Author Topic: **SPOILERS! The Shards of Adonalsium  (Read 70586 times)

Tage

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Re: **SPOILERS! The Shards of Adonalsium
« Reply #180 on: July 15, 2009, 10:13:45 PM »
Yeah, I try to disclaimer things with "last I heard" or similar. I'm pretty sure, and this is just personal opinion, that the three main roles presented in the original Dragonsteel will exist when/if it ever gets published, and that Hoid's identity related to that story will stay. I also have no doubt that the specifics will be wildly different.

Still, with unpublished ideas bouncing around in an author's head, you never know. Brandon may scrap the whole Dragonsteel world and start over, and completely redifine the shards on that world, including Hoid's origin story.
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flyleaffan

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Re: **SPOILERS! The Shards of Adonalsium
« Reply #181 on: July 30, 2009, 06:54:35 AM »
But I've never heard of a magic system which allows for travel across worlds. 

You should check out Raymond E. Feist's Riftwar Saga. It involves magic that allows travel across worlds. And it's quite good.

Ari54

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Re: **SPOILERS! The Shards of Adonalsium
« Reply #182 on: July 30, 2009, 07:12:52 AM »
I think travelling worlds with magic is probably one of those ideas whose time has come. I've had that on my list of "loose ideas" for... I think six years? Almost as long as I've had the list. It's certainly not new, but it's waiting for someone to make a really good book involving it in a way that's fun and exciting. Which is a matter of inventing a cool space travel system.

happyman

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Re: **SPOILERS! The Shards of Adonalsium
« Reply #183 on: July 30, 2009, 03:13:19 PM »
I think travelling worlds with magic is probably one of those ideas whose time has come. I've had that on my list of "loose ideas" for... I think six years? Almost as long as I've had the list. It's certainly not new, but it's waiting for someone to make a really good book involving it in a way that's fun and exciting. Which is a matter of inventing a cool space travel system.

I would argue that sci-fi has been using various magical travelling-to-other-worlds systems for years.

Here's a hint:  Real science hasn't got a clue how we could really do it safely, especially not faster-than-light.
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Patriotic Kaz

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Re: **SPOILERS! The Shards of Adonalsium
« Reply #184 on: July 31, 2009, 04:55:27 AM »
Look up the theoretical 5th dimension if that stuff interest you...pretty cool stuff but very much, as it stands right now, sci-fi aka fanciful bull
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happyman

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Re: **SPOILERS! The Shards of Adonalsium
« Reply #185 on: July 31, 2009, 06:39:58 AM »
Look up the theoretical 5th dimension if that stuff interest you...pretty cool stuff but very much, as it stands right now, sci-fi aka fanciful bull

I'm a physics Ph.D. (finally earned it a couple of weeks back),  and although my emphasis has been on electromagnetic and non-relativistic quantum waves, I've got something of a handle on the other fields of physics.  When it comes to faster than light travel, at the moment there is nowhere to start.  Our best theories say that local faster than light travel just can't be done, with absolutely no loopholes in either the math or the experiments (if anybody starts citing quantum mechanics at me, I'll take you apart.  I've had to take field theory classes which address that very subject very quickly and effectively.  Can't be done.).  Using general relativity to exploit the "local" loophole (creating global faster-than-light travel and, as a side-effect, a time machine) might be possible technically, but is not likely to be really possible, even in principle (e.g. you could create a time machine that functions only when nothing is travelling through it.  Not terribly useful.)

However, a number of faster-than-light travel "magic systems" have been created that are internally useful for storytelling.  It's late and I'm tired, but it might be fun to start listing them and discussing pros and cons, both in their implications and for story-telling.  Not sure where we would stick that thread, though.  I'm still something of a newbie here.
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Aranfan

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Re: **SPOILERS! The Shards of Adonalsium
« Reply #186 on: July 31, 2009, 02:59:47 PM »
What about Alcubierie (sp?) Drives?

happyman

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Re: **SPOILERS! The Shards of Adonalsium
« Reply #187 on: July 31, 2009, 04:45:37 PM »
The Alcubierre drive is actually the perfect example of the kind of general relativistic exception I was talking about.  If the Wikipedia entry is accurate, while it may be possible in principle, it is probably not possible in practice.  The mathematics are extremely difficult and experts in the field disagree on what the implications of such drives are.  For instance, it may be possible to create an Alcubierre drive, but that nobody can get into it or out of it; thus the drive would simply take one bit of spacetime across the universe without taking any people with it.
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Aranfan

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Re: **SPOILERS! The Shards of Adonalsium
« Reply #188 on: August 01, 2009, 06:30:12 AM »
But it might be that you could, theoretically, do the FTL thing?


I have a quantum mechanics question for you btw, should I pm you?

happyman

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Re: **SPOILERS! The Shards of Adonalsium
« Reply #189 on: August 01, 2009, 04:16:52 PM »
But it might be that you could, theoretically, do the FTL thing?

We don't know.  General relativity drives (such as wormholes or the Alcubierre drive) are the only known loophole, and the associated problems are difficult to solve and presumably even hard to actually do (for instance, according to Wikipedia, some have argued that to create an Alcubierre drive, you must have matter travelling locally faster than light, which seems to be absolutely impossible).  Note that in the expanding universe, things travel away from each other faster than speed of light (because the universe itself can expand faster than the speed of light) but that they can never come back together again.  Whether this is a general principle or not is not understood.

I have a quantum mechanics question for you btw, should I pm you?

Go ahead.
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douglas

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Re: **SPOILERS! The Shards of Adonalsium
« Reply #190 on: August 01, 2009, 05:03:04 PM »
From the little I know on the subject, there are several known theoretical ways to travel faster than light in a global sense, or do strange things like return to your starting point in both space and time, but they all require weird setups that are certainly at least extremely difficult to achieve in practice and may prove to be theoretically impossible to actually pull off.  Knowing that a certain configuration of matter and energy makes FTL travel possible does no good if creating that configuration isn't possible.

Patriotic Kaz

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Re: **SPOILERS! The Shards of Adonalsium
« Reply #191 on: August 03, 2009, 05:26:49 AM »
Aren't there particles that go faster than light and b/c of it they go back through time...my physics teacher was having a discussion with another physics teacher about them my junior year of highschool
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Ari54

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Re: **SPOILERS! The Shards of Adonalsium
« Reply #192 on: August 03, 2009, 10:04:28 AM »
I would argue that sci-fi has been using various magical travelling-to-other-worlds systems for years.

Here's a hint:  Real science hasn't got a clue how we could really do it safely, especially not faster-than-light.

Right, soft sci-fi is essentially fantasy, but I can imagine several things you could do with magical space travel with much better suspension of disbelief than scifi space travel. Also, travelling to different worlds in fantasy has traditionally had VERY different implications than doing so in science fiction. Partially because it tends to focus on travel to alternate dimensions.

happyman

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Re: **SPOILERS! The Shards of Adonalsium
« Reply #193 on: August 03, 2009, 07:46:22 PM »
Aren't there particles that go faster than light and b/c of it they go back through time...my physics teacher was having a discussion with another physics teacher about them my junior year of highschool

No.  You are thinking of so-called tachyons.  Such particles have been theorized but not seen.  The only 'true' theories that rigorously describe such beasts turn out to be slower-than-light in terms of actual observable phenomena.  The wikipedia article on the subject seems to be fairly good.  I quote part of the introduction in case in changes:

"Today, in the framework of quantum field theory, tachyons are best understood as signifying an instability of the system and treated using tachyon condensation, rather than as real faster-than-light particles, and such instabilities are described by tachyonic fields. According to the contemporary and widely accepted understanding of the concept of a particle, tachyon particles are too unstable to be treated as existent.[4] By that theory, faster than light information transmission and causality violation with tachyons are impossible on both grounds: they are non-existent in the first place (by tachyon condensation)[4] and even if they existed they wouldn't be able to transmit information (by Feinberg's analysis).[3] Despite the theoretical arguments against the existence of tachyon particles, experimental searches have been conducted to test the assumption against their existence; however, no experimental evidence for or against the existence of tachyon particles has been found.[5]"

This is one of the downsides of pop-sci publications.  People think they know more than they think they really do.  I certainly did, back in the day.
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Chaos

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Re: **SPOILERS! The Shards of Adonalsium
« Reply #194 on: August 04, 2009, 06:42:02 AM »
So, this was recently answered in the B&N forums. We finally know the names of planets:

Elantris:  Sel
Warbreaker:  Nalthis
Mistborn: Scadrial
Way of Kings:  Roshar
White Sand: Taldain
Dragonsteel: Yolen
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