Wild Speculation

[minced]

Hello, I'm new, and I registered so I could post my own baseless speculation regarding the seed Bismuth.

I've always wondered why Tom chose Bismuth to describe the foundation of the court (from the "Seed Bismuth"). If nobody has a better explanation, it may be because Bismuth crystals grow into a shape resembling a city - see attachment. Also, a "Seed" crystal is a starter crystal upon which a larger crystal grows.

So. Is "Seed Bismuth" a chemical reference instead of an alchemical reference?

Attachments:

[Per]

I think any references and connections are fair game; compare the whole Antimony-Stibnite-Surma thing.

[GK Sierra]

Feb 8, 2013 21:17:34 GMT minced said:

Hello, I'm new, and I registered so I could post my own baseless speculation regarding the seed Bismuth.

I've always wondered why Tom chose Bismuth to describe the foundation of the court (from the "Seed Bismuth"). If nobody has a better explanation, it may be because Bismuth crystals grow into a shape resembling a city - see attachment. Also, a "Seed" crystal is a starter crystal upon which a larger crystal grows.

So. Is "Seed Bismuth" a chemical reference instead of an alchemical reference?

I think it's a bit of both. Alchemy is a major theme within the comic, plus Bismuth has the longest half life of any element on the periodic table so that could be why it was picked.

It's full-life (The time in which it takes a sample to decay completely into its daughter element, thallium 205) is 38 exayears, or 38 quintillion years (38,000,000,000,000,000,000 years). The universe is only ~432.3 quadrillion seconds old. A quintillion is a thousand times a quadrillion. This means that the full life of Bismuth-209 is 277.36 trillion times longer than the age of the universe.

...or Tom just pasted all the elements up on the wall and hurled darts at them while blindfolded. The world may never know.

[imaginaryfriend]

Welcome to the forum, Minced!

Maybe there are parallels to be made between how crystals form, how biological entities grow, and how kids mature.

[Nnelg]

Feb 9, 2013 4:15:20 GMT GK Sierra said:

[Bi-209's] full-life (The time in which it takes a sample to decay completely into its daughter element, thallium 205) is 38 exayears, or 38 quintillion years (38,000,000,000,000,000,000 years).

Um, no that's not how it works.

Radioactive decay is an exponential decay, not a linear one. That means the mass that's left is given by:

M(t) = M(0)*(1/2)^(t/λ)

So, if after one half-life you're left with half of your original sample, after another half-life you'll lose half of the remainder. (You'd be left with one-quarter.)

This is because when an unstable atom decays is completely random. Any one atom has a 50% chance of decaying within the next half-life of time. Since usually people deal with sextillions of atoms, we can safely assume that half of a sample will decay in that time. (The odds of it being significantly different are like every single person on Earth winning the lottery.)

[GK Sierra]

Feb 10, 2013 21:46:07 GMT Nnelg said:

Feb 9, 2013 4:15:20 GMT GK Sierra said:

[Bi-209's] full-life (The time in which it takes a sample to decay completely into its daughter element, thallium 205) is 38 exayears, or 38 quintillion years (38,000,000,000,000,000,000 years).

Um, no that's not how it works.

Radioactive decay is an exponential decay, not a linear one. That means the mass that's left is given by:

M(t) = M(0)*(1/2)^(t/λ)

So, if after one half-life you're left with half of your original sample, after another half-life you'll lose half of the remainder. (You'd be left with one-quarter.)

This is because when an unstable atom decays is completely random. Any one atom has a 50% chance of decaying within the next half-life of time. Since usually people deal with sextillions of atoms, we can safely assume that half of a sample will decay in that time. (The odds of it being significantly different are like every single person on Earth winning the lottery.)

Well then, it's a good thing I'm just citing a fun fact and not writing an essay on particle physics, isn't it?

[alexh]

I think maybe Kat's work on protein crystals will somehow intersect with the Seed Bismuth, given what Minced has said.

[TBeholder]

I just had a funny thought.
Surma: fits to be a medium, though way too wild and not too attentive with people (and in the end messed up because of this).
Antimony: same, except can keep this fire under a wall of tungsten carbide if she needs to, and ended up befriending almost everything that moves in the Court too, including people with whom her acquaintance had a bad start, once she put a token effort into this. All in all - better as a Medium.
Donlans: a strong magic-user with some scientifical streak and a talented rockets&robots nerd. They are really cool, what's with that magical computer. And then...
Kat: managed to actually use the First Generation golem gallery where her parents failed, capable of reading the untranslated code of evolved golems at least to some degree and planning to vastly improve on the design.
Jonathan: a passable Headmaster who makes some quite sensible decisions (from what he sees), if not too keen.
Janet: no-nonsense, classy young lady, good at keeping secrets, can make people follow her fancy ideas, willful, but can follow plans someone competent proposed, as well as devise her own. I wonder, at what sort of a job she could be very good?
Noticed a pattern?
So... "man's endeavor to become God", you say?..

[ravenswd]

OK, something I just thought of - and maybe someone else has mentioned it, but this thread is already 72 freakin pages and I ain't reading all of it just to check - Have you noticed that the zombie headmaster always refers to "The Court"? As in, "The Court has made its decision."

We always assume that he's using the name of the establishment as a shortcut to refer to the people who run the establishment, like when people reporting the news say, "The White House announced that blah blah blah something something something."

But...

What if he isn't?

What if, when he says, "The Court has decided," he means that Gunnerkrigg Court, itself, is the thing that made the decision?





Just thought I'd toss that out there.

[GK Sierra]

So the Court is actually the body of a massive artificial intelligence which has designs of its own?

I'll buy it. But only because the Headmaster looks like a big grey puppet being controlled by animatronics in his chair.

[Bandersnatch]

Then what of his daughter?

Or perhaps he only became a puppet after he became headmaster.

THEY OFF'D HIM.

[Deleted]

Feb 15, 2013 6:55:30 GMT ravenswd said:

...
Just thought I'd toss that out there.

I actually rather like this theory, but one thing that may put a dent in it is Eglamore's "I was sure they'd pick Annie!"

I suppose it could still work, but it has little precedent or supporting evidence apart from ambiguous wordplay. Still, it would be nifty.

[Georgie L]

Anthony Carver is laughing.

/tinfoilhat

yeah that was more of a joke than anything.

[imaginaryfriend]

It didn't really sink in for a couple days, and might not have occurred to me at all if it hadn't been brought up tangentially in the MTG thread recently, and then I forgot to post it when I did think of it, but Robot was found in a room labeled "[no] spare robot parts" in a box labeled "spare #13."

Assuming the missing arm was used to replace a faulty arm on on an in-service S class robot, with all the S's we've seen this chapter (ch. 41) I speculate that we have probably seen Robot's missing arm.

[Toloc]

Found this on this Tumblr (walrus-is-walrus)

[EDIT]
Original tumblr quote for clarification:

the court has already succeeded and they don’t even know it. continuity is gonna get fucked. click through for legible.

[/EDIT]



Daaamn

[Nnelg]

Feb 19, 2013 8:54:39 GMT Toloc said:

Daaamn

I've been trying to point out that one for a while now...

[Toloc]

Sorry if you already pointed this out. I spend relatively little time in this thread.
I just found this on tumblr and was like

Whoa, that makes sense

[Per]

I do believe most of us have read all of those panels.

[imaginaryfriend]

Paradox or not paradox depends on what "gods" and supernatural creatures like Coyote are.

[Per]

Feb 19, 2013 15:38:57 GMT imaginaryfriend said:

Paradox or not paradox depends on what "gods" and supernatural creatures like Coyote are.

[legion]

I side with Per here: what is being pointed out, what is making sense???

You've just showed pannels of the comics, that is not "making a point" all by itself, you have to use words.

[imaginaryfriend]

Feb 19, 2013 18:42:22 GMT legion said:

I side with Per here: what is being pointed out, what is making sense???

You've just showed pannels of the comics, that is not "making a point" all by itself, you have to use words.

You have to click through to the tumblr that was quoted: "the court has already succeeded and they don’t even know it. continuity is gonna get fucked." Or to put it another way, humans are already God and what Coyote is saying is a paradox, therefore either retroactive causality or the comic Gunnerkrigg Court is logically inconsistent in and of itself.

However to get the paradox you have to force a particular definition onto what/who Coyote is.

[GK Sierra]

So according the this time travel hypothesis, Jones is a creation of the Court that was abandoned at the beginning of time?

I wonder what her connection to the ether is.

[Nnelg]

Feb 19, 2013 13:11:38 GMT Toloc said:

Sorry if you already pointed this out. I spend relatively little time in this thread.

I didn't post it on this thread; also, I said I've been trying to point this out, not that I succeeded.

Feb 19, 2013 19:14:54 GMT imaginaryfriend said:

Or to put it another way, humans are already God and what Coyote is saying is a paradox, therefore either retroactive causality or the comic Gunnerkrigg Court is logically inconsistent in and of itself.

I don't think that's what it's saying. (It certainly isn't the message I got.)

I interpreted it like this: If Coyote's right, then humans are the most powerful beings on the planet, being the source of great power. But no individual controls where it goes and what it does. The Court is trying to channel it, bend it to their own ends. But there exists one human who can do so naturally...


You think Coyote stopping time was powerful? Well, Zimmy could potentially rewrite it.

[imaginaryfriend]

Except Zimzams can't control it. But not trying to quibble, just trying to summarize the argument briefly. Went with God-with-a-capital-G because those abilities are typically associated with that figure and because Coyote's quote about Man's endeavor was used.

[Nnelg]

Feb 20, 2013 3:46:58 GMT imaginaryfriend said:

Except Zimzams can't control it.

But the power is there, is it not?


In fact... I think you may have just explained the "continuity is gonna get ******" quote...



(Either that, or I'm completely misinterpreting it. Oh well; I like my own idea better anyways.) ;D

[gary]

Strikes me as a very straightforward argument.

The court are trying to gain power by messing with ether to become god.

The theory is that when they succeed what they create is Zimmy, who due to the lack of respect ether has for cause and effect, existed before the experiments reached completion.

[GK Sierra]

Feb 20, 2013 11:52:37 GMT gary said:

The theory is that when they succeed what they create is Zimmy, who due to the lack of respect ether has for cause and effect, existed before the experiments reached completion.

So Zimmy is an unstable example of a new kind of human that can manipulate ether on-demand that the court hope to create/augment? I could see the advantages to doing that. They wouldn't have to look all over hither and yon for etheric candidates like some sort of British Dr. Xavier. They could take any old person and make them special.

[Nnelg]

Feb 20, 2013 11:52:37 GMT gary said:

The theory is that when they succeed what they create is Zimmy, who due to the lack of respect ether has for cause and effect, existed before the experiments reached completion.

Ah, that makes sense.

If true, it would also shed new light on the progression of Zimmy's "problems", especially concerning how the Power Station's involved. If the effects of a single event could be likened to ripples in a pond (only the ripples are moving in time, not space- and backwards in time at that) then things are only going to get more severe the closer we get to what I'm dubbing "the Singularity". What happens at, or after the Singularity is anyones guess; in fact so too is whether or not there will even be an "after".


Of course, the exact same events could be interpreted as merely an unusually sensitive individual reacting to the experiment in a drastic manner.

So, I conclude that it'll be as non-causal as anything in quantum physics is.

[aaroncampbell]

So I wonder when Kat will become the ambassador for the robots? (Somehow medium just doesn't seem the right word.) I mean yes, they work for the Court and all, but it sure looks like the partnership is becoming more unstable and uneasy, or at least great potential is there...