Roshar has no plate tectonics

[Jasonioan he/him]

My friend and I sat down one day, looked at themap of Roshar and thought "What the heck?". We decided to try and figure it out with our limited knowledge of geology and hopefully ask Sanderson about it later. Here it is. (ignore the arrows. They were supposed to indicate movement of plates into other plates)

 

 

Fist I asked Isaac Stewart (The guy who made the map). He said he considers plate tectonics when he makes maps, but he wasn't entirely sure about this one. He also said he probably couldn't say and I should ask Brandon. 

 

So I asked Sanderson behind the scenes. He said he could see how the plate tectonics could work. Then paused. "Roshar was made very specifically by not necessarily natural means it looks the way it does for a certain reason. so no, there are not plate tectonics on Roshar." 

 

This was like six months ago and it was late, so the exact words are probably off. I do know for a fact he said there are not plate tectonics on Roshar. and I'm 97.7% I got his words about right on Roshar not being created naturally, I for sure got the meaning.

Edited February 6, 2016 by Jasonioan

[king of nowhere]

i think it had been established already? but maybe i'm making confusion with the fact that there are no other continents. Anyway, I am worried about the long term habitability of the planet. Plate tectonics are dirven by internal heat, which is the same mechanism that creates a magnetic field. And the magnetic field is what stops the solar wind from stripping away the atmosphere and turning the pale blue dot into a barren desertic dead world. It could mean that plate tectonics stopped shortly before, and the rosharans should have a few tens of millions of years to figure out space flight and abandon their planet. Or it could mean that shards used their shardic powers to make that planet livable.

[baby he/him]

I believe we already had a WoB about this.

[Patrick Star]

Artificial, you say?  Well then, it's official.

 

I'm betting 5 bucks that Roshar is like Nirn, and has an advanced workshop and clockwork city at the center of the planet.

 

I'll bet another 5 bucks that the main operator is the doge from Silent Hill (it IS a Shiba Inu).  Much Desolation.  Very Sanderson.  Wow.

[yurisses]

 

[01:00:40]

Questioner: Does Roshar have a magnetic field?

Brandon: Um, Roshar magnetic field, yes, it does.

Questioner: Yes?

Brandon: *hesitantly* Yes… Yeah it does, I’m pretty sure.

[01:00:25]

Questioner: You said at one point that it is all one plate--

Brandon: Yes.

Questioner: --that there's no tectonic activity. What is the interior of the planet like?

Brandon: That’s a good question.

Questioner: You’re not going to answer.

Brandon: You’re not going to get an answer on that one. It’s a weird planet, let’s just say that. It’s a pretty weird planet.

(https://docs.google.com/document/d/1r4u4t0SH_O-uEkaMwE9Iqjbrzem2e9xXRjFLvGWd7HI/edit)

 

We also found out that Roshar was based on a 2D shadow of a 3D slice of a 4D Julia set.

 

Brandon has commented on this saying it was meant to show that the planet was indeed designed (presumably by Adonalsium) rather than being naturally occurring.

Edited February 7, 2016 by yurisses

[Stormgate he/him]

What exactly is a Julia set?

[Rasarr she/her]

What exactly is a Julia set?

 

A type of a fractal created from a mathemathical function. 

[The Ninja Yodeler he/him]

A type of a fractal created from a mathemathical function.

Ohhhhhhh OK. I looked it up and was far more confused than I was before. Whole bunch of stuff about math and infinity and... Stuff.

[Rasarr she/her]

Ohhhhhhh OK. I looked it up and was far more confused than I was before. Whole bunch of stuff about math and infinity and... Stuff.

 

Math tangent! Alright, so I'm probably going to make a ton of hilarious mistakes, but...

 

Take complex numbers Z₁ and C, and make a sequence out of them that goes like this:

step 0: Z₁

step 1: Z₁² + C

step 2: (Z₁² + C)² + C

step 3: ((Z₁² + C)² + C)² + C

and so on.

 

Now, depending on what number we take as Z₁, the next steps of the sequence can either move past any given circle starting on (0, 0) on a Cartesian chart* - or stay within them. If they escape past the circle, they're called "escapees"; if they remain within radius, they're "prisoners". Now, if you put all Z1s of the "escapees" and Z1s of the "prisoners" on the Cartesian chart - is my translation correct? English isn't my native tongue... - anyway, if you do that, there's no point on the chart that's both a prisoner-Z and an escapee-Z, so you can draw a clear-cut border between the areas taken up by the prisoner-Zs and escapee-Zs. This border is the Julia set. The difference in what the set looks like on different pictures comes from different Cs used.

 

As far as I understood my source (it's not in English, unfortunately, so I doubt I could link to it here), while using ² in the steps above you get a flat image, but using ³ will give you a hovering three-dimensional Julia set, and ⁴ will make it four-dimensional and mind-explodey. If you cut a slice out of the four-dimensional set, it will be three-dimensional, and when it throws a shadow on a flat surface, you get the map of Roshar.

 

I hope this clear things up at least a little bit... and that I didn't make any grievous mistake    Math-inclined Sharders, feel free to bash me.

 

--------

* You may know Complex numbers, but just for clarity: Complex number has a "real" part and "imagined" part, and is written as [Real]+[imagined], for example 3+5i, where 3 is real and 5i is imagined (you can recognize it by the "i"). When you put them on a chart, the horizontal axis counts the "real" numbers and vertical axis counts the amount of "i"s, so 3+5i would be drawn as being 3 steps to the right and 5 steps above from the centre of the chart.

 

EDIT: clarification and simplifying stuff a bit. Also, spelling.

Edited February 8, 2016 by Rasarr