I’m getting some sort of “steam = heat” vibe from this. You apply steam to heat a situation up until it melts and can be remolded in a new form. Then you relax the steam and it cools and solidifies and becomes part of the background.
More generally it’s like energy or work. Energy is the ability to push against a given force a given distance—to overcome inertia / viscosity and modify the state of the world. After that inertia keeps the world state the same until something else changes it. Perhaps viscosity—probably the wrong term, but I mean the amount of pushback if you try to make a change to worldstate, which might vary depending on the “direction” you want to push things—is also a quantity worth thinking about?
Ooh! More generally, energy is about accelerating a mass through a distance. But momentum remains. Perhaps a way of doing things that is stable has lost steam (acceleration) but retains high momentum?
I’m getting some sort of “steam = heat” vibe from this. You apply steam to heat a situation up until it melts and can be remolded in a new form. Then you relax the steam and it cools and solidifies and becomes part of the background.
More generally it’s like energy or work. Energy is the ability to push against a given force a given distance—to overcome inertia / viscosity and modify the state of the world. After that inertia keeps the world state the same until something else changes it. Perhaps viscosity—probably the wrong term, but I mean the amount of pushback if you try to make a change to worldstate, which might vary depending on the “direction” you want to push things—is also a quantity worth thinking about?
Ooh! More generally, energy is about accelerating a mass through a distance. But momentum remains. Perhaps a way of doing things that is stable has lost steam (acceleration) but retains high momentum?