Elfthreads!

[Snark]

... ah, right, that would make a pretty big difference, wouldn't it. I'm too used to thinking of Feanor and Nolofinwë as rivals-by-default.

[lintamande]

They're never emotionally close but pre-Melkor's pardon Fëanor thinks it'd be great for Nolofinwe to run the Noldor, that'd free up Maitimo's time to do something actually valuable with his life, and Maitimo and Nolofinwe get along splendidly except the 'I'm secretly sleeping with your firstborn' thing.

[Unbitwise]

"Gravity follows an inverse square law, even with the infinite-rock-plane thing you've got set up there's somewhere far enough away it'd be irrelevant - I think -"

Fëanáro is of course free to be wrong in his “I think”, but the gravity (more precisely, the acceleration due to gravity) above an infinite plane is constant. Inverse square is a result that applies to a point source which an infinite plane is thoroughly not.

(That's for an infinite plane of finite thickness. I expect an infinite plane of infinite thickness — rather, a half-space — would have infinite gravity but I haven't actually done the math.)

[Nemo]

I did the math once and past me says an infinite plane is 5300 miles thick (2/3 Earth diameter) if it's going to have about one Earth gravity. But I can't ask them to show their work because all I wrote down was the final answer.
Infinitely thick is probably infinite gravity, but it's definitely more gravity than people from Earth would be used to. (Also, pile up infinite rock and eventually, I think within an AU or so, you get enough pressure that everyone's standing on supernovas all the time. Fëanáro is the first glowfic character to more or less definitively prove this is not happening.)

My own theory is that at least some of the infinite plane worlds don't have gravity at all, "as we understand it" or otherwise, and are just constantly accelerating upward.

[DanielH]

Infinite plane means gravity is independent of distance. Half-space means infinitely many infinite planes, so yes would have infinite gravity.

I think that “no conventional gravity” has been said about all the infinite plane worlds except for Dreamward, which is an infinite slab of the correct thickness and has a hole in it and demons on the other side.

[Unbitwise]

Right — I'm not making any claims about the behavior of Fairyland, only what Fëanáro's existing knowledge should be.

[DanielH]

Yeah, I figured.

Also: calculations!

According to Wikipedia, the gravitational attraction is τGd, where d is the planar density (and τ=2π). If instead we assume a slab of some material with conventional volume density ρ, then we get that the thickness of the the slab is g/τGρ. Substituting in some common values of ρ, we get:

• Air: 11.4 million miles, or about a light-minute
• Water: 14,500 miles
• Rock: 5480 miles
• Average Earth density: 2630 miles (for comparison, the Earth’s radius is about 4000 miles, so this is about a third the thickness of the Earth)
• Gold: 750 miles
• Deep space (not a perfect vacuum): 1.48 quadrillion lightyears
• Our sun: 10,300 miles
• White dwarf: 36 feet
• Neutronium: 60 nanometers

[Nemo]

https://vast-journey-9935.herokuapp.com/replies/274507#reply-274507

"Well, there's the question of why but - they're all supposed to sort of harmonize, maybe Melkor was supposed to be the one who understood incarnates."

Odds of a world where Melkor never fell, and hung around understanding incarnates while one or more of the others fell instead? (We discussed a few possible failure modes in IRC.)

Evil Manwë:

And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— among whom we all once lived.

Note that even though it was all fated ("following the course of this world"), Noldorin!Paul still describes the Elves who stayed in Valinor as "the sons of disobedience." Manwë's disobedience, not their own. Manwë doesn't need to understand Incarnates to be able to say "Eru's will is—" about random false things. If not for Melkor converting some of the Elves back to the real Plan and probably getting Angainored for it, they'd all have fallen for it. As it is, he's still at work among the Vanyar.

[jalapeno_dude]

"I can't think of a nickname and in my Arda you have not been born yet, nice to meet you too."

I'm confused about this -- this timeline has Luthien born only 31 YT after Feanor, i.e. she should be older then Maedhros, right?

[pedromvilar]

Couldn't Isabella precog arbitrarily long conversations with Elves, modulo food, by precogging an hour, then precogging bouncing that hour via osanwë and continuing from there, and so on?