Discworld/Thief of Time/Headscratchers

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  • I just realized (reading the Mundane Utility page where it says "Kaos' sword is a rule-breaking as he is"): Why is Kaos' sword's power absolute coldness? Cold brings order. Adding heat energy to something would be more chaotic. Chaos could be "what happens when the fire goes out" (or "what there was before we had fire") considering how important fire was (and, in some forms, still is), but what would be less chaotic than making something's atoms go in all different directions at once, shattering molecules and turning water and ice into steam? His color theme could still be blue, since Red's taken by War and pale (pale green/clear flame) would already be taken by Death... Unless Kaos is actually Entropy, by (possibly) violating the conservation of energy? You'd think Entropy would be part of Death's job, unless Death handled only the actual ending bit and what comes after, but entropy would have made the matter of the universe less chaotic to coalesce into ordered systems of stars and planets and rocks, so that's probably out two ways. It just doesn't make sense for Kaos' power to be Cold. Oh, one last thing: He uses his ability to travel without time to deliver dairy products every day at the exact same time. Rebelling against his former job, what?
    • 'It was a work of art, the sword. It had imaginary velocity, negative energy and positive cold, cold so cold that it met heat coming the other way and took on some of its nature.' Basically, the thing was a hang-over from the 'bid bang' period, maybe even before, and so, of course it didn't make sense. Ronnie himself also shows this, being able to generate, stop, and even 'reverse' time independent of the rest of the world. One wonders if Ronnie is even on the same level as the others, or if he is a cut above them.
    • The way I saw the cold thing, the original perception of the horsemen seems to come from Omnia. A desert. I feel that the coldness of night would be the original chaos to the people of the barren wasteland. That, and, original chaos before the world was in the cold darkness of space.
      • Well, it's given in the novels that Kaos is what existed before most other stuff in the universe, so it may be that the sword is an analogue for Absolute Zero, 0 Kelvin, the lowest temperature something can be, because this is the point that even atoms stop moving.
    • Actually, think about it another way. It's so cold, that it literally loops around negative infinity and touches positive infinity temperature-wise, despite such a thing being impossible, because that's the way it works. "cold so cold that it met heat coming back the other way and took on some of it's nature". So it's possible that it loops in a similar fashion in regards to order, in that it actually goes beyond absolute order and swings right back into utter chaos.
    • The sword's coldness is chaotic, by breaking the laws of thermodynamics. What I got from the description of the sword can be summed up in two words: Negative. Kelvin. It doesn't get much more impossible than that.
      • What about -i Kelvins?
    • The assumptions seems to be that motion is necessarilly chaotic, and inaction necessarilly ordered. While this may appear true from a human perspective, this isn't necessarilly true from a truly objective one- after all, the Auditors, the incarnation of order, specifically involve themselves in the continued orbit of celestial bodies. Perhaps the coldness of the sword represents the breakdown of all action, and so the ability of order to manifest itself in a meaningful fashion?
    • Yet another possible explanation: you would expect the sword of Chaos to be hot, but living according to expectations is orderly. It's cold precisely because you'd expect it not to be.
    • This troper recently read an article about negative Kelvin, which stated that entropy increases as temperature (in K) becomes more negative. So Kaos's sword could have infinite negative K, with infinite entropy...
    • He's Kaos, not chaos, obviously the same expectations do not apply.
    • Kaos not being chaotic is unpredictable, and therefore chaotic!
    • Hmm...ok, entropy could be thought of as inherently more ordered,since everything in the universe goes towards entropy because that's the way the arrow of time points—basically, from our perspective, a decrease in entropy would correspond to going back in time. And can't really happen. Or if it did we wouldn't be able to know. So would a negative potential energy. And negative Kelvin would be "hotter" than any positive temperature, since heat would always flow from the the negative object to the positive one. Which I guess raises the question of what truly is chaotic...
  • Why were Jeremey and Lobsang separated at birth? Why were they basket babies? Why couldn't they be raised by their parents?
    • This one bugged me too, but I think it's probably because some sort of time-shift happened the instant they were born so they're parents literally disappeared as they were being born. They were probably separated because of some Guild tradition about twins or something...
    • Possibly they would never have been able to grow up, either physically or mentally, if they remained in the suspended-time environment of Time's domain. Death had similar problems with Ysabell not having a normal childhood, which Time and Wen might've feared would trouble their son(s) as well.
      • This is the most logical answer. Time and Wen cannot raise them to adulthood since time passes differently for them. Nanny suggested leaving thme as foundlings but deliberately left them at different guilds to prevent anyone from realizing that they were twins.
    • It's myffic. A stronger version of mythic, so says Nanny Ogg.
  • In a couple earlier books (I can't remember which ones exactly), there's a reference to the Sweeper and his apprentice Lobsang. Is this the same Lobsang, or is Lobsang just a common name among the History Monks (considering that Lobsang's guild-given name was Newgate Ludd and the monks gave him the name of Lobsang)?
    • In the early books, "Lobsang" is basically Pterry's go-to name for any monk type character. Like how in one of the Witches books, Magrat gets something dubious from "Lobsang Dibbler." So in-universe, it's probably just the stereotypical/common name for monks in general.
      On the other hand, this is the book where Time literally shatters and has to be put back together piece by piece, so it may just be the same Lobsang in some time displaced legend.
  • What happened to Imp y Celyn?
    • It's mentioned in Hogfather (between Soul Music and Thief of Time) that Susan has had boyfriends, but that they didn't work out for various reasons, usually to do with Susan's strangeness. Imp might well be one of those cases.