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However, the/an aether exists in warhammer. You can point at that as the unmoving reference frame. Does that make sense? Who knows! Maybe ask the people in silver ships. But at the very least, you have a bit more work before you can raise Einstein victorious.
If its anything like the Warp of 40K...
No.
Its very much a moving dynamic frame that fails as a global reference frame on a galactic scale at the very least since warp travel between two equidistant locations through the warp are unlikely to be the same.

And we know even less of Aethyr of WHF so... I guess if Boney says so and otherwise I will assume not.

I assume we're implicitly dropping the whole "light waves propagate through it" otherwise we also need to throw out electromagnetism as we know it and probably wave particle duality.
 
What we're told about the Aethyr in mst detail is this:

So then, the Aethyr is basically a contradiction, as its existence and nature appear to be in direct opposition to what nearly all mortal scholars think they understand about the universe. Therefore, many scholar-Wizards of the Imperial Colleges of Magic insist that it is self-defeating to try to define the Aethyr in terms that are not symbolic and abstract because, unlike the Mortal Plane with its facts and physics, the Aethyr is a state of metaphysics containing all things.

One could view the Aethyr as infinite potential, a state where absolutely everything (conceivable and otherwise) is possible but not necessarily probable. Possibility and potential are key parts of reality, woven into every single aspect of the Mortal Plane, from the smallest to the largest, from the inanimate to the animate, and from that which cannot be detected by the senses to that which can. For indeed, the words "possibility" and "potential" are used to describe something otherwise immeasurable—whether that's because the things they stand for lack any dimension or existence on their own to measure or whether it's because they are truly infinite and therefore beyond all measure.

So "potential" and "possibility" are the names Humans have given to abstract concepts. But the existence of the Aethyr as both a parallel reality and a force could be taken as a suggestion that potential and possibility describe concepts with no physical dimension, time, mass, or measurable energy of their own. Perhaps it is logical to suggest that they, like the Aethyr, also exist in another manner within every single part and aspect of the Mortal Plane as the most basic catalysts for existence. More than this, one might argue that it is the Aethyr that is the existence, spring, and well of all potential and possibility, and Chaos, what we have called magic and Aethyr, is typical and raw potential made visible.

Perhaps, then, calling the Aethyr a realm or even a place is too limiting. The Aethyr has the potential to be a place, state, or thing only because the Aethyr might actually be infinite potential; therefore, it encompasses and contains all possibilities (including that of being a place and realm), but it is at the same time not only just a place, state, or thing. To ask where the Aethyr is would be like asking where infinity is or when eternity is. One could point absolutely anywhere and be correct but only in the most limited sense.

Yet if the Aethyr is not just a place and has no permanent physical dimensions and no comprehensible positioning within the mortal universe, how is it that the Winds of Magic come from the Aethyr? Does this not suggest that it is in fact a place of some kind? Although it is doubtful that anyone can say accurately and honestly that they fully understand the Aethyr, one can say with certainty that the Aethyr does exist in some inexplicable way since Collegiate Wizards perceive and use its energies almost daily. And, as the Colleges' beliefs and academic investigations seem to reveal, there is some kind of rupture in the Aethyr far to the north, beyond the Troll Country and the Chaos Wastes.

Maybe, to use limited terms, if one were to step through that rupture it wouldn't lead to a place at all, but instead it would retreat into one's own mind. Or perhaps to enter the Aethyr is actually a process of making oneself spiritually inside-out? Some accounts suggest that passing into the Aethyr is to enter the collective waking dream of the mortal universe, and such an act causes one to abandon all fact and certainty, essentially becoming a contradiction or myth. Others insist that the Aethyr is absolute uncertainty—absolute and unfulfilled potential waiting for a catalyst that will allow it to realise itself.

Those who believe in this last option view the Aethyr as the ultimate changer of things but not a definite "thing" itself. Possibly, once beings from the Mortal Plane tap into the Aethyr, they give this theoretical raw reagent something to react with. But because the Aethyr has no definite, existing, physical reality of its own, one could say that anything existing on the mortal plane, no matter how abstract, debatable, and insubstantial, is more "definite" than the Aethyr is.

This could explain why some consider the Aethyr a kind of "collective subconscious mind" for the mortal universe. Indeed, many of the great Magisters of the College of Light seem to have held this view and have written fascinating proposals exploring the possibility that the Aethyr is a storehouse and manifestation of all thoughts, emotions, memory fragments, and beliefs of all living beings upon the Mortal Plane. It could be said that the most immaterial things (those that cannot be measured, captured, or contained) generated within the Mortal Plane are thoughts and emotions. But it is precisely because they are immaterial that they find their way so readily into the Aethyr. Maybe they slip through the cracks in our absolute and fully realised reality and somehow into the Aethyr.

To expand on this idea, as even thought and emotion are more definite and real than the potential reality of the Aethyr, and because thought and emotion are the two most readily available things from the Mortal Plane to be found within the Aethyr, they have become the two greatest and most readily available compounds that the Aethyr's unrealised potential can react with.

Basically the Aethyr isn't a place or something that can be used as a frame. if this is correct
 
If its anything like the Warp of 40K...
No.
Its very much a moving dynamic frame that fails as a global reference frame on a galactic scale at the very least since warp travel between two equidistant locations through the warp are unlikely to be the same.

And we know even less of Aethyr of WHF so... I guess if Boney says so and otherwise I will assume not.

I assume we're implicitly dropping the whole "light waves propagate through it" otherwise we also need to throw out electromagnetism as we know it and probably wave particle duality.
That's pretty much my point, we don't really know, but assuming it works the same is only sensible on the doylist assumption that the author will just not change it, nevermind it's already changed. (I'm severly annoyed by all the isekai stories where someone gets dropped elsewhere, and his highschool level knowledge somehow is a great revelation and a deep description of this new reality, when that new reality contains magic and shit.)

And yeah, warhammer aether has nearly nothing to do with IRL physics aether theories. That was a rethorical flourish to draw the connection between the two cases. Though we probably need to throw out electromagnitism anyway because of azyr and so on, or at least acccept it as even more of a rough approximation than it already is IRL.

As for the wave-particle duality? That's quantuam mechanics thing (except it actually really isn't, I'll get back to that), and there's no reason to assume quantum mechanics is a thing. We know Newtonian mechanics does a good job describing the world for the most part, because it mostly works like ours on that scale. However, that's human scale happenings don't really tell you a lot about either relativity or quantum mechanics, unless you really make an effort. So unless and until Mathilde has to do very precise orbital mechanics calculation for her space trip with the dragons, we won't know about relativity. And I can't really came up with a semi plausible case where she'd come across quantum effects in a way that would tell us anything.

Physics appendix: I mentioned that wave-particle duality isn't a quantum thing. How can that be, it's super famously a thing for quantum stuff? And yeah, it is. But wave-particle duality isn't a thing about quantum. Neither is the Heisenberg's unsharpness relation (the common english translation is uncertainty principle, but that's a bad translation of the german, so I'm using this more literal one that better captures the character). It's just a thing about waves. Any waves. Water waves, electromagnetic waves, or particle waves in quantum mechanics.

See, you can have a localised wave, just a few ups and downs. That's called a wave packet, and it's the particle in wave-particle duality. But what's the wavelength? Well, just count the distance between the ups and the downs. More ups and downs means you can get a better estimate. But then, if you have more, your wave paket is longer, and so the location of that packet is kind of smeared out. In the extreme case of a infinitely many ups and downs, and therefore an infinitely precise estimate of the wavelength, there's not sensible way to talk about a location, it's just everywhere. Conversely, if you want to have it really precise, you have a single spike (the delta distribution that was mentioned earlier), and there's no ups and downs to measure the wavelength at all, so you can't sensible talk about that.
If the wave-particle duality is weird, then it's not quatum weirdness.

Quantum weirdness is to a lesser degree that particles are waves/fields (distributed something across space, waves are what the fields are doing) in the first place (lesser because people are happy enough with sonar pulses, which are essentially, mathematically the same), and to a middling degree what kind of fields they are. They're not fields of concentration. There's not 0.1 electron at (0,1,-1). They're probablity of being somewhere, 0.1% chance for an electron to fullly be at (0,1,-1) (well, it's probabilty densities, but let's leave that aside). So that's weird, but not too weird. But the real source of all the quantum weirdness is the way they are the fields they are. Because those probabilities can interfer, and that's extremely fucking weird. And also, we still don't understand who it goes from probability to actual certainty that this the state. That's how weird that is.


Uncertainty appendix: The discussion above of wave packets suggests that this is a measurement limitation. It's not, it's a mathematical thing, but that's a little less intuitvely clear, and the reasons I gave above are true, they're just not the core thing. If you know the fourier transform, and ever looked at the transform of a dirac spike, and then started broadening it, you've seen it. If not, let me give explaining the issue a shot.

Fundamentally, you're wavepaket needs to be some value in a small region, and zero outside. You can do that by adding pure sine (and cosine) waves together. Figuring out which waves you need is called the fourier transform, and it's astonishingly useful. As it turns out, the tighter the region you want to squueze your signal into (which is the location), the more different types of wave you need. Conversely, the more restricited you want to be on the waves you use (a clearer wavelength), the broader your region will be. The reasoning earlier gives some ways to think on why, but ultimately it's just how it works.

Now, in mechanics (not just quantum) there's some quantities that are related to each other, the way postion and wavelength are for waves. So for all these, you run into the same issue. So if it's not a quantum weirdnes, why do we not see it in Newtonian physics? Well, we do, but it's not a fundamental limit like in quantum mechanics.

Why is it not a fundamental limit? Because Newtonian physics has no minimal size. So you can always have something smaller. If you want to check a thing, you have to interact with it. If you have something sufficently small (small not necessarily in spatial dimension), the original thing isn't going to be distrubed. You can get infintely precise.

But what if you're looking at the smalles possible thing? The quanta of the world? (Yes, that's where the name comes from. This is how they were trying and going to solve some of the problems of newtonian physics.) Well, now you don't have something smaller, and any interaction will change the thing you're looking at. The unsharpness relation is an expression of that.
 
That's pretty much my point, we don't really know, but assuming it works the same is only sensible on the doylist assumption that the author will just not change it, nevermind it's already changed. (I'm severly annoyed by all the isekai stories where someone gets dropped elsewhere, and his highschool level knowledge somehow is a great revelation and a deep description of this new reality, when that new reality contains magic and shit.)

And yeah, warhammer aether has nearly nothing to do with IRL physics aether theories. That was a rethorical flourish to draw the connection between the two cases. Though we probably need to throw out electromagnitism anyway because of azyr and so on, or at least acccept it as even more of a rough approximation than it already is IRL.

As for the wave-particle duality? That's quantuam mechanics thing (except it actually really isn't, I'll get back to that), and there's no reason to assume quantum mechanics is a thing. We know Newtonian mechanics does a good job describing the world for the most part, because it mostly works like ours on that scale. However, that's human scale happenings don't really tell you a lot about either relativity or quantum mechanics, unless you really make an effort. So unless and until Mathilde has to do very precise orbital mechanics calculation for her space trip with the dragons, we won't know about relativity. And I can't really came up with a semi plausible case where she'd come across quantum effects in a way that would tell us anything.

Physics appendix: I mentioned that wave-particle duality isn't a quantum thing. How can that be, it's super famously a thing for quantum stuff? And yeah, it is. But wave-particle duality isn't a thing about quantum. Neither is the Heisenberg's unsharpness relation (the common english translation is uncertainty principle, but that's a bad translation of the german, so I'm using this more literal one that better captures the character). It's just a thing about waves. Any waves. Water waves, electromagnetic waves, or particle waves in quantum mechanics.

See, you can have a localised wave, just a few ups and downs. That's called a wave packet, and it's the particle in wave-particle duality. But what's the wavelength? Well, just count the distance between the ups and the downs. More ups and downs means you can get a better estimate. But then, if you have more, your wave paket is longer, and so the location of that packet is kind of smeared out. In the extreme case of a infinitely many ups and downs, and therefore an infinitely precise estimate of the wavelength, there's not sensible way to talk about a location, it's just everywhere. Conversely, if you want to have it really precise, you have a single spike (the delta distribution that was mentioned earlier), and there's no ups and downs to measure the wavelength at all, so you can't sensible talk about that.
If the wave-particle duality is weird, then it's not quatum weirdness.

Quantum weirdness is to a lesser degree that particles are waves/fields (distributed something across space, waves are what the fields are doing) in the first place (lesser because people are happy enough with sonar pulses, which are essentially, mathematically the same), and to a middling degree what kind of fields they are. They're not fields of concentration. There's not 0.1 electron at (0,1,-1). They're probablity of being somewhere, 0.1% chance for an electron to fullly be at (0,1,-1) (well, it's probabilty densities, but let's leave that aside). So that's weird, but not too weird. But the real source of all the quantum weirdness is the way they are the fields they are. Because those probabilities can interfer, and that's extremely fucking weird. And also, we still don't understand who it goes from probability to actual certainty that this the state. That's how weird that is.


Uncertainty appendix: The discussion above of wave packets suggests that this is a measurement limitation. It's not, it's a mathematical thing, but that's a little less intuitvely clear, and the reasons I gave above are true, they're just not the core thing. If you know the fourier transform, and ever looked at the transform of a dirac spike, and then started broadening it, you've seen it. If not, let me give explaining the issue a shot.

Fundamentally, you're wavepaket needs to be some value in a small region, and zero outside. You can do that by adding pure sine (and cosine) waves together. Figuring out which waves you need is called the fourier transform, and it's astonishingly useful. As it turns out, the tighter the region you want to squueze your signal into (which is the location), the more different types of wave you need. Conversely, the more restricited you want to be on the waves you use (a clearer wavelength), the broader your region will be. The reasoning earlier gives some ways to think on why, but ultimately it's just how it works.

Now, in mechanics (not just quantum) there's some quantities that are related to each other, the way postion and wavelength are for waves. So for all these, you run into the same issue. So if it's not a quantum weirdnes, why do we not see it in Newtonian physics? Well, we do, but it's not a fundamental limit like in quantum mechanics.

Why is it not a fundamental limit? Because Newtonian physics has no minimal size. So you can always have something smaller. If you want to check a thing, you have to interact with it. If you have something sufficently small (small not necessarily in spatial dimension), the original thing isn't going to be distrubed. You can get infintely precise.

But what if you're looking at the smalles possible thing? The quanta of the world? (Yes, that's where the name comes from. This is how they were trying and going to solve some of the problems of newtonian physics.) Well, now you don't have something smaller, and any interaction will change the thing you're looking at. The unsharpness relation is an expression of that.

So what I got out of that is you could easily play it so that a lot of advanced tech in an IRL/IRL-like Earth straight up doesn't work on Mallus because the particulars of the physical laws are different. Computers and other finicky things like watches being particularly vulnerable to this.
 
Physics appendix: I mentioned that wave-particle duality isn't a quantum thing. How can that be, it's super famously a thing for quantum stuff? And yeah, it is. But wave-particle duality isn't a thing about quantum. Neither is the Heisenberg's unsharpness relation (the common english translation is uncertainty principle, but that's a bad translation of the german, so I'm using this more literal one that better captures the character). It's just a thing about waves. Any waves. Water waves, electromagnetic waves, or particle waves in quantum mechanics.
I think you went in a different direction than I expected or intended with this. Its a fair bit simpler.
If light genuinely was a wave travelling through the aethyr, it probably wouldn't also be a particle.
 
That's pretty much my point, we don't really know, but assuming it works the same is only sensible on the doylist assumption that the author will just not change it, nevermind it's already changed. (I'm severly annoyed by all the isekai stories where someone gets dropped elsewhere, and his highschool level knowledge somehow is a great revelation and a deep description of this new reality, when that new reality contains magic and shit.)
I feel the same way. If we have a reductionistic physics where everything is the manifestation of physical laws interacting with one another and with ontologically basic entities being objects describable mathematically then agglomerate into more complex behavior, and simultaneously an extremely non-reductionistic physics where something as complicated as concepts seem to be ontologically basic entities, then I think it is much more straightforward to posit that the former is a special case of the latter, a cute little sandbox where things appear to work under simple rules but are in fact embedded in a more complex system, than that the ground state of reality is the former and that someone somehow built the latter out of math.

(if that was hard to parse: "IRL physics is being emulated in a magical reality" is much easier to accept than "magic is being created by IRL physics". And obviously, if familiar physics is the thing being emulated, there's no reason it might not be emulated differently, or just overridden in surprising ways.)
 
So what I got out of that is you could easily play it so that a lot of advanced tech in an IRL/IRL-like Earth straight up doesn't work on Mallus because the particulars of the physical laws are different. Computers and other finicky things like watches being particularly vulnerable to this.
Jup. Absolutely.
I think you went in a different direction than I expected or intended with this. Its a fair bit simpler.
If light genuinely was a wave travelling through the aethyr, it probably wouldn't also be a particle.
If it's a wave, then you can have particular arrangements of it that look like a particle. Whether or not it's traveling through the aether is irrelevant for that.

And the aethyr isn't the aether of 19th century physics anyway. Light might be able to travel into the aethyr, because people/matter can even if not long, but it wouldn't be in the sense the aether was used.
I feel the same way. If we have a reductionistic physics where everything is the manifestation of physical laws interacting with one another and with ontologically basic entities being objects describable mathematically then agglomerate into more complex behavior, and simultaneously an extremely non-reductionistic physics where something as complicated as concepts seem to be ontologically basic entities, then I think it is much more straightforward to posit that the former is a special case of the latter, a cute little sandbox where things appear to work under simple rules but are in fact embedded in a more complex system, than that the ground state of reality is the former and that someone somehow built the latter out of math.

(if that was hard to parse: "IRL physics is being emulated in a magical reality" is much easier to accept than "magic is being created by IRL physics". And obviously, if familiar physics is the thing being emulated, there's no reason it might not be emulated differently, or just overridden in surprising ways.)
Hell, even if you have reductionist physics, they wouldn't be the same reductionist physics, because there's magic. So why would some random unrelated thing be helpful
And if you have concept based physics, then that would go even more so.

But I think we have different ideas about math and what it means for a model to describe something but not be correct.

As a physicist, I know every model is incorrect, but some are useful. We know every model of reality we have is wrong, even the best. And you basically never use the best, because it's so atrociously complicated that we don't know what it says. You could describe all of physics as "Harmonic Oszilators with corrections", and that would be wrong, but not that wrong. Partly that's because we can't really solve anything else, but also because we're lucky that it carries you this far. So for me, talking about a subset of physics being emulated is a bit weird. That's like talking about Newtonian physics being emulated by quantum physics, and special relativity. That's the behavior when certain effects aren't important. In Fantasy, that would be when there's no mana or whatever (doing a properly non-newtonian fantasy is cool, but so much work that basically nobody does it. It'd be some of those really avant-garde weird scifi).

As for math: I'm not sure that you couldn't describe concepts with math. Math is astonishingly capable of describing things. Now, would human intelligences be able to find the correct math, and then actually accomplish anything with it? Dunno. Would it improve the story? Sometimes yes, sometimes very no. But the philosophical position of "some things are not describable by math" is not something I'd subscribe to. If nothing else, you'd have a few books worth of defintion for "things", "describable" and "math".
 
I feel the same way. If we have a reductionistic physics where everything is the manifestation of physical laws interacting with one another and with ontologically basic entities being objects describable mathematically then agglomerate into more complex behavior, and simultaneously an extremely non-reductionistic physics where something as complicated as concepts seem to be ontologically basic entities, then I think it is much more straightforward to posit that the former is a special case of the latter, a cute little sandbox where things appear to work under simple rules but are in fact embedded in a more complex system, than that the ground state of reality is the former and that someone somehow built the latter out of math.

(if that was hard to parse: "IRL physics is being emulated in a magical reality" is much easier to accept than "magic is being created by IRL physics". And obviously, if familiar physics is the thing being emulated, there's no reason it might not be emulated differently, or just overridden in surprising ways.)

War of the Krork plays this concept for Cosmic Horror, having reality be the equivalent of Monkey With Typewriters that arose from sheer random chance, with the Chaos Gods being the process of the bubble popping.
 
I feel the most pertinent question is "Does Mathilde have a relevant trait that would meet the requirements needed to create such a spell?" If the answer to that question is no the answer to you question will probably be "Mathilde can't make such a spell and does not know if people with different magical paradigms might be able to make it work or if it's inherently impossible."
Thinking about it, we currently have an apprentice who's a lot more malleable than we are. She's picking up traits a lot faster than we do these days. Maybe we should start thinking about what activities we want to involve her in so that she has a chance of being able to make the spells we want.

I propose we start by teaching her how to make burritos.
 
Thinking about it, we currently have an apprentice who's a lot more malleable than we are. She's picking up traits a lot faster than we do these days. Maybe we should start thinking about what activities we want to involve her in so that she has a chance of being able to make the spells we want.

I propose we start by teaching her how to make burritos.

Ah. Finding an elven tutor for Pure maths and Philosophy, particularly epistemology and metaphysics.

That should do it if anything can.

More seriously, we've not explored the possibilities of getting tutors from the elder races for Eike during this formative period.

We've exposed her to them culturally; but not given her an intellectual foundation from them.

Getting her an introduction to Hekartian or Hoethian thought might also be useful.
 
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Interestingly for light, waves, particles, and the history of all that, Newton in Opticks pointed to a potential link to both. He manages this in classic Newton style by being scrupulously and meticulously technically correct.

He never states light does have the nature of a particle, or that his observations imply it does, could, or might. He says strictly that observations imply you should ask if it does (more or less). Sometimes it feels like Newton managed to be right about so much so often purely by not being wrong.
 
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