Chaos

Honestly, for that Chronology article, what's important right now is trying to get all that information listed in a way that doesn't make me stab my eyes out. This one is sinfully bad.

I can certainly explain any of it, but it may be easier if you asked which parts confused you. Because a full intro to quantum mechanics would take quite some time EDIT: Not that I'm not known to explain such things.

In the Hero of Annotations, Brandon implies that Spook could hear Kelsier when he held Preservation because Spook was the only one who truly believes in him. Faith, on some level, makes it easier to communicate with Shards. Similarly, Elend has faith in Vin. Indeed, this could be one explanation for why Harmony can read Wax's mind in Alloy of Law, because Wax believes in him.

I almost can't believe we don't have a thread on this. What's your main computer's OS of choice? And once you vote, tell us what version you have, and why you use that? (Obviously, keep it respectful and mature, you guys.) For me, I use Windows 7. A lot of that is familiarity with Windows, I suppose, but Windows 7 is an operating system I'm genuinely happy with.

Oh, you can say whatever you want. You have that freedom. And then we spike you. So. Y'know. Trade-offs. (Btw, I'm stopping this right here and we aren't going to let it go to a political battle. Let's keep it light, okay? We are who we are, and that's all that needs to be said at the moment.)

The best part of this statement is that Will and I are both liberals. You called for some liberals? We have some spikes for you.

Yes, of course. This is certainly a possibility. But I'm pretty sure Vasher, even without knowing anything about Endowment, in his centuries of life, probably thought about Breath in humans, and decided it did not fit with his schema, and kept it this way because it was conceptually easier. That doesn't mean he's right in everything, but I'm going to trust Vasher until shown otherwise.

Ooo, a thread on quantum mechanics! I have lots to say on the subject. You know, it just occurred to me that the spren should definitely "collapse" to a defined value, Realmatically. We know that the Physical Realm limits the ways the power of creation can be accessed. For Allomancy, it's into sixteen metals. This "limiting" is sort of how in quantum mechanics, when a particle is subject to a potential well, it can't receive any energy value; its energies are discrete. So for spren, something in the Cognitive or higher Realm, it seems to me that the Physical Realm can limit those higher Realms in similar ways. In this case, the shape of spren itself--its actual presence in the Physical Realm--is limited. Let's talk some quantum mechanics. Now, hold up. "Defies all laws of physics" is a much stronger statement than is actually happening here. What's happening here is that, before "measurement" (or an "event", if the word measurement isn't your bag of tea) a particle has a wavefunction which is a distribution of possibilities. This wavefunction can interfere with other wavefunctions, because it's a wave, and waves can interfere with one another. The only difference is these waves are matter waves. After measurement comes the wavefunction collapse. That wavefunction--what was formerly a distribution--"collapses" to the single value. The wavefunction is no longer a distribution. or rather, an infinitely narrow distribution, centered at the measured value. Thus, in the instance of the double-slit experiment, in the unmeasured case, those wavefunctions interfere with each other, which gives you those cool patterns. But in the measured case, the photons' wavefunctions have collapsed and have an incredibly narrow distribution. That means they simply aren't wide enough to give you any interference patterns. The double-slit experiment is one of the great experiments which shows that wavefunction collapse is a real, observable thing. You can also do similar things with particles decaying, and measuring one of the created particles' spin before the other. While it is true that physicists do not understand why wavefunction collapse happens, nor what constitutes a "measurement", wavefunction collapse fits very nicely in the framework of quantum mechanics. You need some mechanism to describe the probability interpretation of quantum mechanics and how you can actually get well-defined values from experiment, which is what you'd expect classically. This isn't the only interpretation of quantum mechanics--there are others, like the many-worlds interpretation--but you do need such a mechanism to explain how you can actually measure things and be sure you actually got a true measurement. Thing is, quantum mechanics wasn't made one individual. As the preface in my Quantum Mechanics book says, (Griffiths is an excellent writer; I would recommend his textbooks to anyone, but he can get very mathy. But if you want a nice physics textbook to read, Griffiths' particle physics text is good, and you can get through the first five chapters with virtually no math knowledge) Why am I saying this? Just because I take issue you saying that wavefunction collapse "defies all laws of quantum mechanics." That's not entirely accurate. Sorry. I don't mean to break out Physicist Chaos (wow, that sounds like an awesome supervillain, doesn't it?). I totally agree with your point about the idea that Brandon got this spren idea from the concept of wavefunction collapse. But! I will correct your quantum mechanics if I must For you non-physics people, what is happening in wavefunction collapse is that, prior to measurement, a particle does not have a specific position (or, well, we need not just say "position." It could be a number of properties that you are trying to measure, like angular momentum). It instead has a distribution of possible positions, which are described by the particle's wavefunction. Once you measure, now the particle has a defined position. In a sense, you have defined a property onto the particle--a position--where it did not have one previously. Weird, huh? Can we name it something other than Geranid's Certainty Principle? Comparing it the Uncertainty Principle is most definitely a false analogy, because this "certainty principle" has much to do with measurements defining a property on a spren that it didn't really have before. The Uncertainty Principle is only cursorily related to wavefunction collapse. What the Uncertainly Principle says, precisely, that there is a lower bound to the product of the variance of the distribution of position and the variance of the distribution of momentum of a particle. This doesn't mean that you can't precisely know one of those properties, it just means you can't know both position and momentum to infinite precision. Actually, there's more than one Uncertainty Principle, and you can get one for any two observables whose operators don't commute (specifically, the first relation in that link. The Energy-time uncertainty principle is unrelated), but that doesn't much matter here. While the Uncertainty Principle is a direct consequence of the statistical interpretation of quantum mechanics, and thus has some relation to the idea of wavefunction collapse, what the Uncertainty Principle is more about is dealing with distributions of particles. However, with spren--call them spren mechanics, or something spiffy like that--it's clear they have more relation to wavefunction collapse, in that measurement bestows a defined property to what you are measuring. The Uncertainty Principle is independent of that. We should name it not the "Certainty Principle," but something like "sprenfunction collapse," because this property of spren deals much more with collapse than whether or not you can simultaneously find observables. tl;dr: "Ow ow Chaos hurts my brain, please go away Chaos, and apparently we should name this property of spren to something with 'collapse' in its name, even though 'Certainty Principle' sounds hilarious. Owwww!!!"

I'm dying laughing. Literally dying. That was amazing!

More importantly, the four BioChromatic entities require Breath to even exist. If Breath was not present in those entities, they would die or cease to be Awakened. This is very different from people, who can give away their Breath and reasonably be expected to live. The lack of Breath isn't immediately deadly.

We know nothing about nicrosilminds. I personally like the idea that every "type" of Investiture is a separate nicrosilmind, like tinminds. However, this is directly refuted in the RPG, so... The reason I say this is because if you could store any Feruchemy as a general Investiture charge, then the Lord Ruler could store some stupid attribute like weight or warmth into nicrosilminds, and then withdraw it as age. Doing that would break the whole point of the Lord Ruler spending time aged, and everything Brandon says confirms that the Lord Ruler actually stores age. One thing I know for certain: Allomancy and Feruchemy Investitures need to be strictly separate, at the very least. You shouldn't be able to store an Allomantic Investiture (the effect of a metal) and withdraw it as Feruchemical age.

Atium does not steal all attributes at once. Rather, it steals one attribute (as all Hemalurgy), but it's a Hemalurgic wildcard. It can steal any attribute. (Hey, lookit who asked that question ) Now, I remember a theory that maybe lerasium spikes could make someone Mistborn with a single spike, which is possible, but entirely speculative. Anyway. I am in complete agreement with Windrunner, that the Lord Ruler's extreme Allomancy power has nothing to do with the Well of Ascension. Now, I know right after Alloy of Law, there's a thread on the Lord Ruler's power that basically went the same way, but I discovered that actually, the Lord Ruler is using his Feruchemy to enhance his Allomancy. Some weird sort of Compounding. I suspect he can enhance his Allomancy by storing Allomantic Investitures from burning metals into nicrosilminds, and then he Compounds them, so you get a massive burst of the Investiture you stored. But that's pretty speculative. In any case, this is kind of off-topic... Getting back on track, I really like this theory, for the most part. It seems pretty reasonable, though the Nalthis part is totally speculative. But hey, it's very reasonable and makes sense.

Brandon has also stated that Hoid has temporal abilities, and hasn't lived every year in real-time. (Kind of like a cadmium bubble) Still, he's much, much older than a normal person would be, and I'd imagine he has some magical capability to prevent him from aging. Also, worldhopping. Brandon has said Hoid "is very good at manipulating Shadesmar for his ends". He's got magic, definitely. EDIT: Zas, I couldn't find this quote about Hoid and Shadesmar in the Interview Database, but I know I read it somewhere. The best that is in there is Stormblessed referencing the quote I am talking about. EDIT2: Thanks for finding it. http://www.theoryland.com/intvmain.php?i=428#102

I would also like to mention for the sake of site consistency that in Zas's post, Brandon calls gaining more of an attribute in Feruchemy "compounding". For 17th Shard, we decided that two different kinds of compounding, one purely Feruchemical and the other a very particular effect with Allomancy and Feruchemy, was very confusing. We had voted, and determined that our 17th Shard term for compounding attributes in Feruchemy is "surging" attributes. /disclaimer

This differs from the chatbox at the bottom in that it is completely real-time. Think about it like instant messaging, but with a group of people. Does that make sense? The cbox currently here is more like a general thread, where anyone can blab whatever. But you can't really carry on an extended conversation there. In a chatroom, you could. With IRC (the chat protocol I will most definitely use), it's a very standard chatroom protocol. What that means is that any chat program can, in theory, plug into its functionality. So if you wanted to chat, you could 1. Go into our web interface. This will be surely how 95% of people will use this. 2. You can download an IRC client, or any IM program that has IRC functionality. I know Trillian can do this, and that's how I'll be using the chatroom, because all my IMs go through Trillian anyway. So you download a client, and then connect to a particular server and you're in. The benefits to having a chat room would be a lot, really. Imagine on a day where we have a big contest, and tons of members are flooding the site. It's nice to have a chat channel that we can make the de facto Brandon Sanderson chatroom--which is why I'm leaning to naming the channel #cosmere over #17thShard. On those high traffic days, if lurkers just want to meet members on the site, they can just join the channel, and see if the site is something they are interested in joining. There's a lot of uses a live chatroom can have. It will also be good for live Q&As about cosmere stuff. Obviously, it would be prohibitively challenging to do a cosmere Q&A in the cbox.

They represent your member "rank", which is a function we don't really use. All that's different there is that the more posts you get, the more pips you get.

That's a perfectly fine speculation, but it's also possible that he isn't a sliver at all, but something else. We don't have enough information to say. Not exactly, that Q&A was where we first heard of Shards. So while it is partially Mistborn, it's also the introduction of the greater cosmere. But as that quote explicitly says "Brandon mentioned that there were four Shards other than Ruin and Preservation that have been seen," and then lists them. So the two we've interacted with directly are not Ruin and Preservation, because we're excluding them in this list. Feruchemy is not of a particular Shard, but a balance between Ruin and Preservation. Also, the white mists are the power of Preservation directly. Brandon is referring to non-Mistborn Shards here.

Step Five: Charge Will $100 per hour. That's my favorite part.

You're welcome to randomly pick another of post of mine and upvote it, if you so choose! I'm really glad you like it. I wasn't sure if anything would sink in. I have a tendency to ramble a lot, and it can get a little out of hand. I was mostly doing this off the top of head (with occasional looks into my textbook), haha. This makes me extraordinarily happy that you thought it was good!

We have no knowledge about how Hoid can travel through worlds or live for such a long time. However, saying that Hoid is a Sliver doesn't necessarily solve those problems. For one thing, Slivers that we have seen (Vin, Rashek) aren't immortal in the way you need Hoid to be. Second, other people, like Galladon and Demoux, have learned to worldhop. So Hoid need not be a Sliver to worldhop, either. Really, it's anyone's guess how worldhopping looks. Hoid is a serious mystery. I'll get your Feruchemy question right now. I think you edited your post after I replied, so I didn't see it this quote is from "The Hero of Ages/Epigraphs" Can we take into consideration the bolded sentence from the first quote and apply it to bolded description in the second quote and consider that Feruchemy comes from the third shard's power? Just asking... Nope. In the first quote, Brandon is talking about additional Shards. However, Feruchemy is explicitly a function of Ruin and Preservation. This is supported by many many quotes. In the second passage, "power" refers to the magic system. In fact in the first quote, Brandon says at the top that he's referring to Shards other than Ruin and Preservation. So he can't be talking about Feruchemy. We've actually figured out all the Shards Brandon was talking about in that first quote. You've interacted with two directly. - This refers definitely to Endowment, where Lightsong interacts with the Voice. Also, Devotion, when Raoden went in the pool in Elantris. One is a tough call. You've never met the Shard itself, but you've seen its power. - This probably refers to Dominion, the second Shard on Sel. We see his power from the Dahkor monks. The other one you have not met directly, but have seen its influence. - This certainly applies to Odium, who went to Sel and killed Aona and Skai (Devotion and Dominion's holders, respectively). We haven't seen his magic--at least, at the time of Hero of Ages--but his influence was definitely felt on Sel by the time we saw it.

That's easy: Zas. Not that I'm complaining, I'll happily be a Shard. You don't have to ask me twice! "Yeah, Brandon, I know who exactly you should model that Shard after." "Logic, you mean?" "Yeah, that one. His username on 17S is Chaos." "Chaos. And he's... logical." "...Yes." "Riiiiight." I'm just so chaotic that my username is itself inconsistent with me. I'm so devious! It almost makes too much sense. Shard please.

You do make sense, but we can't necessarily assume that he actually held onto any Shard. It's all very mysterious what happened when Adonalsium Shattered. There are a lot of different possibilities. We don't even know how the Shattering occurred. So, Hoid could very well have simply been an outside observer to the Shattering, but never had a chance to hold onto a Shard. That's certainly a possibility, but yours is also a possibility. We can only speculate madly on the subject

My worry is that technically, there are an infinite amount of Aons, right? You can add modifiers to any base Aon and it is a "different" Aon that has a different effect. Just as there effectively infinite Commands, there'd be infinite Aons. Two actually (that isn't the best image, but whatever), but that comment about four makes a compelling case. By the way, Reader, my favorite part of this theory is the comment about the Ten Heightenings. I don't think anyone picked up on the significance of the "ten" there before you, and that's seriously cool. I just wish the Selian magics would conform to this scheme; I wouldn't hesitate to espouse it if they did.