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Coherent light - how disruptive?


TheOneKEA

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I was thinking about the sorts of mechanistic, nuts-and-bolts science-type questions that I'd like to ask Brandon someday, and one that I came up with was this:

 

"How disruptive would the introduction of coherent light technology (such as lasers or LEDs) be to the culture, society and magic system of Nalthis?"

 

I'm interested because I'd love to know what would happen if you aimed a laser at a wall and then drew forth the color in that wall to perform Awakening while the laser was shining on it. Since Brandon is already going to explore the interaction of magic and technology on Scadrial, I'd love to know how this type of interaction would occur on Nalthis.

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Just off the top of my head, I'd guess nothing special in this particular case. You can't drain a white object, despite the fact that it's technically going to be whatever color is being reflected on it at the time, so I'd guess Awakening needs to work with the "inherent" color of an object under normal conditions.

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I think Awakening is technically powered by pigmentation, not by the light. As noted, you can't drain white objects, and white is all colors for light but colorless for pigment.

 

Now, what they could be useful for is figuring out exactly how much color can be drained from a given object by measuring exactly how much light of any given frequency is reflected. Culture might be a bit more interesting; for one thing lots of people may take to using colored light on white walls so they can look pretty without fueling Awakening.

Edited by name_here
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  • 3 weeks later...

Random thought and the answer is probably no...

 

Imagine a white wall. Imagine a normal lantern with a normal candle, but now hold up a piece of red glass between it and the wall. There's now a patch of red color on the wall. If an Awakener touched that square of red, is it possible she could drain the pigment from the colored glass to power her Awakening?

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Oh, sure! Go and bring realmatics into it.  :P

 

I would simplify and concrete your cognitive statement by saying that, in such a case, the wall would not be generally considered to be red.  Thus, the wall would not be cognitively considered to be 'red'.

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