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Investiture and Field Theory: why Rhythm of War works as an amazing science fiction book


G2F4E6E7E8

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Yes!!! The sci-fi elements of RoW are why this *might* be my favorite SA book so far. The way BS used real scientific theories and methods in a fantasy setting was amazing. When Navani was first thinking about light and examining it as a liquid, I kept thinking about wave-particle duality. I know it’s not quite the same thing, but the way she was describing it was very similar. And her use of the scientific method was fantastic. 
 

Your “wild speculation” is a really interesting idea. I think there’s a lot of potential for Intent to work well with the scientific method, and Rosharan scholars (Navani specifically) will most likely make some huge scientific discoveries through this. 

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Wow that's beautiful. I know a bit about field theory from Arvin Ash's YouTube channel. I like how Sanderson is playing this out. 

Ok ok. Minor mistborn era 1 spoilers 

Spoiler

Huh so ....wait could u transform stormlight into Leras-light or Ati-light and then use it to fuel allomancy ?? I understand the metal is simply the catalyst and the filter which is consumed while opening a gateway to the spiritual realm allowing access to investiture. But perhaps if the investiture is Leras-light found in the physical realm then it could make the metal just a filter . No need for it to open a gateway and be consumed ??  

 

So you could use a metal bead to filter it into granting u a specific power , steel for pushing, tin for senses . That's not all too revolutionary but suppose you had a bead of atium and some Leras-light  or Ati-light , then perhaps u could be a Seer and be gifted with precognition for atleast a very long time with a single bead of atium ?? 

Marsh still has some atium beads , there could be others that are lost but can be found. 

Well I don't see how useful atium would be in a world of bullets rather than arrows or fists  but still heck idk it could be of some use. 

Also u might also love this tidbit. 

Moderate TFE spoilers. Just the first book

Spoiler

Sanderson said in a wob that the feruchemical process of" Skimming " , storing weight in ironminds , works by interfering with the Higgs field ,that I understand is responsible for granting mass to all  particles, except gauge bosons. 

Sanderson originally had it be due to interfering with the acceleration due to gravity (g) I think but that was over a flawed understanding of the law of conservation of momentum so he later retconned it to the Higgs field. 

 

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14 hours ago, Friendshipspren said:

Ok ok. Minor mistborn era 1 spoilers 

  Hide contents

Huh so ....wait could u transform stormlight into Leras-light or Ati-light and then use it to fuel allomancy ?? I understand the metal is simply the catalyst and the filter which is consumed while opening a gateway to the spiritual realm allowing access to investiture. But perhaps if the investiture is Leras-light found in the physical realm then it could make the metal just a filter . No need for it to open a gateway and be consumed ??  

 

So you could use a metal bead to filter it into granting u a specific power , steel for pushing, tin for senses . That's not all too revolutionary but suppose you had a bead of atium and some Leras-light  or Ati-light , then perhaps u could be a Seer and be gifted with precognition for atleast a very long time with a single bead of atium ?? 

Marsh still has some atium beads , there could be others that are lost but can be found. 

Well I don't see how useful atium would be in a world of bullets rather than arrows or fists  but still heck idk it could be of some use. 

 

Oh wow, this sounds super plausible. However, Awakening similarly seems to use color as a filter/catalyst and does use it up even when there's an another source of investiture in breath. Maybe it sometimes takes investiture to move investiture (like a refrigerator needs to use energy to move heat energy)? On the other hand, this same sort of filtering seems to happen with gemstones in fabrials without using up the color, so I'm a bit confused on what the general principle is. 

If you like the physics analogies, this field theory perspective maybe clarifies what's going on with anti-investiture also. In real-world physics, there's an electron field (that I guess you hope to find as some component of a larger field in some hypothetical grand unified theory) and electrons are a certain kind of wave traveling through it. However, the equations governing the field allow waves traveling in the "opposite" direction (there's a technical sense in which "opposite" means "backwards in time", but this creates very misleading and overly dramatic associations---it is only true in a very specific technical sense) that turn out to be anti-electrons, or positrons.

Similarly anti-whatever-light is would come from the same field piece as whatever-light. It is just "inverted" or "traveling in an opposite direction" and the precise details of how this is set up are worked out automatically by the magic system as long as you have the right Intent. 

 

 

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@G2F4E6E7E8 yeah I thought of anti light as analogous to anti matter. 

My understanding of all this is patchy. 

I have a very vague idea of CPT symmetry and such, but I know that antimatter is just charge inverted matter. Positive electrons , negative protons. 

I have little idea about time inversion in electrons . The closest I understood it was the ' One electron theory ' which has been debunked I think. 

Do you think stormlight , etc actually is a stream of photons or do u feel they are some sort of ' new ' elementary particles with mass ? 

It would make more sense if they were non gauge bosons I think. 

 

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@Friendshipspren 
I think "backwards in time" brings up a lot of associations that aren't correct. It's only true in a very narrow sense as described here. As an very simplified analogy, if an electron is represented by a wave like sin(x - vt), a positron would be something like sin(x + vt). There's a change of sign in an equation that you can interpret in many different ways, but the english words people attach to the interpretations---"one electron" or "backwards in time"---tend to connote things that are way stronger than what the equations say. 

I think investiture and the various lights is some sort of new thing where, importantly, it may not matter what the really technical physics details are. In the real world, when we have a popular-science discussion like this, everything we say can only be an analogy not at all approaching any true description. However, something magical in Intent makes these actually relevant in the Investiture case. You can actually manipulate Investiture playing around with pop-science analogies like sound tones and light colors without having to deal with any complicated physics. Some part of the magic system latches onto your Intent and does the translation for you. 

Ok, now for some more wild speculation: it could be possible that as you understand more about the actual physics, you get more Connection to a more powerful "language" that you can use to state you Intent and make more precise Commands. We know that magic like Awakening requires you to speak a Command in your native language. Maybe knowing more math/physics concepts would be like adding "words" to this language---if you understand what a gauge boson is, you might be able to use analogies related to them to manipulate investiture. 

I guess what I'm trying to say is that the focus should be more on what physics analogies we can match to Investiture phenomena instead of what exactly Investiture is at the really technical physics level. I guess my return question then would be what would it mean for the magic if the various lights analogized to a gauge boson instead of something else? (I don't know enough to speculate here as you can see by the edits to fix the physics details). 

Edited by G2F4E6E7E8
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@G2F4E6E7E8 huh , kinda like u have to study or atleast watch YouTube , to get better at it lol. 

I thought deep studies or understanding of magic would be required only by Selish magic systems. But seems other systems need it too. 

Perhaps even the spiritual metals in feruchemy. 

Noice 

*Thrist for mistborn era 3 intensifies.

________

On 12/15/2020 at 1:24 PM, Honorless said:

Okay, the Stormwarden part blew my mind. And it fits too! That knowledge must've been how the high-level Sons of Honor managed to create anti-Voidlight.

 Yeah that is an awesome possiblity. Hmm I wonder if Navani or Jasnah or perhaps Huio will wonder about how they can predict highstorms with only math and no Spren or anything to guide them . Or if they will try to understand how gavilar found it and find the stormwarden equations. 

Or perhaps Renarin and others becoming Knights Prescient will make them stop hiding in mysticism and cold forward to do thier part in the scientific revolution. 

But wait I think , yeah  Lirin knows the math to predict highstorms too.

Quote

Tvlakv had almost missed getting ready for this highstorm. Apparently, the map Kaladin had torn up had also included a list of highstorm dates purchased from a roving stormwarden. The storms could be predicted mathematically; Kaladin’s father had made a hobby of it. He’d been able to pick the right day eight times out of ten.

Huh. Let's see.  

Also @G2F4E6E7E8 is there any significance behind ur name ?

 

Edited by Friendshipspren
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10 hours ago, G2F4E6E7E8 said:

@Friendshipspren 
I think "backwards in time" brings up a lot of associations that aren't correct. It's only true in a very narrow sense as described here. As an very simplified analogy, if an electron is represented by a wave like sin(x - vt), a positron would be something like sin(x + vt). There's a change of sign in an equation that you can interpret in many different ways, but the english words people attach to the interpretations---"one electron" or "backwards in time"---tend to connote things that are way stronger than what the equations say.  

As far as I know about waves, this is incorrect. Changing the sign of vt simply changes the direction the wave is moving in and hence does not capture the idea of a positron. A positron was postulated by Dirac as another solution of E2 = m2c4, IIRC.

I am less sure about this, but wikipedia seems to agree with me, so, what do you think is wrong in considering a positron to be an electron moving backwards in time? AFAIK, this is a fairly simple way to think when using Feynman diagrams.

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On 12/15/2020 at 7:57 AM, Friendshipspren said:

Wow that's beautiful. I know a bit about field theory from Arvin Ash's YouTube channel. I like how Sanderson is playing this out. 

Ok ok. Minor mistborn era 1 spoilers 

  Reveal hidden contents

Huh so ....wait could u transform stormlight into Leras-light or Ati-light and then use it to fuel allomancy ?? I understand the metal is simply the catalyst and the filter which is consumed while opening a gateway to the spiritual realm allowing access to investiture. But perhaps if the investiture is Leras-light found in the physical realm then it could make the metal just a filter . No need for it to open a gateway and be consumed ??  

 

So you could use a metal bead to filter it into granting u a specific power , steel for pushing, tin for senses . That's not all too revolutionary but suppose you had a bead of atium and some Leras-light  or Ati-light , then perhaps u could be a Seer and be gifted with precognition for atleast a very long time with a single bead of atium ?? 

Marsh still has some atium beads , there could be others that are lost but can be found. 

Well I don't see how useful atium would be in a world of bullets rather than arrows or fists  but still heck idk it could be of some use. 

Also u might also love this tidbit. 

Moderate TFE spoilers. Just the first book

  Hide contents

Sanderson said in a wob that the feruchemical process of" Skimming " , storing weight in ironminds , works by interfering with the Higgs field ,that I understand is responsible for granting mass to all  particles, except gauge bosons. 

Sanderson originally had it be due to interfering with the acceleration due to gravity (g) I think but that was over a flawed understanding of the law of conservation of momentum so he later retconned it to the Higgs field. 

 

 

Mistborn era 1 spoilers:

Spoiler

Hmm, following that line of logic. I wonder if it's possible to take Stormlight, turn into Leras/Preservation-light. Then have a surgebinder breathe in the light (assuming they still can), and then they'd become a full mistborn. 

TFE Spoilers:

Spoiler

From what I remember, interactions with the Higgs field is what gives elementary particles their mass. There's other much more complicated mechanisms involved in giving something like the proton its mass (since the mass of the constituent quarks only accounts for something like 3% of the protons mass). So he may have to slightly retcon this again.

Maybe just have it be something that changes how your matter interacts with the investiture field and ends up changing your effective mass.

Side note: There's a similar concept in solid state physics where electrons have their effective mass changed because of how they interact with the electric fields of the surrounding atoms. 

 

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On 12/14/2020 at 11:36 PM, G2F4E6E7E8 said:

In total, they would then be able to create, for example, devotion-light or ambition-light without having heard the tones for devotion or ambition before.

I disagree that you could convert Light to different Shards that way. Even in the vacuum tube, the Light is still described as Voidlight, and it's only changed to the "opposing" tone that is actually the exact same sound. We have seen no evidence Intent can be changed. I personally find it more likely that there's a sort of positive/negative charge that gets flipped instead, but idk.

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On 12/15/2020 at 0:36 AM, G2F4E6E7E8 said:

First, you should be able to use light instead of sound to imprint an investiture type onto base-state investiture. Light is another human-intuitive form of decomposing a wave into pure tones so it should work similarly if you have the right Intent. However, making pure colors is harder than pure sounds and might require a laser or something similar

2 years ago I actually did an r/askscience question on the very issue of how hey used sufficiently coherent light for the significant experiments I've learned about that were performed before lasers.  

Short answer:

  1. For spatial coherence they used thin slits/pinholes to force a node at the zero point.  Something Navani is already moving towards by placing her source "in a box, use a hole to focus the light"
  2. One of the techniques mentioned for "color" coherence was to place the slit/pinhole at the right spot on the spectrum from a prism.  (There were several others, but this fits with what is already in the story and lets you tune the color)

Ok, now to read past that part of your great post.  

You might enjoy this topic I made recently attempting to frame investiture in terms of Fermions and Bosons.  Perhaps you may have insight on the matter.

Edited by Serack
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@Friendshipspren

The name comes from some mysterious, exceptional cases of objects in math that I think about a lot. There's a classification of "continuous symmetry types" (symmetry types of things like circles and spheres instead of things like squares that only have "discrete" symmetries) that is mostly infinite families that mathematicians expected. However, when they were finishing up the classification, they found 5 bizarre exceptions in specific large dimensions ranging from 7 to 248. I find these fascinating. 

@Ookla of Truthshapers

Ah, I think those two concerns you brought up are related. So there are three ways to think of a wave like sin(x - vt). First, you think of it as a one dimensional moving image plotted against the x-axis and moving as you increase t. Second, you think of it as the opposite: plotted against t and moving as you increase x. Third, you can think of it as a stationary plane wave plotted against x and t. 

In the first interpretation you are correct: changing the plus to a minus just changes the direction the wave in moving in space. However, in the second interpretation, changing the sign changes the direction the wave is moving in time. The third interpretation reveals what's going on: a right-moving, forwards-in-time wave is indistinguishable from a left-moving, backwards-in-time wave. Both are diagonal plane waves oriented top-right to bottom-left in the (x,t)-plane. Which interpretation is correct depends on which problem you are trying to solve. 

This is the analogy I am going for: interpreting a positron as an electron going backwards in time is the same. It's just a mathematical trick/change in perspective that's useful for doing some calculations. It does not at all imply all the associations you would normally think of when you hear the English phrase "backwards in time"---you can't mess with causality/kill you grandfather and cause a paradox with an antimatter bullet. I think the wikipedia section is careful to clarify this in the last sentence?

Of course this is an analogy that's wrong in all details. Somehow I'm conflating direction of spacial travel with electron vs. positron. Heck, electrons/positrons are all in quantum fields so even thinking of waves in them as functions plotted in spacetime is problematic. However, I think the analogy is correct in the intuition. Definitely let me know if I'm wrong there however---I'm a mathematician, not a physicist. 

@Serack

Thanks for bringing that up about coherent light---I did not know that! Given that Navani did not seem to need anything like perfect pitch to get the tones right, the magic behind Intent might be good enough to not necessitate something as exact as a laser and those lower-tech methods might be good enough. 

The Boson/Fermion thing is interesting too. I really would not be surprised if Brandon Sanderson meant to go that deeply into physics analogies. His extreme emphasis on symmetries and pure tones is really strong signal that he was thinking a lot about real-world physics. 

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I think Investiture functions like dark energy, like reverse gravity/cosmological constant, in space-time,. The further Investiture moves from its source, the more force is drawn to that center. I can't remember where but the spheres of Stormlight grow extremely heavy as they move off world in the Cognitive Realm. Investiture in a person has an easier ability to move. I think Nightblood acts as a black hole for Investiture.

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  • 11 months later...

I definitely think the analogy to field theories is totally intentional and not a coincidence, the waveforms ideas were hinted at way back in the early cosmere (harmonics of colors & perfect color recognition as analogous to perfect pitch in Warbreaker, Bronze Allomancy in Mistborn Era 1 - I think "pulse length" is their term for "wavelength"

On 12/14/2020 at 11:36 PM, G2F4E6E7E8 said:

Why RoW is amazing science fiction
This fundamental idea--breaking up waves into pure tones--is something that I really don't see that much in even popular science, no matter how important it is to actual physics. Imagine then my shock then when the first mass media I see it in is, of all things, an ostensibly fantasy novel. It's not just a side-note; it's a critical piece of the magic system that I can use above to build wild theories involving real science concepts.  This is what science fiction should be: deep concepts and ideas, not just the superficial trappings of the genre, like robots and spaceships or whatever. It is the pure opposite of technobabble. 

I didn't even talk here about how Navani's chapters present a more accurate view of what it feels like to work on a science problem than anything I've read before. She sees some strange phenomena that confuse her: the voidsphere explosion and the Thaylen guild's fabrial methods. She thinks deeply about all the implications of what they must mean. She then puts together some simple ideas derived from those in complicated ways, experiments with them, and figures out something amazing. This is what science is at its most basic level. 

Yep. SF and fantasy always have muddy edges, and with this sort of book they blur even more.

Arguably RoW is science fiction in a fantasy setting, while Skyward is fantasy in a SF setting.

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  • 1 month later...
On 12/15/2020 at 7:57 AM, Friendshipspren said:

Huh so ....wait could u transform stormlight into Leras-light or Ati-light and then use it to fuel allomancy ?? I understand the metal is simply the catalyst and the filter which is consumed while opening a gateway to the spiritual realm allowing access to investiture. But perhaps if the investiture is Leras-light found in the physical realm then it could make the metal just a filter . No need for it to open a gateway and be consumed ??

I'm relatively sure that light is a gaseous form of investiture, and if so, Leras-light was just the white mists on Scandrial

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