Fall damage in Roshar's Shadesmar

[bridge7]

Questioner 1

You said that moving people like that [Cognitive Shadows] or spren off-world, from Roshar is difficult.

Brandon Sanderson

Yes.

Questioner 1

What about physically, say the Ones Above visit them, and they fly away?

Brandon Sanderson

So one of the things you'll have to be asking questions and theorizing on is what happens if you try to carry a spren around the planet. What happens to their Cognitive sense, right? So you're on Roshar, right? So on the Physical Realm what would happen-- Because on Shadesmar, you have a flattened version. So there are questions for you to be theorizing implicit in that.  And one of them is, what happens, you cross a threshold circling the globe, your spren, what happens to them? Because-- Okay? This relates to the question you’re asking.

Questioner 2

Wait wait, you have a three dimensional plane coexisting with a two dimensional plane?

Brandon Sanderson

Well, two dimensional is the wrong term, but basically...

Questioner 3

Can you specify the mathematically projection used to create this? *laughter*

Brandon Sanderson

We'll try to give it to you eventually, but this is the sort of stuff that I do that Peter's like "Oh man..." *laughter* "Alright give me the math Peter." "Ahhh what do you mean? I'm not a mathematician." "Eh, y'know. You're close." It is very convenient to have a physicist and a mathematician in my writing group.

Arcanum Unbounded Chicago signing (Dec. 6, 2016)

I know that there's gravity and whatnot because when people jump into the bead ocean they fall, and I'm 99% sure you can die in shadesmar (I mean, what's the point of weapons), so with those bases covered, is it possible to die from falling in shadesmar? I think you could, but there are problems with that.

It's 2D(somehow, "not exactly") so maybe a different dimension is missing? Maybe assuming that height is the missing one is wrong, but.... I dunno. There's depth to the oceans, height to fly, so maybe length and width are more like one dimension? He says it's flat so... This paragraph was kinda a waste off time?

Edited November 9, 2020 by bridge7

[Quantus]

There is apparently both gravity and atmosphere (proven humidity presence), so all the mechanisms of terminal velocity are there.  Whether the math works out such that terminal velocity in shadesmar is damaging, hard to say but the perception-based nature of things makes me default to assume it would be comparable to Roshar's reduced gravity (0.7G).  So lacking other evidence, Id say it will likely damage the average person but would technically be less than earth (or rather, similar damage that would take a slightly higher fall).

[ftl]

It's 2D in the sense that the world is flat instead of round. You can walk from one planet to another, like from Roshar to Nalthis.

The Cognitive Realm itself is three-dimensional (you can see characters moving up/down/left/right normally), but there's clearly weirdness about how you map multiple round worlds into a single flat plane.

[Dunkum]

The difference is sort of like globe vs map.  Roshar the planet is spherical, like a globe, but its reflection in Shadesmar is more rectangular, like a map....maybe one of those fancy ones where topographical features are actually raised or lowered compared to the baseline - it's not necessarily a common thing, but i've seen them as like wall decorations before. 

anyway, the point Brandon is making above is like this - imagine a map of earth.  most of the ones I have seen thend to have Alaska and Hawaii on the far left, and eastern Asian on the far right.  so if Earth were projected intot he cognitive realm in a similar manner, then western north america would be one edge and if you tried to go further west you'd end up on a different planet or even different star system.  likewise Eastern Asia would be at the far east and walking further east would also take you off planet.  but on earth itself you could easily sail a boat west from alaska and end up in russia so what happens to the cognitive body of a spren when you cross that border in the physical world?

[Wulfhere]

Thanks for compiling those quotes. That is quite a geometrical quandary, and you've got me thinking about math now...

In spherical geometry, we often imagine that a person on the sphere perceives their space as locally linear (i.e. flat) even if an external observer sees the true shape of the space. That's why you can walk in a "straight line" on Earth and have it make sense to you. 

Since Shadesmar is the cognitive realm and everything there exists based on the perceptions of thinking entities, perhaps "locations" in the cognitive realm don't really have a distance apart but more of a connected relationship. I'm thinking of how you might connect nodes in a drawing of a graph or a social network (image 1.) In such a mapping, the nodes (circles) are important, and the edges show the connections between, but they don't express measurable distance.

Perhaps as you get to the "edge" of the known Roshar in Shadesmar, "space" starts to warp and you can only travel to places that are cognitively "linked' to you. This reminds me of how distance and direction get strange at the edge of a hyperbolic disc. (image 2)

A worldhopper, however, knows that other places exist, so perhaps they are able to perceive and travel on the connections between the worlds, whereas a native Rosharan (etc.) would not. And then as the connections become more traveled, more entities know about them and the paths between worlds become highways.

As to fall damage? No idea. Maybe if you fall from height you perceive yourself as having died, so then you die?

 

image credits:

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/graph-theory-and-cocktail-parties/

https://www.reddit.com/r/GeometryIsNeat/comments/95au4r/sunflower_spirals_in_the_hyperbolic_plane/

[bridge7]

3 hours ago, Wulfhere said:

Thanks for compiling those quotes. That is quite a geometrical quandary, and you've got me thinking about math now...

In spherical geometry, we often imagine that a person on the sphere perceives their space as locally linear (i.e. flat) even if an external observer sees the true shape of the space. That's why you can walk in a "straight line" on Earth and have it make sense to you. 

Since Shadesmar is the cognitive realm and everything there exists based on the perceptions of thinking entities, perhaps "locations" in the cognitive realm don't really have a distance apart but more of a connected relationship. I'm thinking of how you might connect nodes in a drawing of a graph or a social network (image 1.) In such a mapping, the nodes (circles) are important, and the edges show the connections between, but they don't express measurable distance.

Perhaps as you get to the "edge" of the known Roshar in Shadesmar, "space" starts to warp and you can only travel to places that are cognitively "linked' to you. This reminds me of how distance and direction get strange at the edge of a hyperbolic disc. (image 2)

A worldhopper, however, knows that other places exist, so perhaps they are able to perceive and travel on the connections between the worlds, whereas a native Rosharan (etc.) would not. And then as the connections become more traveled, more entities know about them and the paths between worlds become highways.

As to fall damage? No idea. Maybe if you fall from height you perceive yourself as having died, so then you die?

 

image credits:

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/graph-theory-and-cocktail-parties/

https://www.reddit.com/r/GeometryIsNeat/comments/95au4r/sunflower_spirals_in_the_hyperbolic_plane/

Wow. Those are way more in-depth than I thought it would be. It would've been a lot more helpful if he just said that it was flat, and that's what 2d meant, but that's very interesting. I didn't realize that the people's thoughts would have that much effect on the cognitive realm in that way but I guess that's literally how/why the cognitive realm exists.

Would it be different in places with less people, or in placed like silverlight, with way more realmatically educated people?

Edited November 9, 2020 by bridge7