"Oh. All right. In this world there are about eighty fundamental kinds of things. Metals are many of them. We call them fundamental because you can isolate a single tiny essence of them - the smallest aluminum, the smallest gold, the smallest oxygen - and then so far we can't break those tiny essences, and we think that if we did we wouldn't get an even smaller aluminum, we'd get something else entirely.
Now, if you take all eighty things - some of them only exist in Valinor, so it'd be hard, but if you did - and you write up their properties, you get certain regularities. In particular you get regularities in how they link up with each other and with other things. Metals are kind of a category of regularity. So are gases. To make this simpler than it really is, the regularities come from how many other things they'll connect with - like, imagine everyone has arms and they use those arms to catch hold of other essences. Carbon has four arms. Helium doesn't have any.
Most of the world is made out of essences holding hands, or floating around freely if they're the kinds with no hands. They're only stable if everyone has all of their hands occupied. Does all that make sense?
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2016-05-24 12:55 am (UTC)Now, if you take all eighty things - some of them only exist in Valinor, so it'd be hard, but if you did - and you write up their properties, you get certain regularities. In particular you get regularities in how they link up with each other and with other things. Metals are kind of a category of regularity. So are gases. To make this simpler than it really is, the regularities come from how many other things they'll connect with - like, imagine everyone has arms and they use those arms to catch hold of other essences. Carbon has four arms. Helium doesn't have any.
Most of the world is made out of essences holding hands, or floating around freely if they're the kinds with no hands. They're only stable if everyone has all of their hands occupied. Does all that make sense?