Glamdring804

Current is the flow of individual electric charges. I'm not sure just being able to see the charges themselves would give the same effect. Even though countless electrons might be flowing through any part of a circuit, the circuit as a whole will remain electrically neutral. A battery doesn't provide electric charges to a circuit, it creates an electric field that pushes the existing charges in the wires. Same thing with neurons. Each cell has a slight positive charge on the outside and a slit negative charge on the inside. In order to "see" electric charges, you would have to be able to somehow detect individual subatomic particles, as detecting a net charge would only be usable in a few situations.

Is it possible to have your main character be a tag-team duo? One could be good at seeing voltage, the other good at seeing current. I don't know. It's your story, so I can't tell you how to solve the problem. Just a suggestion. So, heart muscles are unique, in that they will naturally contract without stimulation through the nerves. So, if you left a heart alone, it will continue to contract unless it's damaged. I would suggest that you throw body into fibrillation, where the heard is beating erratically and not pumping blood, and then have your character heal them by using a shock to restore normal rhythm. Give this reddit thread a glance, see if it helps.

So basically, they can detect the movement of electric charges, yes? Then yes, they would in theory be able to see impulses in human nervous systems, but it would be very very VERY dim. If electric current is visible to them, then their sight would only tangentially be related to voltage. A rough analogy is to think of water flowing down hill. The voltage is the slope of the hill, but your character only sees the water flowing. Voltage is in fact a bit more complicated than that, since voltage in a circuit is only really used up in resistors, and not in wires. Which means, if they are able to see current moving in a wire, then they will be able to see electricity without knowing anything about the voltage. Of course, you could decide to let them see both voltage and current, which would be pretty damnation useful. So what does this mean for his vision abilities? Well, human nerves have a voltage across their inner and outer surfaces of about 0.07 volts. That's small, but not too tiny. It's something you might be able to come across in everyday life. Now, for the actual current of a nerve cell. I did some Googling around, and found that the average movement of charge across a neuron sell membrane is 10e-12 amps. That is tiny. incredibly tiny. Like, a millionth of a millionth of a standard amp. So, of the two, your character would be better able to see nerve impulses using voltage. However, if you limit yourself to just being able to see voltage, your character wouldn't be able to see actual electricity, just places where electricity is being used. I.e they'll be able to see the light bulb, but not the wires. I would recommend letting them see both, as that would give them a pretty wide spectrum of electrical phenomena they could detect. As for the heart, yes, it is regulated by electrical impulses, but they are very week. You could easily disrupt the flow of charges across a cellular membrane, prevent the neurons from firing, and lock up the muscles. Strokes are a completely different beast. They occur when the brain is deprived of oxygen carrying blood, usually via a blood clot getting stuck in an artery, or internal bleeding in the brain. Neither is really caused by a problem with electrical infrastructure in the body.

Wow. This is really cool. I had no idea it was that simple. Then again, I'm a physics major, and that's what I think of most trig identities.

Yeah, you probably don't know my brother then. Oooh, physics. As a physics undergrad, that is always something that piques my interest.

Hm, not sure I want to reveal that quite yet. Too personal. Counter question: Do know any grad students at U of Rochester?

You're in the same city as one of my siblings. Seriously though, Bozeman is a beautiful place. I'm glad I live here.

Welp, I suppose after I posted that my Calculus 3 instructor is a Sanderfan and promptly discovered that he is in fact @Chaos, my location isn't much of a secret anymore. Bozeman Montana, please.

Destiny, Age of Triumph. Man, that game is in an amazing place right now.

Eh. Sorta. I'm not a big fan of RPGs, I tend to gravitate more towards writing fan-fiction. You probably remember how my entries in the Game of Blades were pretty much just interactive fan-fics. And anyways, I kinda burned out on MtG a year ago. I really got fed up with their storytelling for Battle For Zendikar and especially Shadows Over Innistrad. They basically went and trashed my favorite world into the dirt. It left a bad taste in my mouth that still hasn't gone away. I appreciate the thought though, so thanks anyways.

I am definitely not one of these fans. I like my Cosmere to have variety.

I'm not sure I can keep this level of hype up. Each update seems to kick it up to another level. I'm worried something is going to give eventually.

Yeah, he will probably write one book after he finishes Oathbringer revisions, do another over autumn, do his third "burger and fries" book early 2018, and spend the rest of 2018 writing Stormlight, and finish it sometime in the first third of 2019. That would put it out sometime in early 2020, which is pretty reasonable.

You get recursion with no base case and fall through to infinity. *Inserts Stick*

Almost certainly. The odds of this system forming naturally are extremely low. With the Roshar system, it's unlikely, but not impossible. Autonomy needs to already do a lot to keep the planet habitable, otherwise the UV radiation from the blue-white sun would cook anything on the Dayside to a crisp. I wouldn't be surprised at all if she put the planet there herself, instead of finding an existing one.

The shape of Taldain's orbit has nothing to do with the orientation if its angular momentum. To explain how this works, I'm going to have to give everyone a brief lesson in rotational physics. If you already know rotational physics, great! If you don't, well, warning; Long and nerdy post follows. Before we begin, we need to define some terms and conventions that physicists use to describe rotation. Clockwise and counter-clockwise won't work, because they are dependent on your perspective. Imagine you have a giant flywheel, oriented so it lies north to south. To someone on the west side of the flywheel, it might look like it's rotating counter-clockwise. However, to someone on the east side, that same rotation would look like it's clockwise. Two different viewers get two different results depending on where they are. To rectify this, we use something called a right-hand-rule to define a single direction for any rotation. The way it works is like this: Take your right hand, and curl your fingers in the direction that the object is rotating. Your thumb now points in the direction of the object's rotation. If we use this rule to define the rotation of the flywheel, both observers will agree that the "direction" of its rotation is to the west. Don't believe me? Try it for yourself with a clock or something, and see what happens. Okay, still with me? No? Try reading the Wikipedia page. They have a diagram. Now that we understand rotational motion a little better, we can see how this applies to the Taldain system. I drew a picture to help everyone. This is what Taldain looks like as it orbits its sun. In order for the same side to stay facing the sun everywhere, the planet actually has to have a slight rotation relative to the rest of the universe. This means that Taldain, despite being tidal locked with its sun, has an angular momentum that "points" upwards, which is out of the page in this perspective. This momentum is constant in magnitude and direction. This doesn't violate conservation angular momentum, which states that without external torques, angular momentum stays constant. Now wait a minute, you might say, what about the gravitational forces from Taldain's two suns? Couldn't those exert a torque? The short answer is: No. In order for a force to cause a torque, that force has to have a lever-arm. It needs to be offset from the axis of the object's rotation by some arbitrary distance. Think about what happens when you open or close a door. If you use the handle, on the other side from the door's hinges, the door opens easily. If you try to push closer to the hinges, it gets a lot harder to rotate the door. You wouldn't be able to rotate the door at all if you pushed right on the hinges. This is why the gravity forces between Taldain and its suns don't exert torque. Gravitational forces, by definition, are exerted on an object's center of mass. Since Taldain is a free rotating body, its axis of rotation always goes through its center of mass. Thus, the gravitational forces won't exert any torque on Taldain's rotation. So, under normal circumstances, the planet would just stay happily tidal-locked with its suns. The problem comes from the moon. The moon of Taldain orbits around the twilight band of the planet, on the border between the day and night sides. This immediately causes some problems, since the moon also has angular momentum associated with it. If we apply our right-hand-rule again, this gives us a direction of rotation that is out of the page. However, this isn't the out of the page in the previous diagram, since we changed our perspective. This angular rotation actually points radially inward, towards the larger sun. You can see what I mean here: Now this is unfortunate, since by putting the moon in, we essentially dumped the planet-moon system's rotational axis on its side. We can see that the direction of rotation is changing over time. At time 1, it points down, at time 2, int points to the right, and so on. This is a clear violation of conservation of angular momentum. When a planet is normally tipped on its side in it's orbit, the direction of rotation stays constant to an outside perspective. This means the planet would actually rotate very slowly as it went around is orbit. This is actually what happens with Uranus. One side of the planet experiences day for half the year, while the other experiences night for half the year. It's technically not rotating to an outside perspective, but more importantly, it's not tidally locked. There fore, there has to be something that's not a celestial object that's forcing the Taldain-moon system to stay aligned with its star. The obvious, most natural explanation is Autonomy.

Not just that, Autonomy is actively keeping the planet stable. Since Taldain has a moon that orbits the twilight region of the planet, she has to apply a constant torque to keep the planet tidal locked. The explanation for this won't make much sense without a basic understanding of rotational physics, but it has to do with conservation of angular momentum. I can try to explain it if you want, but no promises that it will make sense.

Well...That's actually more of electrical engineering. If you showed me the circuit diagram, I could tell you the equivalent resistance, the current drawn from the source, etc. I haven't yet taken advanced enough courses to really evaluate your idea from a physics perspective. But, I can tell you that it sounds pretty cool to me.

I agree. It started as hard fantasy, and will only drift further into sci-fi as time goes on.

Well, I'm not a mathematician, (I'm a physicist, we specialize in doing terrible math because it works) but a series is a summation of terms, and it would be fairly difficult to pull that stuff out of the embedded cosines. @Chaos, you are probably a lot more qualified for this, what do you think?

My own pet theory is that Oathbringer in-universe is a book that doesn't show up until the back half. It's a biography of Dalinar that Jasnah or Navani writes after Dalinar (presumably) saves the world in the front half.

We don't know. The visible universe, the region of space and time that we can see, is indeed spherical. Light has had 14 billion years to reach us, so the very farthest edges of the region were 14 billion light-years away when they emitted the light we see today. Since then, the expansion of the universe has pushed those regions to a distance of about 46 billion light-years. So the current visible universe is a sphere 93 billion light-years across, with Earth at the center. We don't know if this is the actual center of the universe (It's probably not) and we don't know what, if anything exists beyond this limit. Maybe it's a sphere, maybe it's a tetrahedron, or maybe its a doughnut. Each of those scenarios works with the math. We don't know what the actual shape is simply because the universe isn't old enough for the information to reach us, and it probably never will. This is a badge I wear with pride.

Well that is actually a very good question that cosmologists would love to know the answer to. Before I continue, let me clarify something. When I say "space is flat," What I am referring to is a large scale curving of all three dimensions of space. I don't mean that space is actually a two dimensional sheet, I'm discussing weather the universe as a whole has a larger shape and structure to it. I am also ignoring distortions made by massive objects, i.e. gravity wells, because they are just blips in the large scheme of things. We don't really know what the universe is like beyond the region within which light has had enough time to reach us, since the beginning of the universe 14 billion years ago. We do not know if the universe is finite or infinite. Does it go on forever, or does if have discernible edges somewhere out there, that we could fall off of, as you put it? Or maybe spacetime is finite in volume, and instead of having edges, it loops back on itself, like the edges of a Pacman map. These are questions we don't have the tools to answer, and probably won't for thousands of years, if ever. It's still fun to speculate, though. To a point. It's actually somewhat more complicated than that. The working mechanics of relativity say that we are actually moving through the four dimensions of spacetime at a constant rate: the speed of light. If we are sitting still, away from anything with strong gravity, then 100 percent of our movement is in the direction of time. We experience time at one second per second. However, if we begin moving at hi speeds, we direct more and more of our speed towards spatial movement, and our progress through time begins to decrease. As we approach the speed of light, nearly all of our motion is through the spatial dimensions, and we have practically stopped moving through time. From an outside perspective, time slows nearly to a crawl for us.

Wow. This is a big scale question. I'm by no means an expert on relativity, but I do have a working knowledge. The two dimensional model of space-time is a bit of an over-simplification. The 'fabric' is not exactly a fabric, but a four dimensional continuum. And even that's not quite right. As for black holes, well, they don't exactly "tear" space-time, rather, they create an infinitely deep pit. And as for a flat universe, well, as far as we can tell, we are living in a flat universe. We've found no evidence of curvature on a large scale, and the distortions caused by stars and planets are rather small and don't really contribute on the larger scale of things.

You seem to be doing pretty well. If you're working on partial fractions, you've already gotten half way through Calc 2. Come to think of it, you'd probably really enjoy my honors physics classes. They storming hard, but certainly a lot of fun.