Investiture "Light" ("Shardlight") musings framed in terms of Bosons and Fermions

[Serack he/him]

First, I'll mention that I have an undergrad electrical engineering degree where I took multiple electives that emphasized optics/photonics, and sound engineering.  So this kind of thing is particularly interesting to me and I have an educational background that gives me interesting insight on it.  Although the physics behind bosons and fermions wasn't part of my formal education.  

I started this as a response to the topic "Lights, Intents and physics" but it ended up getting pretty involved and divergent from the existing discussion there, so I'm putting it in its own topic.  

As Raboniel and Navani discuss the polarity of individual "axi" in RoW chapter 97, I think exploring investiture "light" or "Shardlight" in terms of Fermion and Boson (F/B) particles/physics would be interesting and relevant.

Both individual atomic nuclei, and electrons (and many other particles) have a characteristic "spin" that gives them a magnetic dipole moment (Navani's "polarity").  One of the defining characteristics of a fermion particle vs a boson particle is if their spin is "half integer" or "whole integer" respectively.  

Given this spin value, one of the main behavioral differences between bosons and fermions is that any two fermions can't occupy the same "space" but bosons don't have this constraint.  This is why streams of light/photons (a boson particle) can pass through each other without colliding, while crossing streams of matter particles (fermions) will bounce off each other.  And it's why matter occupies space. (this also governs other properties like electron orbitals that determine the fundamentals of chemistry, and thus their "spectra" but that's a bit of a divergence from this topic.)

 

In very special circumstances (usually involving very low temperatures, sometimes extreeeeeeeemly low) fermions do things like "pair" where the pairs behave as an individual particle with the half integer magnetic moments summed to effectively become a particle with a whole integer magnetic moment.  In these circumstances these otherwise fermionic particles of matter can take on some of the characteristics of bosonic particles like more than one taking up the same "space." 

 

This is the physics behind things like superfluidity, superconductivity, and Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC).  

A little more on BECs:  Under extremely cold, asymptotically approaching absolute zero conditions, a collection of atoms can lose pretty much all their thermal energy and condense into a single waveform with quantum physics almost the same as bosons like light.  My optics professor said they were performing experiments with BECs that could be described with quantum equations that only took up one page, which he said is ridiculously simple for collections of matter.  

Ok given the above trivia lesson on F/B physics, I'll try to extrapolate this to the fictional Investiture "Light."  Lets call it "Shardlight"

I'm kinda winging this, and it's suppositional as this is a work of fiction we are talking about.  

Across the Cosmere, Investiture has different "states" analogous to gas, liquid, and metal.  Metallic investiture (shardbades, atium, lerasium) is said to be investiture that is fully in the physical realm.  Thus I would say that in F/B terms, God Metals are experienced on the physical realm as fully fermionic.  Whereas Shardlight when trapped in a gaseous form is more like fermions condensed into a "BEC" like form that takes on many bosonic properties, however Shardlight investiture seems to evaporate into a state that is even more bosonic as this sate behaves almost identically to actual "light" whereas atoms that evaporate off a BEC end up losing their bosonic properties (although there are some interesting experiments that have been done on the edge of this phenomenon). 

 

So maybe it would be more appropriate to describe Shardlight as the inverse of a BEC, where "bosonic" like investiture from the spiritual realm has been condensed to attain matter like properties that mirror some of those of a BEC.  

 

Bonus trivia:

Generating light from sound waves is a real world thing called sonoluminescence.  Here's a decent 4 minute youtube video that discusses the phenomenon, and even a shrimp that manages to pull it off.

 

Edit 6/17/22:  Added link to article on developments near the end that compliments the earlier link to just the wikipedia article

Edited June 17, 2022 by Serack

[Silarn]

I know I'm digging up an older thread, but this is a fun supposition. (And I took a bit of a hiatus from looking at the forum since I last posted.)

I think it's pretty obvious that Brandon is at least pulling some ideas about the way investiture works from actual particle physics, so whether or not he actually has real specific physics principles behind everything, it's fun to theorize how what we do know about our own reality might map onto Cosmere physics.

[Serack he/him]

@Silarn, as responding to your post is part of the genesis of the topic I'm glad to see you enjoyed it, and I wouldn't have seen so if you hadn't responded.

Please, take a look at the link in my sig for more stuff like this that I've written or that others have, that I particularly enjoyed.