Perhaps, but that doesn't make a few mortals credible authority. I've gotten the impression that they don't know the first thing about even their own universe's physics. They certainly haven't progressed very far technology-wise, despite the abundance of Dwemer ruins to study. Seems to me like their studies have been restricted to the magical aspect, while the mundane, physical aspects of the world around them have been woefully neglected, forever stuck on the Dark Age level of understanding.

You're reminiscent of the sage who peeked around the corner, for wanting to sate his final curiosity, and his head froze. Yes, there's a studio of nerds back there. No, they can't transcend mathematics.

Anyhoo, the physical is incident to the metaphysical, and obvious is your miter.

I can transcend mathematics with logic.

Multiple forms of zero; multiple degrees of infinity.

using mathematics.

I'm sure you could attempt to make a similar argument about every high fantasy universe in history. Doesn't mean it's true. If you see something like gravity in TES, and assume that since it "looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck, and since there's a duck, there must also be x y and z things also related to ducks, then some more things related to those things, and so on", what would you say about how Cyrodiilic (the by far most predominant language used throughout the games) is English (or rather, whatever the national language is of the country you happen to purchase the game from)? That, due to their language obviously being connected to a real world language (or even essentially being that language), they are descendants of real-world Indo-European/whichever peoples who migrated south to Tamriel? Last I checked, there was no continent of Tamriel on the map of Earth.

Seeing a parallel to the real world like what appear to be celestial bodies does not necessarily (and, in many cases, indeed not) have any deeper a connection to reality than does the use of English. Perhaps the point of authoring a high fantasy universe is that it gives the creators near as much creative license as they please to make use of (and as writing a story is an entirely creative process, the benefits of that should be clear); if they wanted things to work more or less like the real world, they may as well have had it take place in the real world/universe and be done with it. Granted, you can't feasibly take things too far, like creating a proprietary language with little or no connection to real world languages that is used as the primary language in the game, and expecting everyone who wants to play it to have to learn said language (which, even if it had plenty of its roots within real-world sources, is a feat in of itself, especially when the usefulness of the language doesn't extend at all beyond being able to play the game/read and understand the story). Or having physics that differ so extensively from the real world that not even someone on a gigantic amount of hallucinogens could experience anything like them before entering cardiac arrest. Maybe it'd be appealing to a few people who have completely lost their marbles and can manage to relate to such wonkiness even a little.

Bravo, Arklon. They're trying to tell a story, not write a fantasy science textbook. It's fun to speculate about the lore, especially since Bethesda gave us so much of it, but even they clearly play with it at will.

Because to me, physics is at the very base of all of it, I personally have little interest in the study of language. And the only mortal race with any grasp of it went poof in the First Era. I don't need it to be exactly the same as in real life, but I can recognize that it's a woefully understudied concept in Tamriel, thus this lack of knowledge in certain areas likely affects their understanding of other things.


I know, else they would have put something into those http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Tribunal:Old_Dwemer_Book in Tribunal.

So how can you believe physics is at the very base of it all? The very base of it all is a fantasy.

With no theories of your own, why bother? The metaphysical we're aware of has taken years to develop, how will you develop the "invisible" physics, when there are no laws to guide you? How much of the game are you willing to trust?

They did leave a lot of their findings behind, though. And some have figured out how to build Animunculi (the Telvanni were noted to have historically used Animunculi to guard their holdings at some point, a practice that was revived during the construction of Tel Uvirith), and even rebuilding large pieces of machinery such as what is now the Imperial Orrery - though, was it originally somewhere in Morrowind or Hammerfell and was disassembled and put back together in Cyrodiil? Still, considering that Dwemeri machines from Morrowind stop working when brought too far from their origin, and the same could be true for the Hammerfell machines (I don't think they ever explicitly said that about the Hammerfell constructs, only Morrowind), if they did have to deal with that problem, they would've had to have reverse engineered enough of their constructs to figure out how to keep it powered within the center of Cyrodiil, which should tell you a bit about their understanding of their technology. There were also the machines used to pump the tainted sap from the little Hist tree the Blackwood Company had, which don't look like original Dwemeri constructs but looked as if someone had reverse engineered some of their machines and rebuilt them from scratch with some different materials, from what I can recall. Then why isn't it used more often? If you want to relate the issue to the real world, technology was brought about to compensate for the limitations of the physique and to ease various tasks, allowing people to do more and be more likely to survive. Problem with that in the Aurbis is you have magick, something that has always filled in that role. You don't need to go through the whole process of figuring out how to build an aircraft to fly, you can just learn something about alteration and cast a levitation spell. The Dwemer were deviant, not to mention bold, and devised their own preferred alternate method capable of achieving the same basic thing. That innovation eventually built up to Walk-Brass.

The reason I say physics is the base of it all is because it is where the other sciences rely upon, just on a smaller level. I do have theories, I'm just reluctant to bring them forward as things currently are. If you want me to share them I'd be glad to.

The physics are not invisible, and they're not metaphysical. Acceleration, thermodynamics, collision, momentum, fluid behavior, all things point to these things working in a similar manner, if not identical, to real life. Similarly, chemistry behaves similarly and biology, while having some key differences, also behaves similarly to reality. I trust what I see, things that can be experienced. I'm not trying to argue that there's no metaphysics, there are. But I don't think that metaphysics replaces mundane physics.


I figured the Centurions shutting down after getting too far away was a precaution to ensure that their enemies couldn't use them, or to ensure that they'd be used as guards, not invading soldiers. It shouldn't hamper progress into developing steam technology. And while the secrets of the Animunculi have been discovered, I'm not so sure if it's actually the practice of building new ones, or rebuilding and magically programming already-existing ones. In fact, every use of Dwemer technology I've seen looks like it was just done by taking some parts from a ruin and reassembling them, instead of actually reverse engineering them, except for the sap pump, which was part of a carefully guarded secret. And while magic is certainly a viable alternative to technology in many cases, it's got many limits, limits that technology doesn't have. I haven't seen any magic rail systems, and only one, very poorly made, airship.

Share when you're comfortable.


It can't, it's metaphysical. The metaphysics is within us. Neo couldn't read the rain, by looking at the letters. So no one can know the metaphysical world, by seeing* the physical world.

Tamriel is a metaphysical world. It is an internal, fiction of the Godhead. A dreamworld, totally.

*(or seeking it in)

That's thinking within the "physical" box. With magic, you can teleport, or fly if you feel like taking the scenic route and don't mind being chased by every Cliff Racer in Morrowind.

As for the Animunculi, their construction was not only of the physical, but of the metaphysical as well. Machines, but enchanted machines. You shouldn't be surprised - take a look at the Tools, and the enchantments Kagrenac placed on the Heart of Lorkhan; though they didn't have a use for regular magic, but they were still very well versed in the metaphysical and used enchantments. There was more than just steam behind their functioning.

By metaphysical, do you mean magical?

IRL, magic would be considered metaphysical, but in a world where magic is commonplace, I'm not sure it would count as metaphysics as opposed to mundane physics.

There's my semantics argument for the day.

Well, for starters, I disagree with some of the stuff in the Cosmology text. In particular, I suspect that the stars and moons look the same to the Daedra as they do to mortals. If there is anything that can be attributed to "mortal mental stress" it would be the perception of distances to the stars and the sizes of the planes to be "infinite", as they're of such great distance and sizes, respectively, that it might as well be, for all intents and purpose, be considered infinite, even if the distance is technically finite. Such could also be seen in real life, as even real life technology doesn't even come close to moving planets or traveling to and from the stars. But as the stars can be perceived even from their great distance and the planes can be represented as finite bodies, they are not truly infinite but so vast that for all intents and purposes, it doesn't really matter.

Edit: It might also be the fact that Nirn seems flat, especially to a civilization that only rarely ventures beyond their own continent, so it is understandable that it seems like nothing more than "mortal mental stress" that all the bodies observed in the sky are spherical.


True, the Animunculi are both physical and metaphysical, as are all of the Dwemer's great achievements. Hence why the Telvanni seem to have a knack for them, because it seems that enchanting is an important factor with them. And there are plenty of Dwemer Animunculi, finding replacement parts and rebuilding them isn't hard. But I have interest in their steam-powered bodies, as well as the steam-powered machinery that can be found in a Dwemer ruin, and what implications those could have, and even more so if it's augmented by magical means.

As for magic, it can make individual travel instantaneous, but it hasn't eliminated other forms of travel, not by a long shot. It may be that the mages have limits to how much they can teleport at a time. Travel by road and by wind-powered ship are still the major forms of moving supplies and trade goods.

And the stars should, because the Daedra built their realms about the telescopic center of the Aurbis, which Mundus also lies on. This is the Tower, or Self, where the spirit beholds and permeates all, to the horizon. The Lords of Misrule have Self in abundance, and so they do not die.

A single Wheel? More like a Telescope that stretches all the way back to the Eye of the Anui-El, with Padomaics innumerable along its infinite walls.

Now when the Daedra Lords heard Shezarr, they mocked him, and the other Aedra. 'Cut parts of ourselves off? And lose them? Forever? That's stupid! You'll be sorry! We are far smarter than you, for we will create a new world out of ourselves, but we will not cut it off, or let it mock us, but we will make this world within ourselves, forever ours, and under our complete control.'


Tamriel is a metaphysical world. It is an internal fiction of the Godhead. A dreamworld, totally.

Did this make anyone else think of Nietzsche?

Talos is dead

When you're debating on this level, I just want to warn all of you that even in the TES world correlation does not imply causality. Just because the world behaves similarly to RL doesn't mean that the same conclusions about it can be drawn. Similarly, just because someone says so in a book somewhere doesn't mean they are right. Current-era mages and scholars know relatively little about magic and the universe and they've also forgotten a lot. Heck, they forgot the purpose of the Rune and Doomstones and those only date back to the Interregnum. Never mind Ayleidic magic, Dwemeri tech (as mentioned), Yokudan sword-singing, and who knows what was lost with Aldmeris. It's amazing that they know anything at all about the Towers.

Your first point is the best lesson to learn in life. Correlation never implies causality.

The Towers though, I think permeate the collective unconscious. Camoran put it well when he pointed out that every culture, no matter how far-flung always has a concept of Lorkhan. When something makes a big enough impact in space and time, those ripples will be felt within the minds of everyone, even if they can't access those memories.

It made me think of that.