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Everything We Know About Time Bubbles


Kurkistan

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I was talking with - to - someone about tidal force several days ago, and I think the reason fast-moving objects change trajectory when passing through a time bubble's barrier might be related. Tidal force, if you are not familiar with it, is actually more of an effect, a consequence of how gravity works - namely, the fact that gravity is powerfully affected by distance. You usually hear about tidal force(s) in the context of cosmological bodies and, well, tides. To illustrate with an example, our moon exerts a stronger gravitational pull on objects on the side of the Earth closer to it, and a weaker gravitational pull on objects on the opposite side. So pools of water closer to the moon are pulled harder than those on the other side - therefore, tides. 

 

The reason I think this is relevant in the context of time bubbles is because we see something similar as objects enter or leave the bubble's border. Take a bullet shot from inside a bendalloy bubble for example. Once the bullet is, for instance, halfway out of the bubble, you've got half of it in normal time and half of it in compressed time. From here it really depends on how Brandon interprets the science, but one possibility is that because the molecular structure of the bullet will be in a constant flux as long as the bullet is passing through the membrane, this flux will result in some really annoying to calculate vibrations. Small vibrations, but maybe enough to change the trajectory of said bullet - or any other object - unpredictably. 

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A good thought, and one I once also endorsed (in a slightly different form), but two problems:
1. Calculus. If part of the bullet is out of a speed slow bubble and the other part is in, then it's moving (say) 10x faster on the outside than the inside. It's still one object, though: So the outside part pulls the inside part along to move faster. Then all the bullet's parts are moving a bit faster than they were originally. Then this continues for infinity and infinite energy explodes the universe. I think.
2. Brandon says no. It's in the OP somewhere, but essentially any discreet object is either entirely in or entirely out of a time bubble. You can't have a bullet that's half in half out.

Edited by Kurkistan
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  • 2 months later...

UPDATE:

 

Just as an FYI, I'm waiting on BoM to update the OP again, since apparently we'll be getting some good ones in that book. Here are the links I'll need at that time:

-Update the OP by referencing Cadmium out-going deflection as seen at that one scene early in SoS

-Multiple RAFOs

-Speed bubble aging

->Reference to how we'll get stuff in BoM

-Bubbles would go around aluminum tubes, can modify bubble sizes

-Brandon on chicanery for bubbles

-4 bubble questions (cancelling venn, emotional allomancy "over the top" -- also rafo on nicrosil)

sdf

Spoiler

Test text

 

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UPDATE:

Just as an FYI, I'm waiting on SoS to update the OP again, since apparently we'll be getting some good ones in that book. Here are the links I'll need at that time:

-Update the OP by referencing Cadmium out-going deflection as seen at that one scene early in SoS

-Multiple RAFOs

-Speed bubble aging

->Reference to how we'll get stuff in BoM

-Bubbles would go around aluminum tubes

-Brandon on chicanery for bubbles

-4 bubble questions (cancelling venn, emotional allomancy "over the top" -- also rafo on nicrosil)

Is it weird that the biggest thing I picked up from that stuff is Hoid's apparent interest in instant noodles?

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Scadrial, apparently. Going off Kurk's links. The third one.

They apparently "almost have instant noodles", though not quite. Hoid is interested in Scadrial for that but isn't getting involved. But there are forces at work trying to help along the development of instant noodles for some reason . . .

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Scadrial, apparently. Going off Kurk's links. The third one.

They apparently "almost have instant noodles", though not quite. Hoid is interested in Scadrial for that but isn't getting involved. But there are forces at work trying to help along the development of instant noodles for some reason . . .

 

Harmony's working to push the world along technologically, so it would make sense to me for Harmony to be the force trying to help along the development of instant noodles.

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I'm not sure why instant noodles even matters. Easily processing aluminum would be more useful. Still trying to figure out how to make Allomantic aircraft, since our aircraft are an alloy of aluminum. Maybe not Allomantically inert, but maybe hard to Push and Pull.

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  • 5 months later...
  • 7 months later...

...and I finally updated the OP to v2.0. Alterations include, but are not limited to, incorporating the WoBs and book info from this thread, restructuring where the sections are, adding in a table of contents and definition of terms, getting rid of that obnoxious blue...

EDIT: Added WoB:

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.

 


This post serves the dual purpose of alerting my loyal followers to the v2.0 update and being an archive of the previous version of the OP, minus its citation archive since that's been retained without alteration.

v1.7

Spoiler

 

I was chatting with Chaos the other day and lamented that much of the conversation about time bubbles on the forums these days is retreading old ground. He suggested I write all my infinite wisdom (definitely his exact words) down, then, so everyone knows the state of the union. 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. Not much of anything fundamentally new, just a laying out of what I know.

Before we start, a fundamental lesson about time bubbles: They make little sense. They involve altering the flow of time and the movement of objects, and not the way you'd think. They do, however (so far as I can tell), follow their own consistent rules. There's no need to throw up our hands in despair, but we can't necessarily trust our initial intuitions either.

Frame of Reference:

The first lesson to learn about time bubbles is, once again, that they make little sense. This is no place more evident than frame of reference concerns.

Time bubbles change both the flow of time for objects 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:

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".
-Note: There is some possibility that what defines "at rest" is determined by individual objects rather than centrally at the bubble, but I find this unlikely. It leads to nasty situations like two different objects right next to each other with different frames of reference being bizarrely affected when encompassed by the same bubble.
Now where exactly this bubble gets its frame of reference from is unclear. Looking at the WoB above, I find it likely that whatever the bubble is "linked" to, its "anchor" as I call it, is likely what defines its frame of reference. So a bubble anchored to a spaceship (to choose an entirely random example...) would not make that ship travel faster through space, since the ship isn't moving so far as the bubble is concerned.
 
-
 
We've recently gotten much more info on how "anchoring" works.
 
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. :D >
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.

 
So that happened. 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.
 
In regards to how to reconcile the two, I'll quote myselfThis 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.
 
-

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 particular 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 x10 speed bubble anchored in our frame of reference, as opposed to 91 or something odd like that.

Conscious control of attributes:

Exactly how much control "bubblers" have over their bubbles is another 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.
 
-
 
We know already from Alloy of Law that the bubbles don't (normally) move with them, and also know that the bubbler leaving their bubble "pops" it. Moreover, both the Mistborn Adventure Game (a dubious source, but worth looking at) and the implications within the book suggest that the size of the bubble cannot be changed once its 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 rather than and/or alongside increasing compression factors. An interesting conclusion it seems we might naturally want to draw from this tradeoff is that there might well be an inverse relationship between the size and the compression factors of bubbles: So a cadmium bubble that was as small as the average bendalloy bubble might be making time pass crazy-slow within it.

Of course this isn't necessarily the case and there are likely some hard upper and lower bounds on both size and compression factors. It bears investigation/Brandon-questioning; even still, as my own new WoB is somewhat lacking in detail.

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).

 

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.

 

So that's all fine and dandy. They overlap multiplicatively like Venn diagrams. This results in a little oddness with subjective burn rates (as touched on above and 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, if my above analysis is to be credited.

 


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.

Competing bubble effects:

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.

This one is all my analysis/intuitions, based almost entirely on my own understanding of how frame of reference works, plus a bit of original thought. I think this implication nearly necessary in order for time bubbles to make sense, though, especially if you also buy my other (once again nearly-necessary, I think) frame of reference analysis.

I have a big fat thread on the matter, which goes into more detail, but it can be summarized thusly: I think 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 set an object moving off at 90 45 degrees.

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. We have this from Peter:

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 suggests 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.

 

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 this 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.

--

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.
 
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).
 
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 RAFO on the matter:
 
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.

 

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. I recently got a somewhat spotty WoB on it, though:

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.

 

We also have a passage from AoL that talks about how borders deal with sound:
 

 

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.

 

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.

 


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.


"Objects" only really exist as singular wholes because of Cognitive perception, and we've seen that someone "in" a train manages to be excluded from the bubble's effects if the train is excluded.

This first WoB is interesting because the above revelations on boundaries show us that their surfaces don't "distend" or otherwise change when stuff impinges against them: So the train is not holding the bubble out, it's just that being "in" an object which is not in the bubble is enough to keep an otherwise-wholly-encompassed object out of the effects of the bubble. The passengers of the train are fully within the bubble's boundaries, and that edge of the bubble is out beyond them, but they're excluded. This initially seems to run counter to the second WoB, though.

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 you 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. Watch this space for a link.

EDIT: Got the link. Enjoy. :D

----

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. 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.

 

We've recently gotten some more info on the matter.

 

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.


Jostling:

We know that objects and people are "jostled" when they exit (or enter? WE DON'T KNOW! (though we suspect entrance also causes jostling)) time bubbles.

Some Alloy of Law quotes for reference:

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.


The earlier WoB on sound may also be worth referencing for any talk of Jostling.

We do not know if this jostling is truly random or if it is somehow mathematically determinable.

We do not know if the angle and/or force of this jostling is a function of the size or the speed of the exiting object.

 

--

 

We do, however, now know that the deflection objects suffer when passing through time bubbles is proportional to the bubble's compression factor: so a 1.5x time bubble would deflect objects less than a 15x one.

 

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
...

 

In addition, this WoB provides weak evidence that jostling occurs for both bendalloy and cadmium bubbles. vorpal_username phrased the question as applying equally well to both, and Brandon did not contest that phrasing.

 

--


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. 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.

We also know from Peter that:

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.


Overall, we know frustratingly little about what exactly happens upon the moment of exiting a bubble. We just 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.

Annoying edge cases

Of course not all is so rosy.

Example:

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. 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 steeljumping along outside a train, going the same speed as it in an essentially straight line. Let's say he runs into a (stationary, of course) 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. No 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 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, and I do not yet have a satisfying solution.

 

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.
 
---
 
EDIT: It looks like "mechallomancy" will be involved in some way. 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.

 
EDIT 2: And again, this one even more definitive. Even with hints regarding when we'll start finding out more.
 
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.

---

Time bubbles are the natural place to look, 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.

 


How I think it'd 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. Or not move at all and anchor my bubble on Z that's moving on a course away from B with A on the line between them.

That'll get you accelerated movement. The ship will move at speed-relative-to-bubble * compression factor. 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.

 

-

 

Looking at the bubble-anchoring quote up above, it seems to me that we may actually be in luck so far as anchoring the bubbles goes. 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.

 

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.

---

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. ;)

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 that I cite in the last section. 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.

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.

If you came here because I threw a link at you in some random thread: Did I answer your question? ;)

-----------------

<WoB Archive>

P.S. Still working on all the formatting, it's not quite as pretty as I'd like.

Change List:
Added water-stream RAFO to compilation - 6/15/2014
Added gravitational time dilation quote - 9/10/2014
Added inset time bubble quote (out of date by now, but still) - 10/29/2014
Added "merger betwen magic and technology" WoB to compilation and relevant part of OP.
Added another FTL-tech quote to WoB compilation and relevant part of OP - 2/19/2015
Misc. updates after the 2015 Chicago signing, various enough that I put the new/changed text in medium blue. - 06/01/2015
Added quote about jostling deflection being proportional to bubble strength - 6/25/2015

 

 

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