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#41 | |
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Gothenburg, Sweden
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“When you arise in the morning think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love ...” Marcus Aurelius Author of Winged Folk. The GURPS Discord. Drop by and say hi! |
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#42 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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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.
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
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#43 |
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Gothenburg, Sweden
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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...
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“When you arise in the morning think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love ...” Marcus Aurelius Author of Winged Folk. The GURPS Discord. Drop by and say hi! |
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#44 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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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.
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
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#45 | ||||||
Join Date: Nov 2009
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that took quite the philosophical turn. with regard to using the path of chance rituals to manipulate entropy:
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how does the perpetual motion machine work by keeping heat on two different sides of the same metal bar? Quote:
why couldn't you add energy to a system? how does entropy interact with data? Quote:
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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. |
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#46 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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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.)
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
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#47 | |||
Join Date: Jun 2006
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[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. Quote:
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Tags |
entropy, path of chance, rituals, rpm |
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