#laplace rambles

[prydoniantrash]

going to assume the list of weirdly specific OC development questions was an ask game. literally any or perhaps multiple of your characters for 1? and 11 for sigma i find that question very interesting for him

yes! that was in fact an ask game :3 let's goooo

1, for the main four: What’s the lie your character says most often?

Sigma: that man loves lying about where he got his scar from. His running favorite is that it was from a dog bite, but he's got a plethora of other options. he broke his leg. a run-in with secret service. freak roller coaster accident. he likes to give a different answer every time, but he doess tend to roll back around to the dog bite one. if someone asks enough, he will in fact toss in an "I'm a science experiment, clearly" because at that point it's just a part of the bullshit.

Canto: that he doesn't care. he does. he probably cares a little too much, as a matter of fact <3.

Simon: that he's fine. he's not. he's very not fine. he's running off 4-5 hours of sleep most nights and the only thing keeping him going is the sole hope that he will in fact be able to bring back the single person who knew him and loved him for who he truly was. simon's version of del is evidently very full of respect and very idealized :3 del pushed down his emotions a lot around simon, he was also veryyy used to living that lie of "I'm fine, I'm strong", so uh. lmao. there was a lot going on between those two and it's very 👀. anyways though, this is a lie that simon is constantly telling himself as well <3. maybe eventually he'll believe it.

Seven: I was about to say that I'm not sure, but I do know it, actually! she very regularly lies about where she got her name from! she claims she got it from being a synesthete and how humans have seven wavelengths. this is a lie. she got it from an OC she roleplayed the fuck out of in early high school. if I ever write a book, I think this is in fact very important information for the readers to know-doesn't it just say so much about her?

11, for sig: If someone was impersonating them, what would friends / family ask or do to tell the difference?

I'm going to assume that it's implied that this is a very good physical impersonation, and that the person in question knows the basics of who/what sigma is. What I would ask these two identical sigmas is "What does it feel like to die?" I think the real one would look away and go sort of quiet. It was a very traumatic experience, and not one he's very pleased with talking or thinking about. there's also the entire manner of admitting to what that question implies, which is also something he's not keen on doing (eg, he's not them-right?). Here's what the rest of the squad would ask, though!

(note on canto/seven: both of them have synesthesia, ie, they can hear/see animaic waves. they would both be able to tell the difference very easily. for the sake of this question, I'm blindfolding them <3.)

Canto: points a gun at them. the real sigma would without a doubt begin walking towards canto very shit-eating grin style like. you wouldn't shoot me again :). would you :)). and then canto would shoot him again (or like. near him. it's a blank dw) and probably end up injuring him!!! this is normal behavior from the both of them don't even worry about it

Simon/Seven: okay so for simon, it would in fact occur to him to use machinery to figure out which one of em has 14 waves. again, this is not allowed. with that barred, both of these people would ask for sig's opinion on starbucks. I think seven would ask for his starbucks order (he'd narrow his eyes and go "nitro cold brew with cold foam."), but simon would ask him what he actually thinks of the coffee ("it sucks ass" "more detail, please" "what do you want me to say? it sucks ass! you know this, I know this, seven knows this-" "I don't actually mind? starbucks??" "seven should know this, canto has bad taste so he-" "fuck you" and so on). I don't. I mean simon definitely had the right idea there but sig's just a bit of an idiot sometimes.

[prydoniantrash]

Why did each of your guys get into physics in the first place? And what else would they have done if not physics? : o

okay! this is easy enough and a very good question, ty!! unless stated otherwise, everyone here is in high energy physics, astrophysics, or hep-astro. which is. both of those.

seven's story is very similar to mine! she was big into scifi as a kid, and upon learning that relativity is a thing that exists, something just clicked. she's in physics for the mystique, for how broken the standard model is, for the things that don't seem like they could be real but are. she knew she wanted to do physics from day 1 and just stuck with it. if she wasn't doing physics she'd probably be doing some sort of creative writing degree.

unlike seven, wren didn't have a ton of exposure to science fiction until later in life, but she always had an interest in what james was doing! after wren's mom's death (wren was about 3 when it happened), james immersed himself in his work. in a way, physics was really the only bond wren had between herself and her dad, so she got very interested in it very fast. that interest only grew after hitting high school, where she realized that she actually quite likes math! she wanted to be a theorist until an internship she did her sophomore year, where she learned that she's actually quite fond of data analysis and the intersection between coding and physics, a thing which. there's a lot of. wren likes funky algorithms basically XD. if physics didn't work out, wren would've done pure math or comp sci! she was getting a minor in art as well, before everything happened.

canto actually really wanted to go into music, but that's not a very profitable field. if it were up to him, he'd be doing jazz shows or some shit XD with some composing on the side. but! like I said that's not very profitable. what it boils down to is that canto has a knack for physics and doesn't hate it. and it pays decent. a big deciding factor in his choice was actually wren! they've been friends since childhood and went to the same fairly local college. wren basically convinced him to give it a shot, and he was like 'well I guess this doesn't suck and what else am I gonna do' lmao.

del actually had a masters in engineering with a phd in physics! he was a lot more interested in the hardware end of things. he'd been building shit since he was a kid, but a lot of that was due to his parents forcing STEM onto him (and simon) from a very young age. del got lucky and as it turns out, he actually really enjoyed tinkering around with stuff. the phd in physics is mostly due to a series of odd-end jobs that led him to realize that he'd rather be using his engineering skills for research as opposed to industry- this is almost entirely due to the extra freedom given to him in the former.

simon would 100% be a theater kid/actor if he had any say in the manner. but his parents were very pushy about going into a profitable, non-artsy field. simon actually got a double major in CS and physics in undergrad, and went on to get a phd in physics because he wasn't having fun in the CS workforce and you can't do research in physics without a PhD. like del, he really didn't enjoy industry and wanted more freedom. with that being said, simon actually quite likes coding! he just wasn't enjoying whatever he was doing before deciding to get a phd lmao

[prydoniantrash]

the problem with physics is that half the time I like. see a physics mention out in the wild and instead of going 'oh shit just like me fr' I go 'oh shit I have physicists!!! my boys!!! my sons!!!!! my stupid idiot children!!!!!!!!!' and I literally only have myself to blame for this

[prydoniantrash]

is it really breaking into a national lab if you already live on the campus of the national lab

[prydoniantrash]

I do feel like you all need to know that sigma canonically woke up knowing how to draw furries (ferals) (not so much anthros rip) (del could do anthros. wren could not). it just feels like important info okay

[prydoniantrash]

I will pretend I totally understood what you just explained (literature major. Science is like. Way above my pay grade </3), but it does look really cool!!! I find it impressive how you decided to come up with a whole new concept in a field as complex as physics and make it make some sort of sense in this theoretical world

Animaic Waves- a much more thorough rundown

First of all, thank you!! Yeah, we'll see what happens- there are still a lot of kinks in this system that I'd like to work out, but it's a work in progress! Second of all- well, let's try to explain this one more time, but this time assuming I remember that most people don't know physics up to a graduate level. This got kind of long, so bear with me!

Let's start really simple: This is a sine wave!

(source)

It's a mathematical function that repeats this up and down pattern ad infinitum. Now Mochi, I hear you asking. This is math. What does this have to do with physics? Well, it turns out that there are a lot of things in physics that can be represented via mathematical models, and just as many that you can probably represent with a sine wave! One example of this is sound. When you hear a pure tone, say, a middle C, that can be represented in a graph of amplitude versus time (like shown above) as a sine wave. Here's a site that goes into more detail, but it has this nice tldr on the top that I like a lot:

Sound is the rapid cycling between compression and rarefaction of air.... ...To represent such cyclic behavior mathematically, think of the air pressure at a listener’s location as a function of time described by a sine wave or sinusoid.

Y'know what else can be represented as a sine wave? Light! Light is "made" out of a particle called a photon. Photons also have wave-like properties- you can think of them as both being a particle (like an electron) and a wave (like sound through air). It's weird and complicated and I won't delve into too much more detail, but the tldr is that just as sound is a wave that propagates through air, light is a wave that kind of sort of propagates through vacuum.

Now, how do we model a light wave? Well, we have to look at the frequency of that wave first. As shown in above figure, waves have a frequency! This is basically their "size" on the horizontal axis. You can also think of it as how fast or slow a wave moves. Here's a lil demo:

(source)

So, you can model light as a wave. These waves come in different frequencies and amplitudes, which is how big or small the wave is. For sound, we measure the frequency in Hertz (which is just 1/second) and the amplitude in. decibels?? I think???? Don't take my word on that- I'm fairly sure I'm correct, though. Now, let's look at sound some more. Imagine a piano. Each key on the piano emits a different pure frequency- this means it emits one (1) sine wave at a certain frequency. Middle C has a frequency of 256 hz, a tuning A has a frequency of 440 hz, so on and so forth.

Now, let's transfer this to light! Light waves can have different frequencies too! We sort different frequencies of light into different categories. Keep in mind while looking at this image that frequency is the reciprocal of wavelength. Aka, frequency=1/wavelength. This means that a higher wavelength is a smaller frequency, and vice versa (see the gif).

(source)

So, light can be thought of as a wave. Light waves come in all different sorts of frequencies, and many different things emit or absorb light at these different frequencies. We as humans can only see light in the visible range, which is about 400-700nm, as shown above. Just as each note on a piano has its own frequency, every color in the visible spectrum has its own frequency too.

Okay. Take a step back. Tldr so far:

Sine waves are funky lil fellas

Both light and sound can be modeled as sine waves

Sine waves have a frequency (related to wavelength) and an amplitude. When describing a wave, we normal describe it with its frequency.

So, let's look at sound again. Say you played a chord on a piano. Now you'd be emitting two sine waves, and you, a human person, would hear those two waves added together. Some people could tell you what those two tones are, but for most of us, it just sounds like a chord. The function, the mathematical representation, of those two waves, looks something like this:

(Source: me, on desmos)

And, to make sure we're on the same page, here are the two functions that we're adding together:

Now, I won't go into super thorough detail, but light comes in summations too- chords, basically. Stars emit a continuous spectrum of light (so, light across all the different wavelengths there are), and we see the sum of those wavelengths.

Now, animaic waves, the thing that I made up, those are a form of light, but they act closer to chords on a piano. Everything that emits these types of waves emits them discretely, meaning they emit a certain number of animaic waves, all of which are at one frequency or another.

While we measure sound frequencies in Hz, we measure light in meters! So, humans emit seven different animaic waves. We could say I emit seven waves, one is at 220cm, the second is at 432cm, the third is at 765cm, and so on. Just as how that piano chord formed it's own, unique sine wave, my animaic 'spectrum' would form one too!

Basically- animaic waves are a second form of light, but they act similar to the notes of a piano. Everything in my universe emits a prime number of waves (eg, 2, 3, 5, ....) at different frequencies, and those frequencies add together to form a summation wave. Through a process called a Fourier Transformation (a cousin of which is called the Laplace Transformation- sound familiar?), it is actually possible to recover the original sine wave components just through looking at that summation (ask for more details if ya want but that's a whole post all on its own omg). All humans have a unique set of animaic wave frequencies that add up to make their unique signature. Think of it like a fingerprint made of light!

All humans have seven sine waves that they emit. Except for Sigma who's a little freak and has fourteen <3. In physics there's something called the standard model, which basically is supposed to be a description of how all fundamental forces in our universe work, including but not limited to light, gravity, and relativity. It is broken as fuck. Our current model of physics does not describe physics correctly. All that to say: A guy who breaks the known laws of physics isn't actually that out of left field!

Hopefully that answered some of your questions! I kind of lost my train of thought near the end there, but I think that's the basics. Thank you for asking!

[prydoniantrash]

You can't just mention animaic waves and not expect someone to ask whatever the fuck it is. Is it a real physics thing or did you invent it???

oh my god I forgot to explain what animaic waves are. oops. I made them up! time for some ✨ fake physics ✨ !!

So in this world, many things emit a second type of light wave known as an animaic wave! Just as there are flavors of neutrinos, the working theory is that there are also flavors of photons in this U. Don't think too hard about it- I'm still working on the actual fundamental physics of things, ha!

Everything that emits light emits animaic waves, but metabolic processes tend to emit them too!

Everything that emits animaic waves emits a discrete spectrum of them. Just as how a pure EM (light) wave can be viewed as sine waves, animaic waves can be too!

So, I mentioned a spectrum. Irl, stars can be analyzed using one of these! This is basically what wavelengths the star emits (or absorbs). Stars emit a continuous amount of EM light across the whole spectrum, but if you google an absorption spectrum, you'll see that there are these spikes where the star emits/absorbs a certain wavelength in particular

While stars emit a continuous spectrum of light, animaic waves are discrete- a person, for example, would emit seven different "light" waves at seven different frequencies, creating a summation wave that's unique to them as a person!

In this world, everything emits a prime number of animaic waves. Except for Sigma. Who has fourteen. He literally breaks against the entire standard model. Don't even worry about it- the standard model is already broken in our world, so it may as well be over there too!

For most people, animaic waves are invisible- they're not on the visible light spectrum (they're larger!). But some people, such as Seven and Canto, can see or hear them.

That's the rundown! Hopefully it made sense, but if not, feel free to hit me up ^-^. I've got diagrams and graphs and shit, as well as a whole VERY relevant tangent on Fourier/Laplace Transforms :3.

[prydoniantrash]

"start guy-posting on main," they said, "it'll be fun," they said. little did they realize, little did they know, I have no clue what the fuck to say. I never post things. I'm a machine that eat hot chip and reblog content and all of my insane ramblings are condemned to discord group chats. anyways hope everyone's day is going well I'm trying to write some fucking dialogue but my character is being an asshole <3