Everything We Know About Time Bubbles

[natc]

There shouldn't be an upper cap to how far you can go as a ferring. Unless it kills you of course. The ferring limitation has always been supply of power, unlike mistings who have that in spades assuming deep enough pockets and have to instead worry about actual strength. Feruchemy is compressible.

So enough mental speed would, indeed, put you into Bullet Time, which makes predicting trajectories easy. Screw atium.

But the mystery really does come from the ricochet at the border for bullets, that's just weird. As if the bubbles themselves aren't weird enough with their handwavium properties.

[Kurkistan]

@Gibletish

 

It's unknown whether the "jostling" that projectiles/people suffer as they leave bubbles is mathematically modelable or entirely arbitrary.

[Master_Moridin]

Something I've been wondering is what happens when steelpushes or ironpulls are involved with Bendalloy bubbles.

 

For example, say someone's Pushing a coin and a bubble is suddenly put up with the coin still inside.  Does the coin continue to move at the same speed as before, considered a part of the coin-push-pusher system, or does it speed up suddenly?

 

In a similar vein, let's say you have a Slider that is being Pushed on, but stationary.  If they put up a bubble that contains the Coinshot, who is also stationary, what happens if:

1. The Slider becomes unstationary and starts moving,
2. The Coinshot becomes unstationary and starts moving,
3. Or both become unstationary and start moving?

I have a suspicion that being able to hold a Bendalloy bubble in place with Pushes and Pulls might be part of the key to FTL, at least based on the model in OP.  Maybe put up a bubble near the front of the ship (but including it), hold it in place with pushes in pulls, and then set the ship to move so that the bubble winds up behind the ship with the ship still half-inside, so that the ship keeps moving at the compressed speed?  Or if that complication is unnecessary and the ship simply being in the bubble but no considered part of the anchor is all that matters to get the relatively increased speed, simply suspend the anchor in the "middle" of the ship?

 

Either way the way directed Allomancy reacts in general to a target entering a bubble is something that's given me thought.  (Maybe I should throw something about that onto the question list at some point...)

[Kurkistan]

Sadly it seems such shenanigans with different-timed steelpushes aren't to be allowed.

 

Source:

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.

 

-

 

Regarding the ship "still moving at the compressed speed" if it were somehow only partially in the bubble: I don't believe changing the positioning of the bubble would help much. The problem as I see it isn't simply that the ship itself is the "anchor" for the bubble, but that the ship is stationary (or nearly so) from the bubble's frame of reference. So no accelerated movement for you.

-(If you look at the end of the post I just Sourced to, I think you may find that the anchoring problem just got a whole lot simpler).

[Kaymyth]

The coin would continue moving at the same speed, relative to the timeframe that it exists in.

 

Of course, per Kurkistan above, if the Coinshot is outside the bubble, the Push will end, but momentum will continue to carry the coin via inertia. 

 

Or, take another example; say you're a Pulser.  You fall off of a tall thing.  Aaaa!  Falling is bad!  You throw up a time bubble around yourself.

 

Now, you will continue to fall at the same rate, relative to your new timeframe.  However, to people outside the bubble, you will suddenly appear to be falling very slowly.  Possibly slowly enough (so be sure to flare!) that they have time to get something very soft and squishy underneath you to keep you from smushing onto the cold, hard ground.

[Master_Moridin]

Well crap.  That interview hadn't come up for me in the database so I thought I'd hit upon something...

 

On a different note awesome we finally know how anchoring's done.  I'd guess objects with a bigger cognitive aspect would probably get prioritized for frame of reference decision.  The whole, bubble gets jarred when it intersects something new, is really neat.

 

All you have to do is have the Cadmium bubble that's keeping everyone going-slow such that's its cutting through the ship, while have the Bendalloy bubble that's making everything go fast through space not intersect the ship at all. The Bendalloy bubble can then gets its frame of reference from the interstellar medium and congratulations you've realized FTL.-Kurkistan

 

When you say interstellar medium here, are you referring to the cold thin plasma that fills space?  Cause in deep space I'm not quite sure that'd work well as the medium would be looking for things around it for its frame of reference, which would be the ship, and then you get into stupid edge case where if no force is acting on the medium then it could either choose to view the ship as still or itself.  (Frame of reference is weird and it gives me headaches)  There might/probably be some weird stuff going on the Cosmere to let something like that work, but I still think we're missing something other than mechallomancy.

 

Course I might have my relativity completely wrong.  Been a while since I lasted studied it.

Edited May 2, 2015 by Master_Moridin

[Kurkistan]

Sorry about the un-findability, I've been waiting on that interview getting in the database before updating this thread.

 

By interstellar medium I just mean all the stuff that's in "empty space". There's not much of it, but I'm sure a sphere of any respectable size will intersect at least some of it.

 

Brandon's clarification is key here for resolving where exactly the bubble looks for its frame of reference, I think:

[...]

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.

 

So it's very specifically the things the surface of the bubble is "cutting into": not the things that are in/around the bubble. So if you have your ship that's sitting at the center of a kilometer-radius bubble, the bubble will only be "cutting through" space; more specifically a bunch of hydrogen and whatnot in space.

 

EDIT: Ah, I misread you. You were talking about what the interstellar medium would perceive as "still", and suggesting it could adopt the view of the ship.

 

An interesting concern, and I hadn't focused/thought as much about the implications of Brandon saying "cognitive things" there instead of just "things." So if an object is in the middle of the void with not even enough thought going on for its location to have a presence in Shadesmar, what does that mean for what that object can tell a time bubble about relative motion?

 

Hmm...

 

Okay, thinking about it we may still be cool. So three broad options here:

1. The interstellar medium won't register to the bubble at all. It's left not "cutting through" anything, so far as the bubble is concerned. That's... going to be weird. Aside from the universe exploding at the edge case, I guess the simplest behavior here would be for the bubble to "default" to the frame of reference of its caster. So FTL fails in that case.
2. The interstellar medium (and everything, really) intrinsically contains at the very least enough of a Cognitive presence to maintain that "I am still" is true. Not too wild an idea, I think, and meshes nicely with the realities of physics in that everything essentially behaves that way.
3. The interstellar medium borrows its perception of stillness from the Cognitive beings who are "observing" it, i.e. those on the ship. In this case there are two subcategories:
   i) The medium borrows directly from the ship's crew: it goes "oh I'll just copy them" and begins to see the ship's movement as "still". This doesn't make sense, I don't think. No one on the ship thinks the medium is moving (here I say "moving" to mean "moving in the sense that the ship is moving"), the medium isn't moving, the medium doesn't have any reason to think it's moving.
   ii) The medium acquires a concept of itself as either "still" because the crew thinks of it that way or "moving very very fast in the opposite direction of the ship" because the crew sees it that way. Either of these options is perfectly fine for getting the bubble to have a frame of reference that accelerates the ship's movement through space.

I lean towards 2, myself.

Edited May 2, 2015 by Kurkistan

[Master_Moridin]

Sorry about the un-findability, I've been waiting on that interview getting in the database before updating this thread.

 

By interstellar medium I just mean all the stuff that's in "empty space". There's not much of it, but I'm sure a sphere of any respectable size will intersect at least some of it.

 

Brandon's clarification is key here for resolving where exactly the bubble looks for its frame of reference, I think:

 

So it's very specifically the things the surface of the bubble is "cutting into": not the things that are in/around the bubble. So if you have your ship that's sitting at the center of a kilometer-radius bubble, the bubble will only be "cutting through" space; more specifically a bunch of hydrogen and whatnot in space.

 

EDIT: Ah, I misread you. You were talking about what the interstellar medium would perceive as "still", and suggesting it could adopt the view of the ship.

 

An interesting concern, and I hadn't focused/thought as much about the implications of Brandon saying "cognitive things" there instead of just "things." So if an object is in the middle of the void with not even enough thought going on for its location to have a presence in Shadesmar, what does that mean for what that object can tell a time bubble about relative motion?

 

Hmm...

 

Okay, thinking about it we may still be cool. So three broad options here:

1. The interstellar medium won't register to the bubble at all. It's left not "cutting through" anything, so far as the bubble is concerned. That's... going to be weird. Aside from the universe exploding at the edge case, I guess the simplest behavior here would be for the bubble to "default" to the frame of reference of its caster. So FTL fails in that case.
2. The interstellar medium (and everything, really) intrinsically contains at the very least enough of a Cognitive presence to maintain that "I am still" is true. Not too wild an idea, I think, and meshes nicely with the realities of physics in that everything essentially behaves that way.
3. The interstellar medium borrows its perception of stillness from the Cognitive beings who are "observing" it, i.e. those on the ship. In this case there are two subcategories:

   i) The medium borrows directly from the ship's crew: it goes "oh I'll just copy them" and begins to see the ship's movement as "still". This doesn't make sense, I don't think. No one on the ship thinks the medium is moving (here I say "moving" to mean "moving in the sense that the ship is moving"), the medium isn't moving, the medium doesn't have any reason to think it's moving.

   ii) The medium acquires a concept of itself as either "still" because the crew thinks of it that way or "moving very very fast in the opposite direction of the ship" because the crew sees it that way. Either of these options is perfectly fine for getting the bubble to have a frame of reference that accelerates the ship's movement through space.

I lean towards 2, myself.

 

When I was referring to "seeing the ship as still" I was generally referring to Relativity specifically, in that the frame of reference for a thing is determined by its movement in comparison to another's movement, and whether it feels a force acting on it.  In deep space there might not be enough interaction going on for the medium to even have a functional frame of reference, and if it did, it'd be in relation to whatever the greatest force acting on it is, as feeling a force is the only way to know you're moving.

 

Relativity is weird and I'm beginning to be certain that is these kinds of cases Brandon's just gonna throw it out the window, in which case woo we have FTL (theoretically).  Otherwise I'm not sure how one'd get around this.

 

Okay nvm I seem to have thought myself back into the actual answer (trying to remember relativity after a while is hard).  Since the only way for an object to know if it's moving or not is if it's experiencing acceleration I guess then the interstellar medium (so long as it's not anywhere it can experience a significant force acting on it) would think of itself as still and anything else that had a different velocity as moving.  So yeah, in that case your number 2 would hold.

 

Weird hacky physics never sits right with me.

 

Also now that I think about it the WoBs on Cognitive Realm worldhopping insinuates that whatever there is in empty space considers itself a roughly singular cohesive object (as you can walk across it) so that in a simpler way might explain how a bubble could potentially intersect and get a sense of still from it.

 

Long story short I am in agreement until we're inevitably proven wrong.

[Guest]

I just read the initial post, but haven't had time for the responses yet (tonight hopefully!), so if this has been explored already I apologize.

 

If I understood everything I read, the only serious element missing from the FTL theory is a way to:

1. Anchor a Time Bubble's relativistics to something other than the world of Scadrial

2. Move that Anchor according to the desired motion of the ship

 

Ideally, the ability to move the Time Bubble(s) while they are active would be the "Holy Grail"

 

Wouldn't the Shard of Preservation accomplish this? We think of Scadrial as a "Planet", but we also know that it's infused with Preservation's power, and Preservation is the source of Allomancy, so the source of Allomancy being the relative point of reference would seem to solve a lot of problems.

 

What if the "missing piece" is literally that? We're missing a PIECE (Splinter) of Preservation for the Scadrians to take with them on FTL flight, allowing them to move Cadmium and Bendalloy bubbles along with their ships because at the heart of their ships are Splinters of Preservation given by Sazed (or gathered after Odium does his thing...)

 

If I'm right, the general design would be this:

Splinter on board ship

Multiple Bendalloy Bubbles bigger than the ship, overlapping and multiplying, which move with the ship.

Multiple overlapping Cadmium bubbles inside the ship, putting the occupants into what amounts to Allomantic Cryosleep

1 standard rocket with enough fuel to get to the destination

 

Going very fast wouldn't even be necessary, since any speed would be sped up by 10^X times

 

 

Now I need to get back to work...

[Kurkistan]

Okay, I really need to update the OP. I'll just add in direct links later, I guess. :/ This weekend, probably.

 

Sorry for not updating earlier, but a signing back in February March had some very interesting stuff to say on the anchoring problem.

 

---

 

That said, an interesting thought on how anchoring might have worked if not for this WoB. Though I believe I may have been unclear on exactly what we needed out of anchoring: so far as I can tell, the Bendalloy bubbles very much need to not move with the ship if we want FTL.

Edited May 19, 2015 by Kurkistan

[Guest]

This (From Post 1)

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.

 

Directly contradicts this (from you)

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?

 

 

So do I need to buy stock in Handwavium? or is the bubble staying on the train confirmed right?

[Kurkistan]

Yup, noticed that one 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 there's just a seen in an AoL-era book that he was like "it would be cool if there were a time bubble on this train..." and then he got to thinking more deeply about why it 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.

[natc]

Yeah, when I think about it a big enough bubble would cut through the train tracks and be ripped out instantly even if anchored to the train.

Temporal metals are so weird.

[Kurkistan]

Okay, updated the OP in medium blue with the Chicago WoBs.

[XenosHg]

I still think that a bullet entering a slow-mo cadmium bubble should be as deflected as a bullet going out of a sped-up bendalloy bubble.

The "either it's completely in, or completely out" and "ricochet" parts I see as some kind of surface tension. You can throw a stone skipping across the pond, or even ricochet a bullet of it, or belly-flop into a pool and hurt yourself. And, vice-versa, there's a moment when you get out of water, and the surface moves up with you, and breaks. (there's a photo somewhere of a swimmer catched right at this moment). And you feel disoriented when getting from one environment into another.

I also just remembered Quicksilver from the "x-men future past" movie to take "backlash" from suddenly changing speed into account.

My question is - can a Pulser falling from a building use the bubble to prolong time so that someone catches him or softens the fall? Yes, he has only the bubble's radius to fall, after which he leaves the bubble and it collapses, and then a ~2-second period before creating a second one, but cadmium bubbles are much larger.
And, supposedly, a bubble that's made while on air, with no surface, is still anchored to the planet.

And the second one - can a Steelrunner ferring speed himself to see what's happening inside the bendalloy bubble, and react? And, maybe, get inside.
And will he be able to speed himself up when inside Slider's bubble? And, to drop the need to save an equal amount of speed, can a steel Twinborn do it indefinitely?

[yurisses]

I'm disappointed that it seems like the time bubbles' anchors are determined by the cognitive realm rather than acceleration and frames of reference in the special theory of relativity, because the latter would have been a great sci-fi element for the future Mistborn trilogy. I imagined the characters having to calculate optimal speed and acceleration or whatever to make a time bubble stable (just like it is stable relative to Scadrial which moves at great speed since solar systems and galaxies travel very fast).

Edited June 3, 2015 by yurisses

[Kurkistan]

@Xeno

 

I don't really disbelieve you on cadmium for jostling/deflection, but we really don't have any hard evidence either way that I know of.

 

So far as the falling Pulser goes, I don't see why not. It is an interesting question what exactly the bubble would be getting its frame of reference from if it was truly cast in mid air, but if I'm going to argue that cutting through the interstellar medium is enough to get a frame of reference I can't really complain about the atmosphere doing the trick.

 

For Steelrunners, I'd say probably not going to work the way you say? It would be interesting if "speed" was simply a personal-level manifestation of sped up or slowed down time, but I kind of doubt that's how it works. That aside if you want to have someone be able to perceive at the same rate as a bubble that's probably what you want a Sparker (Feruchemical zinc, mental speed) for.

 

@yurisses

 

Sorry you're disappointed. If it makes you feel better I've been fairly dismayed more times than I can casually count upon seeing one WoB or another.

[ParadoxicalZen]

Kurk, has it been confirmed whether a Pulser/Slider's Cognitive perception of time plays a part in Time Passing/Slowing before/during/after burning?

Edited July 2, 2015 by ParadoxSpren

[Kurkistan]

Kurk, has it been confirmed whether a Pulser/Slider's Cognitive perception of time plays a part in Time Passing/Slowing before/during/after burning?

 

Nothing has been said on the subject.

[ParadoxicalZen]

Nothing has been said on the subject.

Interesting....thanks, i'll give it some thought!

[tobar14]

How do fluids/gases/not solid objects act with time bubbles.  Like if you were in a room where there was fire everywhere.  Since fire isn't really a "thing", so it doesn't really see itself as a single object....my brain hurts

[Kurkistan]

How do fluids/gases/not solid objects act with time bubbles.  Like if you were in a room where there was fire everywhere.  Since fire isn't really a "thing", so it doesn't really see itself as a single object....my brain hurts

 

RAFO:

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.

[Elbereth]

So I'm going to the SFO signing, and I'm planning on asking this:

If a Mistborn burned both cadmium and bendalloy, 1) would the bubbles default to being the same size, and 2) if the Mistborn made them the same size, would there still be a barrier between the inside and the outside of the bubble?

I read through the post up top and I don't think anything has been said on the subject, but I'd just like to make sure.

[Kurkistan]

Nothing's been said on either topic, though I posted some thoughts on the other thread.

 

Personally I don't think that the first question is likely to get a "yes", as I don't see any reason why the bubbles should default to the same size. I've little doubt that you could intentionally shrink down the cadmium bubble (probably even enough to match the size of the bendalloy bubble), but I don't see why they should automatically match each other.

-Actually... the investiture-blocking nature of the bubbles might come into play in a very intersting way here: if you put up the bendalloy bubble first, would the size of the cadmium bubble be restricted to the size of the bendalloy bubble because investiture can't (easily) pass through bubbles? Hmmm... Another good question.

[Elbereth]

Thanks!