Speed bubbles interaction with light / heat / air

[DoctaDajman]

How do you all think this works?  Air moves through speed bubbles at a typical speed right?  Or no?  The explosion shockwave was slowed down we know. But what of light and heat?  

If someone had a cutting lazer / torch and it took a few seconds to cut through some solid material that is usually moving very quickly... could shooting that same laser or torch at the object from inside of a speed bubble allow you do do it quickly?  

Thinking lazer defense systems throwing up speed bubbles to slow down fast traveling planes to easily track them and focus their weapons. 

Or a heist scene where the user wants to rob an armored truck but only has moments while it is traveling, could they put up a speed bubble and then focus a cutting torch right at the edge of the bubble?  

I get that trajectories and such are changing and effected through the speed bubble, but a bullet shot at a wall through a speed bubble will still hit the wall right?  Difference there is that the torch and laser are continuous. 

I could see that the photons all individually count as projectiles and as they get thrown off course the laser loses effectiveness but what of a wave of heat?  

Take Wax and Wayne's first use of a speed bubble in that conversation where they carry on for pages and cover it with a single cough. If Wayne used a speed bubble right next to a bad guy and held a heat gun right at the edge of the bubble mere inches away from the enemy who is slowed would that heat be compounded on the person?  Thinking of those videos where they hold the flame for 1 second, 5 seconds, 30 seconds etc. Would the heat focused from Wayne for 30 seconds appear as an instant burn that the other guy had no chance to escape?  

On a Sunlight Aether kick in my mind and curious how that might interact with speed bubbles. 

 

[Treamayne]

8 hours ago, DoctaDajman said:

How do you all think this works?  Air moves through speed bubbles at a typical speed right?  Or no?  The explosion shockwave was slowed down we know. But what of light and heat?  

<snip>

On a Sunlight Aether kick in my mind and curious how that might interact with speed bubbles. 

 

Many of these questions are RAFO, because Brandon wants to answer them in the stories.

You may just want to read Timebubble tagged WoBs.

Because the Bubbles have a mechanism for dealing with energy passing through the bubble's barrier, I do not think heat would work - but we simply do not know for certain either way.

 

Here are a few that apply to your question:

Spoiler

Quote

EricLake

@BrandSanderson In M:AoL, will bendalloy’s time dilation result in redshifting of light going in/out of the bubble? #weescience

Brandon Sanderson

I’ve been working on the science of it. Basically, I’ve been treating it as a gravitational time dilation.

But only focused inward, and equally, on those inside the bubble. It’s making my brain hurt a bit, but I think I’ve got it working

I think this means yes to a gravitational redshift. But . . . it gets wacky. Trying to decide just what it would do is tough.

General Twitter 2010 (Nov. 22, 2010)

Quote

Questioner

And I'm not going to ask you to go over Sanderson's Laws but they add up to this magical materialism almost, which I think works really well with your storytelling. Do you have any particular method for meshing together the rules that you create for a system and creating a balance that allows you to tell a compelling story with it?

Brandon Sanderson

That's an excellent question because this is a really interesting give and take. Everything needs to be done in service to the story and the danger of these systems is doing the same sort of thing that an outline does to a story. Too rigid of an outline means you just don't have a good story in a lot of cases. Too rigid of a magic system can actually make certain stories just not work. And I don't think this is the only way you have to do it. For me, this is a lot of the fun but I have to let myself bend.

A good example of this, alright? I wanted to do speed bubbles... But one of the powers is these speed bubbles, right? You can slow down or speed up time around you in a bubble, right? So what I do is I say "Okay if we can do this, science-y people--" I go to my science-y people, that's the official term, I said "What's this going to do?" And they're like "Yeah, red shift. You're going to irradiate everybody." I'm like "Oh, right." *laughter* "Right, irradiating the room. A flashlight becomes a laser beam." Like stuff like this, I have-- What I do-- The difference between me and a science fiction writer is I say "I still want speed bubbles, so we will build into the magic system why the red shift doesn't happen and I will go with that. I will make a rule for it and I'll be consistent but I can make up a rule." And that is something I will recommend to fantasists versus science fiction writers is this thing. Remember the story is king. Be consistent once you've done something but go ahead and give yourself the wiggle room to build something that's going to become-- be for great storytelling. And that balance between being consistent and telling a great story is where you want to be.

DragonCon 2016 (Sept. 3, 2016)

He eventually decided that Redshift and Blue shift were avoided with Cadmium and Bendalloy because the way the powers work, extra energy is either drawn from the Spiritual Realm to counter the shift, or the excess energy is converted to investiture and sent to the Spiritual Realm to bleed off the shift

Quote

Questioner

Is there a simple explanation of why bullets and objects that go through the time bubble wall are refracted at such random...?

Brandon Sanderson

There's two reasons. One is the outside-of-the-books reason, one is the inside-of-the-books reason. Outside the books, it made time bubbles too powerful. Limitations, that whole idea about limitations. In-world, what's happening is, there is a transfer of power that's happening right there. Which is what keeps light from irradiating people when it passes through a bubble. So, there's a transfer of energy, there's actually a thermodynamic process happening when you pass out of the speed bubble. And energy is being lost. And that has to do with cosmere physics.

Arcanum Unbounded release party (Nov. 22, 2016)

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Aiken Frost

Guys, have you noticed this bit in the Bendalloy section [of the Mistborn Adventure Game]?

"A physical attack made through the bubble, whether held or thrown, is robbed of its kinetic energy, often with an audible 'pop.'"

Could this be what we are looking for when trying to figure the FTL space travel thing?

Arcanist Lupus

This statement seems to violate several things from Alloy of Law: first, Wax's "shooting the bullet" scene, and the danger of being shot while inside a cadmium bubble.

Peter Ahlstrom

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.

Miscellaneous 2011 (Dec. 22, 2011)

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Kurkistan

Speaking of time bubbles, can iron and steel and emotional Allomancy go beyond the boundaries of time bubbles; like if I'm inside a time bubble can I just like super Steelpush outside?

Brandon Sanderson

Oh, time bubbles interfere with almost all forms of Investiture.

Firefight Chicago signing (Feb. 20, 2015)

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zas678's sister

If Wayne and Breeze, like if Wayne had a time bubble up and Breeze was inside Pushing on somebody's emotions what--

Brandon Sanderson

He could still make that work.

zas678's sister

Would it affect it?

Brandon Sanderson

Not really. It wouldn't dramatically affect it. You're going to have one of these sort-of effects-- Yeah, because what he is doing is on another Realm, it's not going to affect it.

zas678's sister

Is that the same with all of the *audio obscured*

Brandon Sanderson

Not necessarily. See what's going on is if you are affecting things on the Cognitive Realm--

zas678

It's kind of time-independent?

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah? It's not as-- Really it's the Spiritual Realm that is completely time-independent, right? All time and space are irrelevant once you reach the Spiritual. You're kind of going to go over the top a little bit, it's going to work just fine. In fact you can probably-- So he could use that to make his metals last a little bit better, probably. So that is a hack of the magic systems that you could probably do.

Holiday signing (Dec. 12, 2015)

 

Sorry it does not conclusively answer your question, but I hope it helps.

Edited May 22, 2025 by Treamayne
SPAG

[DoctaDajman]

1 hour ago, Treamayne said:

Many of these questions are RAFO, because Brandon wants to answer them in the stories.

You may just want to read Timebubble tagged WoBs.

Because the Bubbles have a mechanism for dealing with energy passing through the bubble's barrier, I do not think heat would work - but we simply do not know for certain either way.

 

Here are a few that apply to your question:

  Hide contents

He eventually decided that Redshift and Blue shift were avoided with Cadmium and Bendalloy because the way the powers work, extra energy is either drawn from the Spiritual Realm to counter the shift, or the excess energy is converted to investiture and sent to the Spiritual Realm to bleed off the shift

 

Sorry it does not conclusively answer your question, but I hope it helps.

Thanks for these WoBs. I think that answers it. Nothing gets supercharged passing through the bubble. My new head cannon is that lazers from inside are either totally useless outside or they would have to track for the same equivalent to outside the bubble as they normally would have which makes this whole process way to costly to use... and it would be next to impossible to focus anything long enough.  The heat transfer was answered well and I will assume the same would go with any form of air forces. They would be robbed of their energy once passing through. 

[Treamayne]

9 minutes ago, DoctaDajman said:

The heat transfer was answered well and I will assume the same would go with any form of air forces. They would be robbed of their energy once passing through. 

Not so much "robbed" as "corrected to the local Reference Frame" (but amounts to nearly the same thing). The big take-away I noticed is that investiture applied outside of the Physcial Realm does stack (The Breeze WoB). Which may have interesting implacations even outside of Soothing and Rioting. 

Edited May 22, 2025 by Treamayne
SPAG

[Duxredux he/him]

Probably what you're looking for is this thread by DrPhysics where he goes over the oddities of speed bubble boundaries.

[DrPhysics he/him]

The thread linked by @Duxredux addresses the heat, but doesn't address what would happen with a laser.

 

A WOB/story could change this in the future, but if lasers act like regular light crossing a boundary, they will go through without bending (stuff outside a bubble looks normal except for a barely noticeable shimmer) and will be scaled to match the proper brightness/intensity (otherwise it would be very dark in speed bubbles and very bright in slow bubbles).

That said, the time difference would make it hard to do anything, because you have to hold the laser still on the target for long enough. As an example, there are green lasers that you can carry around in your pocket that are bright enough to pop a balloon if you you can shine the laser in one spot for a second (yes, there are much more powerful lasers, but this one works for the example). In order to pop the balloon through a factor of 10 slow down (either from regular time into a slow bubble or from a speed bubble to regular time), you'd have to hold the laser in place for a full 10 seconds of fast time to deliver the one second in slow time needed to pop the balloon.

For reference, commercially available laser cutters can cut through 1/4 inch plywood at 10-20 mm/s. More powerful lasers would need a pretty big speed bubble, and we have no idea in how electricity would handle going into a bubble.

[DoctaDajman]

2 hours ago, DrPhysics said:

The thread linked by @Duxredux addresses the heat, but doesn't address what would happen with a laser.

 

A WOB/story could change this in the future, but if lasers act like regular light crossing a boundary, they will go through without bending (stuff outside a bubble looks normal except for a barely noticeable shimmer) and will be scaled to match the proper brightness/intensity (otherwise it would be very dark in speed bubbles and very bright in slow bubbles).

That said, the time difference would make it hard to do anything, because you have to hold the laser still on the target for long enough. As an example, there are green lasers that you can carry around in your pocket that are bright enough to pop a balloon if you you can shine the laser in one spot for a second (yes, there are much more powerful lasers, but this one works for the example). In order to pop the balloon through a factor of 10 slow down (either from regular time into a slow bubble or from a speed bubble to regular time), you'd have to hold the laser in place for a full 10 seconds of fast time to deliver the one second in slow time needed to pop the balloon.

For reference, commercially available laser cutters can cut through 1/4 inch plywood at 10-20 mm/s. More powerful lasers would need a pretty big speed bubble, and we have no idea in how electricity would handle going into a bubble.

That is sort of my question. I dont know the science enough to even ask the right questions though.  

I'm kind of thinking of it like a bunch of photons piling up. Would the factor really be amplified like that given how much faster the speed of light is? If you shot a water gun out of a bubble what would happen to that water?  Does it compress in some way at the bubbles edge to allow for 10 seconds of a stream to be moving through in that straight line without totally piling up on eachother and giving you more of a water glob than a stream?  

I dont know if I am asking the right question there. Either way if you had to hold a lazer on a plane for 10 seconds to shoot it down the speed bubble is still going to make tracking it and targeting it that much easier right? What advanced weapons systems have to do to shoot at a moving target the allomancer could do from inside their bubble even if the task took longer or became monotonous. 

Forgive me if the thread explains this I have not yet had time to read through it. Will work on that tomorrow hopefully 

[DrPhysics he/him]

Matter seems to interact differently from light. Based on the way the bubbles are described as looking in the book, the edge of the bubble essentially has to absorb all the photos hitting either side, then re-emit photons out the other side in the proper color and amount so that it appears to be clear. 

 

Matter seems to go through without getting created/destroyed, it's just sped up/slowed down appropriately and deflected.

We haven't seen any liquids/gasses cross the line (the explosion broke the bubble when it hit, the slow mo happened while it was outside).

 

The linked post was my attempt to describe what wind does based on what we know about the physics.

 

I'm remembering (but can't find the source, so take this with a grain of salt) that solid objects are either all in or all out of the bubbles. It's cognitive aspect controls that (I'm in, vs I'm out), and the weird deflections happen as they suddenly end up in the other side.

 

I don't know how a stream of water would view itself. Most water traveling through the air like that will break into disconnected droplets, and I imagine that those would cross like bullets and other items. 

 

What a connected stream would do is much harder to predict. The easiest solution would be the all in/all out method. Bubble boundaries would stop at the edge of flowing water. The rare, unbroken streams would be thrown out all at once, possibly deforming the edge of the bubble so that it wraps around the stream and keeps it all on the same side.