Basic Principles of Ectoplasmic Engineering
The House of Forbidden Knowledge's Senior Research Professor of Form and Substance emerges from the lab to introduce students to new concepts and methodologies for manipulating nonphysical phenomena.
For those of you who have been through an engineering course before, you know to expect a certain amount of calculus when people use the term “engineering.” I’m sure some of you still have notebooks full of applications of the memorized equations for Statics for non-moving structures and Dynamics, fluid or otherwise, for dealing with those systems that are in motion. I think I can even detect that peculiar flinch in the couple of you who were exposed to the principles of Relativistic Engineering, where a frame can be interpreted as partially static or partially dynamic depending on the motion of the observer, with associated Lorentzian transformations along axes of motion or rotation. And I’m sure some of you thoroughly enjoyed burning your notebooks after your grades were received.
I’m just going on about this now because I enjoy watching you twitch. You’ll be relieved to know that I have no intention of going into a lot of math today. You either know it or you don’t. If you know it, you’ll be able to sort out on your own how to apply it for specifics of friction, tensile strength, shear force, elastic limits, hysteresis, viscosity, thermal capacity, etc. If you don’t know the math, I’m sure you’ll pick it up later. Today I will be concentrating on the description of the properties of a material and not much else.
The structural properties of a substance derive from the behavior of its smallest units. Smallest functional units, I believe we can say. For ectoplasm the smallest functional unit is the strand. These strands are not necessarily uniform in characteristics. Some are longer, some have weird kinks and coils and knots and other quirks of construction. It’s best to think of them as analogous to strands of proteins, those polymerized chains of amino acids that are so popular among the living. Unadorned, proteins have shapes dictated not only by the nature and order of their amino acid components in the chains but also by the sequences of their folds and twists, which leaves some active areas exposed and others concealed. But also they have the capability to pick up other molecules that alter their characteristics both prior to and after folds have been made.
Mucins, for example, are decorated with sugars and polysaccharides which enhance their ability to interact with and capture water to form the mucus and gels for which they are famous. Mucins are a good analogy to keep in mind. Due to the van der Waals forces that tend to keep liquid water molecules together, it takes only a sparse tangle of a very few strands of mucin proteins to turn a relatively large amount of water into a slimy smear and only a few more to turn it into a rubbery lump.
Traditionally speaking, ectoplasm is the name of the fluid nonphysical or barely physical substance that is bound together by these ephemeral protein-analogous strands, but among those who study its properties, the term also applies to inflexible structures and at least in a general way to the strands themselves. I’ll try to not be a terminology hard-ass, but I’ll also strive to keep confusion to a minimum.
The study of the chemistry of proteins has been very enlightening and energizing to the study of these analogous ectoplasmic strands. Much has been postulated concerning hypothetical building-block components of these strands—whether there are hundreds of “thaumino acids” as there are amino acids in nature (but only 20 of which are employed in human biological self-manufacture and repair, as you may recall), and whether there are analogous chains of thaumo-nucleotides that can manufacture these “thaumino acids” the way DNA and RNA do, or whether the functions of the strands are less based on components of construction and more on knotting and twists and folds and final geometry. Almost as much arguing goes on about the potential names for these features as about evidence for their existence and proposed functions. Suffice it to say that much below the resolution of the strands themselves is … unresolved. And therefore won’t form a significant portion of today’s lesson.
Since ectoplasmic fibers don’t interact with physical matter the way that proteins do, ectoplasmic structures are only barely physical. One colleague used the analogy of how some of the colors reflected by scales in butterfly wings aren’t made by the usual processes of absorption and reflection and scattering, but rather by crystalline structural effects at the microscopic and nanoscopic scale, and the patterns of constructive and destructive interference produced by these structures in turn produce the illusion of colors in broad spectrum radiation. I like to repeat this analogy because, while it is hilarious garbage, it does get across the idea of a virtual structure that is a production of constructive and destructive interference patterns in the probabilities of coherent manifestations emerging from the quantum foam that is the not-quite-void from which the universe is built.
I’m assuming that you recall some of these details from the infamous “l’appellation du vide” lecture from an earlier course.
These evoked patterns of virtual particles and virtual fields are physical and have no trouble impacting the physical world, though it’s rare for these impacts to be very substantial or very forceful without some living (and usually sapient) entity putting a lot of work and/or effort into the manifestation.
This is a reversible process. Which is to say that physical manifestations can, through effects on the foam of quantum fields and particles, also manipulate ectoplasmic strands and complicated structures made from them. This is the mechanism by which a living physical body accrues and generates a spiritual form that can, under certain circumstances, even conduct an independent existence.
If any of you think this is a functional mechanism for sorcery, you should walk into a dusty room in an abandoned building sometime and windmill your arms about in such a way as to encourage the cobwebs to gather and form any kind of coherent artifact with a practical purpose. There’s something to this line of thought, but I think you can guess that the reality of the situation is a good deal more complicated.
It’s probably better that you remember that you already have an entire body made of this stuff complete with limbs and digits capable of fine manipulation and relevant senses that you can learn how to use to manipulate ectoplasm in a much more direct fashion. And that’s just something to remind you of on the way to letting you know that just as proteins are the stuff from which life is made in the physical world of your experience, ectoplasmic strands are the structural basis, at least functionally, of a number of analogous life forms of the nonphysical world.
Any engineer is going to get a quick leg up on design principles by studying living (or living-ish) phenomena as a shortcut to learning the constraints of materials and systems. Fortunately there are a number of simple ectoplasmic entities one can study. The smallest are frequently referred to as thaumatodes—which is kind of kin to the animalcules term from the early days of the microscope—and these are basically krill for the grazers and browsers in their ecological systems. The largest have been mentioned in other classes that you should have had by now—the ones that easily transcend galactic scales.
The chief lesson an engineer will learn by comparing entities like these side-by-side is that ectoplasm, being nonphysical, is also inertialess. This also implies that the material doesn’t have the same issues with scale that physical materials have. As a fiber of less than a tenth of a millimeter in diameter, glass is flexible like a hair. At a tenth of a meter in diameter it is a solid and inflexible pillar and typically too brittle for most applications.
In contrast, a thread of ectoplasmic material has the same basic characteristics at every scale, with those characteristics more dependent on geometries and symmetries than on quantities and dimensions. There are some dependencies on what amounts to a measure of the amount of ectoplasm in play, but since there is no mass per se, measurable quantities like momentum and density don’t make any sense. The basic unit of amount is more closely analogous to a unit of charge than of mass. Therefore, analogically speaking, traditional engineers get more mileage out of models based on electrodynamics, electrochemistry, and electrical engineering to describe how ectoplasmic components and configurations store, impede, or transmit local flows of esoteric forces.
Flows should have been covered at least at a gloss in any of a number of previous parabiology or mythogeography classes. I won’t be going over it again today, so please refer to your notes.
If you know about proteins, then you know that the primary factor in their shape—the way they get folded—is how they react to water. Some portions of their surfaces along their lengths are hydrophobic and some are hydrophilic, so the actions of the water molecules in which they are submerged encourages them to become wadded up in one way or another. Ectoplasmic threads respond in an analogous way to their local flows based on how localized portions of the threads—obviously not a homogeneous substance but still insufficiently studied—respond to ambient flows. Some portions are attracted, some repelled, and this causes the thread to attempt a geometrical configuration that will have its own set of properties.
Other ectoplasmic threads in the vicinity can interfere with these attempts to form specific natural shapes, and in combination they can form static configurations, predictable dynamic configurations, or even complex and chaotic configurations that tend to resolve in ways analogous to those of cellular automata in computer simulations that have been popular among nerds since the 1970s and 80s.
The implication is that anywhere there is a suitable esoteric flow gradient and any amount of ectoplasmic proto-materials, you will be able to find a background environment populated with simple ectoplasmic thaumatode-style organism-like constructs constantly being produced, constantly consuming and incorporating one another, and constantly disintegrating. This is the environment from which you will harvest and sort the materials for your ectoplasmic constructs and larger systems.
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Physical technological artifacts rely on a library of simple mechanical tools for converting forces from kinetic to potential and back, changing the strength and direction of those forces, changing momentum from linear to angular and vice versa. Levers and wheels and inclined planes, cables and springs, etc. These libraries are expanded by wave after wave of technological advances in metallurgy and ceramics and general chemistry, hydraulics, steam and combustion, electronics, etc. Computational tools have also added significantly to the library, from the mechanical logic components of Babbage’s era to the semiconductor-based transistors of recent times.
Once you understand the principles of physical engineering—and here I mean mechanical and fluid and chemical and electrical and any other kind of physical-world-based engineering fields—it’s simply a matter of translation to build analogs to these physical and computational simple machines—these “primitives” in computing terms—in ectoplasmic materials.
It’s dangerous too. Power is learned before finesse in every case. Labs explode. It’s part of the process. One of the benefits of the academy setting is the availability and ubiquity of supervision. The other primary benefit is the Library, of course, which has a wonderful cache of records detailing hundreds of thousands of catastrophes graded on scales of lethality and hilarity, as well as the amount of raw energy released.
I like to arrange the first assignments in ectoplasmic engineering in the following way. First, you will study the handouts to familiarize yourself with a simple set of ectoplasmic primitives, or simple machines if you prefer, and then choose a modest practical application that a small arrangement of three or four of these machines can solve. Second, you will research in the Library how the initial construct that you have designed has historically gone terribly, terribly wrong.
In our next class, you will each present the catastrophe you have inadvertently designed. As a class, we will select the most potentially entertaining proposal to assemble and demonstrate (with reasonable safeguards) in the Quad for the entertainment and edification of the usual array of spectators and hapless bystanders.
Feel free to use the rest of our time in class today to get started. I will make the rounds to answer any individual questions you might have as you try to make sense of the handouts.
Get to work.