quickly, or quite a bit east of where he expects, more slowly. The cork doesn't move west. 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. Let's do the math here. Say the bubble is 10 feet in diameter and the cork toss hits the bubble right in the center. He tossed the cork at 5mph. The bubble is 2x speed. That means the cork goes 10 mph across the train (measuring from the frame of reference of the tosser). The train is moving at 50 mph. The cork crosses the train in 0.682 seconds. In that time the train moves 50 feet to the east. So the cork ends up 50 feet to the east of where the tosser expected it to. If the bubble is 100x speed, the cork goes 500mph across the train, and in that time the train moves 1 foot. The cork ends up 1 foot to the east of where the tosser expected it to, but much faster than he expected. If the bubble is 1/2 speed, then the cork goes 2.5 mph across the train. The cork crosses the train in 2.727 seconds. In that time the train goes 200 feet to the east. The cork ends up 200 feet to the east of where the tosser thought it would end up. If the bubble is 1/100 speed, then the cork goes 0.05 mph across the train. The train moves 1.9 miles in the time it takes the cork to cross the train. The tosser has no idea where it ends up, but he watches it hovering over the train as the train goes off into the distance. ... As far as the cork is concerned, it can't tell the difference whether it's moving through a stationary bubble or a (laterally) moving bubble. From the cork's point of view it moves in a straight line either way. - <Some doodles got involved at one point or another, and it was also confirmed that the path of the cork (barring refraction) would stay the same once it left the bubble, still going directly north> 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: Quote Kurk: What exactly- When an object enters a time bubble, how exactly does it determine- how does it know how fast and which direction it's "really" going? Brandon: It gets deflected a little bit when it enters, but then it adapts to the momentum that it would have going in. Q: Like Spiritual bonds to something or other? A: Riiight <sounds hesitant> it's- so... I can't explain that because it has relevance in the future. But in that moment when it passes [into the bubble], something is happening with conservation of momentum. The trick we have to do with it in order to keep from irradiating people. 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 Quote Kurkistan: Last question: If Wayne was inside of a speed bubble and punches somebody who's standing outside it, what's happening with his fist and them: are they like sucked into the bubble, or what? Brandon: So, I have... So _exiting_ a speed bubble, while it's going, has _weird_ ramifications on lots of things. It would be really hard to punch somebody through a speed bubble- Kurkistan: So would the surface like distend around his fist- -<Illustrates with fist "stretching out" invisible film> Brandon: It's going to steal your momentum, but if you actually managed to do it, then- yes. Anything in the speed bubble that's touching through is counted as being as part of the speed bubble. Kurkistan: Okay, so the bubble would end here <Draws invisible surface in the air> and his fist would be out there <Illustrates by "punching" arm through the fake surface, demonstrating the fist extending past the bubble while he arm is within>, but still fast? Brandon: Yes. Kurkistan: Oh okay, thank you. Brandon: That's how I would imagine it so far. Kurkistan: But the bubble does _end_ at [the same place still, with the fist extending out past its boundary]. Brandon: The bubble does end, yes. Kurkistan: <Makes pleasantries and goes to leave> Brandon: And when you're punching through, it's going to- your momentum is gonna'- you're going to lose momentum and get a ricochet, because you're lurching from- <notices Kurkistan (very foolishly) acting like he's about to leave> anyway... I'll let you figure that one out on your own. 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) Quote Brandon: So, let’s talk about the realities of speed bubbles. I did research on this, and got different answers from people on what really should happen if you could slow time like this. One of the issues is that light doesn’t change speeds based on this sort of issue, so there was discussion of what things would look like inside looking out or outside looking in. It seems likely that there’d be some sort of red shift, and also that things might grow more dim inside a speed bubble. This is all really very theoretical, however, and so—in the end—I decided that there was enough disagreement among scientists with whom I spoke that it wouldn’t be glaringly irregular if I just had the shimmer at the borders and stayed away from dealing with speed of light issues. There’s a much larger issue dealing with slowed time that rarely gets addressed by this type of fiction. I considered using it, and it’s this: conservation of energy. Inside the speed bubble, Wax and Wayne are moving far more quickly, and therefore have a ton of kinetic energy compared to those outside of it. And so, a coin tossed from inside the bubble going outside would suddenly move with a proportional increase in speed (proportional to how much slower things were outside). In essence, speed bubble = railgun. This is dangerous for narrative reasons. I’ve often said that the limitations of a power are more interesting than the powers themselves. (It’s Sanderson’s Second Law of Magics: Limitations > Powers.) One of the reasons for removing Mistborn and Full Feruchemists from the setting was so that we could focus in on the usefulness of the individual powers in Allomancy and Feruchemy. That falls by the wayside if any of the individual powers become too strong on their own. I didn’t want Wayne to be able to slow time, then sit inside his bubble and leisurely pick off enemies one at a time. And so, I had to place strong limitations on the speed bubbles. (Much stronger limitations than on other aspects of Allomancy. Pushing and Pulling, for example, have their limitations based in solid science. With speed bubbles, I eventually decided that solid science made them way too powerful. So I had to change things.) Therefore, the rules became: No shooting/throwing things out of speed bubbles, no moving speed bubbles, and a required couple second cool-down between creating different speed bubbles. The first rule broke required objects to be deflected when leaving the bubble and that we have the bubble absorb excess kinetic energy when something leaves it. Disappointing for the scientists, I know, but it makes for a stronger story. This "loss of kinetic energy" is a general trend we can observe from the earliest days of time bubbles Loss of kinetic energy: On 12/22/2011 at 2:24 PM, PeterAhlstrom said: Not really. A bullet shot out of a speed bubble IS robbed of kinetic energy—not all of it, but just enough to slow it down to the speed it would have been moving at had it been fired outside the bubble in the first place. -- 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: Quote Necarion: One other speed bubble question. Is the speed of light the same inside and outside a speed bubble? Brandon: Um, yes. The speed of light is the same. Good question, you’re trying to figure out the FTL. Necarion: Also, it would eliminate the redshift if the speed of light… Brandon: If the speed of light were similar [Necarion’s note: there would be no redshift if the speed of light were directly proportional to the ‘speed of time’. Alas this theory doesn’t seem to be valid]. That’s one thing we considered, but it felt too unintuitive, plus it’s just not how I imagined things working. So, no it is not, but that’s a good question. It is something we considered. Friend: I just want to setup a lab in a speed bubble and do fun things. Light explanation a ways off Quote Kurkistan: Is there- have you come up with a Realmatic explanation for why light isn't affected by time bubbles besides handwavium "please don't burn people with microwaves"? Brandon: Peter's got one for us. 'Cause we were going to do redshift: like the actual original writing for it had redshifts; Peter's like "dude, you will microwave everybody"—I'm like "oh man". So the handwavium of that: there is a real- there is an actual explanation, but it- <at this point we decamp to the sidewalk outside the store> Brandon: What's the middle of this question? Kurkistan: Middle of the question was you were thinking about explaining the realmatics behind light for time bubbles. Brandon: Oh right, right right right right. I can't because it spoils future books; like that's spoiler for Mistborn... 10? Kurkistan/Argent: <Laughter> Brandon: So... if you count the four Alloys, so really gotta stay away from stuff like that. Kurkistan/Argent: That's fair/fine. 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 Quote Kurkistan: If you are standing inside of a time bubble, and throw a spear out of the bubble, what happens to that spear as it traverses the border of the bubble? Are different parts of the spear ever in different "time zones," going fundamentally different speeds? On that line of reasoning, what would happen to a train and its occupants if Marisi stood next to railroad tracks holding up a Cadmium bubble while that train sped by? Brandon: In general, a large object going through a time bubble is not going to notice. An object is either in or out, and it depends in part on how the object views itself. People inside the train would be inside of its influence, and wouldn't notice the bubble. The spear would go from one to the other, but would never be in both. 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 Quote KLOKKAN () Hello Mr. Sanderson, I have a question about bendalloy bubbles—what happens to a human that is partially in and partially out of the bubble when it's placed? Does the difference in the flow of time kill him? And, if yes, is the boundary of active bendalloy bubble effectively impassable for living organisms? I get that bullets shot out of the bubble randomly change directions, but what happens to, let's say, a person trying to jump out of the bubble (or, given enough time, a person trying to get inside)? BRANDON SANDERSON Any living thing touching the bubble is affected by the bubble. Included as soon as you touch: Quote [01:33:05] zas’ sister: If someone ran into a time bubble, like from the outside into it, what would-- Brandon: The moment they touch it they would be in it. - 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: On 6/9/2014 at 4:20 AM, Kurkistan said: So, to summarize, [my model where passengers ask the train whether or not they're affected by the bubble] leaves passengers in the train not "touching" the bubble proper because they don't really "interact" with it directly. At no point are they actually doing any work in assessing whether or not they're in the bubble: all they do is ask the train to make the call. When the passenger is in the train, he doesn't actually know whether or not he's touching the bubble because the only way he has to assess the question is asking his parent the train what the answer is. When the passenger is outside the train, though, the buck stops with the human and he is, in fact, "touching" the bubble with no Cognitive intermediary. Honestly I preferred distension to all of this, but given the WoB we have and assuming that I'm not drastically misinterpreting it (which I'm fairly sure I'm not), this seems the answer. (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: AoL Chapter 2 said: [speed] bubbles could be very useful, though not in the way most people expected. You couldn’t shoot out of them—well, you could, but something about the barrier interfered with objects passing through it. If you fired a shot in a speed bubble, the bullet would slow as soon as it hit ordinary time and would be moved erratically off course. That made it nearly impossible to aim from within one. AoL Chapter 10 said: Waxillium dropped out of Wayne's bubble of speed and hit real time, the shift jostling him. BoM Ch 8 said: Anytime something entered a speed bubble, it was refracted, changing trajectory. While it was unlikely one would get bounced so radically that it would point downward towards them, it was possible. There's also the possibility that jostling messes with sound, given this quote: Alloy of Law said: [Wayne put up a speed bubble.] Everything outside slowed--bullets stilled in the air, shouts vanished, the waves diffusing as they hit the speed bubble. That did strange things to sound. 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: Quote Friend: Now, do things actually move unpredictable at the edge [of a speed bubble] or do they refract out? Is it just that geometry is hard? Brandon: No, I have a level of unpredictability, I mean we’re Chaos Theory. The idea being, you could predict if you had a perfect closed system and things like this, but it’s unfeasible for most technology and minds to be able to predict. Friend: Thank you 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 Quote vorpal_username: ... Is the magnitude effect that causes bullets to go off course when entering a speed bubble proportional to the slowing/speeding of time in the bubble? For example, could I put up a very slight speed bubble (gaining me an extra second every few minutes) and get the same deflection as the ones used by Wane in the books? ... Brandon: ... In that case, the deflection is indeed proportional ... Richochet effect Quote [...] Brandon: And when you're punching through the speed bubble], it's going to- your momentum is gonna'- you're going to lose momentum and get a ricochet, because you're lurching from- <notices Kurkistan (very foolishly) acting like he's about to leave> anyway... I'll let you figure that one out on your own. 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: On 11/10/2011 at 0:35 PM, discipleofhoid said: At the signing I asked Brandon to personalize the book with a suggestion for a unique or rare effect that could be achieved with a metal. He signed Quote Watch for what happens when something leaves a bendalloy bubble. 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. On 6/9/2014 at 4:20 AM, Kurkistan said: Another expansionary point is that this might actually address the "man runs into pole at 500 mph" point I touch on in a few of my time bubble threads. The basic problem is that of a moving person who is trailing along a train (matching its speed) and then gets time-bubbled at 20x speed into the back of a train that is ignoring the time bubble. Does this man suffer damage from this collision? This "parenting" theory may solve this problem: potentially, the moment the man contacts the train his overriding "wait a minute, I'm now in contact with an object big enough that I consider myself to be 'on' it" is such that he begins to take his time-bubble-related ques from the train rather than his own body. So the man ends up painlessly coming to rest against the back of the train with no tangible impact, rather than going kersplat. 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 Quote Shardlet: A slider and a pulser are standing near each other and each put up a bubble. Neither is standing close enough to the other to be within the other's bubble, but they are near enough that their bubbles would overlap what effect would you have? Brandon: The bubbles would overlap and it would be like a Venn diagram (i.e., outside both bubbles-normal time, in sliders bubble-fast time, in pulser's bubble-slow time, in the overlap-normal time). Cancelling only in area of overlap: Quote [01:33:17] zas’ sister: So it said in the book that if Marasi and Wayne had it on at the same time-- Would it cancel it out all the way, or would it just cancel out where both of the bubbles were? Brandon: Where both of the bubbles were. zas’ sister: So it would be like-- Brandon: You could make a bubble in a bubble, yes. Third book of, which I think I’m officially changing to Era 1.5 to be less confusing [Editor's note: Confusingly, it's since been named Era 2], will have a moment where they try to do a time bubble in motion. zas: [bubble in a bubble] Brandon: Not that one, the motion one, so you’ll finally get some views on what’s going on. You get some rules on that. Moreover, their timey-wimey effects are multiplicative: Overlap multiplicative Quote QUESTION So what happens if you have a Bendalloy bubble, and then another Bendalloy bubble inside of it? BRANDON SANDERSON It will compound and double, and it will multiply. Bendalloy is one of the metals from Alloy of Law if you haven’t read it, as this person obviously has, or has read the Ars Arcanum, you’ll find out what it does. 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: Quote [1:36:00]: Q: If a Mistborn burned both cadmium and bendalloy, would the bubbles be exactly the same size? A: That is an excellent question that I am not going to answer just yet. Q: If they were the same size, would there still be a barrier between the area of normal time and the area of (maybe) distorted time? A: RAFO. In general, cadmium bubbles are bigger, but you can influence the size. Then we have the world's largest RAFO culled from reddit: RAFO on nested bubbles: Quote PathToEternity: Can Cadmium bubbles be nested if you have multiple Pulsers? Bonus Question: add in duralumin/nicrosil to the equation. Phantine: Yes. The effects multiply shinarit:Source I guess hiring 3-4 Pulsers before something you have to prepare for might be worth it. They create their bubbles one after the other at the same place, and boom, you have days instead of minutes. Ok, lets calculate. We don't have exact figures for cadmium, but we have for bendalloy: 2 minutes into 15 seconds, that's a ratio of 8. 4 Pulsers mean 84 = 4096 ratio. So 21 second for every day goes by for every day you spend in there. The outer Pulser burns this 168.75 second's worth of cadmium, the first inner one needs 22.5 minutes, the second inner one needs 3 hours and the innermost needs the 24 hours. So basically for every day spent in these bubbles you need ~27.5 hours worth of cadmium, depending on how routinely they set up the bubbles one after the other. PathToEternity: Wait, are you mixing up sliding and pulsing? I also think you are nesting your bubbles but not your pulsers, so you are losing a lot of efficiency not to mention practicality. Tell me if I'm misinterpreting what you're describing, but this is how I'm visualizing it: I'm saying that you get 4 pulsers huddled together and the one that can open the biggest bubble goes first. Then the next largest one pops his. Then the next. And finally the smallest bubble fires. In that scenario (unless there is something that prevents this) I picture it like this: This method, 170 days pass only burning 4 hours worth of cadmium. Well. I'm gonna do it. Gonna page /u/mistborn and ask: is this possible? Can time bubbles be nested like so and if they can do you truly get this kind of efficiency?crosses fingers Brandon: This one is a RAFO. 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 On 2/3/2014 at 3:52 PM, PeterAhlstrom said: Q: What happens when a Pulser is burning Cadmium and in a speed bubble? She'd be burning her Cadmium 20x faster than usual--so far as her bubble and those in it were concerned--and her slow bubble would extend far outside the area made "normal" by the effects of the speed bubble, so where does all that extra energy go? Peter: And for the other question, the extra energy goes the same place the energy from a certain other related thing goes. 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: On 12/22/2011 at 2:24 PM, PeterAhlstrom said: Not really. A bullet shot out of a speed bubble IS robbed of kinetic energy—not all of it, but just enough to slow it down to the speed it would have been moving at had it been fired outside the bubble in the first place. 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): Quote BeskarKomrk: When someone is inside a time bubble where time is going faster, do they age more quickly than they would outside? A: Yes. Q: So there's a sort of relativistic effect going on there? A: Yes, I tried to keep it as close as possible to the actual effects. The only thing I didn't include, I think, is the red-shift of light when it leaves the bubble, because that would irradiate everything around it. Watches need to be reset: Quote [0:12] Q: Given how much they futz with time, why doesn't Wax continually reset his watch? A: They really should have to, huh? That's a good reminder. I've never thought about that. The inverse also applies for cadmium bubbles. Cadmium hermit can time-capsule self: Quote [1:00:00] Alterodent: If a hermit were to take a whole lot of Cadmium and go off and live by himself, how far within a lifetime, reasonably, could he get into the future by essentially time-capsuling himself? A: <laughs thoughtfully> Q: Assuming they live to be 70 or 75. A: They could get pretty far. Q: What would the savantism do to them? A: The savantism would probably allow them to get further… It’s completely reasonable… you can treat this like relativistic travel. The most direct answer we have on the matter is sadly a paraphrase: Cadmium affects time, not perceptions (paraphrase): On 2/2/2017 at 0:56 PM, Bridge4AM said: Q: Does burning cadmium actually slow down time or just slow down the perception of time? (there was a bit more to the question but I was on the opposite end of the room) A: The answer was it does actually slow time. 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 Quote Kurkistan: So time bubbles again... How much control does a bubbler have over the bubble before and after it's cast? Can they just grow and shrink it or... Brandon: Not very much. Kurkistan: So Wayne could flare his metals make time go faster- Brandon: Yes. Kurkistan: But if he'd stopped flaring- Brandon: Yeah, but- they have a bit of control over the speed of it, but once it's up moving it or anything like that, not much. The flaring of it and things like that, yes they can- it's mostly set when they start. Kurkistan: But they have some discretion when they start it. Brandon: They do have some discretion , yes. 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: Quote [1:00:55] Kurk: How broadly can a time-bubbler control the attributes of the bubble? Like could he make it ten times smaller to make it ten times more powerful? A: It is more controllable than I have generally shown in the books. Q: And does the size correspond inversely to the strength? A: No. - 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. AoL Chapter 2 said: Waxillium poured himself some tea. Harms and the two women looked frozen as they sat on their couch, almost like statues. Wayne was flaring his metal, using as much strength as he could to create a few private moments. 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 Quote FEJICUS Is the size of speed bubbles affected by the strength of the allomancer? BRANDON SANDERSON Yes. 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 Quote Kurkistan: Speaking of time bubbles [Editors note: we were not speaking of time bubbles], can iron and steel and emotional Allomancy- Allomancy go beyond the boundaries of time bubbles; like if I'm inside a time bubble can I just like super steel push outside? Brandon: Oh, time bubbles interfere with almost all forms of 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": Quote [01:31:45] zas’ sister: If Wayne and Breeze, like if Wayne had a time bubble up and Breeze was inside Pushing on somebody’s emotions what-- Brandon: He could still make that work. zas’ sister: Would it affect it? Brandon: Not really. It wouldn’t dramatically affect it. You’re going to have one of these sort-of effects-- Yeah, because what he is doing is on another Realm, it’s not going to affect it. zas’ sister: Is that same with all [magics?] Brandon: Not necessarily. See what’s going on is if you are affecting things on the Cognitive Realm… zas: It’s kind of time-independent? Brandon: Yeah? That’s not really-- Really it’s the Spiritual Realm that is time-independent, right? All time and space are irrelevant once you reach the Spiritual. You’re kind of going to go over the top, it’s going to work just fine. In fact you can probably-- So he could use that to make his metals last a little bit better, probably. So that is a hack of the magic systems that you could probably do. 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 Quote QUESTION What happens if you burn atium at the same time as cadmium or bendalloy? BRANDON SANDERSON That would be really cool to see. 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 Quote Kurkistan: Speaking of interfering, if you shot an aluminum bullet through a time bubble, what would happen? Brandon: Oooooh, that's a _good_ question. I'm gonna' RAFO that one. It's an excellent question. 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) Quote [2:06:26]: Q*: If you dropped a speed bubble whose border goes through an aluminum tube, is the inside of the tube affected by the time distortion? A*: No, the bubble would go around the tube. 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 Quote ericpeters Mon Nov 14 @BrandSanderson You mentioned friday night in #Seattle Allomacy has "FTL" built into it, any more hints you can share on how that would work BrandSanderson Mon Nov 14 @ericpeters It involves where the lost energy from thermodynamic issues goes in certain Allomantic interactions.#torchat Several years later, Brandon PAFO'd the following question, leading to this eventual answer: Subjective burn rates On 2/3/2014 at 3:52 PM, PeterAhlstrom said: Q: What happens when a Pulser is burning Cadmium and in a speed bubble? She'd be burning her Cadmium 20x faster than usual--so far as her bubble and those in it were concerned--and her slow bubble would extend far outside the area made "normal" by the effects of the speed bubble, so where does all that extra energy go? Peter: [...] the extra energy goes the same place the energy from a certain other related thing goes. 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: Quote Um… Send me that one in writing and let me run it through Peter who is my physicist. 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 Quote Kurkistan: If I get a Slider, a Pulser, and a Nicroburst in a rocket with a lot of metal, do I have FTL? Brandon: Hehehehe. You're getting _closer_ but you haven't figured it out yet. 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 Quote QUESTION: With the technology advancing and going faster than light...? BRANDON: 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. QUESTION Okay, awesome, just wanted to double check that. JOSH: Expanding bubbles around the engines and around the ships? BRANDON: You will see, you will see. JOSH: Someone on the site actually has- BRANDON: Actually figured it out? JOSH: Has a very convincing theory. BRANDON: They’re missing a very big important piece of the puzzle that you won’t get for a few more books. Quite awhile after this WoB, Aeromancer was kind enough to ask these questions: Unseen Allomancy required for FTL: Quote Aeromancer: So would it be possible to use Steelrunning + compounding to travel FTL? Brandon: No, it would not. You could get close, though. Aeromancer: Kind of like Zemo's Paradox, than? You keep halving the distance, never quite making it? Brandon (gleam in his eye): Trying to crack Allomatic FTL? Aeromancer (guilty): Maybe. Brandon: You can't. Aeromancer: I don't know, there are alot of good theories out there. Brandon: It involves Allomantic abilities which we don't know about yet. 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: Quote [Leinton]: Can you use hemalurgy to power machinery? Brandon: He was initially confused as to what I meant, so I said I got the idea from thinking about FTL travel, and he said that it was a RAFO, but that I was thinking along the right lines, there needs to be a merger between magic and technology. Contemporary trilogy tech hints at FTL: Quote QUESTION If you were to use Allomancy to fly faster than light, would it be like the Navigators in Dune, where you pick out the best possible route through the stars? BRANDON SANDERSON No, good question though! That's not quite the way, I haven't given you the tools to figure it out, because I feel that the tools you need to figure it out, I couldn't give them to the characters. I wanted it to progress with the technological progress, so hints are only really brief in the story. You will not see a lot of this until the contemporary trilogy, when they are starting to figure out the technology for how this might plausible work out in the future. (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. Spoiler Begin spoiler Bubbles anchored by bond: Quote Q.Zas678- I’ve got a question kind of based off of the train fight. If you have a time bubble, and you were to make it while you are on the train, would the time bubble move with the train, or would it stay at the same spot relative to the planet? A. Time bubbles don’t move, so it would pull you out of it, then it would vanish. Q. (Mi’chelle)- If you were to pop up a time bubble and someone were to be stuck halfway in and halfway out, would they go splooch? A. No, they would be in the time bubble. The time bubbles will move with the planet but not with the train. Q. Yeah, I always thought it was relative to the person creating the time bubble. A. No, you’ll see Wayne create one, then he’ll walk up to the perimeter, but if he leaves it, it ruins the time bubble. Q. Zas678- So is that because it’s linked up to the spiritual gravitational bond between the planet? A. Yes, and you’re digging very deeply into stuff that I now can’t answer. Time bubbles have some weirdness to them that I don’t want to dig in too deeply, but yes. Conservation of momentum On 11/10/2011 at 0:21 PM, PeterAhlstrom said: There's an issue with conservation of momentum with speed bubbles. Loss of kinetic energy On 12/22/2011 at 2:24 PM, PeterAhlstrom said: Not really. A bullet shot out of a speed bubble IS robbed of kinetic energy—not all of it, but just enough to slow it down to the speed it would have been moving at had it been fired outside the bubble in the first place. Lost energy Quote ericpeters Mon Nov 14 @BrandSanderson You mentioned friday night in #Seattle Allomacy has "FTL" built into it, any more hints you can share on how that would work BrandSanderson Mon Nov 14 @ericpeters It involves where the lost energy from thermodynamic issues goes in certain Allomantic interactions.#torchat Leaving bubbles causes unique/rare effect: On 11/10/2011 at 0:35 PM, discipleofhoid said: At the signing I asked Brandon to personalize the book with a suggestion for a unique or rare effect that could be achieved with a metal. He signed Quote Watch for what happens when something leaves a bendalloy bubble. 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. Bubble occupancy Quote Kurkistan: If you are standing inside of a time bubble, and throw a spear out of the bubble, what happens to that spear as it traverses the border of the bubble? Are different parts of the spear ever in different "time zones," going fundamentally different speeds? On that line of reasoning, what would happen to a train and its occupants if Marisi stood next to railroad tracks holding up a Cadmium bubble while that train sped by? Brandon: In general, a large object going through a time bubble is not going to notice. An object is either in or out, and it depends in part on how the object views itself. People inside the train would be inside of its influence, and wouldn't notice the bubble. The spear would go from one to the other, but would never be in both. Frame of reference RAFO Quote Shardlet: You said previously that a slider's bubble is anchored to its position on Scadrial rather than on the slider's position or on the train (if the burner was on a train). If the slider was on a rock in space, would the bubble be anchored to a position relative to Scadrial, the rock or something else? Brandon: RAFO Overlap Venn diagram Quote Shardlet: A slider and a pulser are standing near each other and each put up a bubble. Neither is standing close enough to the other to be within the other's bubble, but they are near enough that their bubbles would overlap what effect would you have? Brandon: The bubbles would overlap and it would be like a Venn diagram (i.e., outside both bubbles-normal time, in sliders bubble-fast time, in pulser's bubble-slow time, in the overlap-normal time). No expansion in vacuum Quote Q: If a time bubble is raied in a vacuum, is the diameter larger than a bubble raised in atmosphere. A: No, atmosphere has no effect on bubble diameter. Overlap multiplicative Quote QUESTION So what happens if you have a Bendalloy bubble, and then another Bendalloy bubble inside of it? BRANDON SANDERSON It will compound and double, and it will multiply. Bendalloy is one of the metals from Alloy of Law if you haven’t read it, as this person obviously has, or has read the Ars Arcanum, you’ll find out what it does. Subjective burn rates On 2/3/2014 at 3:52 PM, PeterAhlstrom said: Q: What happens when a Pulser is burning Cadmium and in a speed bubble? She'd be burning her Cadmium 20x faster than usual--so far as her bubble and those in it were concerned--and her slow bubble would extend far outside the area made "normal" by the effects of the speed bubble, so where does all that extra energy go? Peter: And for the other question, the extra energy goes the same place the energy from a certain other related thing goes. FTL needs Nicrosil and/or time bubbles Quote Kurkistan: If I get a Slider, a Pulser, and a Nicroburst in a rocket with a lot of metal, do I have FTL? Brandon: Hehehehe. You're getting _closer_ but you haven't figured it out yet. Unseen Allomancy required for FTL: Quote Aeromancer: So would it be possible to use Steelrunning + compounding to travel FTL? Brandon: No, it would not. You could get close, though. Aeromancer: Kind of like Zemo's Paradox, than? You keep halving the distance, never quite making it? Brandon (gleam in his eye): Trying to crack Allomatic FTL? Aeromancer (guilty): Maybe. Brandon: You can't. Aeromancer: I don't know, there are alot of good theories out there. Brandon: It involves Allomantic abilities which we don't know about yet. Missing big piece for FTL Quote QUESTION: With the technology advancing and going faster than light...? BRANDON: 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. QUESTION Okay, awesome, just wanted to double check that. JOSH: Expanding bubbles around the engines and around the ships? BRANDON: You will see, you will see. JOSH: Someone on the site actually has- BRANDON: Actually figured it out? JOSH: Has a very convincing theory. BRANDON: They’re missing a very big important piece of the puzzle that you won’t get for a few more books. Bubble borders static Quote Kurkistan: Last question: If Wayne was inside of a speed bubble and punches somebody who's standing outside it, what's happening with his fist and them: are they like sucked into the bubble, or what? Brandon: So, I have... So _exiting_ a speed bubble, while it's going, has _weird_ ramifications on lots of things. It would be really hard to punch somebody through a speed bubble- Kurkistan: So would the surface like distend around his fist- -<Illustrates with fist "stretching out" invisible film> Brandon: It's going to steal your momentum, but if you actually managed to do it, then- yes. Anything in the speed bubble that's touching through is counted as being as part of the speed bubble. Kurkistan: Okay, so the bubble would end here <Draws invisible surface in the air> and his fist would be out there <Illustrates by "punching" arm through the fake surface, demonstrating the fist extending past the bubble while he arm is within>, but still fast? Brandon: Yes. Kurkistan: Oh okay, thank you. Brandon: That's how I would imagine it so far. Kurkistan: But the bubble does _end_ at [the same place still, with the fist extending out past its boundary]. Brandon: The bubble does end, yes. Kurkistan: <Makes pleasantries and goes to leave> Brandon: And when you're punching through, it's going to- your momentum is gonna'- you're going to lose momentum and get a ricochet, because you're lurching from- <notices Kurkistan (very foolishly) acting like he's about to leave> anyway... I'll let you figure that one out on your own. Duralumin+Bendalloy RAFO Quote FEJICUS What would happen if you burned Duralumin and Bendalloy? BRANDON SANDERSON He gave us a big RAFO, and i think hinted at that it was going to play a part in future books, so its going to be important. Nicrosil/Duralumin RAFO: Quote [01:57:12] Questioner: Cadmium or bendalloy with duralumin or nicrosil? Brandon: That’s a RAFO. Living touch enough Quote KLOKKAN () Hello Mr. Sanderson, I have a question about bendalloy bubbles—what happens to a human that is partially in and partially out of the bubble when it's placed? Does the difference in the flow of time kill him? And, if yes, is the boundary of active bendalloy bubble effectively impassable for living organisms? I get that bullets shot out of the bubble randomly change directions, but what happens to, let's say, a person trying to jump out of the bubble (or, given enough time, a person trying to get inside)? BRANDON SANDERSON Any living thing touching the bubble is affected by the bubble. Strength determines size Quote FEJICUS Is the size of speed bubbles affected by the strength of the allomancer? BRANDON SANDERSON Yes. Light not affected as a result of handwavium On 12/7/2010 at 2:18 PM, PeterAhlstrom said: OK guys, help me out on this. Let's take a bubble where time is sped up inside, maybe to 10x, maybe to 100x. I'm thinking that if there is no light source inside the bubble, but all light comes from the area outside the bubble, to an observer outside the bubble all light that goes inside and gets redshifted will get blueshifted back the same amount when it exits the bubble. So the outside observer won't see a color change at all. (I'm ignoring refraction for the purposes of this post, but someone else may elucidate.) The person inside the bubble will see a redshift of all light coming into the bubble--but will also see far fewer photons per second, so the world will go dim or even black. At low time-speedups, the person in the bubble will see UV light shifted into the visible range, so will start effectively seeing in UV. At very fast speeds he can see X rays or even gamma rays. (I don't know from Brandon what the max speedup is.) If the person inside the bubble turns on a flashlight, this will be shifted into the UV or X-ray range when it leaves the bubble. You can fry everyone around you with deadly radiation this way. When you have a bubble that slows time, the opposite happens. People inside can see in infrared or radio waves. And if they go slow enough, visible light from the outside is shifted into the X-ray or gamma-ray range and the person inside gets fried by radiation. If they turn on a flashlight, people outside get cooked. Can anyone point out flaws in this analysis? Does anyone have magical suggestions for why any of these things wouldn't happen? For practical reasons it looks like there will need to be a lot of handwavium burned. Source: Quote Q: What happens when you direct a stream of water at the edge of a time bubble in Alloy of Law Mistborn? B: Let’s do a RAFO on that. Gravitational Time Dilation: Quote EricLake: In M:AoL, will bendalloy's time dilation result in redshifting of light going in/out of the bubble? #weescience BrandonSandrson: I've been working on the science of it. Basically, I've been treating it as a gravitational time dilation. BrandonSandrson: But only focused inward, and equally, on those inside the bubble. It's making my brain hurt a bit, but I think I've got it working BrandonSandrson: I think this means yes to a gravitational redshift. But...it gets wacky. Trying to decide just what it would do is tough. Inset time bubbles don't collapse Quote Q. What happens if you create a time bubble in a time bubble? A. Lots of people are theorizing about that. The time bubble would not collapse, I’ll answer that much. Q. Zas678- I think that you said at the Alloy release that it was mul- de(I couldn’t remember the word. I knew it was based off of “multiply”, but that was it) A. Multiplicative? Q. Zas678- Yeah. A. I may have given an answer to that- or not. I’m not going to say anything about that. Time travel and find out. Merger of magic and technology for FTL: Quote [Leinton]: Can you use hemalurgy to power machinery? Brandon: He was initially confused as to what I meant, so I said I got the idea from thinking about FTL travel, and he said that it was a RAFO, but that I was thinking along the right lines, there needs to be a merger between magic and technology. Contemporary trilogy tech hints at FTL: Quote QUESTION If you were to use Allomancy to fly faster than light, would it be like the Navigators in Dune, where you pick out the best possible route through the stars? BRANDON SANDERSON No, good question though! That's not quite the way, I haven't given you the tools to figure it out, because I feel that the tools you need to figure it out, I couldn't give them to the characters. I wanted it to progress with the technological progress, so hints are only really brief in the story. You will not see a lot of this until the contemporary trilogy, when they are starting to figure out the technology for how this might plausible work out in the future. --Chicago Firefight stuffTime bubbles interfere with investiture Quote Kurkistan: Speaking of time bubbles [Editors note: we were not speaking of time bubbles], can iron and steel and emotional Allomancy- Allomancy go beyond the boundaries of time bubbles; like if I'm inside a time bubble can I just like super steel push outside? Brandon: Oh, time bubbles interfere with almost all forms of investiture. Aluminum RAFO Quote Kurkistan: Speaking of interfering, if you shot an aluminum bullet through a time bubble, what would happen? Brandon: Oooooh, that's a _good_ question. I'm gonna' RAFO that one. It's an excellent question. Degree of control, but only before casting Quote Kurkistan: So time bubbles again... How much control does a bubbler have over the bubble before and after it's cast? Can they just grow and shrink it or... Brandon: Not very much. Kurkistan: So Wayne could flare his metals make time go faster- Brandon: Yes. Kurkistan: But if he'd stopped flaring- Brandon: Yeah, but- they have a bit of control over the speed of it, but once it's up moving it or anything like that, not much. The flaring of it and things like that, yes they can- it's mostly set when they start. Kurkistan: But they have some discretion when they start it. Brandon: They do have some discretion , yes. Light explanation a ways off Quote Kurkistan: Is there- have you come up with a Realmatic explanation for why light isn't affected by time bubbles besides handwavium "please don't burn people with microwaves"? Brandon: Peter's got one for us. 'Cause we were going to do redshift: like the actual original writing for it had redshifts; Peter's like "dude, you will microwave everybody"—I'm like "oh man". So the handwavium of that: there is a real- there is an actual explanation, but it- <at this point we decamp to the sidewalk outside the store> Brandon: What's the middle of this question? Kurkistan: Middle of the question was you were thinking about explaining the realmatics behind light for time bubbles. Brandon: Oh right, right right right right. I can't because it spoils future books; like that's spoiler for Mistborn... 10? Kurkistan/Argent: <Laughter> Brandon: So... if you count the four Alloys, so really gotta stay away from stuff like that. Kurkistan/Argent: That's fair/fine. Bubble anchor determined by what it cuts Quote Kurkistan: Okay, so I'm contractually obligated to ask about time bubbles one more time [this is a lie]. Brandon: Yes. Kurkistan: So what's up with frame of reference for time bubbles; in that obviously if you make a bubble and it's still it's not really still, like time moves differently but- Brandon: We deal with that a little bit in Era 2 Book 2 [shadows of Self], where we talk about the fact that you know- obviously the bubble is moving with the planet. So they're not- the frame of reference is not absolute. Kurkistan: Yeah. Brandon: And so we talk about sorta' the idea of mass and momentum and time bubbles and things like that. Kurkistan: Okay <Fun fact: at this point I was content to go home (actually to a hotel because I didn't feel like falling asleep at the wheel on the way home, but that's another story), but then Brandon just kept talking, and saying very interesting things. > Brandon: For instance you can make a time bubble on a train. Kurkistan: Oh and it _stays_ on the train?! Brandon: Yes, but when you start catching stuff off of the train, it's gonna' _jar_ each time, and it's probably going to ruin your time bubble, right? Kurkistan: So does it get it's "anchor" from- it's asking all the things that are within it what they think "still" is? Brandon: Yes. That's a good way of looking at it. Frame of reference for the cognitive things around. Kurkistan: Okay; the things around or the things within it, specifically? Brandon: The things that it's cutting into, specifically, but yeah. ---- Deflection proportional Quote vorpal_username: ... Is the magnitude effect that causes bullets to go off course when entering a speed bubble proportional to the slowing/speeding of time in the bubble? For example, could I put up a very slight speed bubble (gaining me an extra second every few minutes) and get the same deflection as the ones used by Wane in the books? ... Brandon: ... In that case, the deflection is indeed proportional ... ------- New v2.0 WoBs Time bubbles likely affect atium in interesting ways Quote QUESTION What happens if you burn atium at the same time as cadmium or bendalloy? BRANDON SANDERSON That would be really cool to see. Nested bubble size interaction: Quote [1:36:00]: Q: If a Mistborn burned both cadmium and bendalloy, would the bubbles be exactly the same size? A: That is an excellent question that I am not going to answer just yet. Q: If they were the same size, would there still be a barrier between the area of normal time and the area of (maybe) distorted time? A: RAFO. In general, cadmium bubbles are bigger, but you can influence the size. Aluminum creates dead space: (heavily paraphrased from a recording with approval by the question-asker, for clarity) Quote [2:06:26]: Q*: If you dropped a speed bubble whose border goes through an aluminum tube, is the inside of the tube affected by the time distortion? A*: No, the bubble would go around the tube. Accelerated aging (paraphrase): Quote BeskarKomrk: When someone is inside a time bubble where time is going faster, do they age more quickly than they would outside? A: Yes. Q: So there's a sort of relativistic effect going on there? A: Yes, I tried to keep it as close as possible to the actual effects. The only thing I didn't include, I think, is the red-shift of light when it leaves the bubble, because that would irradiate everything around it. Watches need to be reset: Quote [0:12] Q: Given how much they futz with time, why doesn't Wax continually reset his watch? A: They really should have to, huh? That's a good reminder. I've never thought about that. Doylist rationale behind bubble mechanics: (emphasis added) Quote So, let’s talk about the realities of speed bubbles. I did research on this, and got different answers from people on what really should happen if you could slow time like this. One of the issues is that light doesn’t change speeds based on this sort of issue, so there was discussion of what things would look like inside looking out or outside looking in. It seems likely that there’d be some sort of red shift, and also that things might grow more dim inside a speed bubble. This is all really very theoretical, however, and so—in the end—I decided that there was enough disagreement among scientists with whom I spoke that it wouldn’t be glaringly irregular if I just had the shimmer at the borders and stayed away from dealing with speed of light issues. There’s a much larger issue dealing with slowed time that rarely gets addressed by this type of fiction. I considered using it, and it’s this: conservation of energy. Inside the speed bubble, Wax and Wayne are moving far more quickly, and therefore have a ton of kinetic energy compared to those outside of it. And so, a coin tossed from inside the bubble going outside would suddenly move with a proportional increase in speed (proportional to how much slower things were outside). In essence, speed bubble = railgun. This is dangerous for narrative reasons. I’ve often said that the limitations of a power are more interesting than the powers themselves. (It’s Sanderson’s Second Law of Magics: Limitations > Powers.) One of the reasons for removing Mistborn and Full Feruchemists from the setting was so that we could focus in on the usefulness of the individual powers in Allomancy and Feruchemy. That falls by the wayside if any of the individual powers become too strong on their own. I didn’t want Wayne to be able to slow time, then sit inside his bubble and leisurely pick off enemies one at a time. And so, I had to place strong limitations on the speed bubbles. (Much stronger limitations than on other aspects of Allomancy. Pushing and Pulling, for example, have their limitations based in solid science. With speed bubbles, I eventually decided that solid science made them way too powerful. So I had to change things.) Therefore, the rules became: No shooting/throwing things out of speed bubbles, no moving speed bubbles, and a required couple second cool-down between creating different speed bubbles. The first rule broke required objects to be deflected when leaving the bubble and that we have the bubble absorb excess kinetic energy when something leaves it. Disappointing for the scientists, I know, but it makes for a stronger story. Emotional allomancy works through bubbles because it's "over the top": Quote [01:31:45] zas’ sister: If Wayne and Breeze, like if Wayne had a time bubble up and Breeze was inside Pushing on somebody’s emotions what-- Brandon: He could still make that work. zas’ sister: Would it affect it? Brandon: Not really. It wouldn’t dramatically affect it. You’re going to have one of these sort-of effects-- Yeah, because what he is doing is on another Realm, it’s not going to affect it. zas’ sister: Is that same with all [magics?] Brandon: Not necessarily. See what’s going on is if you are affecting things on the Cognitive Realm… zas: It’s kind of time-independent? Brandon: Yeah? That’s not really-- Really it’s the Spiritual Realm that is time-independent, right? All time and space are irrelevant once you reach the Spiritual. You’re kind of going to go over the top, it’s going to work just fine. In fact you can probably-- So he could use that to make his metals last a little bit better, probably. So that is a hack of the magic systems that you could probably do. Included as soon as you touch: Quote [01:33:05] zas’ sister: If someone ran into a time bubble, like from the outside into it, what would-- Brandon: The moment they touch it they would be in it. Cancelling only in area of overlap: Quote [01:33:17] zas’ sister: So it said in the book that if Marasi and Wayne had it on at the same time-- Would it cancel it out all the way, or would it just cancel out where both of the bubbles were? Brandon: Where both of the bubbles were. zas’ sister: So it would be like-- Brandon: You could make a bubble in a bubble, yes. Third book of, which I think I’m officially changing to Era 1.5 to be less confusing, will have a moment where they try to do a time bubble in motion. zas: [bubble in a bubble] Brandon: Not that one, the motion one, so you’ll finally get some views on what’s going on. You get some rules on that. Nicrosil/Duralumin RAFO: Quote [01:57:12] Questioner: Cadmium or bendalloy with duralumin or nicrosil? Brandon: That’s a RAFO. Conservation of momentum on entrance tied to redshift-solution: Quote Kurk: What exactly- When an object enters a time bubble, how exactly does it determine- how does it know how fast and which direction it's "really" going? Brandon: It gets deflected a little bit when it enters, but then it adapts to the momentum that it would have going in. Q: Like Spiritual bonds to something or other? A: Riiight <sounds hesitant> it's- so... I can't explain that because it has relevance in the future. But in that moment when it passes [into the bubble], something is happening with conservation of momentum. The trick we have to do with it in order to keep from irradiating people. Cadmium hermit can time-capsule self: Quote [1:00:00] Alterodent: If a hermit were to take a whole lot of Cadmium and go off and live by himself, how far within a lifetime, reasonably, could he get into the future by essentially time-capsuling himself? A: <laughs thoughtfully> Q: Assuming they live to be 70 or 75. A: They could get pretty far. Q: What would the savantism do to them? A: The savantism would probably allow them to get further… It’s completely reasonable… you can treat this like relativistic travel. Bubble size/strength more controllable than shown, size not inverse to strength: Quote [1:00:55] Kurk: How broadly can a time-bubbler control the attributes of the bubble? Like could he make it ten times smaller to make it ten times more powerful? A: It is more controllable than I have generally shown in the books. Q: And does the size correspond inversely to the strength? A: No. Moving bubble's effect on intersected object: Quote Kurkistan: Kurk: So when that cork [in Bands of Mourning] was thrown above the train, if the cork had been thrown by someone who was standing _besides_ the train, what would have happened when the bubble hit [the cork]? So the bubble's moving at 60mph and the cork [is not moving laterally relative to the bubble] and gets hit by a bubble... Brandon: Right. Right right right... So... this one's complicated. Let me see if I can... So anything that touches the bubble will be immediately lodged into the bubble, and be hit by that... So say you throw something up, the bubble hits it, is that what you're asking? Q: Yeah. A: But it does not have "momentum" the same as the thing? So it would probably be in the bubble for a short time. Q: So if I threw the cork straight, and then the bubble came from the right, the cork would shift to the right within the bubble as the bubble thought it was moving or something? A: <thoughtful noises> Q: So the bubble thinks the cork is travelling like 60mph North, the cork thinks it's not moving at all... A: Yeah... Q: So does the cork move the opposite direction of the bubble or something? A: Ask Peter the math on that one, and I'll have him run the math. That one's kind of... it's kind of like the time travel train experiment stuff, with the flags and things. So let's go ahead and PAFO that one. Kurkistan: To restate the scenario in more understandable terms (phase 2 is to use diagrams, if it comes to it and I still don't manage to get it across): Say Cory the cork-thrower is standing besides a train track. Cory is facing North and the train is running from West to East. Cory tosses a cork North up over a passing train. Normally, this cork would go over the train and land on the ground directly opposite Cory to the North. From the frame of reference of Cory and his cork, the train is moving West->East. From the frame of reference of the train, the train isn't moving at all and the cork is moving both South->North and East->West (i.e., Northwest). So if we were to draw a line describing the cork's movement, Cory's line would have the cork moving South->North over a moving train. The train's line would have the cork travelling Southeast->Northwest as it described a diagonal across the train. If there's a bubble on the train, that's where things get complicated. When the bubble hits the cork, does the train's frame of reference "take over" so far as it's direction of travel goes? So far as the train is concerned, nothing really changes: the cork is still describing that same diagonal, just more quickly/slowly. But so far as Cory and his cork are concerned, all the sudden the cork is moving laterally (East->West) corresponding to the train's frame of reference. The question, then, is where the cork lands when all's said and done: does it still land directly North of Cory after it passes over the train, or does it land a bit to the West or East as well? ----- My thoughts/model on this would be that it also lands West/East. If the bubble was a bendalloy bubble, then the corks diagonal passage would be accelerated, meaning that it pops out of the bubble off to the West of where it would have otherwise. A cadmium bubble would still move the cork to the West according to its frame of reference, but because of how slow the bubble itself is in motion the cork would still end up East of Cory. Peter: The bubble's frame of reference would take over while it's inside. But you also need to include the fact that bubbles deflect things. The cork would be deflected both when it enters and when it leaves the bubble. So you can't completely predict the path it will take. - <At this point the conversation kept on for a bit as things grew... complicated. We misunderstood one another [which I take the blame for] on several crucial fronts and ended up talking past one another. Long story short is that I'd been implicitly assuming absolute relativity of reference frames in the cork-bubble system—so while both types of bubble would drag the cork along for a bit, that dragging would also be offset (to varying degrees based on bubble type/compression) by lateral movement of the cork within the bubble. This is wrong.> -Peter: If the train is moving east, and he throws the cork over the train, a bubble that slows the cork down will mean the cork ends up east of him. If the train is moving east, and he throws the cork over the train, a bubble that speeds the cork up will mean the cork ends up on the other side of the train faster than it would have with no bubble. It doesn't move west. If the speed bubble only very slightly increases the flow of time, then the cork could even end up slightly east of him, depending on the speed of the train. So depending on the speed or slowness of the bubble, and the speed of the train, the cork will either end up exactly where the thrower expects it to, but more quickly, slightly east of where he expects, but more quickly, or quite a bit east of where he expects, more slowly. The cork doesn't move west. 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. Let's do the math here. Say the bubble is 10 feet in diameter and the cork toss hits the bubble right in the center. He tossed the cork at 5mph. The bubble is 2x speed. That means the cork goes 10 mph across the train (measuring from the frame of reference of the tosser). The train is moving at 50 mph. The cork crosses the train in 0.682 seconds. In that time the train moves 50 feet to the east. So the cork ends up 50 feet to the east of where the tosser expected it to. If the bubble is 100x speed, the cork goes 500mph across the train, and in that time the train moves 1 foot. The cork ends up 1 foot to the east of where the tosser expected it to, but much faster than he expected. If the bubble is 1/2 speed, then the cork goes 2.5 mph across the train. The cork crosses the train in 2.727 seconds. In that time the train goes 200 feet to the east. The cork ends up 200 feet to the east of where the tosser thought it would end up. If the bubble is 1/100 speed, then the cork goes 0.05 mph across the train. The train moves 1.9 miles in the time it takes the cork to cross the train. The tosser has no idea where it ends up, but he watches it hovering over the train as the train goes off into the distance. ... As far as the cork is concerned, it can't tell the difference whether it's moving through a stationary bubble or a (laterally) moving bubble. From the cork's point of view it moves in a straight line either way. - <Some doodles got involved at one point or another, and it was also confirmed that the path of the cork (barring refraction) would stay the same once it left the bubble, still going directly north> RAFO on nested bubbles: Quote PathToEternity: Can Cadmium bubbles be nested if you have multiple Pulsers? Bonus Question: add in duralumin/nicrosil to the equation. Phantine: Yes. The effects multiply shinarit:Source I guess hiring 3-4 Pulsers before something you have to prepare for might be worth it. They create their bubbles one after the other at the same place, and boom, you have days instead of minutes. Ok, lets calculate. We don't have exact figures for cadmium, but we have for bendalloy: 2 minutes into 15 seconds, that's a ratio of 8. 4 Pulsers mean 84 = 4096 ratio. So 21 second for every day goes by for every day you spend in there. The outer Pulser burns this 168.75 second's worth of cadmium, the first inner one needs 22.5 minutes, the second inner one needs 3 hours and the innermost needs the 24 hours. So basically for every day spent in these bubbles you need ~27.5 hours worth of cadmium, depending on how routinely they set up the bubbles one after the other. PathToEternity: Wait, are you mixing up sliding and pulsing? I also think you are nesting your bubbles but not your pulsers, so you are losing a lot of efficiency not to mention practicality. Tell me if I'm misinterpreting what you're describing, but this is how I'm visualizing it: I'm saying that you get 4 pulsers huddled together and the one that can open the biggest bubble goes first. Then the next largest one pops his. Then the next. And finally the smallest bubble fires. In that scenario (unless there is something that prevents this) I picture it like this: This method, 170 days pass only burning 4 hours worth of cadmium. Well. I'm gonna do it. Gonna page /u/mistborn and ask: is this possible? Can time bubbles be nested like so and if they can do you truly get this kind of efficiency?crosses fingers Brandon: This one is a RAFO. Savants can anchor bubbles to themselves; jostling theoretically predictable, realistically chaotic; speed of light constant Quote Friend: So my quick question: Can you use Identity (I love the speed bubbles!) to anchor speed bubbles to yourself? Brandon: Uh, this is possible. That’s less a matter of Identity. What’s gonna happen there, like, the more someone uses the powers, the more familiar and intermingled with their soul the powers become, and they are able to accomplish things that others can’t. This would be like a mistborn learning to hover a coin, right, which they can do, but most think you can’t. That’s the sort of level we’re going with. Necarion: So a savant could? Brandon: A savant could totally do that. The problem is, things moving in and out of a speed bubble, there’s a transference of energy. This is how we keep speed bubbles from irradiating people when light moves through them, right, red shift. And so there’s a transfer of energy directly from the spiritual realm, which means that moving with a speed bubble, you’re gonna run into that, and it’s gonna be, it’s gonna cause all kinds of problems, but it would be possible. Friend: Now, do things actually move unpredictable at the edge [of a speed bubble] or do they refract out? Is it just that geometry is hard? Brandon: No, I have a level of unpredictability, I mean we’re Chaos Theory. The idea being, you could predict if you had a perfect closed system and things like this, but it’s unfeasible for most technology and minds to be able to predict. Friend: Thank you Necarion: One other speed bubble question. Is the speed of light the same inside and outside a speed bubble? Brandon: Um, yes. The speed of light is the same. Good question, you’re trying to figure out the FTL. Necarion: Also, it would eliminate the redshift if the speed of light… Brandon: If the speed of light were similar [Necarion’s note: there would be no redshift if the speed of light were directly proportional to the ‘speed of time’. Alas this theory doesn’t seem to be valid]. That’s one thing we considered, but it felt too unintuitive, plus it’s just not how I imagined things working. So, no it is not, but that’s a good question. It is something we considered. Friend: I just want to setup a lab in a speed bubble and do fun things. Full Delorean quote, weight and bubbles the weirdest, many things affect anchoring Quote [24:00] Q: Speed bubbles- A: Ehh these are the hardest ones... Q: We’ve seen them work and move with trains, we’ve seen them not work with carriages: is there a size requirement, or is it how they view themselves…? A: That’s a good question. So I build in this thing, right? I’m like “eh speed bubbles! Speed bubbles are cool!” but the Delorean problem, right? You’re like “I’m going to go back in time: to the middle of SPACE”, because the planet is in the same position, right? This is stuff that science fiction writers have been having fun with since the silver age of science fiction. So I’m like “alright, I need to deal with the Delorean problem.” And so I’m like alright, we’re going to have to say that frame of reference is a big part of it: so perception and frame of reference is a big part of it; and also _size_ of the thing that you’re on. So it would be _possible_ to use kind of cosmere cognitive training to get that speed bubble moving with you- and someone asked me a question about this on tour, I believe, so it would be in one of the reports—not this exact same thing, but “could they learn to move their speed bubble with them?”: and yes you can. Q: So it is how the allomancer views it, not how the thing views itself? A: That’s a _part_ of it. Partially how you view yourself, partially <garbled>. It’s really also mass. Big things- The speed bubbles required all kinds of physics-gymnastics—I’m sorry physicists—but once you start playing with time the stuff you gotta’ do… just crazy stuff you gotta’ do. Q: We actually sat down and worked out what the metric would have to do to have a speed bubble- it was gnarly A: We did run the math on these things, and stuff like that. And Peter- he’s like “redshift” and stuff like this we talked about, and all kinds of fun stuff about speed bubbles that I then had to- Q: Khriss asked about that? A: Yeah. So- this one [presumably speed bubbles] and manipulating weight- those are the math ones where I’m just like- Q: If you can get get massive _enough_ to move your speed bubbles- [Laughter] A: Yeah. A: So these are the ones where- they create the fun things to talk about, but they are where this is fantasy and not science fiction. A lot of these questions I could answer and you’d be like “alright, if there were this alternate power source we could buy this” but in this case we’re like exception-list of asterisks to make it work. But they’re too fun to not do, right? And I knew I was doing gravity on Stormlight, so I’m like I gotta’ do weight separately. Cadmium affects time, not perceptions (paraphrase): On 2/2/2017 at 0:56 PM, Bridge4AM said: Q: Does burning cadmium actually slow down time or just slow down the perception of time? (there was a bit more to the question but I was on the opposite end of the room) A: The answer was it does actually slow time. End spoiler 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 Edited February 11, 2017 by Kurkistan Add in WoB 45 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted June 9, 2014 The whole time bubble dilemma stinks of Atium/Gold from the original Mistborn trilogy to me. Seems to not quite work, so you dismiss it thinking that the author just overlooked it, before it comes back and you realise just what kind of genius Brandon Sanderson really is. This page will be really interesting to look back on when the true nature of bubbles are revealed (my heart aches in realisation at how long that will be). 2 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted June 9, 2014 To what dilemma do you refer? 0 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted June 9, 2014 This saves me enormous amounts of time and thought. Thanks Kurk! 0 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted June 9, 2014 (edited) This is a nice compilation, Kurk. I remain incredibly displeased with the light explanation. Peter saying handwavium has to be burned really annoys me, since we're expecting FTL to involve (somewhat) reasonable scientific principles, even if there's magic involved at some point. I can accept the redshifting/blueshifting being dealt with via energy stealing shenanigans, but the photons-per-second should still be different in a speed bubble. If there's no internal logic to time bubbles to account for the light issue, then I don't feel comfortable trying to theorize on time bubbles. I hope they're not involved in FTL. Edited June 9, 2014 by Moogle 0 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted June 9, 2014 The dilemma of Gold/Atium not matching up Allomantically in the first two books, and Atium breaks the rules (and the current dilemma is the above mentioned 'handwavium'). 0 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted June 9, 2014 @Tempus Glad I could help someone. About 4 hours in I paused for a moment and was like "will this actually benefit anyone?" and was unsure of how to answer it. Then I kept writing about time bubbles and was happy. @Moogle I feel your pain. I'm sure there's some level of Realmatics that justifies the thing, I just don't feel comfortable speculating as to what it is. The reason this is one of the few time bubble areas I don't want to jump into wild speculation land on is that the handwavium almost necessarily resulted in some weird hack that doesn't "flow" with the rest of how time bubbles work. @MistLord I don't see how light is treated as a "dilemma", at least not as one that matters on the larger scale. My reading of the whole thing is that light gets its own little private exemption that cached out Realmatically in one way or another, but that bubbles otherwise work as they always would. The issue of light, then, has next to nothing to do with anything else related to time bubbles. 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted June 9, 2014 Thanks Kurkistan. Ironically the half in half out issue literally just came up a few minutes ago in another thread and Shaggai mentioned what you said. Having heard none of this, I was confused and two seconds later stumbled across your post. My only issue with all of this, and this has to do with what Brandon stated, not with any of what you posited, and I hope you can help/answer is the excerpt from the new Shadows of Self book. This is an excerpt open to any to read, but just in case I will put it in spoilers below: There is a scene where Wayne approaches a house, sees through the window that the "bad guy" is in there conferring with his ally. Wayne then burns bendalloy, and hops through the window. The "bad guy" was close enough to the window that he was included in the bubble, but "bad guy's" ally was not. Wayne then decks the "bad guy", carries him out the window and then drops the bubble. If I understand what you posted about the train correctly, then since the "bad guy" was in the house, then he should have not been included, since the house was larger than the bubble and thereby not included like the train. Is there something I am missing? You clearly understand this far more than I do, so any help is appreciated 0 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted June 9, 2014 (edited) Well I'm glad my post could preempt some confusion. In reply to your spoiler: You've got the scene wrong: “. . . was a conner for sure,” Wayne heard at a window. “A thousand notes is a lot, Marks. A whole lot. Now, I’m not saying you can’t trust the lads; there’s not a bad alloy in the bunch. But I can say that a little encouragement will help them feel better about their loyalty.”Ratting out a friend: completely off-limits.Extorting a friend: well, that was all in the name of good fun.And if he didn’t act grateful, then maybe he hadn’t been a friend after all. Wayne grinned, slipping on his sets of wooden knucklebones—the weapons fit over his four fingers, and didn’t have a speck of metal on them to be used by a Coinshot.Wayne stepped back, then charged the building. He hit the shutters with one shoulder, crashing through, then tossed up a speed bubble the moment he hit the floor.Wayne rolled, coming up on his feet in front of Marks himself, who was bandaging a wound at his shoulder. The man still wore his red trousers, though. He snapped his head up, displaying a surprised face with bushy eyebrows and large lips.Rusts. No wonder the fellow normally wore a mask.Wayne decked him across the face, laying him out with one punch. Then he spun, fists up.The other occupants of the room, including bowl-head, stood frozen just outside the edge of his speed bubble.Wayne grinned, heaving Marks up onto his shoulder. He took his knuckles off, slipping them into his pocket, and got out an apple. He took a juicy bite, waved farewell to bowl-head—who looked forward with glassy eyes, frozen—then tossed Marks out the window and followed after.Once he passed beyond the edge of his speed bubble, it automatically collapsed. He was already out of the building by then.“. . . What the hell was that!” bowl-head yelled inside.Wayne heaved the unconscious Marks up onto his shoulder again, then wandered back down the road, chewing on his apple. So Wayne was standing in the house before he cast the bubble. Whether this difference matters is unclear. We've seen multiple times that bubbles cast inside buildings work as intended. So this particular example falls under that general umbrella, and thus doesn't tell us anything new from AoL. It's an open question, though, why exactly bubbles "internal" to buildings don't have to worry about the same stuff train-bubbles do, or if, in fact, a speed bubble inside a train would perhaps also work. This all kind of irks me because I thought we had this all settled by modeling the surfaces of bubbles as "distending" around objects. Then Brandon was kind enough to nix it, if my analysis of my one WoB is to be credited. Looking at it again, the door is open for perhaps non-living objects or objects from outside the bubble doing some distension, but that seems an unnatural interpretation founded more on how we want it to work than anything else. Myself, I think I might have a bit of an addendum that I should have put in my spin-off thread: bubbles, it would seem, only care about "parent objects" (houses, trains, etc.) if the child object (the person, in this case) is in some "I should really be sharing my spatio-temporal experiences with this <train/house/etc.>" mode. There's nothing odd about a person moving fast while a house stands still, while someone on a train sees themselves as supposed to be being at rest relative to that train. That's off the top of my head, at least. Edited June 9, 2014 by Kurkistan 0 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted June 10, 2014 I feel foolish cause someone must have mentioned this but FTL uses an alloy of atium and cadmium or bendalloy, right? 3 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted June 10, 2014 I feel foolish cause someone must have mentioned this, but FTL uses an alloy of atium and cadmium or bendalloy, right? Not that we know of. Welcome to the forums, btw. 0 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted June 10, 2014 Well I'm glad my post could preempt some confusion. In reply to your spoiler: You've got the scene wrong: So Wayne was standing in the house before he cast the bubble. Whether this difference matters is unclear. We've seen multiple times that bubbles cast inside buildings work as intended. So this particular example falls under that general umbrella, and thus doesn't tell us anything new from AoL. It's an open question, though, why exactly bubbles "internal" to buildings don't have to worry about the same stuff train-bubbles do, or if, in fact, a speed bubble inside a train would perhaps also work. This all kind of irks me because I thought we had this all settled by modeling the surfaces of bubbles as "distending" around objects. Then Brandon was kind enough to nix it, if my analysis of my one WoB is to be credited. Looking at it again, the door is open for perhaps non-living objects or objects from outside the bubble doing some distension, but that seems an unnatural interpretation founded more on how we want it to work than anything else. Myself, I think I might have a bit of an addendum that I should have put in my spin-off thread: bubbles, it would seem, only care about "parent objects" (houses, trains, etc.) if the child object (the person, in this case) is in some "I should really be sharing my spatio-temporal experiences with this <train/house/etc.>" mode. There's nothing odd about a person moving fast while a house stands still, while someone on a train sees themselves as supposed to be being at rest relative to that train. That's off the top of my head, at least. Ack, totally my bad and good call. Thanks! 0 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted June 10, 2014 Quite awhile after this WoB, Aeromancer was kind enough to ask these questions: Unseen Allomancy required for FTL: Quote Aeromancer: So would it be possible to use Steelrunning + compounding to travel FTL? Brandon: No, it would not. You could get close, though. Aeromancer: Kind of like Zemo's Paradox, than? You keep halving the distance, never quite making it? Brandon (gleam in his eye): Trying to crack Allomatic FTL? Aeromancer (guilty): Maybe. Brandon: You can't. Aeromancer: I don't know, there are alot of good theories out there. Brandon: It involves Allomantic abilities which we don't know about yet. Obviously my hope here is that the missing Allomantic ability (that "very big important piece", it seems) is nothing more or less than something that enables bubblers to anchor their bubbles in different locations. Thanks for welcoming me! I've been here for a while though...just...reading without anything to contribute. But now I will try to contribute. In reference to the above quote; Obviously the thing that allows you to anchor your bubble in a different location is Atium. That's exactly what happens with malatium. It Project the effect of gold onto someone else. 5 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted June 10, 2014 Atium, when burned by it's self, allows you to see the Future of Someone Else. When alloyed with Gold (Which lets you see Your Could have been) Let's you see someone else's Could have been. I think Anatrok figured it out. Good Job! 0 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted June 10, 2014 (edited) I find little obvious about this conclusion. From the table of Allomantic metals: "In alloys, [atium] produces various expanded Mental and Temporal effects." Beyond this quote, we have exactly one instance of any atium alloy whose effect we know. To claim that atium alloys are the key to bubble-anchoring, let alone any specific atium alloys, is little better than bare speculation, then. Edited June 10, 2014 by Kurkistan 0 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted June 10, 2014 Well of course it is rampant speculation... But I do think I'm on to something. We won't know until we know, but I'm just having some fun here. Unless Brandon is going to introduce new metals...atium alloys is the answer to allomantic abilities we don't know yet. What if the expanded mental and temporal effect is projecting the cognitive focus? 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted June 10, 2014 Myself, I think I might have a bit of an addendum that I should have put in my spin-off thread: bubbles, it would seem, only care about "parent objects" (houses, trains, etc.) if the child object (the person, in this case) is in some "I should really be sharing my spatio-temporal experiences with this <train/house/etc.>" mode. There's nothing odd about a person moving fast while a house stands still, while someone on a train sees themselves as supposed to be being at rest relative to that train. Since the relationship is by nature cognitive, it probably depends on how the bubble user views the objects in the bubble more than anything else. If it were a matter of simple perception of relative speeds, then you should certainly not burn when examining the relationship between movement of spatial objects like the planet to yourself - the entire world would suddenly be bubbled. More likely, it's about the user's idea of what is in the bubble and what is not. With trains, we can call it what is known as a categorical entity. The train is actually a category of a collection of things (train cars), which we identify cognitively as a train. In reality here, the train car is the object inside the bubble. But the Allomancer has made a category error, and has identified a part of a thing with its whole, causing it to be within the bubble. Brainwave. Bubbles are actually majority cognitive - what is in or out of the bubble is determined by the entity's position in the Cognitive Realm, and not the physical. The bubble itself is actually inside the Cognitive Realm too. This explains why light is not affected - light does not seem to have a corresponding Cognitive entity that matches its position (as seen with backwards shadows, and Jasnah's description of Shadesmar landscape). Thus, light is not affected by bubbles because the bubbles are not truly encompassing/affecting physical things. That's not bad handwavium. 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted June 10, 2014 (edited) @Anatrok We'll have to wait and see on god-metal alloys. @Tempus I'm leery of giving the bubble user too much import in the system, actually. For one we know that the anchoring is outside of his control—I don't imagine that a Wayne in Descartes' ship would suddenly have the bubble moving along with him rather than sticking to Scadrial. For another, this "anything touching is included" specification is somewhat odd if we're just saying it's all up to the bubbler. Why ought all bubbles created by any bubblers follow this fairly unintuitive rule for all and only living beings? Beyond this, there are just a lot of weird ways in which the bubble seems quite independent of the bubbler once it's up. As for the train, I don't see any need to say that the train isn't a "real" object. I'm sure it has its own bead in Shadesmar as a whole and singular "train". So, "in reality", the object inside (or outside, in this case) is in fact the train as a whole, not the individual car. If all you need to count the cars as distinctly bubble-able entities is a flexibly minded Allomancer... bad things could happen. Very bad. You'd likely end up with train wrecks at the very least, and that general principle can probably be applied to bring down buildings. ---- Since the relationship is by nature cognitive, it probably depends on how the bubble user views the objects in the bubble more than anything else. If it were a matter of simple perception of relative speeds, then you should certainly not burn when examining the relationship between movement of spatial objects like the planet to yourself - the entire world would suddenly be bubbled. I'm unsure as to what you mean with your second sentence there. --- On the brainwave: Sorry, but we're not quite there yet. Talk to Moogle if you want details on all of this, but simply saying "light isn't affected" isn't strictly true. Various and sundry shenanigans have to go on not only to stop red/blue-shift, but also to account for photon density and people not being cooked alive by simple radiant heat and... It gets messy. Edited June 10, 2014 by Kurkistan 0 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted June 10, 2014 I've been avoiding time bubbles, and Feruchemical iron. I honestly just... can't follow em', and I can't dig the strict physics arguments either. I have been convinced now that my foray above into that world was an ill-made decision - I withdraw sir, withdraw with haste. 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted June 10, 2014 Sorry, didn't mean to scare you off. If I sound all sure and Wizard of the Cosmere here it's probably just force of habit when talking about time bubbles. Anything I say that can't be traced directly back to the OP is something that I'm still exploring. 0 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted June 10, 2014 So going on the affected or not affected premise, if i took a garden hose, and turned the water pressure on. Then walked till the hose was extended at its full, and pulled the trigger on the hose resulting in water flowing through the tube from its source to out the spray, and THEN put up a bubble, would the ENTIRE hose all the way back to the source be included since it is touching the bubble? 0 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted June 10, 2014 I really do hate boundary questions... My guess is a "no" there, which makes a certain amount of sense as we don't normally regard hoses as "held items" but more as equipment that we're employing. Another fun and interesting question is what the stream looks like when you spray a stream of water through one side of a time bubble and out the other. 0 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted June 10, 2014 I really do hate boundary questions... My guess is a "no" there, which makes a certain amount of sense as we don't normally regard hoses as "held items" but more as equipment that we're employing. Another fun and interesting question is what the stream looks like when you spray a stream of water through one side of a time bubble and out the other. Lol yep, would it spurt when it sped up, so while your holding the hose, it randomly stops to a trickle, and then shoots out smacking you in the face. Or would it mist, or even just be a steady slow trickle. 0 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted June 14, 2014 We has a WoB that states when a Bullet fire in a Bendalloy Bubble leaves it, the Bubble robs it of It's momentum, restoring it to normal Speed. So Kurk. Here is my Question for you. What happens to a Bullet, fired in a Cadium Bubble? Does the Bubble increase the Bullet's Momentum, or Decrease it? 0 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted June 14, 2014 (edited) Well since my name is neither Brandon nor Peter I can't say for sure. I can't see any reason why a cadmium bubble wouldn't act in the appropriately opposite way and increase the momentum of exiting objects, though. Edited June 14, 2014 by Kurkistan 0 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
