Breaking Bendalloy

[Kurkistan he/him]

Besides the fact that I highly doubt your basic theory, there is no such thing as true vacuum. Find the emptiest piece of space you can manage, but if you actually manage to apply infinite acceleration to any object that object will quite quickly run into an atom of something and things will go kaboom.

[DocHoliday he/him]

My feeling is that the coins would be going no faster than a regular Push.They themselves are not affected by the Bubble and are moving at real time speed. Because you're putting your weight against the coin, the coin is Pushed away; albeit slower to you're perception than in real time

[aeromancer he/him]

@Kurkistan: I take it you never read Issac Asimov? He has a short story discussing this. Can't remember the title, I'll update this later.

[Kurkistan he/him]

Stay your tongue sir! "I take it you never read Issac Asimov" indeed! 

 

I can't recall that specific story, though, if you'd be kind enough to drop the title/synopsis.

Edited July 25, 2013 by Kurkistan

[aeromancer he/him]

Read it is the 50 year collection, think the story is called "dirty pool"

 

About a professor creating a zero-G field over a pool table. 

 

Hope I didn't mortally offend you.

Edited July 25, 2013 by aeromancer

[Kurkistan he/him]

Can't say I've read it. Oh well: the nice thing about Asimov is that there's always more short stories to find.

Edited July 25, 2013 by Kurkistan

[happyman he/him]

I actually have read that Asimov short story, but I don't see what it has to do with anything.  He was just speculating, like the rest of us.  Among other things, no one has found a way to use electromagnetism to counter the curvature of space due to gravity.

[Pechvarry]

So something I mentioned earlier which keeps me from thinking my interpretation is true is what I called "delayed causality."  I'm looking at my assumption that you could push on a coin that's outside of a bubble, which would fly away from you in slow-motion.  But the fact is, that coin is technically pushing back at you.  Even if just a minuscule amount.  If you're not putting the coin in your timeframe, its effective weight is either delayed, somehow, or amplified (what I referred to as pushing against the weight of an entire timeline, just like a coin embedded in a wall pushed you back instead).

 

What happens if it's a heavier object?  What if you weigh 150 lb and you push on a 150 lb object?  In normal space-time, both you and the object would push away from each other at the same rate (ignoring wind resistance and traction).  If you're in a bubble and it's not, what then?  You fly backwards faster than the object flies forwards.  Do you maintain that improved speed when you break out of the bubble and get deflected in a random direction?  Do you suddenly decelerate as you exit the bubble?

 

I don't know how, but I feel like there's an interpretation wherein it's possible to suffer the effect before the cause even occurs, here.  I think I'm thinking too hard.

 

The "read-only universe" interpretation where blue lines simply don't reach outside the bubble is looking very appealing, just so I stop trying to abuse edge cases.

[Shardlet he/him]

Our perception of the coin outside the bubble is that it is somewhat anchored.  But this is not really the case.  The coin does not have a different mass because it is in a different time reference than you.  Consider the converse; Being in a cadmium bubble and pushing on a coin outside that bubble.  Is that coin going to push back at you any less than if it was in the same time reference as you?  No, this is merely our perception.  I am now thinking though that you could build up quite a powerfully flared steelpush on a coin that is outside a bubble which you are in.  It takes time and effort to built up a flare like that and the time differential from inside to outside a bendalloy bubble may allow that time whereas you could not build up a flared steelpush on a coin normally.  Perhaps this would be like an allomantic rail gun.

[Pechvarry]

That's the effect I mentioned in my OP about continued application of force. It's the same as the thrusters on a spaceship. Continued burn just keeps accelerating your ship.

But it's still weird when you consider an object large enough to move you as well (like being your same weight). If you fly away faster, relative to the object because you're in a bubble, then isn't that the same as it being heavier? After all, you'll end doing more traveling. Move apart at a uniform rate? Then you have to choose internal or external timeframes. If external, seems like it'd slow you down. Forcing you to observe yourself in slow motion. Use the internal timeframe? The object travels super fast, and we have yet another railgun.

[Shardlet he/him]

The thing is, you wouldn't actually be moving away faster it would only appear that you are.  Recall that velocity is a displacement of position relative to a unit of time.  In our example, we have two different rates of time.  In other words, your perception of your velocity inside the bubble would be identical to someone's (who is outside the bubble) perception of the velocity of the other object.  True, there will be a 'normal-time' jump from your original position to the position you'd be in once you reached the edge of your bubble. But once you exit the bubble, it vanishes and your velocity would not change and there would be no change in momentum either. You'd just be in 'normal-time' and would now perceive that your velocity was the same as the object you're pushing. 

 

As to a regular continued push on the coin, it depends on a lot of factors.  Most importantly for this example, if the strength of your push was constant, then the coin would accelerate until it reached an equilibrium velocity and be maintained at that velocity.  To have a true rail gun effect, the strength of your push would have to be super strong (super high flare and then duralumin?) such that the coin reaches a speed where the friction from the air was high enough that the heat generated was sufficient to melt the coin.   

[Oudeis he/him]

I am way, way too tired to discuss time dilation right now. I have one point of narrative causality to reply to. Someone asked, why wouldn't Wax and Wayne have done this, since they know about time-bubbles and steelpushes? My answer: When in the books did they ever need to fire metal that strongly? Guns with a steelpushed bullet have punched through every defense Wax ever faced. Why did he need to do something fancy, potentially breaking space-time, just to push something even harder? If it's possible, I'm sure they have done it in the past, when it was either necessary or just some cool new thing, but bendalloy is expensive and somewhat rare. After all these years it stops being the novelty to them that it would be to us, and they wouldn't bother if it wasn't necessary. And it never was.