Mistborn in SPACE

[Kurkistan]

My current head-cannon has Feruchemicy be usable to change where time bubbles "anchor", and so enabling my version of FTL.

[happyman]

While messing with mass might have some of the needed effects, I suspect that Brandon's FTL idea has something rather more fundamental in mind.

 

As others have pointed out, in the real world, reducing something's mass to zero would (as far as we can tell) just cause it to move at the speed of light.  No FTL.  Our most modern theories suggest (but don't prove; that's impossible) that the light-speed limit is inherently geometrical; that nothing can move faster than the speed of light because that is just the way space and time are shaped.  Most "realistic" (usually still pretty darn impractical) suggestions to get around it involve reshaping time and space in some way.  I suspect that this is the way Brandon would go, given that he has already shown that Allomancy can affect time directly.

[Phantom Monstrosity]

But what happens if mass goes negative, eh?

Yeah sure in theory you can't store more of an attribute than you have, but that may just be a limit imposed by the health/strength of the feruchemist. A machine won't die from poor muscule tone.

I mean, there's also the option that reducing mass to zero also causes weird cognitive stuffs due to information entropy and stuff.

[Kurkistan]

Ahem. Quote:

 

 

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 WoA, 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.

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.)

[Phantom Monstrosity]

Yes, unless (as I said) you figure vout some way to break the limit. What happens if you store 100% AND bob stores 100%

[Kurkistan]

Don't take this glorious moment away from me, Phantom . I finally out-quoted you. . .

 

Since I don't think this scheme of storing the weight of 3rd persons will work, I imagine you and Bob would be able to have a fun time playing anti-gravity tag. Other than that: No effect.

[Phantom Monstrosity]

I'll also point out that the amount you can store/tap is limited by your ferustrength - inquistors take longer to store health than natural feruchemists because of that. Brandon may well have been referring to a base power feruchemist, and not one with the combined feruchemy of a million men.

[Kurkistan]

Art thou secure in thy surety that that thou wanteth to go down this torturous trail, oh taunting Phantom?

Edited July 3, 2013 by Kurkistan

[Jaaaaaade]

An easier solution to the hive-mind hemalurgy ship idea; There's this book, the Long War by Terry Pratchet and Stephen Baxter. That has Stepping, a way of hopping through various dimensions. It's limited to sentient minds, as in people and some primates, and whatever clothes they're wearing and what they're carrying. If you want to move a house, you have to get each person to jump holding each brick, or several men carrying a bit of timber. Vehicles can't go through, until they make an AI so powerful it's sentient, and insert it into the vehicle (In this case it was a pretty badass airship).

You could create an AI that is able to use Allomancy and Feruchemy. However, it'd need more than just sentience, a potato and the ability to flick a switch, you need the right genetics in Mistborn. Perhaps pump someone's blood through the engines.

[happyman]

But what happens if mass goes negative, eh? Yeah sure in theory you can't store more of an attribute than you have, but that may just be a limit imposed by the health/strength of the feruchemist. A machine won't die from poor muscule tone. I mean, there's also the option that reducing mass to zero also causes weird cognitive stuffs due to information entropy and stuff.

 

Actually, the question of negative mass has been asked in real-world physics.  (Negative mass squared is actually considered more likely, despite sounding even stranger.)

In our current theories, the answer is "It's complicated and unintuitive, but nothing physical actually goes faster than the speed of light, despite your best effort."

For those who want more details, if the mass squared of a particle goes negative, it does not manifest as a particle at all.  Rather, it splits into different particles with either no mass (light speed) or positive masses.  Still no violation of FTL.

[Phantom Monstrosity]

Actually, the question of negative mass has been asked in real-world physics.  (Negative mass squared is actually considered more likely, despite sounding even stranger.)

In our current theories, the answer is "It's complicated and unintuitive, but nothing physical actually goes faster than the speed of light, despite your best effort."

For those who want more details, if the mass squared of a particle goes negative, it does not manifest as a particle at all.  Rather, it splits into different particles with either no mass (light speed) or positive masses.  Still no violation of FTL.

Depends what model you're going with.  More estoreric ones let negative mass travel backward through time, which is FTL for all intents and purposes.

[happyman]

Depends what model you're going with.  More estoreric ones let negative mass travel backward through time, which is FTL for all intents and purposes.

 

Are these serious, modern theories proposed by respected professionals, or are they out-of-date theories, or some pop-sci interpretation of the mathematics?  Because if I remember my QFT classes correctly, special relativity is so deeply fundamental to them, it's not even funny.  These are the ones that don't violate FTL in any circumstances.  However, they don't play nice with gravity, and so are fundamentally flawed.

[Pechvarry]

I apologize for bumbling in here without a physics degree, but what's wrong with the Mass Effect model? In that world, they envelope an object (space craft) in a bubble, and pump in energy that lowers the mass of everything inside (relative to everything outside).

Since increased velocity is essentially the same as increased mass (as far as relativity is concerned), you just need to continue to pump more energy in as you approach the speed of light. This shouldn't violate relativity -- it's changing the variables that dictate that "infinite mass" dead end.

Likewise, the faster an iron feruchemist is travelling, the more effective weight they'd have to store.

Still doesn't work unless he can include his whole ship and every molecule of matter on board, though.

[happyman]

I apologize for bumbling in here without a physics degree, but what's wrong with the Mass Effect model? In that world, they envelope an object (space craft) in a bubble, and pump in energy that lowers the mass of everything inside (relative to everything outside).

Since increased velocity is essentially the same as increased mass (as far as relativity is concerned), you just need to continue to pump more energy in as you approach the speed of light. This shouldn't violate relativity -- it's changing the variables that dictate that "infinite mass" dead end.

Likewise, the faster an iron feruchemist is travelling, the more effective weight they'd have to store.

Still doesn't work unless he can include his whole ship and every molecule of matter on board, though.

 

The first problem with this is that the interaction between "mass" and velocity is complicated in special relativity.  It is also not particularly useful for solving real problems.  (Among other things, particles get have two different "masses" as the same time, depending on whether the force is applied parallel or perpendicular to their motion.)  So much so that most modern physicists just talk about the momentum and energy (mathematically much better behaved), with mass referring only to the "rest mass," or how massive the particle is at rest.  You can find older quotes from physicists talking about mass changing with velocity, but trust me---from personal experience, it just ties the mathematics and the physics into knots, with no real gain, conceptually or practically.

The other problem is that both special relativity and general relativity are, when written most simply, geometrical.  The speed of light limit isn't caused by any complicated interaction between the mass, the forces driving it, light, or any other such nonsense.  It's just the way space and time are shaped.  There is no reason, in special relativity, why you couldn't have a particle with imaginary mass, or with changing mass.  If our current theories are correct, there are particles which do that all the time!  But because they exist in a spacetime which has a relativistic geometry, these effects never translate into FTL behavior once you work through the math.

[Phantom Monstrosity]

Are these serious, modern theories proposed by respected professionals, or are they out-of-date theories, or some pop-sci interpretation of the mathematics?  Because if I remember my QFT classes correctly, special relativity is so deeply fundamental to them, it's not even funny.  These are the ones that don't violate FTL in any circumstances.  However, they don't play nice with gravity, and so are fundamentally flawed.

 

If I understand properly, the mere existence of "negative mass" is pretty much nonsense, and ends up violating a lot of the assumptions necessary to have relativity in the first place.  I believe Hawking has come up with a few theoretical ways to make a closed timelike curve with enough negative mass, which lets you do both FTL and time travel. 

 

If your drive requires the existence of forms of matter forbidden by current physics, it starts off impossible and just gets worse. 

 

 

And of course by necessity any FTL drive is going to violate some bit of relativity or another.  I doubt Brandon's going to do something weird like define a preferred frame and only let your spacedrive travel at negative c in the z-axis, though that has the advantage of preserving causality and the rest of relativity.

[Kadrok]

Wow. Epic find Phantom, and what I am about to say shouldn't be seen as coming anywhere close to what you've mentioned. But as someone else who doesn't have a physics degree, can I just mention the Talents series by Anne McCaffrey? The general gist is that psychic powers are discovered in the human populous, and they affect the trajectory of human development (technological and otherwise) resulting in the development of psychic powered space travel. A character named Peter Reidinger features significantly because he can increase his power through tapping outside sources of energy... *cough* Nicrosil *cough* (Nicrosil Feruchemy OR Allomancy...). I haven't quite finished the series (got distracted by my other studies) but my understanding is that they basically have one uber-psychic on each planet whose job is teleporting spaceships.

[Pechvarry]

Thanks, Happyman. Enjoy a +1. New abuse of these forums: finding ways to slightly break reality in ways that don't horrendously violate causality (in other words, this is probably the best place on The Internet to develop sci-fi tech and magic systems, but that should've been obvious to me before now).

And of course by necessity any FTL drive is going to violate some bit of relativity or another

I've never been comfortable with this assumption. It stifles the ability to create solutions, because you're looking at the problem instead of attempting to side-step it.

What about the Alcubierre "Warp Drives" unveiled earlier this year? My understanding is, under this technology, you're still traveling at sub-luminal speeds. But space-time is contorting around you, rapidly tossing you into new regions of objective space. I know it's still in the speculation phase, and I'm aware other people have already derided this model, saying it's incredibly possible to pick up a single random particle in transit and destroy whatever solar system you exit in because you've built up an impossible amount of energy in said particle.

But I just mean, I don't think it's fair to say "all FTL travel upsets relativity and is a time machine." But maybe you're not saying that.

[Phantom Monstrosity]

The Alcubierre has the slight problem that it requires a lot of negative energy (which most current physical models don't like), and it'd be basically impossible to build, start, or stop it - so it's possible that even if you built one you'd never be able to go home and brag about it.

[happyman]

What about the Alcubierre "Warp Drives" unveiled earlier this year? My understanding is, under this technology, you're still traveling at sub-luminal speeds. But space-time is contorting around you, rapidly tossing you into new regions of objective space. I know it's still in the speculation phase, and I'm aware other people have already derided this model, saying it's incredibly possible to pick up a single random particle in transit and destroy whatever solar system you exit in because you've built up an impossible amount of energy in said particle.

But I just mean, I don't think it's fair to say "all FTL travel upsets relativity and is a time machine." But maybe you're not saying that.

 

Luckily for speculation, Special Relativity isn't the whole story.  It's incompatible with gravity, among other things.  That's why we have General Relativity, where space and time themselves actually bend!  Special Relativity is to the universe as plane geometry is to the surface of the Earth: a good approximation for an awful lot of practical problems.  But the surface of the Earth is not flat, and the universe does not globally obey special relativity.

 

In fact, at a fundamental level, the whole thing is a bit of a mess currently.  There *may* be something useful at that level which we could use to make some kind of work-a-round.

 

Most importantly for the actual topic, though, I'd say that the only "realistic" FTL drives are the ones like the Alcubierre which affect space and time directly.  If I had to guess how Brandon was going to use Allomancy to work around relativity, I would guess that the Allomancy will affect space and time directly, just like such drives.  It's by far the easiest lever to pull in modern theories to make a work-a-round.  I still don't know how he would get around the time-travel problems, though.

[Pechvarry]

You could still have weird artifacts by traveling ahead of your own light cone and looking back, observing your past self and such, but I don't see why it would result in time travel (aside from the single-

direction time travel all humans experience).

Sorry for bringing it off topic. I've just been in conversations like this where someone just says "either burns the known universe in energy to obtain or creates time travel. The end." And stifles all further discussion on the matter. I didn't want this discussion to go the same way.

[happyman]

You could still have weird artifacts by traveling ahead of your own light cone and looking back, observing your past self and such, but I don't see why it would result in time travel (aside from the single-

direction time travel all humans experience).

Sorry for bringing it off topic. I've just been in conversations like this where someone just says "either burns the known universe in energy to obtain or creates time travel. The end." And stifles all further discussion on the matter. I didn't want this discussion to go the same way.

 

It's a mathematical theorem that if the universe obeys special relativity exactly, then any FTL travel allows information to travel backwards through time.  It may seem stifling, but the proof is quite elementary by modern standards, roughly comparable to many of the proofs of the Pythogorean theorem in classical plane geometry.  In constrast, the only known proof of Fermat's Last Theorem is orders of magnitude more complicated, as is the classification of all finite simple groups.

 

Because of this, most scientists/engineers/mathematicians prefer to approach the ways in which special relativity does not apply to the universe; it seems much more fruitful.

[Pechvarry]

Because of this, most scientists/engineers/mathematicians prefer to approach the ways in which special relativity does not apply to the universe; it seems much more fruitful.

 

Ok, sorry for being dense (and you have been great, btw).  I thought the idea of the Alcubierre concept was to avoid special relativity.  But, since I seem to be latching onto only small parts of relativity theories without understanding the whole, I'd like to get back to Sanderson.

 

Assuming he doesn't just copy Triplanetary (I can't imagine he will)... Say you Store planetary identity, have ship tap.  Bendalloy bubble anchors to it and rides off into a distant sunset.  Is this better or worse than affecting your mass, as far as verisimilitude and special relativity are concerned?

[happyman]

Ok, sorry for being dense (and you have been great, btw).  I thought the idea of the Alcubierre concept was to avoid special relativity.  But, since I seem to be latching onto only small parts of relativity theories without understanding the whole, I'd like to get back to Sanderson.

 

Assuming he doesn't just copy Triplanetary (I can't imagine he will)... Say you Store planetary identity, have ship tap.  Bendalloy bubble anchors to it and rides off into a distant sunset.  Is this better or worse than affecting your mass, as far as verisimilitude and special relativity are concerned?

 

You aren't wrong; the Alcubierre concept does get around Special Relativity, but that's because Special Relativity is only an approximation to General Relativity.  It isn't actually "true" in the absolute sense of the word.

My general point is that most "reasonable" ways around light-speed involve changing the relationship between space and time.  In Special Relativity, this relationship is fixed by assumption.  The relationship is not fixed in the real world, though; it is modified by gravity.  If time bubbles can modify this relationship directly in the Cosmere without the exotic matter or negative energy, it could plausibly create a FTL drive.  I don't know how they would avoid also producing a time machine, but am willing to suspend disbelief on that.

This is all hard to gauge, though.  I mean, the term unrealistic is hard to measure in a fictional universe.

[Isomere]

I previously created this post as a joke, borrowing from the improbability drive in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.  The theory: Perhaps Bendalloy contracts space-time, but it is just very hard to control so it sort of forms a bubble around you that doesn't have much form. If you could tweak your luck, the random bubble could be given direction and purpose allowing you to control the warp in space-time for FTL travel. While this idea is absurd, I believe there actually IS a way to control the warp in space-time, but I truly doubt Luck is the right way to do it. 

 

Q: So what happens if you have a Bendalloy bubble, and then another Bendalloy bubble inside of it?
BRANDON: It will compound and double, and it will multiply. Source

 

Watch for what happens when something leaves a bendalloy bubble. (He later said "Ha, that won't make sense for about 10 books," leading many to believe this has to do with FTL travel.) Source

 

The final Mistborn trilogy will indeed be sf, with a deep understanding of Allomancy and Feruchemy having allowed them to figure out a method of FTL travel. Source

So we want something that combines Feruchemy, Allomancy, Bendalloy bubble compounding, and passing through an intact bendalloy bubble in a very specific and controlled manner. 

Edited July 9, 2013 by Isomere

[Kurkistan]

Note that it might not necessarily be the actual act of passing through the bubble: it could instead be what happens just before/after. Such as the surface of the bubble distending or some such. Maybe not, but worth keeping in mind.