happyman

I've always assumed that being a Steel Inquisitor involved more than just having the Hemalurgic gifts. The annotations in HoA suggest that strongly. This apparently requires spikes through the eyes, rather than elsewhere. I personally feel that it's because Ruin (Brandon) "wants" Hemalurgy to be awesome and creepy at the same time, more than anything.

There is evidence in Words of Radiance against this idea, although it takes a certain amount of knowledge/sleuthing to make all the connections. Words of Radiance and Warbreaker spoilers

I don't think so. As far as I can tell, the cognitive effect on things like this is usually a very broad consensus. Individual perceptions only come into play only if they are within "standard" or "expected" versions of the cognitive and spiritual consensus. I don't think stable isotopes are different enough for a single person to affect it.

You're right about the melted structure still being an alloy. In that case, though, the Spiritweb isn't looking at individual atoms, but large-scale average properties. This is fine, but it almost certainly means that it can't tell the difference between different isotopes. The cognitive identity being important produces the same conclusion. If it's the cognitive identity of the steel which makes it steel, then, since people can't easily tell the difference between different isotopes, or generally even know that isotopes are a thing, the different isotopes should behave identically. Either way, isotopes have no effect on Allomancy.

Can you provide sources for that? I don't remember any canonical examples of this. If it were true, then burning alloys in those states would be difficult to define properly.

OK, I'm seeing confusion here about what an isotope is and means. First, my conclusions: Different metal isotopes work just fine for Allomancy. The Allomancy probably can't "see" well enough to know that they are different. My background: Physics Ph.D., but not one specializing in chemistry or "condensed-matter physics," i.e. the physics of the solid things around us. Broadly speaking, all atoms have two different structures, the electronic structure and the nucleus structure. The structure of the nucleus is what creates isotopes. Every nucleus consists of a combination of protons and neutrons. All that really matters in the nucleus is the number of protons and neutrons; technically a nucleus can have different "shapes" depending on how the protons and neutrons are arranged, but in practice the forces between the protons and neutrons are so strong you never actually see a "wild" nucleus in anything besides the most compact version. The number of protons is what determines which element the atom is, and the number of neutrons determines which isotope the atom is. The important point about this nuclear structure is that it is very compact. It's obscenely small. Although it contains 99.94% or so of the mass of an atom, it's volume is roughly 1/100,000 that of the atom. It's hard to see or measure. The structure that is most important for chemistry is the structure of the electrons. For practically all atoms, the structure of the electrons depends almost purely on the number of protons in the nucleus rather than the total mass in the nucleus. (Technically the electron structure is slightly affected by the mass differences between the isotope nuclei, but good luck actually measuring the effects. It's next to impossible with atoms as large as most metals.) It's the chemistry, the electrons, which determines the kind of "shapes" the atoms form when they are combined into a solid. This is largely why different isotopes of the same element are found together. They act very much the same at the level of chemical reactions and can mix almost perfectly together into the same "grids." My argument is that it is the chemical configurations which the Spiritweb senses when it burns the metals and uses that as a conduit for power. My evidence is that the exact alloys matter when creating the paired internal and external metals. The major effect of alloying metals is to change the legal chemical structure of the metals. The "extra" atoms for the "other" metals have to fit somewhere, and that changes the kinds of patterns the atoms can make. The power is obviously not looking at the individual atoms, but rather the large-scale structures those atoms form. Otherwise copper and bronze would produce the same power for Smokers, and would also be burnable by Tineyes. Presumably Seekers would not exist. Thus the effects of isotopes is almost certainly too small for Allomancy to detect. Another way to think of it is that you could have a good metal which is a specific isotope, with all the other isotopes being slightly off. However, the difference between the "true" metal and its isotopes is so obscenely small, no Mistborn or Misting would ever notice that their recent push or pull was weak by a factor of 99.99999999999999%.

I don't pretend to really understand it, but one really important functional difference is that a world-hopper can re-enter the physical realm and have their original body back and interact with the people normally. Cognitive shadows can't enter, or even really affect, the physical realm at all.

He lied. As far as I can tell, only Sazed really had all the pieces to figure it out, and he cared much more for the kind of person Breeze was, than who his parents were.

It's practically a trope in its own right that the "mysterious stranger" who shows up to help will have his own magic system, completely independent of the rest. Since Hoid has already shown off his magic a couple of times, I don't see why he should be the one to have all the fun. After all, Brandon Sanderson has a far better justification for it than most times I've seen it.

Things like this become complicated when dealing with Shards. If Devotion and Dominion are half as invested other shards in the Cosmere, then even shattered they will be forces to be reckoned with.

That all sounds very reasonable. I'd only change it by saying that it's "really" a merging of the worship of Dominion and Jaddeth---Dominion was real, Jaddeth was not, but for probably political reasons, the two of them were claimed to be the same. Given Dominion's intent, this probably doesn't really hurt him or his power all that much, either.

Yeah, near the well, when it was full of power, the "distance" between the three realms was drastically reduced. Ruin had a far easier time reaching from the spiritual into the cognitive and physical near the well. Presumably this included speaking to Vin.

Getting in shape enough to read one of the Stormlight books with one hand would be quite the exercise regime. Pity it would just end up giving you enormous hands.

You and everybody else. Well, not everybody else, but I think most people like those two a lot less. They didn't really have anywhere to go after using up the Radio Broadcasts and the nascent Dr. Who script (the third book.)

Stormlight doesn't behave all that much like electricity. Since we know that the Cosmere has real electricity, we can't read it as an analogy, either. If you had enough static electricity build up in a storm to produce the glowing and effects we see, it wouldn't be a storm. It would almost instantly turn into the world largest lightning bolt and blow off a significant chunk of the planet. It may have started off as static electricity, but it wouldn't stay static for long.

I'd add to this that if the cognitive realm had as many loopholes as people here on the forums seem to think, then madmen would be gods in fact, rather than in their own minds. The cosmere clearly doesn't work that way; not at all. Madmen may be able to hear the gods and other things normal people are protected from, but for the most part it's obviously rather a down-side than otherwise, rather like the real world. The only conclusion I can come to is that the "bigger" (more wide-spread) ideals and forms create really strong constraints on what things like healing can do. Since nobody but Kaladin has a really strong opinion on whether or not he should be branded as a slave, and because having slave brands falls well within the consensus range of "normal and healthy," Kaladin's vote counts for the most. Believing that you should be able to regrow earings does not fall in this range by any kind of wide consensus, and thus I don't believe that any normal person, no matter how mad, would be able to work against it.

Yeah, being deliberately mysterious and obtuse is one of his hobbies. He gets a huge kick out of it. I think there is more to his little story than first meets the eye. Hoid does seem to have a feel for when things are important and when they aren't.

Don't forget that it's not just your personal view of yourself that affects how healing works. The global view of "what is a human" and "what is not" and "what can be healed" and "what can't" is almost certainly going to affect what a healer can actually do as well. There are very few people who think that humans can naturally grow diamonds! This gigantic, essentially universal understanding will almost certainly bear down on the healer in a such a way that they can't pull stunts like this even if they, personally, were deluded enough to really believe they could grow diamonds.

The key, as usual with Sanderson characters, is to ignore (a lot of) what she thinks, and almost all of what she says, and look at what she is actually doing. Lightsong is a similar character this way, but wittier and more constrained. But the basics are there.

I think you should read that interlude again. Lift is very good at lying, and while she does it to lots of other people, her main target is herself. It took me a while to realize what her real motives were, but when I did, the whole thing snapped into place for me. Also, she is a very good person at heart. It's remarkable, really, just how good she is at hiding that from everybody. She's mostly random in her words, not her actions, which tends to confuse folks.

Which makes me mourn for Inquisitors (well, Marsh, really.) He can see lots of things, but he can't see sunrises or sunsets any more. And museums of fine art must baffle him no end. Which also makes me wonder if there were ever any artistic Inquisitors, which produce art which other Inquisitors can appreciate. I imagine it would be very subtle.

Quantum mechanics is frigging weird when it comes to this kind of thing. Combine it with Special Relativity and it's quite literally impossible to give a single moment when a wave-function collapses, (or whatever mechanism your favorite interpretation gives of what happens). All that we can say is that the final result will not violate the order of cause and effect---and Atium completely short-circuits that all by itself. It would be far simpler to make it work if the Atium burner counts as an observer, seeing the atom's decision before the atom itself knows it has made it.

This is so very tricky, isn't it? Nice and philosophical and all. We've actually gotten some insight into how Atium works, thanks to Mistborn: Secret History. From this, we can conclude that Atium and Shardic Future sight are one and the same power, but with the first one being much weaker than the second. We know from other sources (Honor, in particular) that these visions of the future are changing and splitting as things go on. On the other hand, Atium seems to be completely deterministic for a couple of seconds. My guess is that even with true quantum randomness, the Atium observer is enough of an observer to see what the effect is going to be after the decay occurs. The act of the Atium burner seeing what is gong to happen is enough to "collapse the wave function" and make the behavior deterministic. Of course, this creates the usual future-sight feedback loop, but radioactive atoms don't much care about avoiding a Seer, so I doubt it has any practical effects.

Upvoted just because it's a fun thought.

Can I just say here how much I like the term Mistpoint for the kind of absurd power people held when using the Bands? As for being a Sliver...I don't know. Despite what Brandon said, I feel like there's something qualitatively different about somebody who's become a Sliver. An echo of (secret history spoiler) I don't know what it is, but there's something there which just changes a person. I don't think either Wax or Marasi had enough of "that," whatever it is.