jjh
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Posts posted by jjh
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On 6/20/2017 at 9:33 AM, Kurkistan said:
I wouldn't bet too heavily on being able to get creative with storing mass, given Peter's reaction to a Tor article's talk about it.
I think a big hint might have been given in Bands of Mourning, when Khriss (I think?) asked Wax about how modulating his mass changed his speed. The example given then was of increasing his mass, which slowed him, but the obvious implication is that it works the other way too. The importance of the characters involved, and the obvious lesson in allomantic-affected physics, seems like a pretty big easter egg/foreshadow plant.
The ability to control one's mass is especially important when approaching the the speed of light, as the object being accelerated actually gains mass (from a resting observer's viewpoint), which assymptotically retards further acceleration. Basically (to my understanding), the observation from particle accelerators is that an object's mass approaches infinite as its speed approaches that of light, which makes further acceleration more and more difficult. BUT... if you could somehow siphon off (or better, "store") the extra mass imparted by acceleration, then, yeah I suppose you could make the case that you could get faster than lightspeed. Potentially multiple times faster, as dividing your mass your mass by n would either n-times your speed (by conservation of momentum) or multiply it by the square root of n, depending on which conservation the author decides is more fundamental (I'm guessing momentum). And of course if you can reduce mass to near zero, you get near-instantaneous travel, which is a convenient thing to have in fiction. Plus near-infinite "stores" of mass, which could be useful in a number of ways.
Note that in his comment, Peter didn't say that the Tor theory was wrong, only that the reasoning was a bit sloppy. With all respect to Peter, I wonder if it's possible he's obfuscating a bit?
One last point-- accelerating by storing mass wouldn't be very useful for Wax in atmosphere, as the reduced mass would likely make him more susceptible to drag, so it's plausible to have them "discover" this rather obvious trick only later in the series...
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FTL allomancy
in Cosmere Discussion
Posted · Edited by jjh
Good points! In defense of my (fake) physics conjecture, let me make a couple of extrapolations from real relativistic behavior (with the caveat that I am kind of an armchair relativist)