Debts

[PK]

Eveningstar: Yes, exactly. The Mobius spell is clearly repaid and resolved, it just wasn't the timeslide. What we've been talking about (with some digressions) as being possibly unresolved was the timeslide spell Nita and Kit used earlier in the book. Involved a large dead battery, a silver fork, and several sugar cubes, if I recall correctly.

[eveningstar]

PK: I thought it said: open-ended Mobius spell. Oh wait, the TIMESLIDE? I thought it was the Mobius spell. It might have been the Bright Book. Since they brought it back and all.

[Quill]

They may not have paid yet. Wizards repay each other in services...and sometimes the services aren't done for years. Not in quotes because I don't have the book to hand.

[Moonsong]

That's exactly the point I brought up earlier! Hey, did anyone else pronounce Sidhe exactly how it's spelled? I only looked in the glossary of AWA yesterday to find it's pronounced shee.

[eveningstar]

Moonsong: This is probably another thing for the Nitpickery. But maybe they will repay by &lt;spoiler <span class="ev_code_WHITE">senioring</span> spoiler&gt; I personally think bringing back the Bright Book solved it.

[shananagan]

no, in the first book they had a credit so they didn't have to

[Nathan]

Originally posted by Ardub:

Originally posted by Nathan:
One would expend 6650 kilocalories per pound doing work against the Earth's gravitational field in going from its surface to the Moon's.

Ah, but let's not constrain our thoughts to us lowly oxidizing humans :-) If we work under the assumption that some wizard somewhere is employed as an energy broker between our half and the presumable antimatter half of the universe, the energy you mention (for, let's say, a 120lb person) could be supplied by about 55 nL (nanoliters) of water, or the equivalent amount of dust brushed off an arm, etc. Plus a little extra dust as a commission to the broker :-)

Clever! Under the assumption of strict matter/antimatter symmetry, this provides a very appealing method for the energy for wizardry to be provided by the wizard without the problems (detailed above) that result from the energy being provided solely from the wizard's personal chemical (or biological, if you prefer) energy supply, as the drain on the wizard's biological (chemical) energy would correspond in some fashion to the energy required to initiate the process of bringing the matter/antimatter together and would only be a small fraction of the total energy released (as it must be, by my above arguments) *. However, there are a few caveats (one more physical and one more philosophical): This argument is very strongly predicated on the assumption of matter/antimatter symmetry, which does not appear to be observationally or experimentally justified and is up in the air theoretically (see, e.g., this paper and this press release), though this is far from insuperable in the context of the YW universe, as one could either posit that matter/antimatter symmetry is in force in the YW universe proper or that there exists a 'mirror' antimatter universe to ours. The philosophical argument is quite a bit stronger, in my regard: The assumption of strict (i.e., 'mirror') matter/antimatter symmetry is really necessary to make this solution philosophically and ethically palatable (in addition to physically possible), as, unless one is subtracting the antimatter from a wizard's 'mirror' antimatter self (where this antimatter self is not a separate entity), one would otherwise be obtaining some of the energy from a source other than the wizard, which goes (at least to me) against the philosophical raison d'ètre of this solution (and would, presumably, also require that the source from which the antimatter was obtained to be at least complicit in the transaction). There are a few ways of getting around these arguments, such as positing the existence of a large supply of antimatter that the Powers have made available for this use, but this is a very ad hoc solution and hardly more satisfactory than my original solution. Another way to avoid my arguments would be to treat this accession of energy via antimatter in the same way as the accession of energy via food, the latter of which obviously would be legitimately added to the wizard's personal energy supply and would, presumably, not require any permission to be consumed (cf. Nita and the lettuce in Holiday). Perhaps the most satisfactory way of obviating this concern would be for the wizard to give up twice as much matter as is necessary to get the energy she needs (i.e., the exact matter equivalent of the energy she needs) and 'credit' the entity providing the antimatter with an amount of matter equivalent to the antimatter that was provided (and that the antimatter-providing entity [or 'broker'] could then use to generate energy). There is one final point about this solution that requires at least some comment, I think: the necessity of having exactly the same constituents in the matter and antimatter. This is automatically satisfied in the 'mirror' hypothesis, but is harder to take care of otherwise, as one has to either know or determine the exact composition of the matter extracted in order to precisely match the number of elementary particles (protons, neutrons and electrons, for life that we know [not going down to the quark level, for obvious reasons **]) and thus obtain the optimal (that is, perfect) efficiency of this process. This, though, shouldn't pose too much of a problem for wizardry (and, besides, you really only need to worry about the baryons, as the leptons aren't 'worth much' energy-wise). Obviously, one could just assume that wizardry employs some (unknown) method of converting the wizard's matter into energy, and not worry about antimatter, but this would be a pretty unsatisfactory solution in my eyes.

Just as a matter of further corroboration of my previous results, the water boiling scene in the first Wizards at War excerpt offers an excellent opportunity to check the relationship between expenditure of energy needed to do a wizardry and the amount of energy removed from the wizard's biological energy supply, as it is easy to estimate the amount of energy required to boil the water and the energy required to run up a few flights of stairs. (As an aside, we've seen quite a lot of 'around-the-house wizardry' [and in particular 'kitchen wizardry'] in recent books, which, while it appears to be 'merely' incidental detail, still gives us a nice feel for the more mundane uses of wizardry.) A cup (~237 mL =&gt; ~237 g) of water at about room temperature (~20º C = ~68º F) requires ~19.0 kcal of energy to be raised to the boiling point (100º C), while the change in gravitational potential energy required to raise a weight of 120 lb =&gt; 54.4 kg (using Ardub's fiducial 120 lb person) through 3 stories (~15 m) is ~8 kJ = ~2 kcal. Now, these very rough estimates neglect the energy required to vaporize the (presumably small) amount of water that gets turned into steam as well as the energy required to run up the stairs, though these will probably cancel, to a reasonable approximation (as the amount of water vaporized will be small, but the heat of vaporization for water is quite large). Thus, as I have been quite generous towards the hypothesis of "all the energy for wizardry coming from the wizard's chemical energy supply" with my assumptions (in particular by taking "a couple of flights of stairs" to be ~15 meters) and we still get a discrepancy (of about an order of magnitude) between the amount of biological energy expended and the amount of energy required to perform the task, we must conclude that not all the energy for wizardry comes from a wizard's personal energy supply, unless my analysis is somehow faulty when applied to wizardry (or faulty, period, as I have been known to make outrageous careless errors).

Nathan

* I get a slightly different amount of water required when attempting to reproduce Ardub's calculation (though it isincreases in strength with separation distance and when it's 'stretched' enough, there's enough energy in the field for production of more quarks [see this illustration]) and, besides, I would still have to consider the leptons (well, in this case just the electrons) separately.

[EDIT: Good grief! The mad filter even censors URLs! The URL for the "illustration" above should be &lt;http://web.hep.uiuc.edu/Home/tml/Par...sld017.htm&gt; with the underscore between 'particle' and 'zoo' removed. This is, interestingly, my first run-in with the filter over one of my posts, which rather surprises me, considering how out-of-control its rampages can be.]