Any science fail I'm missing in my fantasy idea?

[tamtrible]

location: alternate Earth with magic, but most of the laws of physics and such are basically the same. Same world discussed hereresearch: honestly wasn't sure what to do here. Mostly going off of the physics classes I had in college and my general knowledge of science. I don't think there are sites that tell you how *not* to break the laws of

Comments

[mindways]

This is a hard question to answer, because you're talking about having already busted open (or circumvented) some of the building-block laws of thermodynamics. Most of the "natural laws" I can think of that you'd be breaking would ultimately derive from those, which you've already thrown out or handwaved away.

I mean, a bow that always hits its target is stupendously unlikely in any variety of ways. It needs mind-reading to know what the target is. It needs action-at-a-distance to affect the flight of the arrow - perfect aim isn't enough; arrows take time to reach their target, and that target can move. It potentially needs to sustain that energy indefinitely, if the target is able to move at least as fast as the arrow is. It needs to allow the arrow to phase (or punch?) through shelters of arbitrary material and/or energy, or survive intact through any conditions.

It might actually be "simpler" to have a bow which could arbitrarily reconfigure space so that wherever the arrow is, the target is. I think that wormholes are

[tamtrible]

I figured the aforementioned bow "hits its target" only in the sense of "hits the external point it is being aimed at, regardless of wind", not "causes actual damage, regardless of intervening circumstances". Otherwise, you get into irresistible force/immovable object stuff if you also have a shield that can block any blow, for example.

Good point about how some things like that are more complicated than they seem on the face of it.

[lilacsigil]

A lot of science - even now - operates on "if A then B except for these 5 weird exceptions that no-one can explain yet". I don't think having specific exceptions would particularly harm or help the development of science.

[tamtrible]

Good point. Though I was thinking that the existence of so *many* apparent exceptions might hinder the development of even relatively basic "universal laws" like conservation of matter. At least, until they realize that relics actually *do* follow conservation of matter.

The help, I was imagining, didn't come from the existence of weird exceptions. It came from, well, the fact that proto-scientists often had better *tools*. If your dead grandmother became a perfectly accurate set of scales, for example, or a spyglass that could see as well as a modern high-powered telescope...

[lilacsigil]

If your dead grandmother became a perfectly accurate set of scales

One thing I'm find very confusing about your world: why is turning people into objects that are SELLABLE (as opposed to prized and revered relics) NOT considered creepy in your world? There are reasons why in ours it's considered creepy to have vellum made from human skin. I'm not judging so much as I keep tripping over this plothole.

[tamtrible]

For one thing, sheer utility. Vellum made from human skin is no more useful than vellum made from, say, sheep or cows. But, for example, a sword that can cut through metal without so much as being scratched? A lot more useful than a normal sword

[dr_tectonic]

So if I can suggest a tweak to how relics work, I think you can have what you want and only be bending/breaking physics in one place, the distillation process itself. (Probably this idea makes the most sense if you abandon the bit where the person's body is transformed into the object, and instead say that the object must be supplied also. Hopefully that's not a deal-breaker

[dr_tectonic]

So let's take the example of the bow that always hits its target. Can we imagine building something like that using modern technology? Sure. You just need some kind of active guidance system. Say you have tiny mechanical controllers that can bend the fletching on the arrow to steer it while it's in flight, and that they're are operated by a pilot who knows what the target looks like. That's going to hit the target almost all the time, right? Certainly enough to call it "always magically hits

[dr_tectonic]

The ever-full inkwell is also pretty straightforward. The way you've described it, it's a bit of a Maxwell's demon, grabbing CO2 out of the air, breaking it into oxygen and carbon, and mixing the carbon with water (also from the air) to make ink. (Non-carbon ink woud be much harder to make, and I'm neglecting the issue of the binding agent.) Maxwell's demon violates thermodynamics, but don't actually have to do it that way. After all, plants metabolize CO2 to split it into carbon and oxygen. So your inkwell has something similar going on, which suggests that it needs sunlight. Put it in the dark and it will eventually stop working. For water, it could condense it out of the air using a tiny cooling condenser (which will only work if the air is decently humid), but it probably works a lot better if you add water to it when you're done using it, and let it change the water into ink. But if you are condensing water out of the air, it'll need energy to do that (so more sunlight, probably). And the outside will get warm from the

[dr_tectonic]

But anyway, the point of all this is that if you think about how you'd make a technological version of each relic, it'll tell you what you need to do to keep it from breaking physics