Logical/Scientific Explanation for Umbrakinesis?

Question

I'm working on a story where the characters have elemental-based powers based on natural material/materials/phenomena found in nature. So far, each of the powers makes sense on a physical level, since their foundation is based on them being a form of matter or energy.

The problem is is that one of the characters has umbrakinesis. While there is a spiritual context in the story, I don't want to wave off as 'it's just magic, don't look far into it and turn your brain off'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkness What darkness is

https://powerlisting.fandom.com/wiki/Darkness_Manipulation Examples of users

Darkness is essentially the absence of energy, in this case light. And this make the problem worse is because darkness has no mass, and I want to make the darkness power be on equal footing with the other elemental powers whiles having a logical and scientific reason why this is possible?

Like this Foundation allows the darkness to manipulate/push around objects, allows the darkness to manifest in naturally-lit areas and allows the user to darken the area around them too.

At the moment, I'm thinking that possibly it's explanation could be explained with the exact barrier to which light and darkness connect, forming a crude area of effect. But that's all I have so far.

Answer 1

You're treating the absence of something as if it is, itself, something

It ain't.

Umbrakinesis and Photokinesis are the same thing. They may not be in the magical world of superheros and supervillains, but you tagged your question Science-Based. Darkness is the absence of light.¹ The only way you get it is by manipulating the light.

Why is this important? Because the contents of an empty glass could be described as "the absence of water." And I'm hard-pressed to believe that someone can manipulate what's in an empty glass and call it the ability to manipulate the absence of water. Kinda reminds me of Dwayne Johnson's line from Jungle Cruise. "The back side of water! ... It's totally different...."

So, scientifically, an "umbrakinetic" is a photokinetic who prefers dark rooms. But it's all the same superpower. The ability to manipulate light.

And how do you do that scientifically?² Well... with gravity. Or by manipulating the atmosphere to create lenses. Or by manipulating water to create really dense clouds. Or by making everything in the area that's "dark" totally light absorbent (entirely non-reflective). That could cause some heat problems.... Or, if you really want to channel your inner Einstein, give your superhero the ability to convert energy to mass such that the photons drop to the ground like so many grains of sand.

That might actually make for an interesting story. Your umbrakinetic creates darkness by converting light to mass, resulting in a substantial storm of "stuff" flying about like a sandstorm. Really fine "stuff." I'd probably be allergic to it. That'd be dark on several levels.

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_{¹ Technically, darkness, which is something perceived by critters like humans with eyeballs, is the absence of visible electromagnetic energy. But the simplification works for the answer.}

_{² What you're about to discover is that you can manipulate a lot of things other than light, all of which affect light. In other words, while it's certainly true that photokenisis is the opposite of umbrakenisis, the manipulation of light, itself, isn't actually the only path you can take to get to the "creation of darkness."}

Answer 2

It's not because you can do it that you understand how you do it

As accurately explained in JBH's answer, you cannot really have a plausible "manipulation of the absence of light" without manipulating light itself. So here's my solution : your character does manipulate light, but thinks they're manipulating darkness.

You can explain it any way you want, be it directly manipulating photons, the atmosphere or anything. But your character doesn't need to know how it works. For them, they're creating and manipulating "darkness", whatever that means in their mind. Even if, in reality, they're manipulating light, the way they think about it makes it so that if anyone looks at the consequences of their ability, it's manipulating darkness.

It's actually a common trope to have a character not understand how their abilities work at the start, especially because it's a good setup for character evolutions. If they ever notice that they're actually manipulating photons, or simply get a better understanding of how their ability works, for instance by having someone versed in the topic explain it to them, it could lead to them learning new ways to use it, and with enough mind gymnastics on their end, add "manipulation of light" to their arsenal.

Answer 3

First, +1 to JBH, that was my first thought.

If you converted the photonic energy to mass (via E=MC^2) the amount of mass would be miniscule. At best for the brightest light I imagine you'd be creating a few atoms of hydrogen.

However, the visible light spectrum of photonic vibration is quite narrow. Beneath it is infrared, above it is ultraviolet, and X-rays, etc.

An alternative to turning the photons into mass is just modifying their frequency, say reducing it to infrared. We cannot sense infrared as light; a room filled with infrared radiation is completely dark. But it is still the same photons. We do sense those as heat. If your character has a magical lensing effect, they could create a warm shell around something that shifts all visible light into the infrared band.

EDIT due to comment: I wasn't clear on why this shell is warm. If we change the frequency of visible light to a lower frequency, the lower frequency has less energy. If we are not doing energy to matter conversion, then the excess energy has to go somewhere. It can go into warming atmospheric molecules at the point of the conversion. That would be a "shell" of where the darkness effect takes place. How, exactly, this reduction in frequency is accomplished is unexplained magic; but it a plausible physical consequence of reducing the the EM wave length, and thus reducing the energy of the photon.

That would result in darkness inside the shell. The area of conversion (where the 'shell' is) can be very warm air, if anybody passes through it, and the shell would be warmer on the inside than the surrounding air. And as far as somebody inside the shell, it would be dark in all directions, because no visible light reaches their eyes from anywhere. It might as well be black walls all around.

But if they tried to feel their way to the wall, presuming the shell does not move, then at some point they find the edge as hot air, and they can walk through it into the light.

If your hero turns it off, the warm air just dissipates, like dousing a campfire.

If you want, you can make the whole region frequency converting; a flashlight inside the sphere emits no light, it just emits an equivalent number of photons as infrared light. It will feel slightly warmer [edit: due to magical frequency downshifting], that's it. The same for fire; it will feel like fire and behave like fire, but it will be a bit hotter and completely dark.

If there is no light to sense, the sighted people and animals inside the bubble are effectively blind, they cannot see a thing.

Which leads you to another way to implement this; a biological suppression of signals on optic nerves. That would be fine on a personal level, but undetectable outside the bubble of influence. So it depends on what your story demands: I suspect you want want people outside the bubble to see the area of darkness; in that case go with photon frequency conversion to outside the visible spectrum.

Alternatively, if you just want people in a bubble to experience blindness but appear visible and normal to observers outside the bubble, you could go with optic nerve blocking; or preventing retinas from reacting to light.

Answer 4

The person can manipulate the properties of surfaces to minimize light reflection

There are scientific researches into extreme black paints and extreme black coatings. We know that perceived blackness can be enhanced by manipulating the microscopic properties of surfaces. Your character can do this. Naturally because of how its approached, they think of it as manipulating darkness not light, whatever may physically be going on.

Note this won't prevent Infra red radiation, or transmission. But most objects ate seen by their reflected light and this will kill that. Light emission is then tackled by applying the same or appropriate properties to the light bulb or other container, or at a pinch the viewer's eyeball (!).

This doesn't cover every way they would need to create and manage darkness selectively but could probably be extended to do so?

Answer 5

1. Darkness wielders are unknowingly wielding light. If you keep in mind that you could make a room dark by removing light, and that there is a spectrum of invisible light lengths, one amusing explanation of darkness powers is that "darkness" wielders just aren't aware of what they actually wielding - plus its an awesome plot moment when someone suddenly doubles the nature of their powers at a late point in the story.

2. Darkness users are actually manipulating space, photons go bye-bye. The physics thingy which carries light is known as a photon. Sometimes it behaves like a particle, sometimes it behaves like a wave. If you willing to say that when your "Darkness" wielders use their power the photons disappear in the affected area, then the abilities you describe could be explained by directly manipulating space.

3. Anti-light! When matter and anti-matter collide they completely annihilate each other, releasing an explosion of energy and photons. Photons can't be annihilated because they have zero charge (matter has positive charge, anti-matter negative charge) which means that "light" has no true opposite. If you pretend there is another property of particles, and that photons are positive in it, then you could invent a negative photon, meaning there would be a type of dark light which would annihilate photons (and light) on contact in addition to the darkness which is just the absence of light.

Answer 6

I have a simple answer for you. Umbrakinesis can be performed by having an area repel light. Not block it, like with normal shadow, but bend light, like with prisms, so that it doesn't hit the spot the person is concentrating on.

You'll have to figure out how far out the spot redirects light, since the redirection point will look slightly brighter to the onlookers.

Answer 7

Energy moves from areas of high concentration to areas of low concentration:

Your “Darkness” wielders are actually just wicking away power. They have some huge sink into which they can dump energy. So they can absorb the energy from photons to cause “darkness” or drain kinetic energy to dampen motion. If there are electronics, they can disable them by draining the energy from a current. Real masters can even drain heat to dampen fires or freeze liquids.

So their powers don’t so much do something as stop something else. The higher potential the energy in use, the easier it is to drain. If your magic system has a consistent energy form, then magic energy is drained, with the strongest Magic’s being the easiest to defeat.

The form of this vast sink is open to interpretation, but with pseudo magic, a parallel universe with incredibly low energy potential is a good candidate.

Answer 8

Change the science of light in your universe. Here's one example approach.

Light and darkness are two immiscible, compressible fluids. Light flows out of sources, bounces off surfaces, etc. And darkness is a fluid but a very compressible one; it 'falls back' when it interacts with light. It's the weaker of the two fluids by far, but there's far more of it. Nature abhor a vacuum, and what nature puts into the vacuum is darkness.

The character can make darkness more robust. Under their control, darkness can push back light, or mix with it to create shade, increase it's viscosity to create effects like slowing, solidify it to create weapons, etc.

If you think of it as a kind of wind magic, it could make scientific sense.

You just need to drop the idea of photons and rays -- but a wave theory is still possible, it's just waves of aetheric darkess.

Answer 9

Maybe they can manipulate melanosomes. This is a pigmentation found in certain species of deep-sea fish. This unique adaptation allows them to absorb more than 99.5% of the light that hits them, rendering them nearly invisible in the dark ocean depths. Maybe your character can do that.

Answer 10

It's actually dust control.

They assume they are controlling shadows, but they are actually controlling dust particles in the air.

When they move objects with shadows, they are condensing dust into a ball which looks dark and can push things.

When they darken areas, they are forming blobs of condensed dust. They have the magic of small particle manipulation which tends to form darkness when they use it.

Answer 11

Phased Light

(I'll elaborate on this answer more later)

Light is a particle but also a wave, and when two of the same waves 180 degrees out of phase overlap, they cancel out. This is the idea behind a lot of holographic technology in scifi universes.

If you had sufficient foreknowledge about the light entering a room, you could project the same amount of light at the precise time so that the two light fields are 180° out of phase everywhere within a particular region, creating a volume of darkness in an otherwise brightly-lit room.

Answer 12

FRAME CHALLENGE:

The Umbrakinetics are not really affecting light/darkness itself, but the PERCEPTION of it. Umbrakinesis is a form of telepathic illusion, in the same way "invisibility" would be. It tricks the perception of people around the umbrakinetic to make certain objects or areas fall into the Saccadic Suppression our eyes and brain naturally need to do anyway to avoid constant motion blur.

The easiest way to describe it, is that umbrokinesis causes the viewers eyes to "slide over" certain parts of what they see, making it dissapear into saccadic masking. But since the illusion is incomplete, they victim's brain substitutes total darkness in place of just not being able to see something. Human brain cannot conceive of "seeing nothing" nor can it mend the hole in perception, so it sees total black instead as a placeholder. For example, if I timed my movement with your saccadic masking, and stole a pen from the table in between your "frames", you would see the pen vanishing from existence. But since I cannot, in most cases, move that fast, you would instead see the pen vanish into a shadowy blur that is connected to my person via indistinct smear of darkness. The darkness is basically your visual cortex saying "look, something weird happened in between saccades, I have no idea what, so im painting it black as a shift between frames, ok?"

Within those "areas of darkness" the Umbrakinetic is completely invisible, and thus can manually manipulate objects without anyone seeing them. This creates the illusion that darkness itself did it.

In fact, the effect need not be telepathic. Maybe the Umbrakinetic is just extremely good at moving exactly in tune with human saccadic masking, blinking, and human "framerate" so that they appear like a teleporting blurry shadow that makes stuff (and people!) disappear in vague blots of darkness, not just visual darkness, but the "darkness" of short term memory and perception.

Depending on how good one is with this power, this can manifest as either umbrakinesis, invisibility, illusion, or just a horrific way to drive people insane.