Being able to just declare math formulas to act on the physical world is an intriguing super power.
this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2025
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How would you even world build that in? Become a prominent mathematician and figure out all the uses?
X is the objects mass and Y is how fast it is going, now there is a black hole next to your face.
Charles Stross The Laundry Files - It's a good read
Does it pick up? It feels like a slog so far. I don't even remember how far I got before I had to drop it. I love the premise though.
Kind of Dr Who meets James bond meets BOFH in a way, there's a lot of build-up with tons of details that come together by the ending.
He's a mathemagician
Pretty sure there's a Final Fantasy Tactics class that is exactly that
If your level is divisible by four then you die instantly and if it's a prime number you're on my team now
Katalepsis does exactly this for millions of words, and it’s (unfortunately) one of the best books I’ve read in my life.
Paradox from Ben 10 does that which on itself a reference to Dr.who. If i remember correctly, its not that he got powers from being sucked into the time portal but that his mind expanded allowing him to travel among other stuff.
from the wiki: Paradox was displaced outside of time, where he lost the ability to age and was unable to sleep or eat; just exist. He went insane for a while, but then got bored and regained his sanity. Gaining complete understanding of the space-time continuum, Paradox forgot his original name in the process
Don't accidentally use the equation that opens a 4th dimensional path through the floor though.
I've been reassured by that one Star Trek episode where Riker and Ro are out of phase with the rest of the ship that you can never pass through floors, only walls.
I remember a certain episode of batman beyond as a kid giving me a strange fear of "using powers to phase through walls and ending up accidentally falling through the ground". On second thought though, thats the least of your concerns; you wont actually hit the ground or anything and more importantly you'll phase through the air molecules as well instead of breathing them
Mirio (Lemillion) from My Hero Academia has the power to phase through anything, and the story executed it well.
When he activates his power, he falls through the ground and loses the ability to see or breathe. Over time, he learns how to activate his power selectively on specific parts of his body, which allows him to phase through walls effectively.
Wow, core memory unlocked. That was a pretty fucked up episode when you think about it
That one and the sound guy that Terry made deafen himself are two peak episodes.
Bruce putting on that like exoskeleton bat suit and being Batman one last time was a pretty good one too
Y'all forgot about Mr Freeze committing suicide-by-Batman.
The Earth is spinning at around 1000 mph at the equator, orbiting the sun at 67,000 mph. The solar system moves at 450,000 mph around our galaxy, which in turn moves at 1,300,000 mph through the cosmos. If you can phase through things, falling through floors is exactly the least of your problems.
Inertia though. You'd also have no drag, so you'd stay in place, relative to the observed start point.
The goofy light-hearted sitcom Ghosts has a terrifying setup for how the ghosts can move about. They can move through matter laterally, but still use stairs and inclines to change elevation. Go down to the basement and through the wall? Then you'll be trapped in darkness and unable to find your way back except by accident. One character falls down a well and is trapped for most of a season. Another is missing for decades.
They can also sit on sofas etc. "It makes no sense!" says one newly dead character.
Geordie you philistine.
Gravity plating in the floors! Their phased baryons were able to pass through normal matter, but not through the graviton fields running through all the floors of the decks.
Now don't ask how they were able to breathe, because I've got nothing on that.
Um ackshully it's Geordi and Ro.
Pfff...4th dimension. 4th wall is the real super power.
Amateur hour.
What's that? A comic book character breaking the fourth wall to torture Frank Castle with bees? A large influx of bees ought to put a stop to that!
Unbeelievable.
It's not as easy to sing along to as the quadratic equation...
Adding time and distance? Nonsense! Do your unit analysis, people!
It is probably in natural units where c=1. Then you see that all the time. Just do t -> ct and you are grand.
That accounts for the proper units! We did it all the time in my relativity courses, but we had to be explicit
That's why he can phase through walls and you can not.
Why does the back of his head look like a cock?
I don't know, but it made him very popular with some of the other inmates.
Now I need to know what that formula actually is.
d/dx is notation for "derivative of" and what follows is a 4-variable function that (I think) would graph to some kind of 4D shape. Though taking the derivative of that surface with respect to X should result in a 3D shape. I think the author knew just enough calculus to sorta get the gist of something that looks like it's describing 4D/3D stuff to anyone else who's taken high school or college calculus (e.g. me. I don't know much higher math)
It's 0, since ∂t/∂x = 0.
Oh look, it’s Heather Morell, running off and doing shit without telling anyone.
Now we know what comics Charles Stross read as a kid