Robert Jordan’s Physics in The Wheel of Time

Does anyone else really enjoy Robert Jordan’s use of his Physics background in The Wheel of Time? On the back of every book there’s Robert Jordan’s brief biography where it talks about him recieving his degree in physics from the Citadel. He clearly has brought that background and knowledge into his stories and I love it. I’m not sure if there’s any other fantasy author I’ve read (not saying they aren’t out there) that has as deep of an understanding of science as Robert Jordan. It’s when Jordan makes physics break down that his world seems to be in most chaos. When metal becomes soft and storms appear out of nowhere it bothers us from a fundamental level as much as it bothers the people in the story. It’s Jordan’s use of real science that makes us believe in his world and get worried when things really seem amiss. I rarely describe the Wheel of Time as having “Magic” like I would describe it for Harry Potter or The Lost Years of Merlin. It’s how he twists scientific laws that make events seem less like “magic” and more like real life.

There are the obvious uses of physics like the Two Rivers longbow being crazy huge. There’s also the very cool uses like the making of Dragonmount and the multiverse theory where there are infinite worlds with infinite outcomes. The idea of “time” itself is so important in physics with Einstein’s theories on Special and General Relativity and I like how those ideas are so subtly hinted at in the Wheel of Time to make Jordan’s world even more realistic. The idea that time can change depending on your frame of reference is seen in Einstein’s theories and very strongly in Tel’Aran’Rhiod. Three hours in one frame of reference can be a day in another (think of the movie Interstellar). You also see this most especially in The Great Hunt when everyone goes through the Portal Stone and time is changed for them. For Rand and his group it’s a few moments that pass but for the rest of the world it’s really weeks. The ter’angreal in the White Tower for testing Accepted and Aes Sedai also seems to have different relative times depending on if you are in the ter’angreal or not.

Balefire seems to work with the Laws of Thermodynamics in mind. Entropy (disorder) always increases according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics which is why we can’t go back in time in real life. You will never walk on the beach and see a sandcastle spontaneously form in front of you out of a pile of sand, but you will always see a sandcastle become a pile of sand over time. This is because entropy always needs to increase. Balefire literally wipes an event out of history so that entropy doesn’t actually decrease in the Wheel of Time, the event just never happened at all in the first place. This idea works for the Ta’veren as well. The likelihood of a sandcastle forming spontaneously according to physics is like 1 in a billion but Rand makes that one in a billion random chance actually happen with his Ta’veren nature (hence the bread falling all on their ends, or marriages happening that seemed unlikely hours before hand).  

Whenever I read Dragonmount’s formation in the Eye of the World’s Prologue it makes me think of what it would look like if a meteor hit the Earth. Or when they describe the the land moving like waves during the Breaking I always think of how earthquakes move. I truly find it amazing how Jordan can take these scientific laws and make them his own but also use them to make his world more real. Channeling and weaves clearly use ideas from physics as well. The weaves for healing, Gateways, rain repellant, anti-eavesdropping and many more all seem to stem from an idea or law in physics.