For the magnitude of effect:
Hazo could also go by way of a flat increase or a flat reference propagated outward rather than a relative shift like TR. Peanut butter and honey are rather common natural phenomena (though the former might not be in most EN), after all. Also, other seal/rune effects like "hardening air" to the level of granite (a 2,000x increase, which is within the order of magnitude we'd need in the worst case), iirc, suggest that either other large relative scaling instances are not as big of a deal as fiddling with time, or that he can do flat changes too. Either works fine.
Overall, I agree with your message, and thank you for engaging with the rune!
The peanut butter grade could indeed be an interesting instant biological stasis rune as you suggest. I am fine with that, though of course I too don't know what ninja physics will say in the end. ...But I would be glad to turn "extreme stakes rocket tag" to "pulling essie weeds".
I am now curious what you think about the honey grade. From my estimations, it stops or severely slows some macro and micro biological processes. This is because the diffusion coefficient formula I used also includes the size of the 'spherical' particle, which means that as we turn up the viscosity, processes using more complex particles will fail first.
So this could even happen way before honey, as our effect first stops organic molecules that are far larger than simple ions. I assume that the frontal lobe and the brainstem are the foremost targets for permanent damage here.
What are your thoughts on that?
Honestly? I have no idea. The peanut butter grade is straightforward because (at least, assuming both your calculations and my interpretation of them are correct, which is honestly a pretty dodgy assumption) the important stuff is practically immobile, so not much can really happen. We know from the
frozen hamster study that doing that kind of thing is at least not an automatic death sentence, and the damage that did occur there can probably be put down to non-instant freezing/thawing.
With lower grades than that, I don't know what would happen. It might be that the first effect is that your heart can't effectively pump blood through capillaries any more and so you suffer hypoxia and death. It might also be that the changes to the fluidity of the cell membrane result in aggregation/denaturation/loss-of-function of membrane proteins, including ion channels in the nervous system. Or the same effect might stop exocytosis of neurotransmitters at synapses, stopping nerve signals that way. Or maybe what goes wrong first is that vesicle transport inside cells slows down, and all of the processes that depend on that slow down too. Or .... too many options. Changing fluid viscocity would mess with so many biological processes that figuring out which one would kill you first is the kind of problem someone could probably do a PhD on and be nowhere close to actually solving. Even if that's not the case, I personally do not understand the effects of fluid viscocity on biological processes even close to well enough to properly answer it.
That said, I
am pretty confident that spending any significant length of time in the radius of effect of a rune that even doubled the viscosity of nearby fluids would kill you. I can't tell you exactly how it would kill you, or whether you would have time to notice and flee the effect before it did, but I'm fairly sure you would die.
No, that's a weird idea. I'm saying chakra has traditionally had difficulty manipulating anything precisely at the subatomic level so a bunch of electrons moving around seems unlikely to be perfectly preserved or replicated by this rune, and having your brain electricity randomized seems like a bad thing.
Oh - you meant neurologically 'how does the brain work' not philosophically 'what is consciousness'. That makes more sense.
As I've said recently, nerves don't operate like electric wires; there is no electron transfer involved in nerve signalling. More pertinently, while I do remember seeing some things about persistent neuron firing patterns being important in certain kinds of memory and cognition, it seems extremely unlikely that disruption of such systems would effect meaningful change to who someone is. As a straightforward example, it's known that people can be resuscitated after immersion in freezing water for long time periods (certainly at least half an hour, I can't be bothered to track down exactly what the maximums are and how much brain damage they came with), without a heartbeat and therefore without a supply of oxygen to the brain; it seems like a reasonable assumption that brain activity ceases during this process, although I admit that I wouldn't say that with complete confidence. In general, it's my impression that the evidence we have suggests that most of the information stored in brains is determined by properties of the arrangement of neurons, their connections, and their cellular states, none of which are particularly labile.
Caveat: I am not a neurologist, and indeed know relatively little about neurology. It's entirely possible that I'm wrong here. However, I think it is pretty unlikely that deviations at the subatomic level that don't already kill people due to transfiguration-sickness-like effects would have any special effect on the brain.
