happyman

I don't think it's a flaw; I think it's a plot arc that hasn't ended yet.

In special relativity, kinetic energy and momentum are best understood as the time- and space-like aspects, respectively, of a single quantity, the energy-momentum four-vector. This means that you can't transform kinetic energy without including momentum. However, speed bubbles change both energy and momentum, so this is OK!

We are all Sticks! Fool! There must be opposition in all things, and the harder you fight, the stronger we resist. The heat and the hammer only make for a better grade of steelstick.

[nerd joke]Pressure doesn't suck; it pushes![/nerd joke]

Robert Jordan was always very good at giving characters motivations and actions which don't agree with their thoughts or words.

Secret Schmecret. Nynaeve never possessed the self-awareness to hide how much she loved her dresses, despite what she said. She would widely denounce them, then publicly order (and then wear) one of everything.

I actually know the answer to the first part of your question. Look up Einstein Notation for understanding how to tell what type of product you are seeing. The short description is that if an index name is duplicated somewhere in a term, there is an implicit sum over that index. If an index stands alone, then the expression implicitly stands for all possible choices of that index, i.e. that is one of the indices into the resulting tensor. Then the expression a_i b^i is a dot-product between two vectors and a scalar, and a^i b_j is second-order tensor (e.g. matrix) It's not a trivial bit of math, but its better than all the other notations we've come up with. As for the second part, well, in the real world, when light falls down a gravitational well, it's frequency changes just like we talked about in the previous time-bubble thread, so handwavium is still vital to not kill everybody.

This looks like a case of holy war! Would you rather this be settled by thumb wars or a pie-eating contest?

Now I'm imagining a bad sitcom set in the Cosmere. "As the Galaxy Turns." Will Vasher and Vivi get bagck together? What will Truthwatcher the Faithful do when she discovers that Headclogged the Bold is cheating on her with Housebreaker the Beautiful? And what dark secret is Annie hiding, and why is it related to her new piercings and her newly revealed ability to burn Steel?

For the first part, I believe the differences between upper and lower indices are between covariant and contra-variant tensors. I'm mostly just repeating words here, though. If I am right, the reason this is hard to explain is because in Euclidean space there is very little practical difference between the two types of indices; they are most useful in curved spaces. Our intuition is much worse at grasping curved spaces. As for the second part of your post, that's an example of the kind of non-conservation of energy which GR can produce, although I also suspect handwavium must be burned to get the details right.

Come on folks. Let's be real. At his smartest, Taragavinian may not have understood why people (even very smart people in no danger) would have objected to his law, but there would certainly be some very practical constraints on its application, for the good of the city if nothing else. Among other things: (1) Children would almost certainly be exempt until an age when their intelligence could reasonably be assumed to have stabilized. (2) It would be essentially a one-time thing for every person. Once you passed the cut, you would be reasonably safe until you hit some form of dementia. (3) The cut-off level would have to be set low enough to keep up a sensible birth rate. If he didn't include any of these things, than he really wasn't that smart, was he? If so, that is telling in its own right. But I suspect it was a one-time thing, either for the entire city, or possibly for each individual in the city. Also, it would be a very odd law that didn't allow mitigating circumstances that would reasonably expected to go away, like sickness. And his own exception would fit in with these constraints just fine. After all, he knows he will have smart days in the future, and that will work for the good of the world. Edit: Incidentally, I hate coming up with these scenarios. I like logic and would prefer that people uphold it in even in odd cases like this, but as I'm no sociopath, the idea of the law he proposed makes my stomach hurt. I'm not arguing this because I think it's a good idea. I'm just saying: don't let those emotions force you to make the wrong decision about the logic. The logic is sound, but it is based of a false premise, so there is no need to refute it.

There were a lot of factors in Roshone's tormenting Kaladin's family, but I think we are making the mistake of thinking "There must be somebody to blame." As far as I can tell, the people to most directly blame, if it absolutely must be done, are Lirin, Roshone, and Amaran. Everyone else is too far removed from the relevant consequences to be really "blamable." Which isn't the same as saying that Kaladin won't hold a grudge against Dalinar for not going with the harshest consequence, but I don't think it is fair. There is no one person at fault. A series of decisions, many bad, some possibly neutral, by different people, all led into the situation. This is life, folks.

Nah, his intellectual status isn't permanent. While I am very dubious of the morality of that law (duh), if such a thing were to be passed, I would consider it perfectly logical for him to carve out an exception for himself because his potential when he's brilliant outweighs the costs when he isn't. It's a scary kind of logic, but at least its self-consistent.

This is pretty complicated stuff. You really can't understand GR without a solid grounding in SR, and while SR is not mathematically complex, it turns our intuition into a bloody mess. GR just makes it worse. The basic summary of what I said is that a time bubble forces the relationship between space and time to change in a way which causes more or less time to pass inside than outside. It is rather like grabbing space-time and pulling or pushing it taut in the area around you. You take pretty much flat spacetime and bend it directly using magic. Incidentally, conservation of energy does not apply (globally) in general relativity. (Still can't make a perpetual motion machine, though; it's still locally true.) So the energy non-conservation and odd effects at the boundary may actually be handwaved as effects due to very rapid changes in space-time curvature. I doubt it holds up in detail, but I don't really care, either.

Wow. So, sorry for the long delay getting back to this. Life has thrown me some very strange curve-balls recently, and I stopped paying attention to FTL and/or time bubble theories a long time ago. I have done QFT, but I haven't done any GR. It really is an extraordinarily difficult theory, mathematically. I have been studying it recently, mostly via Wikipedia (which isn't as unreliable or incomplete as it may sound once you get into the necessary mathematical articles.) so I'm starting to get some sense of what they really mean by the term, say, pseudo-Reimannian manifold. The common effects of GR in the real world have almost nothing to do with time bubbles as we see them. Real space-time effects are caused by a combination of energy and momentum, and as a general rule they fall off continually and without barriers. So at best the effects of time bubbles are analogous to general relativity in some conceptual sense, but certainly not in the details. For those who don't know, GR models space and time as part of a more complete whole. In "flat space" (far away from anything that can cause gravity) everything is, in some sense, moving at the same "speed" (the speed of light) through space-time. This may sound like nonsense, but it actually isn't. Something sitting perfectly still in space is actually moving "as fast as possible" through time (aging normally). If it starts moving in space a little, it has to stop moving so quickly through time, and we get time dilation. Light never ages because it always moves at the speed of light in space. There is a lot more to all this, including the fact that every person in the universe always sees themselves as moving only in time, with everybody else' motion being slightly mixed between space and time. If we keep talking at this level, we will get confused very quickly, so I will just say that, as Chaos said, the core mathematics is fairly simple and elegant, and everything always works out consistently. That last point is a rigorous mathematical theorem. With gravity around, things are more complicated. Space-time is curved, which has a solid mathematical definition. In practice, it means that motion through time can turn into motion through space, at least from the perspective of people a long ways away. Thus a particle that isn't moving at one time can, just by the nature of the space around it, begin moving a bit later, its motion through time being converted into motion through space. This is what we call "gravity," and it has all kinds of unintuitive, but very real and observed, effects. Among other things, if you are deep inside a gravitational field (say near a black hole), the "distance" to get from one "point" in time to another is actually shorter than that experienced at a point a further distance away. With all this background, and If I had to guess, I would say that pulsers and sliders are somehow pulling or pushing directly on space-time itself in a way analogous to mass-energy in standard GR. Unlike standard GR, where the pulling and pushing comes from point sources and never stop but just fade away, the pulser or slider is essentially yanking on a bit of the space-time around them and forcing the relationship between space and time to change so that there is literally more or less time available in the bubble they create. That's the best I can do, though; an awful lot of the answers involve Realmantics which, as far as we know, don't apply to the real world at all.

That it's inconvenient, or that it making radiants a high-priority target, doesn't make it false. Conservation of energy is blasted inconvenient at times, as is the second law of thermodynamics, but we just live with it because we have to. Squires depowering when their Knight dies is blasted inconvenient, if it happens, but it's not less convenient than not having squires at all, so Radiants would have squires despite the tactical weakness it would result in. It is overshadowed quite a bit by the tactical necessity of having them in the first place.

Maybe you can only receive one power at a time? Seems unlikely. I'm guessing its something else.

Lash water and sharks, together, upward, sideways and then into a tornado. Voila, an actual Sharknado. (No, it wouldn't be any more dangerous than a normal tornado. It'd kill the sharks pretty fast. Why do you ask?)

Ah, but the Stick can be pushed. This does not change its essential Stick-ness. A lesson for all of us.

He's scary enough already, thanks. Now I'm going to have John-Cleaver-on-Scandrial nightmares. Talk about temptation...

My personal guess is that the mind is expanded in ways that correspond to the shard's underlying nature, equivalent to human instincts, and that the rest follows from the knowledge and observation. The two would fit together fairly well, in my opinion. An example from humanity: There is strong evidence that we are born with an innate practical knowledge of Euclidian geometry, with us learning concepts related to it very quickly. Among other things, our entire visual system is built around finding and tracking things in three-dimensional space. Thus we are born with this knowledge. With this basis of intuition, there are lots of other things we need to learn from experience, but which we learn really, really quickly on this basis, basically just by looking. (Note that "really quickly" involves months of experience, but compared to how complex the problems really are, including social interaction (!), that's fast.) I expect newly formed shards are much the same way. They almost instantly get new senses and abilities to understand the world, with much of the stuff they "learn" built-in to their new instincts. To consciously understand it, though, they need to explore. However, their newly tuned instincts and mental capacity make things which look really hard to normal humans practically obvious once they think to look. Hence Sazed's almost instantaneous discovery of the three realms, something not remotely obvious to normal humans. Thus I suspect that Sazed is more cosmere aware just because he's thought to look and because his instincts made hard problems much simpler for him. However, this gets to the last, and trickiest subject: motivation. He's only going to look at things he cares about, and this is the downside to holding shards: you become monomaniacal on your driving subject. A normal human may make a connection a shard doesn't, not because the Shard can't, but because it doesn't care.

Blasphemy!

Of all the factions, I fit this one best. I expect I'll emulate the Stick, though, and not get involved much.

These are relatively easy to answer. The dowser is real technology programmed to lie about Doc, and all Megan had to do in order to figure out how to work it was hang out invisibly and watch others. I suspect it was just a standard human-usable interface. Like a simple visual display.

I don't think you understand Hoid or Conflux very well.