Healing and extra mass

[Vortaan he/him]

So a question has been rattling around in my brain during a AoL reread. Where does Miles get the extra mass he would need to heal wounds like losing fingers, toes, arms, and etc? 

 

Before someone writes this off as a silly question, the only other Feruchemical ability that ties into a large gain in mass is pewter, and while storing there is a decrease in muscle mass that makes sense for the later increase. We've seen Sazed store gold, and he doesn't seem to be getting skinnier or weaker, he just gets sick. Same with Wayne. So where does the mass for these larger healings come from? Particularly if a large injury like losing an arm or leg happens... does it all get shunted from hammerspace on the back of your invisible clone?

 

This kind of makes me think that gold healing is actually a personalized reversal of time more than actual healing. You reset your body to an earlier state, rather than heaing your body's current damage.

[Kurkistan he/him]

This kind of makes me think that gold healing is actually a personalized reversal of time more than actual healing. You reset your body to an earlier state, rather than heaing your body's current damage.

 

Yes.

[Satsuoni he/him]

Mind you, you still get extra mass, no matter the true mechanism. You could repeatedly cut off pieces of yourself and regrow them (as long as you are gold compounder), and then do whatever (eat?) the cut off parts.

This is not the only case of Feruchemy (even without Compounding) adding energy to the system - the simplest case would be Feruchemical iron on a pump connected to generator storing and tapping repeatedly (say 5sec half/ 5sec 1.5).

 

Bottom line - the energy/mass is probably provided by the Shard in some way, then recycled as usual.

[Moogle]

Bottom line - the energy/mass is probably provided by the Shard in some way, then recycled as usual.

 

A Ferring storing and tapping weight can generate infinite amounts of electricity, which will eventually generate waste heat. At what point does this get recycled? I really don't know, but I can safely say that conservation of energy is not a thing. Probably. On the plus side, the inhabitants of the Cosmere don't have to worry about running out of negentropy.

[Shardlet he/him]

Conservation of energy could still hold.  Energy could be drawn from the feruchemist, the surroundings, the power of creation or any combination.

 

The rub with the reversal to a previous state idea is scarring.  But, if I recall that was a major point of debate in the thread which Kurk linked to.

[Kurkistan he/him]

No, not that thread. I just linked to the proof that Cognitive aspects guide healing.

 

Now if you want scarring, you could look at this thread, or this other one.

[Moogle]

Conservation of energy could still hold.  Energy could be drawn from the feruchemist, the surroundings, the power of creation or any combination.

So what you're proposing is that eventually Feruchemy will no longer work if one stores/taps weight to create electricity, as the power of creation runs out? Or that tapping weight with Feruchemy to make a seesaw go up and down will make you tired?

 

Or are you saying that creating electricity would not generate waste heat/make the environment colder? If that's the case, you're reducing entropy, which means you're essentially gaining infinite energy still, as you can convert negentropy into useful work.

 

I'm not really sure how conservation of energy holds here at all, unless thermodynamics are incredibly different in the Cosmere.

[Shardlet he/him]

I was more referring to energy as a source for mass production for healing as in energy can be converted to mass in order to provide the bits for regrown fingers and such.  I would assume that all other external effects would be unchanged.  The part of the cosmere that is necessarily outside the realm of physics is going to be the power of creation and its direct application.  Most all of the magic systems step outside of physics at least a bit. 

 

As for creation of electricity on a seesaw per se, obviously you are going to have heat generated by friction and transmission of electricity.  But insofar as you are getting something for nothing, as it were, you are drawing on your investiture and therefor using the power of creation to some extend even if all the weight stored and tapped comes from you.  I think this gives some slush to work with. 

[Satsuoni he/him]

Shard would recover energy in the same way it recovers allomantic energy (note that since metal eventually returns to planet, there is energy gain). How exactly? Well, I am not sure, and I am relatively sure Brandon does not know. I have some thoughts on that in my old thermodynamics thread (in my sig), which boil down to the idea of entropy being different in Cosmere - possibly defined with taking into account Shardic intent and current mental state, possibly with the 3-realm interaction turning our real entropy into a kind of complex  number, no longer comparable (no more "more" or "less" entropy). Then the second law of thermodynamics becomes, in many cases, null and void, and energy conservation becomes very different indeed as long as "magic" is involved.

Edited September 26, 2013 by Satsuoni

[Vortaan he/him]

Is it bad that I don't like the "The shard provides energy which turns into matter" argument? If this is this case, why does storing pewter cause muscles to deflate? I'm ok with the mass being converted into energy and then later being turned back into mass, but in the case of gold, it doesn't seem like mass is being stored at all. I suppose an argument for health being stored and turning into energy that can be converted into mass as necessary could be made, but in that case I would think healing a deadly deadly poison would probably use less healing than restoring an arm... which seems off.

[Shardlet he/him]

I don't think it's bad that it doesn't jive with you.  It doesn't really jive with me either.  If for no other reason than it takes a pretty enormous amount of energy to create any appreciable amount of matter from it.  I was just tossing it out there. 

[Kurkistan he/him]

I wouldn't think of it in such Einsteinian terms. You store Health, that quality which is your body's ability to stay or return to as it ought to be in the face of attack. You then tap it. I don't think reducing it to a discussion of energy is helpful.

Edited September 26, 2013 by Kurkistan

[Vortaan he/him]

I wouldn't think of it in such Einsteinian terms. You store Health, that quality which is your body's ability to stay or return to as it ought to be in the face of attack. You then tap it. I don't think reducing it to a discussion of energy is helpful.

 

Then this still doesn't solve the mass problem. Assuming that storing health gives you the ability to turn back the clock, so to speak, then where does the second arm come from to replace the one on the ground in front of you? Or to use a less extreme example, where did Wayne's second back come from?

[Isomere]

The human attribute "health" has never been quantified in terms of absolute energy. It's possible there is a tremendous amount of power absorbed when you store health in a metalmind, enough to create matter from scratch. 

[Kurkistan he/him]

Then this still doesn't solve the mass problem. Assuming that storing health gives you the ability to turn back the clock, so to speak, then where does the second arm come from to replace the one on the ground in front of you? Or to use a less extreme example, where did Wayne's second back come from?

 

*TES Spoilers*

 

Where did the gilt on Shai's desk come from? Or her regrown hair when she removed the beggar!Shai stamp? Or the glass in her window, or marble for her floor? I think magic in the Cosmere can just make stuff appear, without the excessive energy costs we normally associate with matter-creation.

[Satsuoni he/him]

Essentially, this is physics/metaphysics interaction Remember, in vacuum, small splashes of mass and energy always appear and disappear, and, for example, stretching quark-quark pair results in the another quark pair being pulled from vacuum, since it is more thermodynamically favorable than increasing distance between them. Feruchemical gold alters the system in such a way that pulling mass from vacuum becomes favorable, with the equilibrium being "healthy human being". The more Feruchemical gold you tap, the faster relaxation towards that equilibrium. It is no more surprising than our universe pulling vacuum (which has nonzero energy and mass per unit of volume) out of nowhere at all as it expands (as per some current theories. Nobody knows for certain what happens to the universe yet.)

[Shardlet he/him]

Ooh, bustin' a quantum cap!  Nice.

[Isomere]

With most magic systems such as Forgery I can buy that extra energy comes from the Power of Creation. But I believe all the energy you get while tapping a metalmind comes from what was previously stored, with no net addition of energy from any shard. Of course compounding changes that since you borrow energy from Allomancy.

[Moogle]

But I believe all the energy you get while tapping a metalmind comes from what was previously stored, with no net addition of energy from any shard.

 

You can get infinite energy easily by storing weight (and, by extension, storing strength, which changes your mass). I don't think that's really the case, unless physics are very different in the Cosmere.