Gaming - The System of the World, Part 1

 

 Note, then, that for each Effect, there is a Cause, and that the Cause must be proportional to the Effect, and that Causes can be compounded by their increase in both magnitude and type; however, an imbalance in Causes must of necessity create an imbalance of Effects.  Further, the compounded Causes are such that no lesser Cause may produce a greater Effect, nor even shall be equal to the Effect, save by proportion, for in all matter there is resistance to action in proportion to its mass.

    - Isaac Newton, "Principles of Alchemy," 1686

---

For about a year, I've been trying to figure out how to create what I think of as "magic Chernobyl," or rather a magical equivalent to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster without resorting to it as simply "big explosion, deal with it."  Finally, two days ago, it came to me pretty much fully-formed.

The basis of diversion is that the classical Greek elements - earth, fire, air, and water - are expressions of universal forces, and that each of these forces can be bound to an object, and multiple bindings increase the effect and complexity of the binding.  So, for instance, the steam engine is a binding of fire and water; an artillery charge is fire and air; an artillery shell is fire and earth.  The first is meant to be a permanent, or at least a stable, binding; the artillery examples are bindings where the bind is only meaningful to release the energy it contains.  What does this have to do with Chernobyl?

A nuclear binding is a four-way bind; containing all four elements in tension is a difficult and dangerous activity, producing a tremendous amount of energy simply from the resulting tension.  If the balance or containment fails, then even small failures have the potential to be absolutely catastrophic.

So let's discuss the world.

The first known bindings, though not thought of by those terms, were the three Great Fires of Zoroastrianism, though some dispute this and claim it is the water works of Great Yu, in China, or the Delphic oracle.  The reason that the Great Fires are conventionally credited is that they burned perpetually at a specific size until forcibly extinguished in the 600s, and they could be divided into lesser fires which also stayed burning until extinguished.  There are subtractive sources from those fires still burning in a handful of Zoroastrian temples worldwide.

There is considerable debate about the first artificial binding, but it is generally agreed that the Greeks were the first to recognize and exploit it.  Hero of Alexandria's wind organ, aeliopile, and fountain were each a single-binding elemental engine; while the organ and fountain were clearly air and water, there is considerable dispute about which element was bound in the aeliopile, and fringe scientists have suggested that it was a two-way binding.  However, while the aeliopile can be created as a two-way binding, the first known two-way containments were much larger and less efficient, and so most historians disregard this hypothesis.

Nevertheless, by the fall of Rome, we know that sequential binding had been developed - the Roman use of perpetual earth sources, followed by perpetual fire sources, created the first cement kilns.  Because of the scale of some of these operations, we also know that additive binding was known to the Romans: the size of the earth sources used was often such that even after hundreds of years out of operation, they were put back into use with their rediscovery, and it was impossible to achieve something on the scale of the Great Fires or the Pharos light without some sort of addition to the source over time.  Indeed, the Pharos was the source of most of Rome's knowledge of commutative binding - ship captains capable of affording a fire created from the Pharos found themselves able to detect it by sympathetic action than those without such fires.  

Of course, additive binding has its limitations, as shown by the extinguishing of the Great Fires and the destruction of the Pharos: At a certain scale, a source becomes impossible to move.  For most earth sources, this is unimportant, but earth has, for a variety of reasons, been the historically least-exploited source.  For water, air, and fire, this can be an absolute limitation: especially in primitive circumstances, containment of a massive fire is difficult and dangerous whether that fire is a bound source or a combustion reaction.

The next technical innovation was using bound elements for refining - the use of fire to purify water into a purer source, or to refine earth into a purer form.  This was the goal of many of the medieval alchemists, and they achieved much greater success with water than with earth, and they achieved absolutely no success with refining air until far later.  The limits of containment technology limited the effectiveness of equipment; the limits of language limited the effectiveness of experimentation or recording.

This did not stop substantial progress from being made - we do not know who it was that first created a two-way bind of fire and air to create the first reliable steel smelting, but we do know that this happened between 800 and 1300, and spread rapidly, especially once paired with a large-scale water source to produce a way of operating a hammer continuously with regular force.  By the late 1300s, there were large-scale steelworks on both sides of the Rhine.

Another problem was the limit of literacy, and the difficulty of transmitting knowledge.  It was one thing for al-Zahrawi to describe the process of creating aqua fortis in the 800s, and another entirely for it to be disseminated, so it was not for another 400 years that Alderotti describes iterative distillation, so that a true second-order source of water could be created, and it would not be until the late 1500s that the idea of source order would even be described, let alone the procedure for creating it reliably repeated.  Unreliability, and the cumbersome size of sources, are why, despite the military applications of a mixture of fire, water, and earth being well-known as "Greek fire," conventional gunpowder was still generally considered more reliable than bound sources.

Of course, everyone knows that between 1600 and 1700, there was an explosion of scientific knowledge.  What changed?

It began with the printing press; of course, that invention alone would not have accounted for anything if there had been nothing printed.  The language of science began to evolve in the early 1600s, starting with Napier describing logarithms, then Descartes describing coordinate geometry.  Suddenly the tools for drawing a map of a world previously only described imprecisely by words began to appear.  Then came Newton.

It is impossible to overstate the importance of Isaac Newton to the understanding of universal laws; it was Newton who combined Napier's logarithms with observation to determine the law of diminishing return that describes the upper practical limit of a single-element source of a particular order.  It was Newton who empirically derived from observation the commutative law that states that one source, derived from another, can be affected by that source at a distance proportional to their masses.  It was Newton whose theoretical underpinnings showed that the use of multiple elements in combination could produce second-order sources without the prohibitive destruction of sources that had plagued the earliest experimenters.  This culminated in him being named Master of the Mint in 1699 after deriving, from an iron earth source, a fire source, and an aqua fortis source, the first confirmed gold source - an artificially created second-order earth source, capable of generating, at small quantities, an infinite stream of gold.  While Newton was incredibly secretive of his apparatus, he had no difficulty in publishing the theoretical underpinnings behind them, especially when he was called a charlatan.

---

Okay, that was exhausting to write.  Next up: The discovery that you can force elemental sources into a close bond; the first applications of the temporary bond; the development of the steam engine and the permanent bond; and the 19th Century.