Fundamental Force Control VS Mass Replication

[Spacescifi]

Just curious, if we ever figure a way to harness the fundamental forces to adjust as we wish, would that enable mass replication from existing mass?

In other words,  if I have a propellant tank full of water, could I by adjusting or tweaking the four fundamental forces make more water from it so I would never run out of propellant for my nuclear thermal rocket?

Until the mass replicator breaks anyway...

At. Any rate the future is made of the same stuff as the present, meaning we shall overcome... using means already in existence.

How is the unanswered question.

 

What do you think about the original question?

[kerbiloid]

The protons and neutrons become twice heavier? It's possible even now, but why?

Its amount of substance is another story.

P.S.
Even if create a replicator, the banknotes would have either same numbers, or non-existing ones. Both is bad.

Edited September 16, 2020 by kerbiloid

[sevenperforce]

1 hour ago, Spacescifi said:

Just curious, if we ever figure a way to harness the fundamental forces to adjust as we wish, would that enable mass replication from existing mass?

In other words,  if I have a propellant tank full of water, could I by adjusting or tweaking the four fundamental forces make more water from it so I would never run out of propellant for my nuclear thermal rocket?

Until the mass replicator breaks anyway...

Yes, readily. If you can manipulate the four fundamental forces at will, you can use the Higgs mechanism to generate arbitrary amounts of mass.

Of course you will have to deal with heat and pressure comparable to the interior of a neutron star, but that's fine because you can manipulate the four fundamental forces at will.

Or you can skip the Higgs mechanism altogether and just build a photon rocket. If you can manipulate the fundamental forces of the Standard Model at will, you are so far beyond needing a nuclear thermal rocket that it's silly. It's a little like using microprocessors to design a turntable that adjusts the position of a sundial to keep it properly aligned with the position of the sun throughout the year. Yes, you can do it, but if you have microprocessors you really don't need a sundial anymore.

Using fundamental force manipulation to generate reaction mass for a nuclear thermal rocket is like 3D-printing a steam engine for a locomotive.

Edited September 16, 2020 by sevenperforce

[magnemoe]

1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

The protons and neutrons become twice heavier? It's possible even now, but why?

Its amount of substance is another story.

P.S.
Even if create a replicator, the banknotes would have either same numbers, or non-existing ones. Both is bad.

This, now something like an nano scale detail 3d printer would be way more effective for stuff like this and can be build with current physic and you could change the numbers here

Now you might be able to convert matter to energy without going trough making antimatter with some sort of magic who just breaks a few laws. 
Creating matter from nothing is just an very bad perpetuum mobile.
Now we are not very short on matter.
You can do easier stuff like strip mining stars then you run out of gas giants. 

No nobody is doing stuff like this in this or nearby galaxies as stars would going out.

http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff1200/fv01163.htm
 

[magnemoe]

39 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:

Yes, readily. If you can manipulate the four fundamental forces at will, you can use the Higgs mechanism to generate arbitrary amounts of mass.

Of course you will have to deal with heat and pressure comparable to the interior of a neutron star, but that's fine because you can manipulate the four fundamental forces at will.

Or you can skip the Higgs mechanism altogether and just build a photon rocket. If you can manipulate the fundamental forces of the Standard Model at will, you are so far beyond needing a nuclear thermal rocket that it's silly. It's a little like using microprocessors to design a turntable that adjusts the position of a sundial to keep it properly aligned with the position of the sun throughout the year. Yes, you can do it, but if you have microprocessors you really don't need a sundial anymore.

Using fundamental force manipulation to generate reaction mass for a nuclear thermal rocket is like 3D-printing a steam engine for a locomotive.

This, note photon rocket in that you convert matter into energy  
Yes this create some problems over making very fast charged particles but you could probably solve them pretty easy.
I would focus on digging a bit deeper into physic, using the tools you have, you are pretty close to root password of the matrix / becoming an god/ how the big bang started
 

[Spacescifi]

1 hour ago, sevenperforce said:

Yes, readily. If you can manipulate the four fundamental forces at will, you can use the Higgs mechanism to generate arbitrary amounts of mass.

Of course you will have to deal with heat and pressure comparable to the interior of a neutron star, but that's fine because you can manipulate the four fundamental forces at will.

Or you can skip the Higgs mechanism altogether and just build a photon rocket. If you can manipulate the fundamental forces of the Standard Model at will, you are so far beyond needing a nuclear thermal rocket that it's silly. It's a little like using microprocessors to design a turntable that adjusts the position of a sundial to keep it properly aligned with the position of the sun throughout the year. Yes, you can do it, but if you have microprocessors you really don't need a sundial anymore.

Using fundamental force manipulation to generate reaction mass for a nuclear thermal rocket is like 3D-printing a steam engine for a locomotive.

How would an engine survive such heat and pressure using fundamental force manipulation?

What? By arbitrarily increasing the strong force on the engine so it does not explode?

With abiliies like this you could fly thru the sun and probably survive.

 

We just turned a spaceship into....

 

Spoiler

 

Edited September 16, 2020 by Spacescifi

[sevenperforce]

1 minute ago, Spacescifi said:

How would an engine survive such heat and pressure using fundamental force manipulation?

What? By arbitrarily increasing the strong force on the engine so it does not explode?

With abiliies like this you could fly thru the sun and probably survive.

If you have the ability to alter fundamental forces at will, you can build Maxwell's demon. If you can build Maxwell's demon, you can use Doppler cooling to make mincemeat of the Second Law. You have an infinite entropy sink. A "box of cold" that never heats up. A heat shield with infinite ablator. Not only could you fly through the sun, but you could build a condominium on the surface of the sun and sell timeshares.

[Spacescifi]

3 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:

If you have the ability to alter fundamental forces at will, you can build Maxwell's demon. If you can build Maxwell's demon, you can use Doppler cooling to make mincemeat of the Second Law. You have an infinite entropy sink. A "box of cold" that never heats up. A heat shield with infinite ablator. Not only could you fly through the sun, but you could build a condominium on the surface of the sun and sell timeshares.

LOL.

Thanks... may use it hahahaha!

[sevenperforce]

8 minutes ago, Spacescifi said:

We just turned a spaceship into....

  Hide contents

 

Yes. Literally.

Of all the absurd things that Pre-Crisis (or Post-Crisis, even) Supes can do, his ability to ignore the second law whenever it suits him is the most absurd one. 

If each of Superman's cells is a tiny Maxwell's demon, then he really needs no further superpowers.

[K^2]

1 hour ago, sevenperforce said:

Yes, readily. If you can manipulate the four fundamental forces at will, you can use the Higgs mechanism to generate arbitrary amounts of mass.

Nah, most of the mass is dynamically generated. Higgs mechanism provides a symmetry break in the electroweak bosons, but that's just one of contributions to mass. You could, of course, change mass of electrons by tweaking Higgs coupling, but you'd get better results playing with strength of electrostatic and weak forces. Likewise, your best bet on changing mass of protons and neutrons is going to be messing with strong force, as by far most of the mass comes from gluon and meson exchange.

That said, none of it makes for more matter. Just heavier matter. And even that's not free. The energy for it has to come from somewhere.

Here's simple example. I have buckets of water on my ship that I want to use for propulsion. Someone asks, "Can I make more buckets by adjusting how much water goes into each one?" Well, no, you'd be making heavier buckets. You'll run out of them eventually, though, that might be good enough. The bigger question is where does the water come from, and why don't you just point a hose back and use water for propulsion directly with same efficiency?

To put it back into original terms, if you have the energy to manipulate the mass of propellant, it's going to be more efficient to just use that energy directly for propulsion as a photon rocket.

[sevenperforce]

17 minutes ago, K^2 said:

Nah, most of the mass is dynamically generated. Higgs mechanism provides a symmetry break in the electroweak bosons, but that's just one of contributions to mass. You could, of course, change mass of electrons by tweaking Higgs coupling, but you'd get better results playing with strength of electrostatic and weak forces. Likewise, your best bet on changing mass of protons and neutrons is going to be messing with strong force, as by far most of the mass comes from gluon and meson exchange.

That said, none of it makes for more matter. Just heavier matter. And even that's not free. The energy for it has to come from somewhere.

If you have control over fundamental forces you can generate infinite energy by setting up a Maxwell's demon, creating an infinite heat sink, and then recycling entropy. You can change coupling energies so that decoupling is more energetic on one side of the box and less energetic on the other side. 

[Bill Phil]

Hmm....

Might be able to make some ultra-strong materials. Still a fundamental limit to strength, but a Niven style ringworld falls well below it, and a Banks orbital is still smaller.

But I doubt mass replication is possible - the energy has to come from somewhere even if you can manipulate it to be matter. Though it does become a lot easier to transmute elements.

[sevenperforce]

26 minutes ago, Bill Phil said:

I doubt mass replication is possible - the energy has to come from somewhere even if you can manipulate it to be matter. Though it does become a lot easier to transmute elements.

If you can arbitrarily adjust the fundamental forces then you can alter quantum chromodynamic binding energy for certain hadrons and not others, resulting in the formation of a closed loop that annihilates and forms particles endlessly with net positive energy production.

[Bill Phil]

Just now, sevenperforce said:

If you can arbitrarily adjust the fundamental forces then you can alter quantum chromodynamic binding energy for certain hadrons and not others, resulting in the formation of a closed loop that annihilates and forms particles endlessly with net positive energy production.

I suspect that we lack the understanding necessary to really make that claim. 

The relationship between fundamental forces could make it so that such a thing just doesn't happen.

Some process may create "negative" energy, so that the energy remains conserved.

If not, it would be interesting if an advanced species tried to prevent the expansion of the universe by "creating" more energy, at least locally (perhaps within their local supercluster). Of course then you'd need to deal with entropy. And possibly proton decay. But if it is as you say this could be doable.

[kerbiloid]

Whatever we change in constants (btw, should we add the keyword "volatile" to them?), it would affect the metabolism. Well, maybe except G, at least directly.

But if we could manage the really fundamental force, we would be

Spoiler

jedis.

P.S.
Personally I would like to increase G 10⁹ times to have Spore-sized stars and planets to play there.

Edited September 16, 2020 by kerbiloid

[sevenperforce]

10 minutes ago, Bill Phil said:

I suspect that we lack the understanding necessary to really make that claim. 

The relationship between fundamental forces could make it so that such a thing just doesn't happen.

Well, yes. That's the trick. That's why fundamental forces cannot be changed willy-nilly.

I ran into this back in my creationist days. "Can't you just change the speed of light so light gets there faster?" No, because the speed of light is an intrinsic property of the causality relationship of the universe. Change one thing, and everything else goes to pieces.

People don't think about it, but the ability to violate the second law of thermodynamics would instantly give rise to the ability to violate ALL the laws of thermodynamics. If you can take a box of hot and separate it into hot and cold without an external heat sink, then you can literally rule the universe. You can take a box of hot, make half of it cold, then use a heat engine to extract work from it...then repeat, forever. If you have a heat engine containing an infinite amount of work, you can produce arbitrary amounts of electrical current to power lasers to produce a kugelblitz or mass via pair production or literally anything you want. Waste laser heat can be recycled via your "box of cold" to increase efficiency. 

Break anything, and you break everything.

 

[K^2]

2 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

If you have control over fundamental forces you can generate infinite energy by setting up a Maxwell's demon, creating an infinite heat sink, and then recycling entropy. You can change coupling energies so that decoupling is more energetic on one side of the box and less energetic on the other side. 

We already have such device. We have different metals that have different band energies for electrons. From perspective of how it affects energy of electrons, it's identical to changing binding strengths. You can weld two of these metals together and generate energy at one of the junctions. However, these devices only generate energy when there is a temperature difference. What you are describing is not Maxwell's Demon, but rather a variant of Seebeck Effect.

[Spacescifi]

4 hours ago, K^2 said:

Nah, most of the mass is dynamically generated. Higgs mechanism provides a symmetry break in the electroweak bosons, but that's just one of contributions to mass. You could, of course, change mass of electrons by tweaking Higgs coupling, but you'd get better results playing with strength of electrostatic and weak forces. Likewise, your best bet on changing mass of protons and neutrons is going to be messing with strong force, as by far most of the mass comes from gluon and meson exchange.

That said, none of it makes for more matter. Just heavier matter. And even that's not free. The energy for it has to come from somewhere.

Here's simple example. I have buckets of water on my ship that I want to use for propulsion. Someone asks, "Can I make more buckets by adjusting how much water goes into each one?" Well, no, you'd be making heavier buckets. You'll run out of them eventually, though, that might be good enough. The bigger question is where does the water come from, and why don't you just point a hose back and use water for propulsion directly with same efficiency?

To put it back into original terms, if you have the energy to manipulate the mass of propellant, it's going to be more efficient to just use that energy directly for propulsion as a photon rocket.

I had a strong feeling the answer might still be no... and was ready to laugh out if frustration... thinking that one has to literally invoke god-like powers to do.... what turns out to be kinda god-like stuff... since the physics is like... maybe??? Ish?

In other words... impossible for us.

 

Then there is this article:

 

This post is not related to Stormlight Archive, but the general idea of manipulating natural forces seems similar to the 10 surges like Gravitation, Cohesion, Division, Tension etc.

I came across this brilliant Quora answer today that tries to explain what are the implications of being able to control each of the four fundamental forces of nature: Electromagnetism, Gravitation, Weak Nuclear Force, Strong Nuclear Force. Just wanted to share this with you all. Reproducing them here for you.

---

As far as we know today, there are 4 fundamental forces of nature:

1. Electromagnetism

2. Gravitation

3. Weak Nuclear Force

4. Strong Nuclear Force

I will also interpret “manipulate” as “able to change the underlying quantum fields which represent these interactions at will” — just to get rid of any ambiguity! I’m also going to ignore unification, because otherwise that takes the fun away!

So let’s have a quick, whistle stop tour of what each force governs, and how being able to manipulate it would work out:

---

Electromagnetism

Electromagnetism is a force which is created by electrically charged particles. EM forces are everywhere. Electromagnetism is what holds molecules together, it is what governs electricity and light, basically every single thing you think of as a “force” (which isn’t gravity) is an expression of electromagnetism in some way.

Contact forces? Yep - they’re electromagnetic in nature. As I type on my keyboard, the electrons in my fingers repel the electrons in the buttons - this repulsion is what forces the key down, registering a keypress.

This in turn fires an electrical signal through a maze of processors, into my computer — this is then translated into visible light on my screen (light is part of the EM spectrum), and also into radio waves, which connect to the wireless.

Control over electromagnetism would allow me dominion over all of these things.

I can generate “push” forces on demand, by creating intense localised electric fields — so I can knock things (or people) over, lift them up, or just throw them around:

I can also use these fields to move myself around — yep, full on flight!

I can create illusions and holograms, by manipulating the electric field to create visible light wherever I choose.

I could even make these illusions interact with their environment, by giving them their own electric field to repel stuff — essentially making “solid light”

I would be able to manipulate matter at will — able to shift the chemical bonds and structure of matter.

Sure — I wouldn’t be able to change the atoms themselves (that’s another force), but I can rearrange the atoms which exist:

I can also go full evil, and start chucking bolts of freakin’ lightning around:

Sure, with a more complex manipulation of matter (as described above), I could give all the atoms a boatload more energy and essentially manipulate fire — but that’s a bit too far. Lightning is probably enough!

---

Gravitation

At first, being able to manipulate gravity doesn’t sound like much — wow. You can float….what a surprise.

Unlike EM, this wouldn’t even let you fly properly — you have nothing to give you a sideways push, except generating a gravitation field in the direction you want to go.

In essence — you can’t fly anywhere, you just have to fall everywhere. I hear it is possible to do this with style, however….

But gravity has one really important thing on its side.

You know that clever Einstein bloke? Relativity? Time being “the fourth dimension”?

Yeah. That.

General Relativity tells us how gravity, space and time are actually all one and the same — a big mixture of a curved Riemannian 4D space.

Thus — control over gravity means a fundamental control over space and time.

You can warp the spacetime metric however you please — you can generate an Alcubierre metric, and travel faster than the speed of light (sort of), without ever getting out of your chair.

You can warp time, and knock planets out of orbit. You could age someone a thousand years in a second (backwards is a bit….complicated), you can expand the space between you and an enemy, hurling them thousands of light years away.

You would be a Lord of Space and Time. Freakin’ badass

---

Weak Nuclear Force

Ugh - who’d want the weak nuclear force? If you’re going to go for a nuclear force, you’d want it to be strong wouldn’t you?

Well…maybe.

But the Weak force has something pretty good going for it — the Weak Interaction governs nuclear decay and nuclear fission and fusion.

Let’s start with the first — with control over nuclear decay you can halt or accelerate nuclear decay. By appropriate manipulation of fields, you could even force previously stable things to undergo decay.

This means atomic transmutation.

You know how alchemists always wanted to turn lead into gold?

Yep. With appropriate control over fission, fusion and decay you can simply and easily turn a big lump of lead into gold (there’ll probably be some subatomic leftovers….deal with them carefully!)

You could also use this as an offensive power — enemy running at you? ** STONE! **

Stuck in the wilderness? Just manipulate the elements into everything you need. Can’t start a fire? Get some lithium, and chuck it into a bit of water — voila, sparks.

You don’t have as much control over the structure of the matter — but you can fundamentally alter its atomic structure.

Feeling really evil?

Just use your powers and don’t clean up the subatomic fragments I mentioned earlier — you will be essentially a walking, talking dirty bomb.

If you were feeling nice, you could provide the world with sustainable energy, through nuclear fusion (boring!) — or you could go full supervillain and put out the Sun.

The Sun uses Weak interaction to power the thermonuclear processes which release energy — you can now stop those (or crank them up!), either way — you'd better call Dave Consiglio, because a lot of people are going to die.

My summary of a Weak-manipulator is that they’re overpowered but clumsy. You could change the entire planet into stone — but you don’t have the finesse powers that EM and Gravitation let you do, such as flight, illusions, time manipulation and so on.

---

Strong Force

Much like the Weak Force, the Strong Force is overpowered, but clumsy. The Strong Interaction is what holds quarks into protons, and protons and neutrons into the atomic nucleus.

With the power to manipulate this field, you can disassemble all the atoms and subatomic particles in a block of matter — there wouldn’t be an explosion, it would just…..stop sticking together.

Matter would blow away like dust.

Sure, electrostatic interactions still occur between the quarks and the electrons….but nothing nuclear is holding it together.

Matter as we know it simply could not exist!

You’d also be of great interest to physicists - by turning off the Strong Force, you can isolate quarks….which we don’t think is possible. If you can do it, you’d be a very popular person!

Or — maybe you could increase the strength of the nuclear force. I don’t know exactly what this would do — but it doesn’t sound pretty!

You wouldn’t be able to touch electrons in any way — they do not feel the strong force, so you’d be vulnerable there.

As I said — you have one incredibly overpowered ability, but not much else you can do with it.

---

TLDR;

Summary:

• Electromagnetism : telekinesis, flight, light manipulation, illusions, matter manipulation (structure only) and lightning. Lots and lots of applications and subtle ways to do different things with one power — but powers are (in general) fairly standard. Nothing overpowered.

• Gravitation: Flight (rudimentary), faster than light (ish) travel, ability to warp time and space. Fewer uses — but the ability to manipulate time is a big bonus

• Weak: Elementary transmutation, ability to create or prevent nuclear bombs, ability to control the sun. Hugely overpowered — but transmutation is pretty much your only power which isn’t “kill a whole bunch of people”

• Strong: Ability to control the bonding of the atomic nucleus — can reduce all matter in the universe into dust. Ridiculously overpowered. Can literally destroy all matter in the entire universe. However — not much versatility in the powers.

 

19

 

4

[kerbiloid]

6 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

Electromagnetism is a force which is created by electrically charged particles.

"Things fall down because it's their natural property".

6 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

Control over electromagnetism would allow me dominion over all of these things.

Would disintegrate you into atoms on trying to apply, due to the continuous and uncertain nature of the particle clouds named "things" and unpredictable relations between them.

6 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

I can generate “push” forces on demand, by creating intense localised electric fields — so I can knock things (or people) over, lift them up, or just throw them around:

You can do this right now, in the balanced and safe way.

6 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

Summary:

• Electromagnetism : telekinesis, flight, light manipulation, illusions, matter manipulation (structure only) and lightning. Lots and lots of applications and subtle ways to do different things with one power — but powers are (in general) fairly standard. Nothing overpowered.

• Gravitation: Flight (rudimentary), faster than light (ish) travel, ability to warp time and space. Fewer uses — but the ability to manipulate time is a big bonus

• Weak: Elementary transmutation, ability to create or prevent nuclear bombs, ability to control the sun. Hugely overpowered — but transmutation is pretty much your only power which isn’t “kill a whole bunch of people”

• Strong: Ability to control the bonding of the atomic nucleus — can reduce all matter in the universe into dust. Ridiculously overpowered. Can literally destroy all matter in the entire universe. However — not much versatility in the powers.

All Mary and Marty Sues in the world are nervously whimpering in front of such power.

I just can't see what are the problems which such almighty "sci"-fi character should solve to read about.

It looks more like Tom&Jerry,

Edited September 17, 2020 by kerbiloid

[sevenperforce]

17 hours ago, K^2 said:

You can weld two of these metals together and generate energy at one of the junctions. However, these devices only generate energy when there is a temperature difference. What you are describing is not Maxwell's Demon, but rather a variant of Seebeck Effect.

No, the demon was independent.

With a Maxwell's Demon and a thermoelectric generator, you can put the ends of the thermocouple into fluid baths with a door separating the two. Use the demon to preferentially select higher-energy Brownian particles for one side. Infinite energy.

If you have control over the fundamental forces then you can construct a Maxwell's demon trivially.

16 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

I will also interpret “manipulate” as “able to change the underlying quantum fields which represent these interactions at will” — just to get rid of any ambiguity! I’m also going to ignore unification, because otherwise that takes the fun away!

Yep, unification is the tricky bit! Ultimately all the fundamental forces are part of the same set of interactions and so you can't change one thing without screwing up other things...but it's fun to speculate regardless!

16 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

You’d also be of great interest to physicists - by turning off the Strong Force, you can isolate quarks….which we don’t think is possible. If you can do it, you’d be a very popular person!

I love this part.

[K^2]

5 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

No, the demon was independent.

With a Maxwell's Demon and a thermoelectric generator, you can put the ends of the thermocouple into fluid baths with a door separating the two. Use the demon to preferentially select higher-energy Brownian particles for one side. Infinite energy.

Right. I'm familiar with the concept. You're not explaining how you build a Maxwell's Demon. I'm telling you explicitly that we have systems where effective energy of the particle changes when it transitions from one material to another. If you need to make it time-dependent, there are materials where you can adjust that energy with external electric field, for example. So we have technology to do this in limited, controlled settings. If you can explain to me how to turn that into Maxwell's Demon, you can be generating free energy right now.

[sevenperforce]

3 hours ago, K^2 said:

You're not explaining how you build a Maxwell's Demon. I'm telling you explicitly that we have systems where effective energy of the particle changes when it transitions from one material to another. If you need to make it time-dependent, there are materials where you can adjust that energy with external electric field, for example.

But you cannot make it time-dependent via the application of an external electric field unless that electric field draws energy OR unless you have advance information about the Brownian energies of the particles. That’s where information, entropy, and energy find equivalency.

If you want to build a Maxwellian daemon by manipulation of the fundamental forces, then put two boxes next to each other and put a door between them, and then modify the electromagnetic field properties of the electrons in the molecules. On one side you reduce the electromagnetic field strength and on the other side you increase it. Faster-moving, more energetic particles will move through the door preferentially from the high strength to the low strength side, and there’s your daemon. 

That’s if you want to build Maxwell’s demon. If you want to just generate endless energy, then build an overbalanced wheel and adjust the masses of the weights on one side in real time. Spin it forever. 

[K^2]

8 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

But you cannot make it time-dependent via the application of an external electric field unless that electric field draws energy

Of course. And why should manipulation of the fundamental constants be any different? I mean, you CAN start with assumption that, "We can tweak fundamental constants without adding or removing energy," but then your claim is, "If we were given means of violating conservation of energy, we could use it to violate conservation of energy!" You don't need a Maxwell's Demon. You're given the keys to the whole castle from the start.

Alternatively, we can look at what a self-consistent theory where fundamental constants are tunable can look like. And solid state physics is a good example of what might be. You are still dealing with a field theory of some sort. It might look weird and have bizarre emergent properties, but it's still a field theory with an action over the fields. And where there is action there is Hamiltonian. And then so long as the rules applying to universe as a whole don't change in time, the Hamiltonian is translationally invariant in time, and we have conservation of energy as consequence. The energy may not be conserved in sub-system we are manipulating, but it has to come from somewhere. If you are changing the constants to increase mass of matter in your fuel tanks, you will need to supply energy to make it happen. That's only fair. And mathematically self-consistent.

8 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

If you want to build a Maxwellian daemon by manipulation of the fundamental forces, then put two boxes next to each other and put a door between them, and then modify the electromagnetic field properties of the electrons in the molecules. On one side you reduce the electromagnetic field strength and on the other side you increase it. Faster-moving, more energetic particles will move through the door preferentially from the high strength to the low strength side, and there’s your daemon.

I'm not following this argument at all. Why should there be preferential movement? Is the door actuated by something? Or just constantly open. If it's the later, then what you're describing has time-independent Hamiltonian and will conserve energy. Thermodynamics should take care of it. The only thing I can see changing is the average size of molecules and their binding energies. I don't see how that should affect energy distributions to cause one side to heat up. Otherwise, this is still very similar to welding two different metals together, each of which has different energies of electron gas.

[Incarnation of Chaos]

On 9/16/2020 at 11:37 PM, kerbiloid said:

 

I just can't see what are the problems which such almighty "sci"-fi character should solve to read about.

It looks more like Tom&Jerry

Spoiler

When you're dealing with issues that require literally breaking the universe to fix, a bit of slapstick on the side i think isn't just a good idea to fit in. But mandatory.

Though in all seriousness, i always thought the struggle of such a being/character would be internal rather than external. Just learning to control such power, dealing with the ramifications, the responsibility, and all of the emotional baggage accumulated over millennia (Because if we can break physics selectively, then absurd life extension would be rather trivial by that point). Adapting back to life outside whenever duty didn't call, etc.

Basically; every war story ever written. Just with a massive line of cocaine cut with psychedelics taken before writing it.

But without any mechanism to limit this ability, then you run into a couple issues. Firstly is that someone like this would literally blast themselves apart if not careful, there's more than a number of ways you could end up increasing your energy without any upper bound if you can "Break" laws of physics that wouldn't agree with any form of matter regardless if it was biological or machine. And even if you had a magical box to dump the excess heat or w/e into, there's infinite amounts of opportunities for you to forget about it in haste/rage/etc.

The second is exactly your point; which is they're never in any danger, nor are their any stakes. So i always had any characters that could do such things essentially require a activation energy, they have to be in an excited state before they can start bending fundamental forces to their will. And once there, they can easily collapse back to "Ground" without the proper training/attention etc.

Basically; i borrowed a fundamental principle of chemistry and wacked it into a supersoldier so i didn't have a complete snoozefest. And i'd say it's definitely Science Fantasy instead of Fiction.

Now if i can ever manage to maintain my limited attention span for more than a couple minutes, and finish the 3 rough drafts i have (I wrote the ending, then the middle, then the beginning, and then this semester started and that all stopped) to the point where they converge then i'd be happy to let you get a good chuckle out of it.

Oh and somewhat back to the OP now, this post alone made me glad i stumbled upon this thread.

On 9/16/2020 at 12:24 PM, sevenperforce said:

If you have the ability to alter fundamental forces at will, you can build Maxwell's demon. If you can build Maxwell's demon, you can use Doppler cooling to make mincemeat of the Second Law. You have an infinite entropy sink. A "box of cold" that never heats up. A heat shield with infinite ablator. Not only could you fly through the sun, but you could build a condominium on the surface of the sun and sell timeshares.

Take your upvote you majestic *******. Literally made my night with this one.

[Guest]

It would be like a good Superman story (indeed, control over electromagnetic force makes for a fairly standard superhero powerset). The guy is invincible, but the world around him isn't, and he's got interesting people around him. He's also not omniscient, despite the super-senses, he can't stop an evil plan he doesn't know about, and a good story can be written about trying to find out who/what to blast.

Indeed, any plot that could be entirely resolved by an "almighty" character was never all that great, because it would mean it relies on constraints imposed on by the world and not by people. As a rule, people are more interesting than objects. Some of the best superhero stories ever written pitted them against people they wish to protect, with their usual supervillain adversaries being in the background (usually manipulating things so they can still have a big fight at the end, but sometimes not involved at all).