Soulcasting Advanced Materials

[SwordNimiForPresident the sword/that sword]

I was rereading Oathbringer recently and part of the main battle sequence got me thinking about the limits of soulcasting. In particular, the scene where Jasnah soulcasts air into stone and the text mentions "individual axi of air" aligning and forming stone. I take axi to mean either atom or molecule in this context. So this leaves me wondering if a strong knowledge of physic and chemistry could allow a soulcaster to create much more advanced things. Some ideas I had include: carbon nanotubes, graphene plates, degenerate matter, antimatter, entangle particles and complex machinery such as microprocessors, nanites, quantum computers and nuclear weapons. Since they can also produce organic matter like grain and blood, could they also create genetically enhanced organisms like super viruses or white blood cells that can kill any disease? What about super foods? What about entire bodies?

If any of the things in that list are possible then Roshar is going to be a major player in the future Cosmere and a world hopping Elsecaller would probably be extremely rich.

[Calderis he/him]

It works exactly like your thinking it does. 

Major Mistborn spoilers, but confirmation that Axi are atoms. 

Spoiler

Argent

At the end of The Bands of Mourning, Wax starts seeing what seems like souls, as he’s holding the Bands. He sees lines. He ponders that man/metals they’re same thing. Is he seeing Investiture there?

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah, to an extent he’s seeing—yes. He’s seeing the Cosmere equivalent of atoms, Investiture, and energy waves all being the same thing.

Argent

Okay, so kind of a building block of things.

Brandon Sanderson

Yes, it’s almost like he’s seeing the axi, right, the atoms.

Calamity Chicago signing (Feb. 22, 2016)

 

[Weltall]

Brandon actually discusses the question of Soulcasting uranium or plutonium here, the gist of it is that you'd need a better understanding of physics than Roshar currently has and you'd need to properly convey all of this to the Surgebinder and they'd have to convey it to their spren, but it would totally be possible.

Making antimatter would be a lot trickier since it has this lovely little property of reacting violently with normal matter. Like, say, the air surrounding it. You'd probably need the cooperation of a Windrunner to create a vacuum bubble and you'd still need a way to prevent whatever you're Soulcasting into antimatter from simply falling due to gravity and hitting something it'll react with. So far we haven't seen Windrunners able to create anything like a 'bubble' of zero gravity (they have to touch things to lash them, which would be Very Bad in the case of antimatter) but maybe that's something they could learn to do.

Anyhow, the WoB about nuclear material and Soulcasting sets out the general issues with making any of those things but also establishes that most of it should be possible with the right knowledge.

[SwordNimiForPresident the sword/that sword]

@Weltall thanks for the link. The part about conveying the knowledge to the soulcaster might not be that big a barrier though. Given what we know about the orders so far, the Elsecallers actually seem like the most likely group to discover things like advanced physics anyway.

As for the part about antimatter, the fact that it reacts the way it does is part of what made me wonder if it was possible in the first place. With the proper knowledge, every soulcaster becomes a walking nuclear explosion, in the gigaton range, waiting to happen.

[+Oltux72 he/him]

1 minute ago, SwordNimiForPresident said:

As for the part about antimatter, the fact that it reacts the way it does is part of what made me wonder if it was possible in the first place. With the proper knowledge, every soulcaster becomes a walking nuclear explosion, in the gigaton range, waiting to happen.

They could soulcast Einsteinium or Californium. Here comes your pocket nuke. In fact they could do that from Shadesmar. Unkillable ghost with nuclear weapons.

[SwordNimiForPresident the sword/that sword]

1 hour ago, Oltux72 said:

They could soulcast Einsteinium or Californium. Here comes your pocket nuke. In fact they could do that from Shadesmar. Unkillable ghost with nuclear weapons.

They might also be able to soulcast a neutron burst to kill everything in the target area without destroying the infrastructure. Now that I think about it a Lightweaver might be able to cause the same effect with X-Rays.