Pink Party Pony Physics Problems

In my ongoing quest to wrest logical understanding from the world of magical, talking ponies, I've decided to tackle the most daunting obstacle I've yet encountered: Pinkie Pie.

Now, the common joke is that the laws of physics (and sense) simply don't apply to Pinkie. Even Twilight Sparkle, in her infinite wisdom, has declared her study to be a lost cause. I posit that this is not the case; all of the abilities displayed by Pinkie Pie (Pinkius Pieicus) can be explained in some way by (mis-)application of actual, physical laws.

The first step is to collect and collate all of Pinkie's supposed violations of physics [1]. Let's take a look at laws she's "broken":
- Newton's First Law of Motion; inertia
- The Second Law of Thermodynamics; entropy (as a gross oversimplification, "order tends to disorder" [2])
- Universal Gravitation
- Archimedes' Principle; bouyancy
- Conservation of Energy
- Conservation of Mass
- Special Relativity; the only absolute is the speed of light, and time and space are relative
- General Relativity; expansion of special relativity to encompass gravitational effects
- Causality [4]; an effect cannot precede its cause

Now, possible explanations for most of these violations are trivial, so I won't give them too much attention. Violations of Archimedes' Principle and Universal Gravitation, for example, can be explained using whatever method you choose to attribute pegasus flight to [5].

Instead, I'll focus on just a few key abilities, and how they make more sense than you might expect.

1: Teleportation
To my knowledge, there have only been two [6] instances of Pinkie Pie teleporting; one in "Call of the Cutie", and one in "A Friend in Deed". During her songs, "Cupcakes" and "Smile, Smile, Smile", she appears in two places at once; her appearances have space-like separation, meaning that the only way for her to travel between them would be to travel faster than light. Teleportation is only one way to do that, but it's the easiest to justify within the confines of MLP:FiM. Twilight Sparkle, Princess Celestia, Nightmare Moon, Discord [7], and Sunset Shimmer have all shown that teleportation is allowed under the show's rules.

As to how teleportation would be possible at all, my answer involves wormholes. Were one to link a black hole and a white hole [8] together, holding them stable in such a way that one could pass through the black hole without encountering the singularity or causing the wormhole to collapse, then one could step into one end and out the other, traveling across space-time much quicker than the speed of light would otherwise allow. In fact, were one to accelerate one end of the wormhole, one could create a time machine. Now, our current understanding of physics suggests that, were it even possible for a wormhole to form, it would require either exotic matter or vast quantities of energy to keep it open. It's possible, though, that Equestria's unicorns have managed to find a way around these restrictions, allowing them to create wormholes at will.

Other possibilities include cosmic strings (get one spinning fast enough, and space-time throws up its arms in confusion) and the Alcubierre drive (warp space in front of you and behind you; relative to your surroundings, you're stationary, but your "bubble" can travel faster than light). Any of these methods would work, and the differences are mainly academic. The end result is a pony who can appear in two places at one time [9].

2: Pinkie Sense
Pinkie Pie is occasionally party to a bizarre phenomenon, whereby a specific sensation in her body can accurately and infallibly predict a certain event in the future. In other words, the effect (say, a twitchy tail) precedes the cause (a falling plant pot). This seems to violate not only physical law, but also reason and common sense. Actually, though, it's brilliant.

There is only one condition under which the Pinkie Sense must operate: If the prediction made by the Pinkie Sense is true, then the event it predicts must take place. This seems to be a tautology; if the prediction is true, then the prediction is true. However, we are given one additional fact: the Pinkie Sense is never wrong. What this means is that Pinkie Pie can never prevent an event predicted by her Pinkie Sense. Nor can anypony else, for that matter. It also means that, for the Pinkie Sense to be both useful and feasible, it must be vague [10].

Let's say a flowerpot is about to fall on Twilight's head. Say the Pinkie Sense were more specific; maybe a combo of twitchy tail + growling stomach + pinchy knee corresponds to "flowerpot on Twilight's head". Any possible sequence of events in which the flowerpot fails to land on Twilight is then immediately and irrevocably given a probability of zero, making the Pinkie Sense almost entirely pointless. If, however, the only information given by the Sense is that something will fall, there is now the possibility of sparing Twilight from said flowerpot. It then falls to Pinkie to interpret the signals, which she has shown herself to be remarkably proficient at.

So, given that the Pinkie Sense is at least logically consistent, we are still left with the question of how it works. If you've been following along, you'll note that I've actually already answered this question; if Pinkie can travel faster than light, then she can travel back in time. In the case of the Pinkie Sense, however, it could just as easily be nervous responses that travel back in time. The sequence of events, from the perspective of the information given by the Sense, is this: flowerpot falls in the future, Pinkie Sense is triggered, response travels back in time, Pinkie Pie's tail twitches in the present. It doesn't have to be a conscious decision to send back the signals, either; when Celestia fell at the end of "Feeling Pinkie Keen", Pinkie never saw.

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Notes:
[1]: "Physics" is used here as a blanket term, covering such topics as mechanics, dynamics, statics, fluids, relativity, quantum mechanics, etc. In short, any method by which properties and interactions of physical systems may be modeled.

[2]: Entropy is, in a sense, a measure of the number of possible states of a system. It's actually a heavily statistical concept, with strong ties to both quantum mechanics and probability theory. The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of a closed system can never decrease; one consequence of this is that there can be no thermodynamic system with the sole consequence that heat is transferred from a hotter body to a cooler one. In fact, the concept of temperature is defined in relation to entropy. Another consequence is that, on macroscopic scales, order will never [3] arise spontaneously from disorder. It's a fascinating topic, and one that I would love to discuss in depth.

[3]: "Never" is a tricky word. Strictly speaking, under certain interpretations, anything is possible. In cases relating to entropy, though, the probabilities are on the order of 1:1*10^(10)^(23); you'd have to wait longer than the lifetime of several universes to see something like this occur.

[4]: Causality is not strictly a physical law; rather, it is a concept required for all other physical laws to make sense.

[5]: I use helium, personally. When I finally get around to my "Peganalysis" segments, you'll see my reasoning. As to why Pinkie, an earth pony, can use pegasus-exclusive flight science, I can only guess.

[6]: Any other instance of nigh-instantaneous travel can be explained without invoking teleportation, if one grants that Pinkie Pie is the fastest thing alive when she wants to be.

[7]: For now, I'm giving Discord a pass on all laws of physics. His abilities, then, really shouldn't be taken as an example.

[8]: A time-reversed black hole. Where nothing can escape from the event horizon of a black hole after falling in, a white hole is a region into which nothing can fall. No-one has ever seen one, and there is no currently-known mechanism by which one could form.

[9]: Again, the difficulty is in explaining how Pinkie Pie can perform unicorn magic.

[10]: If you want more information about why this is, see the Novikov self-consistency principle, or the law of conservation of history.

Comments

[devas]

This is actually brilliant and funny! Have an internet! :-)

[Gizogin]

1218928

Huzzah! This brings my grand total of collected internets to:
1 Internet(s)

Ooh, extra fun fact: a properly-constructed experiment could utilize the Pinkie Sense to solve almost any problem on the first try. All you have to do is set things up so that, after the Pinkie Sense has predicted something, getting the wrong answer would cause that prediction to be false. Then, because paradoxes are impossible under self-consistency, the first answer will always be the correct one.