[SoS Spoilers] FTL, Time Bubbles and Twinborn?

[Haelbarde]

I've got nothing more than a single thought for discussion, but from reading Kurk's megathread on time bubbles, we've known that we're missing an important piece of the puzzle with working out how FTL works. One of the sources Kurk cites is this WoB, where Brandon comments that '[FTL] involves Allomantic abilities which we don't know about yet.'  

 

Now, in SoS, and particularly in the Arcanum, we see Nazh posit that Twinborn get the two powers and an effect. Is it possible this is the first hint at the missing piece? Or these Allomantic abilities still more likely to relate to Mechanical Allomancy? Or actually something further again (you know, alloys with new metals...)
 

Edited October 19, 2015 by Haelbarde

[Ari]

I'm reasonably certain the new abilities Brandon is referencing are the southern continent machine-Allomancy abilities.

 

Either that, or there's a new metal that sends you and anything you're touching through to the Cognitive Realm, and you just need to be in a car before you go

[qarlin]

Maybe you can use a speed bubble around a thrust engine and build up kinetic energy, then release it all at once...? Perhaps tapping weight to prevent the vehicle from launching. Don't think that would work like a sling shot, though...

 

Or what if you combine a speed bubble and a SLOW bubble. What effects would happen there?

 

I have no idea...

[Voidus]

Maybe you can use a speed bubble around a thrust engine and build up kinetic energy, then release it all at once...? Perhaps tapping weight to prevent the vehicle from launching. Don't think that would work like a sling shot, though...

 

Or what if you combine a speed bubble and a SLOW bubble. What effects would happen there?

 

I have no idea...

Speed bubbles either cancel or multiply their effects in a region of overlap depending on whether they're the same type or not.

And simply getting more energy wouldn't do much to achieve FTL, you need infinite energy to accelerate to the speed of light, to go faster you need to either do something weird with your mass or mess with time/space somehow.

[BeskarKomrk]

Does anybody know if there are limits on the amount you can decrease your weight? Like, can you make yourself completely massless?

[Kurkistan]

Does anybody know if there are limits on the amount you can decrease your weight? Like, can you make yourself completely massless?

 

Myself I'd guess it was asymptotic to 0, but that aside it's a moot point because you're going to need to be in contact with at the very least an ironmind, and that will retain its mass.

 

EDIT: Peter also apparently wasn't too impressed with a Tor article on FTL possibilities that talked about decreasing mass to 0.

Edited October 22, 2015 by Kurkistan

[BeskarKomrk]

Asymptotic to 0 makes a lot of sense to me, as does the actual ironmind itself restricting the amount you can decrease. I enjoyed Wax's discovery of the principles of rocketry (even if he didn't realize it), but it seems like this isn't the path that will get us to Allomantic FTL travel. Oh well, back to the drawing board.

[Haelbarde]

Asymptotic to 0 makes a lot of sense to me, as does the actual ironmind itself restricting the amount you can decrease. I enjoyed Wax's discovery of the principles of rocketry (even if he didn't realize it), but it seems like this isn't the path that will get us to Allomantic FTL travel. Oh well, back to the drawing board.

If you are interested in the problem, do read Kurk's megapost on the topic here.

[eltari]

Does anybody know if there are limits on the amount you can decrease your weight? Like, can you make yourself completely massless?

Not to be pedantic, but decreasing weight isn't the same as decreasing mass.

And it's specifically weight in the Ars Arcanum. 

 

 

[Voidus]

Not to be pedantic, but decreasing weight isn't the same as decreasing mass.

And it's specifically weight in the Ars Arcanum. 

 

 

It is but Brandons said numerous times that it's kind of weird. I doubt it's really either of the two precisely.

[BeskarKomrk]

Definitely as good a reason as any to be pedantic. It is weight in the Ars Arcanum, but as those are in-universe resources, I don't know that the writer of them knows the difference between weight and mass (we got an expy of Tesla in SoS, does that mean there already was one of Newton?). 

[natc]

You'd think with the abundance of coinshots and lurchers that motion would actually be a hot topic of study, come to think of it. Like, ages ago.

[eltari]

I guess from my prospective with a B.S. in physics, I just hate seeing the two used interchangably like in the thread.  It's been years since I've thought about the FTL problem so I'm deficient on the current theories and didn't realize they've been used a little more interchangable than I think is appropriate. 

Okay, given my distaste for that changability, in universe I would postulate that instead of F = m*a (or m*g) governing weight of a body, it's F = µ*m*g, where µ is some feruchemy coefficient that modifies the total force acting upon a feruchemist.  When decreasing weight, µ < 1, increasing weight µ > 1. 

Which leads me to think that µ might be a new universal coefficient within the Cosmere.  Overall, the Cosmere magic systems need to make sense functionally.  Each world has it's own unique abilities, but because they are offshoots of whatever was before Adonalsium's shattering, I would say that the physics, or at least the physics equations of any given world, should be the same.  When magic isn't being used, µ = 1.  Now, how that coefficient is expressed, might have to be defined a bit differently on each world, like µ(Scadrial) is going to be different than µ(Roshar), like the former being µ(Allomancy + Feruchemy) while the latter is µ(Surgebinding + Voidbinding + Old Magic? I don't really know what the third system on Roshar is). 

So, for all our real world physics equations, I think there's a corresponding Cosmere equivalent where µ is always expressed.  If I were to attack this problem, I'd first look at some of the most fundamental equations in physics, and see how to modify them for the Cosmere. 

I believe Newton's Second Law can be rewritten as I stated above.  It's an empirical law in our world, seems like a good empirical one for the Cosmeres.  Now we'd just need to do that with all the other equations.  Maybe if I decide to nerd out real hard, I'll do something like that.  

[Kurkistan]

Feruchemical iron very definitely stores mass. It's just that some of the interactions are weird so that things don't get broken.

[eltari]

Feruchemical iron very definitely stores mass. It's just that some of the interactions are weird so that things don't get broken.

 

Essentially, that means the Higgs boson is being messed with.  Moved from the Physical Realm to the Cognitive/Spirituall but still tied to the particles it's tied too?

[BeskarKomrk]

Yay for physics degrees! (Graduating next May with my B.S. in Physics). Changing the interaction with the Higgs Field seems like the most self-contained way of altering the mass without altering the overall picture of Newtonian Dynamics that seems to hold in the books. So I guess, continuing the trend of pedantism, rather than saying we have F = µ*m*a, where µ depends on the world and the magic system, we may have something more like F = m(µ)*a, where the overall relationship isn't altered but now m is some function of µ. This would allow for an asymptotic relationship in Feruchemy like Kurkistan suggested. I'm trying to think of a snappy name to call µ in this idea; I guess it represents, abstractly, the amount of magic you're using? Since there isn't one coefficient for all of Feruchemy; you can decrease or increase your mass by different amounts. 

[Seonid]

Essentially, that means the Higgs boson is being messed with.  Moved from the Physical Realm to the Cognitive/Spirituall but still tied to the particles it's tied too?

 

That's been my interpretation of Feruchemical mass storage - changing the strength of the Feruchemist's interaction with the Higgs field. Feruchemy appears to affect both gravitational mass and inertial mass, but it doesn't seem to affect density (at least in terms of how well bullets can pass through the person storing/tapping - no idea how it would affect buoyancy which also is determined by density). That might be a good question to ask Brandon - could a Feruchemist storing in iron float better?

[eltari]

Yay for physics degrees! (Graduating next May with my B.S. in Physics). Changing the interaction with the Higgs Field seems like the most self-contained way of altering the mass without altering the overall picture of Newtonian Dynamics that seems to hold in the books. So I guess, continuing the trend of pedantism, rather than saying we have F = µ*m*a, where µ depends on the world and the magic system, we may have something more like F = m(µ)*a, where the overall relationship isn't altered but now m is some function of µ. This would allow for an asymptotic relationship in Feruchemy like Kurkistan suggested. I'm trying to think of a snappy name to call µ in this idea; I guess it represents, abstractly, the amount of magic you're using? Since there isn't one coefficient for all of Feruchemy; you can decrease or increase your mass by different amounts. 

Nice, I like that!  That definitely is a better definition since mass is going to be a function of however the feruchemist is using his ironmind. 

And, Cosmere wide, more readily adaptable to the individual system. 

WRT the coefficient, I was treating it more like the coefficient of friction.  Changes depending on numerous factors.  Hell, even friction is broken up into static and kinetic.  Though, it'd get a little tedious with 32 coefficients, just for Scadrien magic. And yeah, I was thinking of it as the change precipitated by the amount magic used.