np Wednesday, October 26, 2016

[hkmaly 490]

11 hours ago, Scotty said:

11 hours ago, hkmaly said:

Exactly. Although I would list Mall girl as prime example

Well, Elliot's standard female morph in general is apparently difficult for him to get exactly what he wants, which is why he opted to keep it a simple as possible for when he was burning off excess energy.

I meant because it was outside influence which altered the morph. (Unless it would happen anyway like Elliot though.)

[Amiable Dorsai 70]

19 hours ago, hkmaly said:

They always are. What you expect will change? That they will get into visible superposition?

Oh my, what a picture.

Back in the sixties Ray Palmer (The Atom) would occasionally shrink to the point where he could see individual atoms.  Sometime after, I read George Gamov's Mr Thompkins stories, about an ordinary man who gets to see what happens when various physical constants, like the speed of light or Planck's constant, changed to the point where relativity or the uncertainty principle became palpable. Would that whoever was writing The Atom back then had read those stories. The comics would have been more entertaining, and I could have truthfully told Mom that I was learning something. :-)

On the other hand, if Ray shrank to below his own Schwarzschild radius, the series would have ended rather abruptly.

[Scotty 1,061]

3 hours ago, hkmaly said:

I meant because it was outside influence which altered the morph. (Unless it would happen anyway like Elliot though.)

Yeah, Mall Girl was outside influence because Ashley made Elliot think of big boobs, but it's still Elliot thinking about it that affected the form, just like thinking about Grace and Ellen created Gracelyn and thinking about the Uryuom suits created Cheerleadra 2.0

[hkmaly 490]

4 hours ago, Amiable Dorsai said:

23 hours ago, hkmaly said:

They always are. What you expect will change? That they will get into visible superposition?

Oh my, what a picture.

Back in the sixties Ray Palmer (The Atom) would occasionally shrink to the point where he could see individual atoms.  Sometime after, I read George Gamov's Mr Thompkins stories, about an ordinary man who gets to see what happens when various physical constants, like the speed of light or Planck's constant, changed to the point where relativity or the uncertainty principle became palpable. Would that whoever was writing The Atom back then had read those stories. The comics would have been more entertaining, and I could have truthfully told Mom that I was learning something. :-)

Would definitely be more interesting and would teach you something about physics, but it wouldn't be any more realistic. You can't see atom because you need photons to see and photons are "too big" (have too big wavelengths) for that. At least the photons which won't kill anyone around (except Hulk).

4 hours ago, Amiable Dorsai said:

On the other hand, if Ray shrank to below his own Schwarzschild radius, the series would have ended rather abruptly.

Ray shrinking to 50% and not dying fast is already physically impossible due to various square-cube laws effects. If he's using magic like Rhoda ("sweet" magic), he can be just as able to avoid any unfortunate sideefects of shrinking under Schwarzschild radius.

3 hours ago, Scotty said:

7 hours ago, hkmaly said:

I meant because it was outside influence which altered the morph. (Unless it would happen anyway like Elliot though.)

Yeah, Mall Girl was outside influence because Ashley made Elliot think of big boobs, but it's still Elliot thinking about it that affected the form, just like thinking about Grace and Ellen created Gracelyn and thinking about the Uryuom suits created Cheerleadra 2.0

Well, yes, obviously. She even stopped saying "big boobs" before the transformation itself.

You're right, Gracelyn and Cheerleadra 2.0 are just as good examples. The examples which wouldn't be as good would be the "trying to stay correct height" ones, because that was just failure to imagine it properly, while we are looking for examples of thoughts which were not supposed to be part of concentration on the spell ending up influencing it.

 

[Scotty 1,061]

2 hours ago, hkmaly said:

You're right, Gracelyn and Cheerleadra 2.0 are just as good examples. The examples which wouldn't be as good would be the "trying to stay correct height" ones, because that was just failure to imagine it properly, while we are looking for examples of thoughts which were not supposed to be part of concentration on the spell ending up influencing it.

In Rhoda's case....Hmm, actually, I'll explain that in the relevant thread.

[Don Edwards 548]

Quote

Ray shrinking to 50% and not dying fast is already physically impossible due to various square-cube laws effects.

I don't think so. On the other hand, there are places in the human body where the distance between two things is important in the timing of chemical responses, and shrinking would alter that timing in unpleasant ways. Whereas maintaining the spacing in spite of major shrinkage would require removing cells... and brain cells are one area where this happens a LOT.

Square-cube effects of a 50% (height) shrinkage would produce a person who can carry 1/4 as much weight - and weighs 1/8 as much. Has 1/4 the blood-flow capacity - and needs 1/8 as much blood-flow. Can eat 1/4 as much - and needs to eat 1/8 as much.

It's enlarging where square-cube really bites you in the posterior.

[hkmaly 490]

59 minutes ago, Don Edwards said:

I don't think so. On the other hand, there are places in the human body where the distance between two things is important in the timing of chemical responses, and shrinking would alter that timing in unpleasant ways. Whereas maintaining the spacing in spite of major shrinkage would require removing cells... and brain cells are one area where this happens a LOT.

There isn't any truly free space inside human body.

You can either shrink atoms, which makes them chemically incompatible with non-shrunk atoms, or remove atoms, which requires god power to do in human body without causing major damage. The cells aren't "marked" in any way, physical process wouldn't be able to do something as complicated as removed whole cells, and, as you mentioned, even that would be extremely bad idea.

1 hour ago, Don Edwards said:

Square-cube effects of a 50% (height) shrinkage would produce a person who can carry 1/4 as much weight - and weighs 1/8 as much. Has 1/4 the blood-flow capacity - and needs 1/8 as much blood-flow. Can eat 1/4 as much - and needs to eat 1/8 as much.

It's enlarging where square-cube really bites you in the posterior.

I think there are some ways where shrinking causes problems as well. Kleiber's law doesn't have the exact explanation like the problems with enlarging, so you might be right that it's not square-cube law doing it, it likely would affect shrunk people. For example, it's harder to keep body heat if you are smaller.

(The question if those problems are serious enough to affect people on 50% height is open. You are definitely right that enlarging is problematic much more straightforwardly.)

[ijuin 572]

The limit is probably smaller than 50%. There already exist adults who are less than 50% of the dimensions of median adults in most measurements (yes, that means weighing less than 10 kg as well). Quite probably the limit is at least a bit smaller than the smallest healthy adults who have ever existed.

[Amiable Dorsai 70]

8 hours ago, hkmaly said:

Would definitely be more interesting and would teach you something about physics, but it wouldn't be any more realistic. You can't see atom because you need photons to see and photons are "too big" (have too big wavelengths) for that. At least the photons which won't kill anyone around (except Hulk).

Ray shrinking to 50% and not dying fast is already physically impossible due to various square-cube laws effects. If he's using magic like Rhoda ("sweet" magic), he can be just as able to avoid any unfortunate sideefects of shrinking under Schwarzschild radius.

Yep.

I did learn a lot of science from the comics.

Sadly, I had to unlearn a lot of it.

My first laser was a HeNe, about 10 milliwatts. Huge for a HeNe, not so huge for a kid who wanted to blow stuff up. I actually managed to make a hologram, though the druggist down the street who developed it was sure there was a mistake. we had a pre

[hkmaly 490]

14 hours ago, ijuin said:

The limit is probably smaller than 50%. There already exist adults who are less than 50% of the dimensions of median adults in most measurements (yes, that means weighing less than 10 kg as well). Quite probably the limit is at least a bit smaller than the smallest healthy adults who have ever existed.

Those adults don't have the same proportions as normal-sized adults, often having bigger head (proportionally of course) for example. Also, their health is questionable. The size of their head might be more relevant to real limit than their height, considering we talk about proportional shrinking. Unfortunately, finding details about their body parts is harder than their height, but based on photos, I would expect Jyoti Amge's head having 14cm, which is more than half of standard head size of 20-23 centimetres.

6 hours ago, Amiable Dorsai said:

Yep.

I did learn a lot of science from the comics.

Sadly, I had to unlearn a lot of it.

My first laser was a HeNe, about 10 milliwatts. Huge for a HeNe, not so huge for a kid who wanted to blow stuff up. I actually managed to make a hologram, though the druggist down the street who developed it was sure there was a mistake. we had a pre

My first own laser was in mouse . And, yes, there are people in military with big budget who STILL don't have as huge lasers as they wanted as kids.

EDIT: Ok, technically, I had laser in CD-ROM earlier, but I didn't tried to pick it apart, so I didn't actually saw it.

[ijuin 572]

Yeah, they haven't come up with sufficiently energy-efficient lasers for human-portable use yet. The best they can do at present is something the size of a van that can burn a hole in armored vehicles. But hey, that means that we can build laser tanks next tech iteration!

[hkmaly 490]

18 hours ago, ijuin said:

Yeah, they haven't come up with sufficiently energy-efficient lasers for human-portable use yet. The best they can do at present is something the size of a van that can burn a hole in armored vehicles. But hey, that means that we can build laser tanks next tech iteration!

Well they already put lasers on ships. For ships it doesn't matter that it's size of a van and you can fire that much more cheaply than "normal" cannon, rocket or railgun (around Somalia, the price of ammunition is often bigger than price of target).

(BTW, I suspect that it WOULD be possible for laser to be human-portable ... when you don't count energy source. The laser is pretty energy efficient, BUT you need the target hit with lot of energy.)

[ijuin 572]

Yes--at present, the set of ultracapacitors that would be needed to power a laser powerful enough to kill a human wearing reasonable body armor would take up an entire heavy backpack and still only be good for a couple of shots. It's the same disadvantage as backpack-mounted flamethrowers or jetpacks--you run out of fuel within moments, after which the device becomes dead weight. Lasers might be practical to replace stationary machine gun emplacements, however--you can hide the generator and its fuel tank behind your wall-o-sandbags.