#fictional physics

[saphronethaleph]

Latchkey discovery

“General Organa Solo! Admiral! I – there’s something you need to know!”

“What is it?” Leia replied, frowning for a moment at the Duros in front of her. “Yaral, correct?”

“Yes, General,” Yaral confirmed. “General, I’ve been going over the implications of the operation that took place on Starkiller Base, and… I think I’ve got it.”

“...got what?” Holdo asked. “You’re not making sense.”

“I – ah, sorry,” Yaral mumbled, and put down his datapad. “It’s… so, ah, one of the extant problems in Hyperspace theoretics for the last several decades at least is that we can’t predict what routes will work and what routes won’t. It should be a settled science, but the fact that it only semi-reliably produced results matching empirical observations is a major clue that what we’re working with is actually an approximation… and not a good one. There’s plenty of models that were supposed to solve this, but none of them were… ah… they didn’t properly allow for the psuedovelocity-hypervelocity transition, for example, or they produced results that seemed to indicate that actual hyperspace travel was impossible, or they weren’t reliable with results.”

“Is this important?” Leia asked. “I mean you no insult, Yaral, but we are currently being pursued by a First Order ship capable of tracking us through-”

She stopped.

“...is that relevant to this?” she asked.

“It might be,” Yaral said. “At least – it might be if they’ve got a general solution to hyperspatial field theory, if it’s the same as – so, I’ve been working from the way that the Millennium Falcon jumped under the Starkiller Base shield. That indicates that the former understandings about mass shadows were not correct and could not be correct, and that gave me a hint so I tried using a different model on the way that mass impacts hyperspace. Specifically, it’s not the mass itself that impacts hyperspace, it’s the energy of the gravity that impacts hyperspace. The very energy bound up in the gravitational field, the, the warped space time is what is causing the impact, and normally that’s essentially the same but it becomes different under certain circumstances. Frame dragging around black holes, especially multiple black holes, is one of the places where it becomes particularly noticeable, but it’s not the only one – and Starkiller Base was suppressing the mass that it contained as it charged up, which changed the calculations!”

The duros sounded terribly excited, and he flicked through several pages of notes. “And this results in – it all falls out of equations from the seven-fifties, one of the old models that was rejected for improper agreement with evidence, but if I plug in the new corrections then it fits all known observations. And the effect of firing a large bolus of energy through hyperspace has the same impact!”

He showed them the next page. “See?”

Admiral Holdo and General Organa Solo exchanged glances.

“...we… don’t have qualifications in theoretical hypermetrics,” Holdo said. “What are we looking at, exactly?”

“This is what happens if you fire a large beam of pure energy through hyperspace,” Yaral explained. “See this term here? Because the pure energy beam has energy, and that energy is the same kind of mass-energy that impacts hyperspace, then in addition to exiting hyperspace at the target location it suffers superluminal bleed – the normal scattering that you get with light moving through a medium, it still happens, only the light moves outwards at faster than light speeds. That’s why the beam could be seen while it was in transit!”

His voice was full of passion. “You see? This must be correct, because it exactly replicated observations I wasn’t even trying to explain. It’s the grand unified theory of hypermetrics!”

“Marvellous,” Holdo said, sounding slightly frustrated. “But what does this mean on a practical level? What can we do with it?”

Yaral looked at his notes, then at Admiral Holdo.

Then back at his notes.

“...well, this means that it’s possible to predict the exact moment at which the superluminal transition takes place,” he said. “And, in fact, to demonstrate that the hyper velocity generated by the hyperdrive does not have to take place only after transition. It would in fact be possible to tune a hyperdrive so that it makes a very good approximation of hitting lightspeed while still in normal space, though the downside is that the whole ship would be converted to an energy packet in so doing while still in normal space instead of tachyonic space. It would completely destroy the ship if it hit anything, and it’d make a mess of whatever it hit…”

He flicked forwards another page. “And it would make it possible to hit hyperspace anywhere! Without restriction, in fact – once the calibrations were done to more correctly align a hyper envelope with the energy structure of the ship, you wouldn’t even need to take off. You could jump to hyperspace while standing on the ground.”

“And tracking through hyperspace?” Leia asked.

“...possibly, but…” Yaral said, flicking back, then tapped out a few more calculations.

“I think I can see how they’re doing it,” he said, eventually. “It’s something about the energy signature of a specific ship, they’re tracking the vector and energy levels on hyperspace transition and they can then simply follow it until it stops. But that’s a branch conclusion of the theory, it doesn’t require the full unified theory.”

Holdo nodded.

“Thank you,” she said, catching Leia’s eye. “General. This is our answer – we retune the hyperdrive of the Raddus to do that superluminal transition in realspace. I’ll stay on board to drive it in, but the rest of you need to evacuate to transports… there’s a world not far away. We can get in range of it, then everyone else evacuates and I ram the Raddus right down Snoke’s throat.”

“You’d die,” Leia pointed out, which was an understatement.

“I did not join the Resistance because it was safe, General,” Holdo replied. “And we need to get Yaral’s knowledge off this ship and to the New Republic. We need the Resistance to survive. That is the highest priority.”

[lothli]

Hello.

I don't particularly post anymore, mostly because I've felt less motivated to as of late. I've always had friction with the posting process; the formatting, the polishing, the tagging. Writing has mostly been a thing I've done consistently privately, so this is just a return to form, mostly.

But I have the Limitless paper, at least. And I am proud of it. So I've returned to put it out on my blog.

Happy reading.

[colby-jac-cheese]

Does anyone wanna see the time travel math I made during my college physics class instead of listening before I dropped out?

[lothli]

Progress On That One Limitless Fluid Paper

Hello again.

The paper's nearly done. The one that I struggle to describe in blog-friendly terms, mostly because it's not exactly a blog-friendly paper.

It is the Phenomenological Model of the Limitless as a Regularized Hydrodynamic Manifold.

...Limitless Fluid Paper works fine for now.

Well, yes, it is nearly done. It is around 30 pages long, it probably requires an undergraduate degree in physics to understand, and it is also a character piece about a grieving niece formalizing her uncle as a form of memorial.

....Surprise! This is a writer's blog, and I'm still going to write fiction, even in a paper like this. Besides, it would be all too dry if the author of the paper was just... generic academic physicist voice.

There she is, putting her name on my work. My little Gojo creature. The girl with the Limitless and no Six Eyes.

Now, the paper is practically done. The only work left is honestly me figuring out how to post this in a way that is readable to like... I'm aiming for something that's understandable to STEM Bachelor's holders... with the basics available for everyone. The paper itself is a bit... too far for that? But that's fine. I'll figure out the bridge somehow.

I'll throw out a few more fun(?) things. Sneak peaks.

These are our major symbols. If you're formally trained, you might get the general shape of what I'm doing from this alone. At least... hopefully... all the important symbols should be here.

And there it is. Lime Green.

We must have Lime Green, after all. A theoretical physics paper that doesn't use its model to predict is a worthless physics paper. And I'm not going to be boring and naming it "Technique δ" for being the fourth offensive Limitless technique. It has to be Lime Green, dammit.

And here, a linguistic fun fact. It will be important later.

That's all from me this time. It's difficult for me to tell what people find interesting about this project from the outside to include in these sneak peeks. More equations? I'm not sure about the level of understanding most readers have on fluid dynamics, so I'm not sure if my personal usage Navier-Stokes equation would garner interest, even if it is famous (to me, at least).

For those who do know of it, we beat the shit out of it to simplify it down to the Stokes equation and then rip out the mobility limit to actually use. Because no, the full thing is not worth the bother, and hopefully I justified it properly enough.

Thanks for reading about my weird project.

[tomthefanboy]

Thinking about lasers in Star Wars today

Preface: This is a discussion of fictional in-universe physics for a space opera. Any mentions of "rulle of cool" or "fake and in space" are to be treated as bad faith comments and will result in account blocks.

The Deathstar superlaser is visible to the naked eye. It's been theorized that this is due to the corrupted kyber energy modulation that essential creates massive lightsaber beams, which extend to a focal point for direction of a single, planetary-scale lightsaber beam with a multi-second duration.

On the smaller scale, blasters used by planetary vehicles and as personal armaments don't fire lasers but instead shoot "bolts" of incandescent plasma at their targets. With more exotic weapons (disrupters, bowcasters, etc) adding additional ingredients to pack a bigger punch.

But lasers are powerful emissions of electromagnetic energy that become invisible to the human eye as they amplify into spectrum/power levels capable of damage. So then why are the laser cannons of fighters and capital ships visible?

My theory: TRACERS.

Much like how the sounds of passing starships is created in cockpit to aid the pilot, I believe that small quantities of gas are injected into the barrel of the laser at the instant of firing and the laser converts this gas to plasma and "carries" it on its path. This provides the gunner with a visual aid to supplement their targetting systems.

It also provides an explanation to why the distortion effect on an targets ray shields may look like a small fireball in addition to the fluctuation in the energy field. The plasma is being diffused.

The different colors used by various starships is indicitave of the plasma tracer's source gas.

The iconic green lasers of Imperial vessels can be traced to MERCURY VAPOR!

Mercury is toxic to most species, meaning that when fired in atmosphere where the disappated plasma can revert to gas and be inhaled later, Imperials are LITERALLY SHOOTING POISON!

[bluemanedhawk]

If they were to exist, what would happen if somebody were to interact with the edge of a freestanding portal?

[fuckyeah-valarin]

So about those aspects

I was drawn into a long comment-dissertation today on the physics of Taintverse/Songs’verse, especially as it pertains to what I call ‘aspects’. Considering how much I apparently have to say about these things, I thought I would synthesize the comments into a tumblr post. So here you are. 

To understand aspects in Songs’verse, a basic understanding of ainu metabiology is necessary. ('Metabiology' here used in place of ‘biology’ because they're not actually organic beings.) The simplest explanation of the ainur is that they are living Songs. They're music that is alive and self-perpetuating, and their metabolism is heavily tied up in the continuation of their song -- in fact, song basically is their metabolism.

This is important because Songs'verse physics are not at all like Earth physics. They're more along the lines of elemental-physics, but a lot more complex and detailed than just four elements. A full 'aspect' is kind of a combination of two things -- the Song of the aspect and a collection of 'plain matter' that is subsumed by that Song and thus assumes the form and qualities of the aspect that has been sung into it. Perhaps one could thing of the 'plain matter' as akin to an empty piece of sheet music, and the Song as the ink that adds the necessary means for the manifestation of the music. I have the outlines of the Songs'verse aspect system sketched out -- the two "highest" aspects, or the two huge umbrellas under which every other aspect falls, are 'nothing' and 'something', probably better described as Void and Being respectively. Every aspect has an associated Song, and the way ainur 'work' is that they adopt these songs into themselves as part of their metabolism.

That is the introduction section. Here is a readmore, because this is really fucking long, okay? 

Artificial Versus Intrinsic

Aspects are a weird combination of "intrinsic to reality" and "artificially created", and they get more or less one or the other the further down the aspect-pyramid you go. Void-aspect and Being-aspect are pretty much incontrovertibly intrinsic to the existence of things and you can't really touch them or manipulate their Songs to make variant Void or Being aspects. Smaller aspects, for example Water, are considered by ainur physicists/scientists to be “intrinsic” but can be easily changed and manipulated by an ainu to create a new variant of Water, that might act differently than 'normal' Water -- for example you might increase the viscosity. Making the manipulated Song stay manipulated and not fade back into the 'normal' Water-song is a different matter entirely. Making living things is even more hideously complicated and involves not only fiddling with the Songs of multiple aspects, but fiddling with them in such a way that they can be bent together and merged seamlessly into a single new Song that does not involve any discord or tuning problems. The Songs of all living things are considered to be “artificial” and “not intrinsic”.

Physical versus Conceptual

Many of the “intrinsic but changable” aspects are themselves composed of multiple aspects. For example, Heat is an aspect that happens to automatically be included in all Fire-aspects. Fire contains other aspects as well, such as Light and a sub-variant of Corrosion that is tied into the Heat-song (not an exhaustive list). These aspects (Light, Heat, Corrosion) seem much more conceptual than simply Fire, and this intuition is correct. The latter is considered to be a physical aspect, while the former are conceptual aspects. Conceptual aspects can also have variants created for them (depending on the specific conceptual aspect and their relative height on the pyramid), but these variants can usually only be created by altering through other conceptual aspects, not by using physical aspects.

One interesting thing about conceptual aspects like Heat, Light, and Corrosion is that they all act like liquids when they're alone and not incorporated into some other aspect-Song. They flow, and I describe them with water-based imagery in my writing. You can, however, walk right through them without noticing any resistance as one would when walking through water, which is simultaneously cool and dangerous. Dark and Light aspects in particular act like oil and water to one another, which can give you some very interesting lighting effects that wouldn't be found on Earth.

Even though conceptual aspects are some of the most basic building blocks of the universe that one can get in Songs’verse, conceptual aspects are much harder for ainur to metabolize than physical aspects. A lot of this difficulty comes from their non-physicality -- you can’t grab a handful of Corrosion, but you can grab a handful of Rock. Well, okay, if you’re an ainu you might be able to grab a handful of Corrosion, but you don’t normally find puddles of Corrosion lying around the landscape. (As an aside, pure distilled conceptual aspects that aren’t usually found distilled in that ‘usual state of affairs’ can be exceedingly destructive, especially if they’re being weaponized. Imagine a wave of pure Corrosion sweeping across a field.)

For an ainu to metabolize Corrosion, considering that this particular aspect is not found in isolation except in highly exceptional circumstances, the ainu has to at least have passing familiarity with, if not outright metabolization of, all the possible physical Songs that incorporate Corrosion. And that is difficult. For this reason, only older, more powerful ainur tend to be able to claim to have metabolized a conceptual aspect. Metabolizing a conceptual aspect is nevertheless highly desirable, because it makes it easier to ‘hack’ physical aspect Songs -- an automatic boost to your godlike reality-warping powers.

To use an example of an ainu with conceptual aspects metabolized, we’ll use Melkor. Melkor is slightly fucking terrifying by fact of having metabolized enough things to have a whole conceptual-aspect complex -- namely that of Temperature, not to mention a number of other conceptual aspects (such as Darkness for one), and those on top of a whole host of physical aspects. (For more information on aspect-complexes see next section.) Melkor is furthermore one of the only ainur to have successfully metabolized aspects that hailed from both the Fire-complex and the Water-complex aspect systems. Part of all this is because ey’s older than everyone else, but another part of it is just sheer tenacity. Long story short -- why the fuck would you mess with Melkor. 

Aspect Complexes

The existence of variant aspects contributes to the phenomenon of aspect-complexes. Having an aspect of simply “Water” is more specifically having an aspect composed of “all the variants of basic Water plus basic Water”. This is why it's called a complex. To use Mairon as an example, ey has a Fire-complex as eir 'main' aspect, plus a couple of other side-aspects related to eir life experiences. (These include a couple of types of lava, part of the molten-metals-complex, and ashes, cinders, sparks, and other Fire-residue.) Most ainu wind up with aspect-complexes by the time they reach a certain age, because it's easier to learn to sing (and to subsequently incorporate into yourself) a Song that has a lot in common with aspects you already have than it is to learn a completely unrelated Song.

Aspect complexes can themselves be sub-aspects of a 'larger' complex umbrella, and so on and so forth, all the way up to Being. Void has no other aspects underlying it, unless one wants to group Plain and Unsung Matter under Void, and Plain Matter has no song but silence, so.

Some aspect-complexes can prohibit the learning of any of the minor aspects of another aspect-complex because of the way the Songs combine. Mairon, being so heavily reliant on Fire-related aspects for eir metabolism, cannot tolerate contact with Water-complex aspects or ey sustains actual injury. Actually learning to Sing Water-song is pretty much an impossibility for em as ey currently is, and attempting to do so would also cause injury. While it might eventually be possible for Mairon to learn Water-song, this event could only occur after ey has internalized the Songs of a vast number of other aspects, to the point where the majority of eir metabolism is no longer reliant on Fire-song. Considering further that Water and Fire aspects are notoriously difficult Songs to combine (successful combination basically hasn’t been recorded yet, or at least not stably and not for all variants of either aspect, with a few exceptions: see Melkor), it’s going to take even longer to potentially happen. This is not to speak of Mairon’s own well-developed aversion to water, meaning ey may choose not to metabolize that particular set of aspects no matter how capable of it ey becomes.

[waffle-sorter]

Okay, so there's this question that keeps bugging me as I'm watching Stargate SG-1. If the iris is closed when the gate opens, there is no splash effect. If the iris is open, the splash happens and destroys whatever it touches.

What happens if the iris is partly closed? Is there a smaller splash, or does it delete the iris, or what?