8.7 KiB
Aetherium, the science behind flying islands
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Author: u/Sagebrysh Rank 7 Pragmatist*
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URL: http://talesfromaeria.tumblr.com/post/124725708247/aetherium
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Score: 6
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Created: 2015-07-22T05:18:55
Post:
Comments:
u/None [+6] (5 hours later)
[deleted]
u/gabbalis [+3] (8 hours later)
You don't really need a miracle metal either... You could just make a world without universal gravitation. Make it follow Minecraft rules for instance.
u/Sagebrysh [+2] Rank 7 Pragmatist (10 hours later)
I really don't like the idea of a world that just completely throws out our physics. There's a reason that Aeria operates on all the same physics as our world. As strange as it may seem, this world is meant to connect causally back to our own, though how it does that I won't be sharing just yet.
u/Chronophilia [+2] sci-fi ≠ futurology (13 hours later)
But that raises more questions than a miracle metal. A world that runs on Minecraft rules might be interesting - would trees evolve differently if they can have part of their trunks removed and just float in the air? - but it would be hard to work with. Particularly if you just want to tell a story about floating islands.
u/gabbalis [+1] (15 hours later)
Well the true nature of the world of minecraft is really quite simple.
It's a true world in a fold of the §f§k§a§b.
Did you even read the end poem?
Seriously though, You definitely wouldn't want all the minecraft rules to apply, but a naturally evolved life-as-we-know-it-friendly world where floating is the default might be workable. I recall the mechanics of the world of Unicorn Jelly were such that large bodies naturally floated, and only smaller things fell.
To quote from the official physics primer of that universe:
In Tryslmaistan, gravity operates on a different principle than in our universe. The cosmos is striated, and these dimensional lines in the crystalline structure of Tryslmaistan space-time force gravity into a single direction, to which mass -on the planetary scale or above- is irrelevant. This effectively means that there is an absolute up, and an absolute down, and no such thing as zero gravity. One can literally fall forever. There is no vacuum. Air fills the universe from forever to forever. However, a secondary force operates on the macro scale, and it only begins to become inescapable to objects that are 100 kilometers and above. This force is the dominating 'Reticutriational Force'. Essentially, it freezes all massive universe structures -such as world plates- into a lattice, and is so powerful on the macro scale that it easily overcomes the 'striation gravity' unique to Tryslmaistan. Just as in our own universe, cosmic forces operate on different scales, in counterintuitive ways. Where we have the Strong and the Weak nuclear Forces that only operate on the subatomic scale, gravity on the macro scale, and quantum effects at the smallest scale, Tryslmaistan has Reticutriation, Trinal Paravection, Planovection, and so forth.
Actually on second thought maybe unicorn jelly isn't a good example of a nice simple alternate cosmology after all...
u/Chronophilia [+1] sci-fi ≠ futurology (16 hours later)
Chatoyance's older stuff is kind of weird like that. A lot of amateur writers feel the need to fit their strange worlds into soft-science explanations - to pick an example that I noticed earlier, this recent post in /r/worldbuilding asks how to physically justify a planet where one nation experiences eternal night while the rest has a normal-ish day/night cycle. Such settings take real-life physics and just staple "extras" onto it where they need something that real-life physics can't provide, like magic or FTL. The cosmology is assumed to be like reality unless noted.
Unicorn Jelly is different in that it completely and deliberately throws out any resemblance to our reality. The cosmology is created from whole cloth, and things like Newtonian physics and humanoid faces are only kept in because they're required by the story. Cosmology and chemistry are unlike our reality by default.
It seems like this should produce a very strange and alien-feeling universe, and as far as I've read Unicorn Jelly that's the case. The closest thing I can think of is Greg Egan's Orthogonal series, with its own elaborate alternate physics. But that was always more of a fictional physics textbook with the characters and story emerging from it; Unicorn Jelly is the other way around.
u/Sagebrysh [+2] Rank 7 Pragmatist (17 hours later)
Such settings take real-life physics and just staple "extras" onto it where they need something that real-life physics can't provide, like magic or FTL.
Aetherium is actually the only stapled on thing in Aeria. Their 'magic' would work in our world.
u/Chronophilia [+1] sci-fi ≠ futurology (17 hours later)
... whoops, I just implied you were an amateur, didn't I? Sorry, I didn't mean that. There's absolutely nothing wrong with stapled-on physics, lots of good books are written like that, but there are other ways of writing that create different effects.
You're not an amateur and I apologise for calling you such.
u/Sagebrysh [+2] Rank 7 Pragmatist (18 hours later)
Its cool :P
You totally missed the real implication in what I said there though ;)
u/Chronophilia [+1] sci-fi ≠ futurology (18 hours later)
The aether as a concept is Greek and the nomenclature: "-ium" is Latin,
"Aether" is a word in Latin, and it's even spelled the same way. (The Greek version is aιθηρ which is closer to "aither"). "Aetherium" can be a Latin-derived word, the etymology makes about as much sense as I'd expect.
By the way "Aetherium" has been used in fiction before. /u/Sagebrysh, you don't have to change it just because of that, but it's a good idea to get in the habit of Googling your made-up words in case they're Korean swear words or something. "Etherium", for example, would be right out since it's the title of a recently-released RTS game.
u/Sagebrysh [+1] Rank 7 Pragmatist (10 hours later)
You don't need to invoke "science" or use words that sound scientific enough for your miracle metal. Readers will suspend disbelief as long as the material has a defined set of qualities and rules it will follow and strays from neither. Else you risk fake explanations.
The world has science though, and to as great a degree as I'm able, still follows all of the regular laws of our universe. So I wanted to ground it as much as I could in science. Its a naturally occurring liquid superconductor.
The ash is overused and "aetherium" calls back to its writer rather than a name arrived at organically.
The ash? Not sure what you're referring to here.
The aether as a concept is Greek and the nomenclature: "-ium" is Latin, so unless this fantasy world has been colonized by humanity or is somehow alt-Earth history it probably isn't explicitly called "aetherium" and even its translation would be improbable to translate literally into "aetherium."
I went with 'aether' as the base to connect to its properties related to the island's levitation, and the -ium ending because its an element. I know its not 'goldium' and so yes, if it was a material that's been around awhile, it would probably have a simpler name. That being said, 'floatstone' is the material that was attributed to the island's lift. Pure aetherium was only discovered within the last few hundred years of the world.
Admittedly a possible solution to its improbable naming is a global scientific authority whose nomenclature is used uniformly or at least by a sufficient majority but even then the material is likely to be commonly called by its most populous historical name, a la "floatstone."
This is pretty much it exactly. The Libarium of Goeth is the leading scientific body on the planet in present times, and has been at the forefront for close to a thousand years. Their terminology is very widely accepted. You're correct though that the populous name is probably more commonly used. Floatstone essentially acts as a catch-all term for the basement rocks that underlie all the rest of the material on the islands.