Maldis

The status of the body isn't entirely meaningless and access to his gold isn't quite the only thing he needs. Miles had to forcefully remove his mask when Wax shot him in the eye, because the cloth that was stuck in his eye was preventing it from healing. Since we were considering the potential of Miles' body to protect his gold from damage that would separate it from his body, by insulating it from heat or absorbing its excess heat, his body's ability to withstand heat is relevant. My point here was just that we know his body can't absorb limitless heat with impunity. But all that is moot, since we have reasonable evidence that the heat source couldn't have produced enough heat to break contact between his whole body and all of the gold embedded in it.

It's really a question of how much energy was released, and whether it was sufficient to damage his body enough to expose the gold to whatever energy was left, thereby melting and scattering the gold and then separating enough of the gold from what was left of his body to leave him without enough healing mojo to recover (which raises several other interesting questions: If melting down hemalurgic and feruchemical metals doesn't reduce their charge, what happens when a piece of humalurgic or feruchemical metal is subdivided into several parts? Is the charge distributed in proportion to the quantity of metal in each fragment? Is it lost? Is part of it lost? If so, does the amount lost vary depending on how the metal is split? What if the metal is cut with a shardblade? And with a coppermind, would different pieces of knowledge be distributed amongst the fragments, or would the same knowledge exist in every fragment, but dimmed to some degree?). We know Bloodmakers aren't immune to heat damage. Wayne loses a layer of skin off his back in an explosion. What I find convincing in @Moogle's comment is the suggestion that there wasn't enough dynamite to produce the heat to finish Miles off. This is supported by the fact that after the detonation, his pants are completely intact. That's a tiny blast radius.

Hooray! Crisis averted! Thanks!

Hi, I feel like such an obnoxious jerk for even asking this question, especially as my first post here, but I just can't let it go. (By the way, huge fan, have been for years.) I've just re-read the original Mistborn trilogy, and now I'm re-reading Alloy of Law, all to refresh my memory of details before I read Shadows of Self. I've gotten to the scene in which Miles detonates dynamite in his own hand, and I can't shake my obsession with the idea that doing so should have instantly melted his goldminds, preventing further regeneration. In the last hour, I've Googled the melting point of gold and the temperature of a dynamite explosion enough to get myself added to countless terror watchlists, all in the hope that I'll find numbers to assuage my waxing anxiety, but according to this book about mining, "the latent heat of fusion of gold is 163 calories. In the case of most metals the latent heat of fusion is about one-third the heat required to raise the metal from absolute zero ... to its melting-point." Further, according to the Engineering and Mining Journal, Volume 93, "with the dynamite the heat produced is about 1500 cal. per kg." (Please don't hate me Brandon Sanderson and Brandon Sanderson fans.) I'm willing to suspend my disbelief here if that's the only way to move on with my life, but I'd rather either learn I've misunderstood the situation or get an official ruling on the aberrant nature of Scadrial's thermodynamics. Now I'm going to go breathe into a paper bag. Thanks, Maldis