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Infrared and ultraviolet


TheOneKEA

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While I was looking at the Ars Arcanum for Warbreaker I noted that the Third Heightening confers perfect color recognition and that the Tenth Heightening allows an object to be drained to the color white to fuel Awakening. These points make me wonder about the following questions:

- Can someone at the Third Heightening see and perceive infrared and ultraviolet light? If they can see infrared light, can they tell what temperature an object is from observing it?

- If someone at the Tenth Heightening touches a colored object that is radiating thermal energy in the infrared spectrum and drains it of all color, does its temperature drop?

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So far, everything in Warbreaker is visible spectrum. IR and UV aren't normally considered visible. It would be kind of hard to pull a color you cannot see. I can see them being able to distinguish various shades of navy and such, but I would have a hard time with them being able to see into the non-visible spectrum. Even now, some people can see differences in colors that others are unable to.

Supposedly, blue eyes enable you to make out some differences that others are unable to see. I know for years I was able to tell the difference between a dark navy and black whereas my family without blue eyes was unable to do so. I knew a girl once that had brown eyes, and she said I could tell differences in shades that she could not.

On a sidebar, Brent Weeks' Lightbringer series has an excellent color based magic system with UV and IR playing important roles.

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You do make good points about everything seen so far in Warbreaker having to do with the visible spectrum, but one of the interesting points about white-colored objects in the real world is that they require greater energy input to reach a certain temperature. An obvious example is a white shirt versus a black shirt; you'll feel cooler in the white shirt. My thought was that even if a person at the Tenth Heightening couldn't directly perceive infrared radiation from a heated object, their use of that object's colors to fuel Awakening would still cause its temperature to drop because it is now reflecting more energy then it was beforehand. Once I thought of that I wondered if it could be extended to a scenario where that temperature drop could happen immediately because that infrared radiation is indirectly contributing to the overall input to the action of Awakening.

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Hi, engineering student here, I usually just come by to keep up to date with theories and what not, but this I have to answer since it's what i'm studing right now.

You are mixing radion emission, which is dependant on the temperature of the object, and radiation absorption/reflection/transmission, which depends on the characteristics of the surface of the object.

At ambient temperature the radion emission is always well in the range of infrared, so we can't see it. What we see, and identify as color of an object, is the radiation emitted by a source(lightbulb, fire, sun) and reflected by the object itself. So if we see that something is green is because it absorb all the frequencies of light except for the green. Something that reflects al frequencies is white and something that reflects none is black.

Given this premise, when the awakeners drain color from something, they are not changing is temperature, but just changinge the properties of its surface so that now it reflects more frequencies.

Btw, about the black and white shirt, you feel cooler in white because it reflects more frequencies(more light, more energy) than the black one that absorbs the energy and then transmits it to you.

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Hi, engineering student here, I usually just come by to keep up to date with theories and what not, but this I have to answer since it's what i'm studing right now.

You are mixing radion emission, which is dependant on the temperature of the object, and radiation absorption/reflection/transmission, which depends on the characteristics of the surface of the object.

At ambient temperature the radion emission is always well in the range of infrared, so we can't see it. What we see, and identify as color of an object, is the radiation emitted by a source(lightbulb, fire, sun) and reflected by the object itself. So if we see that something is green is because it absorb all the frequencies of light except for the green. Something that reflects al frequencies is white and something that reflects none is black.

Given this premise, when the awakeners drain color from something, they are not changing is temperature, but just changinge the properties of its surface so that now it reflects more frequencies.

That is quite possibly the most awesome answer I could have ever expected to get. Thank you for posting this!

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I'd add that, if I were Brandon, I would try to figure out a way of including light in the Cosmere that is self-consistent but has little to do with the real world description. We've already dealt with the problems with time bubbles and frequency; awakening is liable to fall into the same trap in different ways. The way our world has really been observed to be is so different from the way we perceive it, fun and cool magical systems really don't fit. So don't force them.

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