Should Bendalloy make you blind?

[Vortaan]

I'm going to preface this with admitting that I am not the best physics guy in the world. However, I know some of you are, so maybe you can help me with this.

 

I was thinking today about Slider bubbles. They slow down time inside the bubble, and do funny things to ballistics and sound going into or out of the bubble. So why don't they seem to affect light going into the bubble? I mean, light should be scattering oddly upon hitting the border, just like sound and solid objects do. Another factor is that the light outside the bubble is moving slower than the light inside the bubble, relatively speaking, and it seems to me that some wierd visual effects should be taking place, no?

[TheOneKEA]

Under normal circumstances, I would agree with you. I decided that Wayne and Marasi's cognitive perception of their bubbles are such that light is specifically not affected by the time dilation, thus preventing any acute red shifting or blue shifting of the light entering or exiting the bubble. I don't recall any textev describing any changes in lighting when inside one of Wayne's bubbles. If this is true, and cognitive perception controls how the bubble affects light crossing its border, that may have major implications for Kurkistan's FTL theories.

I'd love to ask Brandon what would happen if someone aimed a green laser at an object from inside a bubble of both types, and then aimed a green laser at an object from outside a bubble of both types. It sounds like a massive RAFO Bait question.

[Kurkistan]

You are right, KEA, in that light is generally not affected by time bubbles. At its root, this is a result of the fact that Cadmium is, in fact, actually an alloy of Handwavum. Realmatically, I agree that some level of perception of what it "makes sense" for bubbles to affect likely comes into play.

 

EDIT: I'm not the only person with FTL theories, btw. Just the most vocal.

Edited December 27, 2013 by Kurkistan

[Vortaan]

Well then, you just need high powered lasers to kill Sliders, huh? Or a tesla coil. 

[Oudeis]

Well then, you just need high powered lasers to kill Sliders, huh? Or a tesla coil. 

Except that the fact remains that they're still faster than the person aiming/pulling the trigger. You might have better success, considering how often he throws up the bubble when a bullet is already in the air at him.

 

The fact that bullets deflect as they pass through isn't something that Sliders use defensively very often, it's a handicap to their offense; it means they can't fire out of their bubbles. I think, in fact, that a laser is actually a very good weapon for a Slider, rather than against one.

[name_here]

The bubbles apparently do blur and distort light a bit, actually. People who know what they're looking for can detect a bubble from how it interferes with light. I'm not sure if it's operating on the light itself or if it's an artifact of how it interacts with air, though.

 

As for why they don't cause blueshift/redshift, light interacts pretty oddly with relativistic time dilation and might interact equally oddly with the bubbles. The relative velocity of light is the same in any reference frame; blueshift/redshift occurs because the source is getting closer or further away, not because they're experiencing time at different rates. The bubbles break relativity, since they don't cause Lorentz Contraction, but that might still hold constant.

 

I don't think Cognative perception entirely explains it, since the bubbles are a localized phenomenon and light is generated from outside the bubble. However, I recall we've got WoB that objects crossing the boundary actually gain/lose kinetic energy instead of simply appearing to do so due to the different timeframe, so the bubble might do the same with light. With a fixed time ratio, adjusting the frequency would be a fairly straightforward multiplication/division.

[Kurkistan]

I don't think Cognative perception entirely explains it, since the bubbles are a localized phenomenon and light is generated from outside the bubble. However, I recall we've got WoB that objects crossing the boundary actually gain/lose kinetic energy instead of simply appearing to do so due to the different timeframe, so the bubble might do the same with light. With a fixed time ratio, adjusting the frequency would be a fairly straightforward multiplication/division.

 

WoP, actually.

 

Not really. A bullet shot out of a speed bubble IS robbed of kinetic energy—not all of it, but just enough to slow it down to the speed it would have been moving at had it been fired outside the bubble in the first place.

[Vortaan]

Except that the fact remains that they're still faster than the person aiming/pulling the trigger. You might have better success, considering how often he throws up the bubble when a bullet is already in the air at him.

 

The fact that bullets deflect as they pass through isn't something that Sliders use defensively very often, it's a handicap to their offense; it means they can't fire out of their bubbles. I think, in fact, that a laser is actually a very good weapon for a Slider, rather than against one.

 

Except that the laser is moving at the speed of light, which apparently doesn't shift at all going into a bubble. Makes the whole throwing up a bubble to have time to dodge thing not work all that well. Admittedly Wayne's trick of seeing where people are aiming and moving to where they aren't would still work, but a halfway decent crossfire should take care of that. Come on lasers in the third trilogy!

[Swimmingly]

You could do ridiculous things to generate energy by pumping matter through a time bubble to a turbine generator inside. You could stand under a waterfall with a huge water volume and flow rate, then funnel it into a time bubble where it would turn a turbine. Assuming the turbine is going to move at the nearly the same speed as the water entering the bubble at it's maximum speed, regardless of volume, then there would be a stream of water with a tenth the volume but the same speed hitting the generator for ten times as long per arbitrary unit of volume. Though the energy imparted would be the same overall, the efficiency would be much higher due to the turbine blades needing to be much shorter.

[Satsuoni]

I more or less gave up trying to figure bubbles out I have already posted about their properties before, but for clarity (and because I am too lazy to search all my posts) I'll try to summarize here. Whatever theories I had couldn't reconcile all of the properties ;(

So, problems/properties:

1. The "punching problem", defining what is inside or outside the bubble. If you punch someone outside the bubble, does he get sucked into or you out? What about the floor you are standing on? What happens if the floor is moving? Etc. (there are many variations) (a subset is Allomantic interactions, such as Pulling on object outside the bubble, Soothing, etc)

 

2. Energy. If you put a solar panel in bendalloy bubble, it would generate energy much longer, increasing outside efficiency. Likewise, putting emitter (light) inside slider's bubble and panel outside would allow one to extract possibly more energy than there were in its batteries.

 

3. Related to 2, the air interaction. If the air molecules inside the bubble are 10 times as fast, 10 times as much of them escape the bubble than enter it at every given time interval. That should create a pressure gradient pumping the air out of bendalloy bubble. Why doesn't that happen? If the air is not affected, how do sliders/pulsers breathe? What happens if the bubble is underwater? Or half-submerged? What about the dust in the air?

 

4. How is the object entering the bubble deflected, depending on its mass/ velocity? Why is the bullet deflected, but not falling human (experiencing only a jolt)?

 

5. A host of relativity questions, such as whether the light propagates with the same speed inside the bubble (when measured from outside), or the properties of spacetime itself (electric permittivity, etc) are altered in a way that changes it?

Edited December 28, 2013 by Satsuoni