The sun.
Burning, hot, aegeus of eternal flame; the life blood of Equestria; the single most powerful, and very nearly heaviest object in the immediate universe. For years, ponies have pondered on the mysterious inner workings of this majestic beast but all have rout in defeat.
And now today, with the help of some generous prodding from Princess Twilight Sparkle, Celestia finally reveals her secret.
Kinda.
Based on a discussion about the mechanics of moving the sun on a cartoon horse fiction site about technicolor ponies.
Big thank you to Samey90 for help with editing.
Chapters (2)
Well, that was fun. A ton of fun. Possibly even a Butt-ton of fun. Your explanation at the end seems much more plausible than mine. I always thought it was powered by a secret cabal of alcohol-fueled wooden robot priests.
8898465
Robotic priests!?
Hm.... Very interesting...
If there's a scientist in the room, please clarify the legitness of this.
Aside from that, an amusing and intriguing read.
8898659
Thank you!
I have a doctorate in ponyology, and I confirm that this does contain ponies. That's about all I can do, though.
The sun ain't real cause man's not hot. (Never hot.)
And the significance of clove leaf tea is... what?
Twi has a skirt fetish, doesn’t she?
8898994
They're both high, basically.
8899012
Oh, thanks for clarifying that
8899012 8899014
Not exactly what I intended, but sure, we can roll with that.
8898997
Hm... Perhaps. That does raise some questions, though.
8898659
I suspect that right until we got to the highly technical aspect everything lines up...however when Twilight asked why every thing didn't get flung into space I suspected Celly had failed 5th grade physics.
Because gravity.
Is this part of Diaries of a Madman then?
8899165
I've not read that, so no. Why? Is there some overlap?
Naa. It's a light bulb.
8899394
The ultimate conspiracy.
Some typos/suggestions:
not turned fellow princess.
-now
However do you mean, Twilight?” she said.
- What do you mean (or if you want that fake politeness "How ..."_
followed suite
- followed suit
She made a mental not to get Twilight
-note
She gave s tern nod,
-stern
Celestia slurped her tea then set the pot to pouring her a new cup, one with a little extra kick to it, this time.
- pour herself
Any small alterations would,
- (IMHO singular form here would be better) alteration
Luna’s steps turned into a trot, then a gallop, and then an all out run as Twilight and Celestia sat in silence.
- gallop is the fastest "run", try: trot, canter, gallop.
Her forehead creased in to a scowl and, at last, she looked up to Twilight. “What.”
- she looked up to Celestia
Twilight, shivering, Sparkle, jerked her head up, snapped out of her dumbfounded stupor.
???
Twilight added a scrunch, causing a sudden lance of pain through Celestia’s chest.
- made a scrunch ? / scrunched up ?
Then, Twilight’s face contorted in a manner of ways Celestia could only describe as heart wrenchingly
- in all manner of ways
Chapter #2
The Alicorn of Books, and benefits, was currently huddled behind her desk, muzzle pressed down over the last page o her junior thesis on sinology.
- the last page of her
The quill continued scribbling, unattended as Twilight directed all of her attention t the young drake-turned maid.
- attention to the young
8899216 The fact that Celestia controls earth's rotation and the short skirts and explosions bit.
Okay, I'm not a physicist but I have done some stuff on planets and how they work before so let's see how good the science is here.
Okay, a matrix made up of multiple spells acting together. Do Parts A, B and C align to the three things specified here - caster, planet, residents? Let's see.
So A is about the planet... Standard levitation field - so normal telekinesis. Temporal-spatial distortion array using gravitation warp... hm. So... They're using the natural gravitational energy of the planet itself and redirecting it into the telekinesis field to make it strong enough to- okay.
Planet has energy. Telekinesis field around planet. Spell redirects and feeds planet energy to telekinesis field, so you're using the planets own energy to move it, just in a way you want it to, without using up any of Celestia's magic. She just logs in and gives it directions. Huh. Okay. I guess.
This is basically... right, so moving through space doesn't have any friction to slow you down, and if you're moving you might end up going too fast because there's nothing to stop if you put in anything a bit too much. So the spell compensates...?
Alterations above 8 Celestiatons... gravitational constants... So the Sun is around 500 Celestiatonnes in mass, right? A little over, but not enough to instead be 'nearly 600', so between 500-549. If the relationship between the Sun here and the planet here is similar to ours, then the Sun has 333,000 times the mass of the planet, which would put it at... 0.0015 to 0.0015 Celestiatonnes. (One Celestiatonne seems to be about 3.978x1024 earth tonnes, for comparison.) I'm not sure 8 Celestiatonnes is small... unless Celestiatonnes follow some sort of... exponential thing rather than a linear sequence because doubling the diamter gets more each time. Hmmm, okay, I'm gonna say that might check out?
I don't want to do any more maths.
Gravitational constant is about the relationship between two objects - the mass and the distance. So what they'd be compensating for here would be the slight changes in distance brought about by manually moving a planet - I mean most orbits are somewhat elliptical in nature but that change is gradual and not really that relevant.
So Part B... does it feed into/draw from Part A's spacio-temporal stuff and... relocate the energy from the gravitational force through time? It takes the increase from getting too close to the Sun and adds it to the decrease on the moving away from it? But only up to a certain amount of to-be-expected wobble, right? So onto Part C...
Bigger differences have to be mathematically mapped by Part C? It's basically the control panel and gets a secondary energy from the gravity- oh, right, the no-friction-through-space thing and potential speed ups - so extra energy not required to balance out the speed of the planet gets rerouted to maintaining the inertia stuff. I think that makes sense?
So - Part A - telekinesis field steals planet's own gravitational energy to move planet, sometimes becomes too speedy because space has no friction and magic is weird.
Part B - helps offset weirdnesses with speed changes that might happen to the planet's residents as it moves; also the planet's energy does different weird stuff as it moves away and towards the sun so it reroutes the energy through time to even stuff out, but only up to a certain amount of too-close-too-far-ness.
Part C - siphons off the extra speed from part A and sets up a secondary anti-weirdness thing to stop the weird effects of speeding up/slowing down/changing distance between the planet and the sun even more, but this time powered by the planet itself so the casters don't have to expend so much energy and can continue to function.
Celestia can 'log in' and adjust the coding of these functions, basically. Her magic is the password.
Did I get that right?
You know, this actually explains why all those unicorns who raised the sun lost their powers forever - if weird space-time things are involved then the spell took the magic from their whole futures, too. (Starswirl wasn't affected, but Starswirl studied time magic...
)
All right then...
First up, if Equestria is a normal planet, in a normal solar system, subject to normal physics, then none of this has any point. It's like discussing who moves the sun in the real world and ignoring that no one has to.
Second up, the very first episode showed that Equestria ignores conservation of mass (Rainbow producing many gallons of rain from a small cloud), basic geometry (Rainbow's ability to criss-cross the sky clearing clouds in ten seconds while remaining clearly visible; that is a LOT of miles), and Newton's laws of emotion (where are the clouds transmitting the forces exerted on them to?). Sonic Rainboom showed that the sun was close enough for Rarity to approach with a brief period of flight (if she hadn't closed much of the distance, the effective temperature would not have gone up) and was small enough to be occluded by her wings (otherwise her divergent rainbow effect would have been washed out instead of coloring Cloudsdale). Yet the sun is also supposed to be large enough and far enough away to provide reasonably even heating across hundreds of miles - unless, of course, as shown later (with both day and night in the sky at once) it's essentially a magical effect and not actually a star as we know them.
Pegasi whirlwinds, sending water to Cloudsdale, basic unicorn telekinesis... the show is constantly violating real-wold physics in many many ways even when no unicorn or alicorn magic is involved.
As for this...
Part I either negates rotational inertia or produces energy from a static field, violating conservation or energy. Since both are conservation principles and the various conservation principles are linked, this would negate all of them. It also means that Equestria, now without mass in terms of physics, can only move at the speed of light and will no longer experience time.
Part II sounds like it is matching the acceleration of things on the planet to the planet, to avoid suddenly having the planet moving far differently from the things on it. On the other hand, since the first part is negating inertia, this will result in instantaneous acceleration to light speed (presuming that the atmosphere and items on the surface were treated as a unit with the planet by part I. If they were not, they are already wandering off at light speed).
Part III seems to be saying that they've installed a system that automatically handles most of the computation involved in balancing the forces involved. This would help if the first two parts were workable. Of course, modifying the "gravitational well" is modifying the potential energy of the universe. It also will not have any real result when you are already negating conservation principles.
Since you did ask... it's a fairly tasty bit of word salad, but it's still technobabble.
8899590
But aren't celestiatonnes an exponential scale? That would make their sun indescribably huge- if it's (800)^500 kg.
8899850
That really depends on what the actual original value of a celestiatonne is. While 500 celestiatonnes is the mass of the Sun... I'm not great with complex maths, but. Would the value of the celestiatonne not decrease as you go down?
If one celestiatonne is 3.978x1024 earth tonnes at 500 if the suns are roughly the same, then to find out the value of just 1 at 1 you'd have to go down, right? Would it... something... by pi? 4? If it's diameter then? Divide by x every time you go down, basically Ack, I can't maths
If you wanted to work out the original from the original, you'd have to know about the mass of cake that one needs to consume to double the diameter of Celestia's leg, so you would have to factor in Celestia's bodily entropy and know how bioavailable the nutrients are from the exact constituents in the cake and how efficient her metabolism is. And consider the % of converted body fat that ends up in her legs. Oh wow. That's kind of creepy, Twilight.
Anyway, that's not something we can really check.
Anyway, the value of the celestiatonne would decrease as it goes down. I think?
Sorry if this is badly worded, it's 4am.
Lets be honest, none of us read all that sciencey bit
8899913
I read it 3 times over trying to understand it. I'm an engineering nerd, and the possibility that this story had some actual in depth physics in it was too awesome to ignore!
8898659
Oh, goody! Someone is asking people to nerd out! I love nerding out.
There's a lot of terminology in it that modern science doesn't have -- but that's probably because they're aliens in a universe with alien physics and had to invent their own terminology for things.
Basically, my reading of it was "you just have to dump a lot of power into blah blah blah spell terms I don't understand, and then do some other magic stuff to keep the sudden acceleration from hurting people".
Which implies that the spell would by default not consider the ponies themselves 'part of the planet', or that changes in velocity are somehow intrinsically harmful in this universe. (In ours, the only danger in a rapid change in velocity is because the objects around you are changing velocity down, and friction and against those surfaces is what changes your velocity to match, but there's a period in which some parts of you are moving at different speeds than other parts, which causes mechanical stress...)
And then there was the gravitational constant changing thing... which doesn't happen in our universe, AFAIK. But, again, this is a different universe.
In our universe, you could just give the planet a kick start once, and it'd keep spinning from inertia. So my guess is either they don't have quite Newtonian style physics, or they've got some opposing force that's slow the planet's rotation down, e.g. some diamagnatism-type thing that only happens in proportion to the planet's rotation (which explains why it wouldn't start spinning the other way on its own).
Ultimately, it's just really hard to say because this is an alien culture in an alien universe. It doesn't contradict itself, but it definitely contradicts our physics on a number of levels, I'd say.
And as for the "logging in" thing, it totally made sense! There's not a lot of energy going in at all, so the casting is very easy!
As for the vaguely mathy bits, I wasn't really following at all because I'm sleepy and let's be honest the writer probably didn't bother to invent an entire self-consistent physics to go with this oneshot.
8899590
Awesome analysis! I didn't think of the spell converting momentum into stored 'spell energy' and back with my attempt. And I was too lazy to do that much of a breakdown. Good job!
My only confusion with that idea and the assumption of inertia working just like it does in our universe, is why can't Celesta just set an appropriate rotational period and have it work the old fashioned way? Why does it have to be micromanaged like this even? I'd say for them to go through all the trouble, Newtonian physics may not be a safe guess here!
8899505
Fixes made, thank you!
8899511
Ah. Well it must've been coincidence, and Samey fed me the idea of putting in Short Skirts and Explosions as my second author cameo.
8899590
Wew, fantastic analysis! I think you've put more though into this than even I have.
I like your ideas, and yes, it was mentioned about half-way through that Celestiatonnes are exponential. It was based on Decibels, except in reverse. So with a starting circumfrerence for Celestia's ass being 1 meter, one Celestiatonne of cake would increase it to 2 meters. 2 Celestiatonnes makes it 4, three makes it 8, 4 is 16, etc...
So based on this, and on which parts if the spell each sister explained, Celestia became a princess by dumping the problem onto somepony (well, in this case, something) else. That explains so much.
On another topic, I suspect that there is a math error floating around somewhere. Since, according to Twilight, their sun is more massive than the entire visible universe (If anyone's interested, that's about 3*1052 kg[1], including dark matter and energy).
And I read the title as "Butt that is impossible".
Anyway that was very enlightening story.
I think you mean argon.
I have a feeling there's something I'm missing here, some kind of pun or similarity that makes this chapter make sense. Is there a person named Aragon (outside of the writer on this site) who is particularly linked to short skirts and explosions? If so, that would imply that the misconstrued name of the element argon is intentional, invalidating my earlier comment. Either way, I'm missing the joke--would someone care to explain?
8901028
No. But both are writers on this site that are inexplicably linked to cartoon horse fiction.
8899913
I did! Because I'm an astrophysicist who actually enjoys science babble. On that note:
BULL-SHITE! If the Sun has a mass of 800 Celestiatonnes, that's 800^500 kg = 3.5*10^1451 kg. The mass of the observable universe is ~ 3*10^52 kg. This is what in science is known as a VERY BIG PROBLEM. If you go with multiplication instead of exponentiation, it's almost as bad: 800*500 = 4*10^5 kg, which is less than a small mountain.
While I enjoyed Luna's explanation of the mechanics of the spell, this kind of numerical error is almost unforgivable.
8901159
Heh, fair enough. I forgot to check the actual math in that part, having written the entire concept whilst travelling.
*Reads story, sees comments*
Good Lord, and here I thought Star Wars dorks arguing over the Endor Holocaust was needless nerdity.
Have a thumbs up anyway, author, for ridiculously pedantic fan behavior.
8901208
Thank you! Believe me, I'm loving every bit of it. It's always amazing to see people adding value in ways I'd never expected. And part of the intention was to get people talking about this, since it spawned from a thread on the exact same topic.
8901239
I suppose. Myself I always favored the ideas that either the sun and moon were artificial constructs of some kind, or that the unicorns were dirty rotten liars and the Sisters simply didn't tell the truth to help solidify their position when they came to power.
KISS principle, after all.
8901250
Ah, yeah. Normally I subscribe to them being more or less the same as our universe. I've never had to deal with the mechanics of how it works before, though, so this was a fun exercise in 'wat'-inducing.
NNNNEEEEEERRRRRDDD
Boooo!
Go home with this thumbs up and feel feelings!
Some writers engage in world-building. Some authors excel at world-deconstruction, explaining the previously unexplained.
Some just want to watch the world burn.
So thanks for that.
8902754
It was my pleasure.
Huh. Somewhere between Mass Effect and Star Trek in terms of the magical physics involved. And I do quite like the idea of enchanting the sun with the global rotation spell for no-muss, no-fuss transitions. All told, a most enjoyable bit of silly world building. Thank you for it.
8910778
I'm glad to hear you liked it.
Silly worldbuilding is best worldbuilding, as I always say -- right now, this time.
Oh no, it's definitely powered by short skirts and explosions.
Wait, so you're telling me when it comes to equestrian alicorn magic, Luna is the scientist and Celestia is the engineer? Sounds about right.
What... Did I just read?
8901018
Perhaps Equestria's sun does contain Aragorn? One of the few things that could, I suppose.