Lois’s answer to “Penric can get water from the air, and also turn it to ice. I wonder what else? Purify seawater (an…” > Likes and Comments
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Thanks! I was wondering whether heating food would count as uphill or downhill magic: is heat an increase in chaos? If I were more of a scientist, I could surely think of a lot more possibilities, but my physics classes stopped almost 52 years ago…
I'm particularly interested in the start-a-fire game. That's starting an oxidation-reduction chemical reaction, which makes me wonder what others she could do.
@ Karen -- Reactions that need a small... there's a name for it, drattit -- energy to get it started, and then run on their own as long as reactant stocks last (fire as a classic example) should all be demonically do-able. Exothermic, iirc. Reactions that require continuous energy input would be harder. (Uphill, generating more ambient waste chaos for the sorcerer to deal with. Endothermic?) Catalysts, someone whose chemistry education is more recent than my half-century-old lessons would have to think about. But I bet chemically trained sorcerers could do really clever things with catalysts, once understood.
Des likely has some other exothermic processes in her bag, but on a piecemeal, recipe-like basis. Lacking explanatory theory that would allow extensions. It would be interesting to think what, besides fire, she might already have recipes for. We did see some sort of complicated chemistry going on in Pen's mouth when she was destroying the strong sedative/poison that Clee and his brother were slipping him.
Ta, L.
"Reactions that need a small... there's a name for it, drattit -- energy to get it started"
I believe that's activation energy. Catalysts lower the activation energy, making it easier for the reaction to proceed. Thanks Jonathan for asking this question and Lois for answering!
I find myself remembering Janie in Sturgeon’s “More Than Human”, who could use telekinesis to remove liquids from precise locations in the human body to achieve particular effects: to diminish the desire to urinate, or the desire to have sex, for example. I wonder whether a sorcerer could learn to do that.
Although this is an old question, I'm putting in my own two cents, as I find this idea fascinating. I strongly suspect that the limits of Pen's (ultimately, Des's) abilities are tied to his own level of knoweldge and the general level of scientific knowledge in his world. Given that Pen is a major scholar in his own right, the former probably is not much of a constraint. But also given that his world is at a medieval level of scientific knowledge, the latter is more of an issue. If Pen knew that water was made up of hydrogen and oxygen (and, for that matter, if he knew about the concepts of atoms/molecules), he would probably be able to figure out a way to separate them. Ditto for achieving nuclear fission/fusion. But the problem is, he doesn't know these concepts, and he can't very well do stuff involving concepts neither he nor Des know anything about.
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Jonathan
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May 07, 2023 10:41PM
Thanks! I was wondering whether heating food would count as uphill or downhill magic: is heat an increase in chaos? If I were more of a scientist, I could surely think of a lot more possibilities, but my physics classes stopped almost 52 years ago…
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I'm particularly interested in the start-a-fire game. That's starting an oxidation-reduction chemical reaction, which makes me wonder what others she could do.
@ Karen -- Reactions that need a small... there's a name for it, drattit -- energy to get it started, and then run on their own as long as reactant stocks last (fire as a classic example) should all be demonically do-able. Exothermic, iirc. Reactions that require continuous energy input would be harder. (Uphill, generating more ambient waste chaos for the sorcerer to deal with. Endothermic?) Catalysts, someone whose chemistry education is more recent than my half-century-old lessons would have to think about. But I bet chemically trained sorcerers could do really clever things with catalysts, once understood.Des likely has some other exothermic processes in her bag, but on a piecemeal, recipe-like basis. Lacking explanatory theory that would allow extensions. It would be interesting to think what, besides fire, she might already have recipes for. We did see some sort of complicated chemistry going on in Pen's mouth when she was destroying the strong sedative/poison that Clee and his brother were slipping him.
Ta, L.
"Reactions that need a small... there's a name for it, drattit -- energy to get it started" I believe that's activation energy. Catalysts lower the activation energy, making it easier for the reaction to proceed. Thanks Jonathan for asking this question and Lois for answering!
I find myself remembering Janie in Sturgeon’s “More Than Human”, who could use telekinesis to remove liquids from precise locations in the human body to achieve particular effects: to diminish the desire to urinate, or the desire to have sex, for example. I wonder whether a sorcerer could learn to do that.
Although this is an old question, I'm putting in my own two cents, as I find this idea fascinating. I strongly suspect that the limits of Pen's (ultimately, Des's) abilities are tied to his own level of knoweldge and the general level of scientific knowledge in his world. Given that Pen is a major scholar in his own right, the former probably is not much of a constraint. But also given that his world is at a medieval level of scientific knowledge, the latter is more of an issue. If Pen knew that water was made up of hydrogen and oxygen (and, for that matter, if he knew about the concepts of atoms/molecules), he would probably be able to figure out a way to separate them. Ditto for achieving nuclear fission/fusion. But the problem is, he doesn't know these concepts, and he can't very well do stuff involving concepts neither he nor Des know anything about.
