RPM, path of chance, entropy rituals

[Anders]

Originally Posted by whswhs

The first is perfectly compatible with subjectivism; it just says that sometimes your subjectivity collides with other peoples' subjectivity. The second is not; it only makes sense if you assume objective reality. To my mind that makes the game philosophically a lot less interesting.

There has to be some objective reality, even if it's only "subjective views determine everything else". Otherwise it could be locked into an objective state by e.g. our time.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Anders

There has to be some objective reality, even if it's only "subjective views determine everything else".

I would not consider the latter to be an objective reality; I would consider it rather to be a claim that depends on the assumption of objective reality in the act of denying it, and thus self-invalidating.

But the point of Mage, for me, was to explore that very premise of subjective reality as fully as possible.

Of course, now that I think about it, Mage had another of those deadly concessions: The Nephandi, who seem to be inherently and objectively evil, and thus to represent the concept that there is objective evil, rather than all values being subjective or relative. I had problems with that one too.

[Anders]

Ok, how about "consciousness exists". If reality is determined by consciousness then there would be no reality if there was no consciousness. Existence, identity, consciousness...

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Anders

Ok, how about "consciousness exists". If reality is determined by consciousness then there would be no reality if there was no consciousness. Existence, identity, consciousness...

Yes, well, "A consciousness with nothing to be conscious of is a contradiction in terms. A consciousness conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction in terms." (John Galt's speech)

However, I view Mage as interesting precisely because it explores the prior certainty of consciousness as a premise as systematically as possible. Or nearly so; when it make concessions to existence being prior to consciousness I find it unsatisfactory.

[baronopium]

that took quite the philosophical turn. with regard to using the path of chance rituals to manipulate entropy:

Originally Posted by whswhs

It might let you create a perpetual motion machine of the second kind—say, the Galt motor from Atlas Shrugged, which "converts static energy into kinetic," or a Maxwell demon with no energy cost to function. That sounds like a greater effect!

It might let you simply stop processes driven by entropy from functioning. Maybe you could shut down heat flow from hotter to colder, for example; I believe that's entropically driven. So you pick up a hot coal in your hand and don't allow the heat to equilibrate. A buffer version of that could give you your perpetual motion machine: you have a hot chunk of metal, a gadget that extracts energy from heat flow (even a simple steam engine), and a cold chunk of metal—but they're the ends of the same metal bar, and you're making heat flow from the cold end to the hot end.

Basically, any anti-entropic effect you like can be achieved by supplying an energy flow to power it. The magic would just let you get away with no energy flow.

how does the perpetual motion machine work by keeping heat on two different sides of the same metal bar?

Originally Posted by ULFGARD

I can see un-mixing (i.e., negating entropy), or controlling the rate of entropy increase (so making an insulator, or slowing the rate of diffusion). Another possible effect is reversing irreversible processes (restoring from ash a letter that had been destroyed, for instance). What I can't see is it adding energy to a system, and I'd be leery of situations where efficiency is greatly increased -- bad side effects of decreasing entropy in a vehicle might include much lower performance in spite of the excellent fuel economy -- without greater effects.

I rather liked the suggestion of destroying data. I can image a form of data encryption using "entropic encryption/decryption," which would be sort of cool. Another thought is to use entropy as a measure of information content, which, much as the encryption suggests, could have some very interesting consequences (destroying the functioning of a language in a given area or person).
.

can someone explain the reversing an irreversible process concept more thoroughly?

why couldn't you add energy to a system?

how does entropy interact with data?

Originally Posted by ericthered

How I would rule:

Path Of energy or matter:
manipulating heat *flows* - you could build a refrigerator, heat pump or perfect insulator.
crystalize anything made of glass (it goes bang and turns to silica dust),

Maybe Path of Chance, maybe something else:
change the polarization of light,
magnetize or demagnetize something,
build a shaped charge with any profile you like

Definately appropriate:
remove noise from a communications channel,
make something perfectly efficient (though it will depend on the exact effect)
destroy information (erase electronic storage, drown a channel in static etc.),
unmix things (separating wheat from chaff or needles from haystacks is easy), or
deaden sounds (randomizing ordered vibration, turns them to a fairly negligible amount of heat)
Another possible effect is reversing irreversible processes (restoring from ash a letter that had been destroyed, for instance).

how do people feel about these distinctions?

Originally Posted by whswhs

If you can do that then you can build a perpetual motion machine of the second kind, but not one of the first kind.

why?

Originally Posted by Clockwork_Virus

I imagine that an offensive entropy ritual would be a Strengthen or Control Chance effect with Subject Weight and Internal Toxic damage. You'd be increasing the disorder/randomness within the target's body (not sure if Strengthen or Control is more appropriate here), which results in damage on a cellular level. Adding a Fatigue Attack component to represent disruption of major physiological processes might also be appropriate.

nice offensive use.

Originally Posted by malloyd

If you go with the common definition of reverse, you may even be able to build one of the first kind. If you can unburn a letter *without* heating the ashes to glowing first, well....

can you explain why this would be true?

Originally Posted by whswhs

Entropy is a nineteenth century concept; it evolved out of scientific studies of steam engines. Having a mage in AD 1700 or AD 1250 or 500 BC even talk about "entropy," let alone having a category of spells for it, is anachronistic.

the game i'm playing in is a cinematic Jungle Opera. it is essentially indiana jones, and it takes place in 1935. i don't think it would be anachronistic for my character to understand the occult aspects of entropy manipulation.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by baronopium

the game i'm playing in is a cinematic Jungle Opera. it is essentially indiana jones, and it takes place in 1935. i don't think it would be anachronistic for my character to understand the occult aspects of entropy manipulation.

No, it wouldn't, though unless he is a physicist, chemist, or engineer, he may not really understand the theoretical foundations.

As for perpetual motion machines, let's look at one specific kind of machine, the kind whose theoretical analysis created the concept of "entropy": the heat engine. You have a piece of material at a high temperature, the source. You have a piece of material at a lot temperature, the sink. Heat will naturally "want" to move from the source to the sink. If you use a working fluid, such as air or water/steam, to carry the heat, you can extract work from the fluid in the process. Think of a steam engine. But as you do this, the source cools down, and the sink heats up, and eventually they're at the same temperature and the heat engine stops working.

Now, one way around this is to come up with a way to keep putting more heat energy into the source. (Or you could keep making heat energy vanish from the sink, so it doesn't heat up—but eventually the source will run out of energy.) Usually you do this by burning fuel or something. But if you could just make new heat energy appear out of nowhere, you could keep running the heat engine (until the source and the sink both got so hot that the whole thing vaporized, I suppose, but this is fantasy, so let's handwave that). That's a perpetual motion machine of the first kind: It violates the conservation of energy. You would need energy magic to make one of them.

But suppose, instead, you had a single bar of material that was both your source and your sink; and you cast a spell that caused the heat within it to concentrate at the source end, and move away from the sink end. The source would get hot, and the sink would get cold. You can make this happen with an external source of energy, but that's not magic. But suppose you could do this with no energy at all? You'd have a flow of heat from the source, through the engine, to the sink—and then it would go back to the source. Instead of being able to use the heat energy once, you could use it over and over, as many times as you wanted, by magically changing it from even to uneven. That's an entropy decrease, and you have a perpetual motion machine of the second kind—it uses the same energy over and over, rather than creating new energy.

If you have entropy magic, you can create that version of perpetual motion.

(Cosmically, the sun is a heat source, interstellar space is a heat sink, and the weather systems on earth, for example, are a huge heat engine that uses heat differences to move things around. Temperature differences are the key to a lot of things.)

[malloyd]

[QUOTE=baronopium;1933591]
how does the perpetual motion machine work by keeping heat on two different sides of the same metal bar?

A perpetual motion machine of the first class violates the first law of thermodynamics - it creates energy from nothing. A perpetual motion machine of the second class violates the second law - it doesn't create energy, but it does allow you to turn heat back into higher quality energy.

If you have a bar that is hot on one end and cold on the other you can run a generator on it - you can boil water on the hot end, expand it through a turbine, condense it on the cold end and repeat. In reality, this will eventually bring the two ends to the same temperature (boiling the water will absorb heat, cooling the hot end, condensing the steam will warm the cold end), but if you can force heat to flow from the cold to hot end in the bar (that is, violate the second law) you can counter that, the two ends of the bar remain at different temperatures regardless of how many times you cycle the water.

can someone explain the reversing an irreversible process concept more thoroughly?

These are technical terms in thermodynamics having to do with whether or not entropy changes as some thermodynamic variable does. In a reversible process you can undo the process and everything in the universe is the same as before you started. Imagine for example compressing an ideal spring. Ease off compressing it and it returns to its starting shape, and the energy it releases as it re-expands is exactly as much as the energy you put into compressing it in the first place. In irreversible process does not do that. If you want to return everything to its original condition, you need more energy than the system has left in it. Imagine a non-ideal spring that has set while compressed - ease off of it and it only returns part way to its original length. Some of the energy you used to compress it has turned into something from which you can't get it back.

how does entropy interact with data?

There are definitions of entropy which relate it to the logarithm of the number of microstates the system could be in that would display the same thermodynamic variables. If you have a bit of data, you have at least one microstate that *can't* be in a different state that it currently is, if it were, the data would be erased. Therefore the more data something contains, the lower its entropy has to be. This line of thinking arises from the Maxwell's Demon thought experiment - it's the entropy reduction inherent in the demon *knowing* if a molecule is fast or slow and thus whether or not to open the stopcock that ends up defeating the scheme.

can you explain why this would be true?

If you can unburn a letter, you could burn it as fuel for a steam engine, unburn it, and burn it again.... You can't unburn something by *just* changing the entropy, the unburning needs to reabsorb the heat burning it generated, so you have to supply heat too.