Physics Issues

Alright, here's the Sit Rep... I've got a series (trying a blend of sci-fi and fantasy, heavy on the sci) in early development and I'm setting some ground rules here. Having decided that magic is just "really strange physics" and must abide by the laws of conservation (yeah... i'm going a little higher on the hardness scale than i probably should (aiming for a 5, Contains only theoretical yet plausible elements.) but if you hand wave magic as a whole then there's no point because everyone is going to be OP) I find myself in a conundrum. How do I logically explain the following.

• Why are vampires in need of blood (not as a nutrient source, that could be cured by a supplement)?
• A werewolf's bite is a "poison" that temperately drives them nuts, or transforms the victim into a wolf. Ho to explain the latter.
• How can you "power" a god for about four hours? We're talking creating a storm and controlling the water in the clouds to create a "solar laser."
• "Aliens" who are actually a lost group of human colonists from Mars. Any way to "jump start" a dead planet? Is teraforming plausible in any regards?
• I'm open to other ideas. The point of this is to try and make it sound plausible without resorting to Phleblotinum. This list may very well grow longer. I said Sound Plausible, not rock hard. Look, we can't even fully agree the Einstein's Theory of Specific Relativity works, especially when Quantum Entanglement is in the picture.

edited 27th Sep '10 10:25:12 PM by Lockhart

Why are vampires in need of blood? Bonus points for explaining why drinking too much drives them nuts.

How about — oxygen to keep their cells from deteriorating? the fresher the blood, the more oxygen it is carrying. Too much blood, too much oxygen, oxygen intoxication, and most of them are mean drunks.

How large would a pair of wings need to be in able to let a human "glide" down to earth with only minor injury? We're talking from a height that would let a normal person reach terminal velocity. Bonus points for bits of biology info.

Look into Argentavis Magnificens: estimated to weigh approximately 155 lbs (70 Kilos or so), with a 21 foot wingspan, it probably couldn't take off from the ground, but was an excellent glider. Go from there.

Just how much energy (from any source/s you can think of) can you pull out of a person before they die?

edited 27th Sep '10 10:20:32 AM by Yej

In order to get anything like you're thinking of, you're going to have to rewrite at least some of the laws of physics.

I'm thinking more of a "side step" rather than a rewrite. And I'm looking for advise, not "you can't." Even a polite ones such as yours. If a nuclear bomb the size of a basketball can do what the Atomic Annie did, and there's supposedly far more energy in an atom than that, there has to be something you can do with the various atoms in the human body.

The Salvation War had a lot of justifying and explaining why gods had powers and stuff, but it also took advantage of saying that other places had different physics than earth.

Let's look at the wing thing. Honestly? I don't think wings will help a person much. Parachutes exist for a reason. Human beings are usually too heavy for simple bird wings.

But if you REALLY wanted to know, I'd go and look up the one man planes that were originally invented, and judge from there.

'Energy' is an abstract term you seem to be using. Do you mean Kinetic Energy? Potential Energry? Joules? Watts? What?

For vampires, research mosquitos and actual vampire bats.

For werewolves, it seems like it would be something similar to a parasite.

I only know so much about physics, but from my limited knowledge, I am definitely adding the whole 'magic' factor, to at least make things easier. The only way you would EVER have something completely accurate in terms of science is if you studied it your entire life and loved it more than anything. Mostly.

Even when people manage to make all the general rules accurate to physics, they tend to break the minute ones. Someone falls? Someone punches? Someone shoots? Someone slams into someone else? Someone transforms? A tiny girl beats a big guy up? Super strength? Super speed? Flying? Deep sea diving? Shrapnel? All possible places to deface the laws of physics.

edited 27th Sep '10 12:36:37 PM by A_H_R

While the human body comprises an immense amount of energy (roughly 100,000 Hiroshimas), you can't actually make use of more then an extremely tiny fraction of that.

Here's what Wikipedia says on the matter.

In nuclear reactions, typically only a small fraction of the total mass–energy of the bomb is converted into heat, light, radiation and motion, which are "active" forms which can be used. When an atom fissions, it loses only about 0.1% of its mass (which escapes from the system and does not disappear), and in a bomb or reactor not all the atoms can fission. In a fission based atomic bomb, the efficiency is only 40%, so only 40% of the fissionable atoms actually fission, and only 0.04% of the total mass appears as energy in the end. In nuclear fusion, more of the mass is released as usable energy, roughly 0.3%. But in a fusion bomb (see nuclear weapon yield), the bomb mass is partly casing and non-reacting components, so that practically no more than about 0.03% of the total mass of the entire weapon is released as usable energy (which retains the missing mass).

In theory, it should be possible to convert all of the mass in matter into heat and light (which would of course have the same mass), but none of the theoretically known methods are practical. One way to convert all matter into usable energy is to annihilate matter with antimatter. But antimatter is rare in our universe, and must be made first. Due to inefficient mechanisms of production, making antimatter always requires far more energy than would be released when it was annihilated.

Since most of the mass of ordinary objects resides in protons and neutrons, in order to convert all ordinary matter to useful energy, the protons and neutrons must be converted to lighter particles. In the standard model of particle physics, the number of protons plus neutrons is nearly exactly conserved. Still, Gerard 't Hooft showed that there is a process which will convert protons and neutrons to antielectrons and neutrinos.[15] This is the weak SU(2) instanton proposed by Belavin Polyakov Schwarz and Tyupkin.[16] This process, can in principle convert all the mass of matter into neutrinos and usable energy, but it is normally extraordinarily slow. Later it became clear that this process will happen at a fast rate at very high temperatures,[17] since then instanton-like configurations will be copiously produced from thermal fluctuations. The temperature required is so high that it would only have been reached shortly after the big bang.

Many extensions of the standard model contain magnetic monopoles, and in some models of grand unification, these monopoles catalyze proton decay, a process known as the Callan–Rubakov effect.[18] This process would be an efficient mass–energy conversion at ordinary temperatures, but it requires making monopoles and anti-monopoles first. The energy required to produce monopoles is believed to be enormous, but magnetic charge is conserved, so that the lightest monopole is stable. All these properties are deduced in theoretical models—magnetic monopoles have never been observed, nor have they been produced in any experiment so far.

A third known method of total matter–energy conversion is using gravity, specifically black holes. Stephen Hawking theorized[19] that black holes radiate thermally with no regard to how they are formed. So it is theoretically possible to throw matter into a black hole and use the emitted heat to generate power. According to the theory of Hawking radiation, however, the black hole used will radiate at a higher rate the smaller it is, producing usable powers at only small black hole masses, where usable may for example be something greater than the local background radiation. It is also worth noting that the ambient irradiated power would change with the mass of the black hole, increasing as the mass of the black hole decreases, or decreasing as the mass increases, at a rate where power is proportional to the inverse square of the mass. In a "practical" scenario, mass and energy could be dumped into the black hole to regulate this growth, or keep its size, and thus power output, near constant. This could result from the fact that mass and energy are lost from the hole with its thermal radiation.

edited 27th Sep '10 7:20:08 PM by storyyeller

Misquotes need blood as a protein source. Unless vampires live on nectar, that won't be a problem. You could just go with the insulin. I like that one.

Does the werewolf thing just make them act feral, or do they literally turn into a wolf? You might be able to justify it if you make it permanent, but turning into a wolf and back in a single day every month wouldn't work.

Anything powerful enough to control the weather will have, for all practical purposes, unlimited power.

The average person uses about 2000 kilocalories a day. That's about two and a third kilowatt-hours, or about 8 million joules. It's more than enough energy to lift a half-ton object a mile, or a metric tonne 850 meters. I'm not sure how much you carry. You'll start using less if you go a significant time without eating, but I'm sure it's more than that.

What do you mean by jump start a dead planet? Do you mean terraforming? That takes a few hundred years, at best.

How about this. Vampires need blood in order to gain new DNA to repair their DNA that is breaking down. Werewolves might have prions in their saliva that have a natural/programmed kill sequence that kicks in 4 hours and the prions die off. Unless maybe certain people are different so the prions stay active making more werewolves?