Infinite Feruchemical Trait

[Shining Silhouette he/him]

Here's a question about feruchemistry: what's stopping a feruchemist from storing an absolute massive amount of trait in massively small moment of time? What stops a pewter feruchemist from becoming infinitely weak for an infinitely small amount of time and then returning to normal the next instant? Since the instant of time is just as small as the strength is large, it probably wouldn't have an impact, right, because the infinities would probably cancel each other out? But since some infinities are larger than others (math!), what if a larger infinite amount of strength is stored in a comparatively smaller infinitely small period of time (a period of time so small that it wouldn't have a lasting effect on the body; the weak moment would be "skipped" over)? Could that lead to an infinite amount of strength? Are there limits on how full a metalmind can be?

The other thought that I had was processing speed and the mental control it would take to initiate the storing in an infinitely small amount of time since humans are limited by mental speed, so this probably wouldn't work with just a pewter feruchemist. So what if a zinc (mental speed) + pewter feruchemist stored so much mental processing that they had the mental capacity to do this? Is this theoretically possible?

I guess the other issue would be that the zinc feruchemist wouldn't be able to store the infinite amount of mental speed required to process an infinitely small period of time in the first place. But in theory, could this work on a smaller scale if the feruchemist stored enough mental power to complete this process on some level? As the mental processing approaches infinity?

Thoughts?

[Dunkum he/him]

A couple of things:

1. storing/tapping is additive, not multiplicative.  this is easiest to demonstrate with Iron/Mass since the units make more sense: if you have a mass of 60 Kg and you store 1/2 your mass for 1 hour, then for that hour you have an effective mass of 30 Kg.  if you then tapped that you would not have double mass for an hour, you would have 1.5x mass for an hour (regular mass + the 1/2 mass you stored) so 90 Kg.

2. moving from that, then, the most you can store of an attribute would be 100%; and storing 100% for a second would let you tap 100% and double whichever attribute for 1 second. there is no such thing as storing an infinite or near infinite amount as you approach 100%.

3. however even that theoretical limit of 100% isn't truly achievable for most attributes. in a lot of cases storing 100% of an attribute for any length of time would result in death.

4. and finally - there are diminishing returns on over-tapping (Brandon originally has Sazed call it compounding in era 1, but that term has since come to mean something else, so i'm going to call the act of tapping a lot of an attribute in a short burst over-tapping since I don't see an existing term for it).  to go back to that mass example if you stored 30 Kg for 1 hr you could tap 30 Kg for 1 hour or you could tap 60 Kg for maybe 25 minutes - strictly less than the 1/2 hour you would expect.  so while there is an actual multiplicative aspect here, the more you try to tap at once, the more of it gets wasted on the extra expenditure to do that over-tapping and the shorter the burs of extra attribute gets.

[Sjsharks93]

Along with the answer above, metalminds have a limited amount of space, and the smaller the metalmind the less space it has

[Treamayne]

8 hours ago, Shining Silhouette said:

Here's a question about feruchemistry: what's stopping a feruchemist from storing an absolute massive amount of trait in massively small moment of time?

 

6 hours ago, Dunkum said:

3. however even that theoretical limit of 100% isn't truly achievable for most attributes. in a lot of cases storing 100% of an attribute for any length of time would result in death.

Here is the WoB that deals with your specific question, as answered by @Dunkum

 

Spoiler

 

Thoughtful Spurts

If there's really no upper limit to Feruchemy for practical reasons* , why didn't Sazed just fill steel at ridiculous levels for a few minutes in [Well of Ascension], and then go back to running instead of leaving his steelminds there? Say, being some 100,000 times slower than he would normally be for about a minute. Meaning that a Feruchemist should be able to fill a given metalmind in very short periods of time if you fill at a high enough rate.

*(yes, you have the limit of how much you can store in a given metalmind and for how many metalminds you can carry on your person, but those are probably too high to really be taken into account in more "normal" circumstances)

Brandon Sanderson

The low end is bounded. You can pull out tons--but in filling, you can only go so far. I didn't ever explicitly talk about this in the series, but the implications are there. Not all have the same bounds, but in your example, the body just can't slow beyond a certain point. Think of it this way--you can only fill a weight metalmind with as much weight as you have to give. So you can become very, very light--but you only add to a time for doubling your weight. You can't make yourself 100,000 times slower and gain 100,000 times multiplication. You can give up all of your normal speed, and so when you tap that speed out you are at 200% for an equal period. (And that's a theoretical maximum; realistically, you can only go to down around 75% slower or the like.)

 

For example, if a Steel Runner tried storing 100% of their speed, heart and lung function would stop (anything with muscle movement). . . with the predictable result.

More Here

[Shining Silhouette he/him]

7 hours ago, Dunkum said:

however even that theoretical limit of 100% isn't truly achievable for most attributes. in a lot of cases storing 100% of an attribute for any length of time would result in death.

 That makes sense now that I think about it. I was thinking that the moment of time would be so small that one might die for less than a millisecond but then be revived the next, but probably if someone died they wouldn't be able to stop the storing of the trait and just die (and that's not even accounting for the addition/multiplication error).

 

4 hours ago, Sjsharks93 said:

Along with the answer above, metalminds have a limited amount of space, and the smaller the metalmind the less space it has

Oh that's right!

 

34 minutes ago, Treamayne said:

 

Here is the WoB that deals with your specific question, as answered by @Dunkum

 

Thank you! I've had this thought for a while and now I think I understand. 

Edited June 2, 2022 by Shining Silhouette