Daevinity Worldbuilding Info

[Alicorn]

I don't know what you're asking. I've shown Cam making things with charged batteries...?

[DanielH]

I mean an object posessing a net electrical charge. A battery is still electrically neutral; you extract energy by moivng the charge from one part of a battery to another. I mean somrthing like a balloon you have rubbed on your hair and can then stick to the wall: it is not electrically neutral, and instead has a different number of electrons and protons (your hair acquired an equal and opposite charge in the case where you charged the balloon by rubbing it against your hair). I don't see why Cam couldn't make something with a nonzero net charge, but I also don't see why he couldn't make something in motion relative to himself. Given that he can't do the latter, it seemed worth asking whether or not he could do the former.

[Bluelantern]

Maybe they should unionise.

Daeva worker rights now!

I am now vaguely wondering how it would look like if a Demon created something big without any electrons, if it is even possible, I suppose Alicorn could rule it out....?

[DanielH]

It would look bad. Probably one of the most destructive things they can do in deep space or before the discovery of the black hole (if they can make charged objects, they would have discovered the electron much sooner than humans did). Possibly almost on a level with antimatter in terms of destructive potenial, actually.

Then again, with what we've seen they can get most of that potential *anyway* even if their creations do need to be net electrically neutral, by separating the positive and negative charges..

[Shoal]

Ok, that last question (by way of an obscure pun*) reminds me: can demons create charged objects, or angels change an object’s electric charge (the alternative would be daeva being bound by law of conservation of charge)?

:D how do you tell an engineer from a chemist?

[Kappa]

Okay, I'm curious, what actually would happen with the lack of electrons?

[Alicorn]

I don't see why Cam couldn't make a staticky balloon. Or something without any electrons. Not that I have much idea what the implications are, so maybe the implications are terrible and I must cut it off here.

[DanielH]

Electromagnetism is a very strong force. If you make, say, a 1 kg iron ball but neglect the electrons, you get about 1 kg of iron nucleii. This has a charge of about 45 megacoulombs. This is a lot of charge, and it takes up a rather small space. As like charges repel, this sphere of iron nucleii becomes a huge explosion (if my quick calculations are corrext, about 350 septillion joules, about 83 million gigatons of TNT, or about 1.5 billion Tsar Bombas). This is actually about 25 billion times as much energy as one kilogram of matter-antimatter explosion; I'm not sure if that means my calculations are wrong or my intuition that the matter-antimatter explosion must be bigger is wrong.

The thing is, demons and angels can obviously make separated charges (or batteries and even atoms would be impossible), so a demon could just make a one-kilogram iron ball without its electrons in one hand, and all the electrons as far away as possible (getting two giant explosions, and a bonus path of added destruction between the two). I think this just needs to be categories under “demons are DANGEROUS” and “angels can change this sort of thing, but only a certain amount”.

EDIT: In case anybody is interested, equation 601 here is one of the places with the formula for the electrostatic energy of a uniformly charged sphere (I have no clue if the site’s reliable and haven’t checked the math, but I’ve seen the same equation floating around a few other places), and the (unnatotated, but with that paper it should be easy enough to reverse engineer) equation I entered into Google is

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((1 kg / (55.845 amu) * 26 electron charge)^2 * 3/5 * (1/(4 * pi * 8.854187817e-12 F/m)) / (1 kg / (7.87 g/cm^3) * 3/4 / pi)^(1/3))

[Alicorn]

Cool! A new way for demons to be dangerous! I don't think this contradicts canon anywhere because Cam has never wanted to set off a large and indiscriminate explosion.

[DanielH]

It occurs to me that a really useful weapon in a demon-angel battle would be a large train or other vehicle moving at high velocity. What was on the train wouldn't much matter, but “a bunch of letters and packages” would be one such option.

Why do the postal workers not just force their way into the battle, if their usual tool for mail delivery during concordances happens to be such a weapon?