Now, a lot of the stuff they try to do, is liable to have to go through chemistry at one point or another.

So now that there's an interim contract, how about if, first, Keltham quickly summarizes to them about protons, neutrons, electrons, the Periodic Table of Elements, covalent bonds, molecules, conservation of elemental atoms under almost all ordinary reactions that rearrange the same elements into different molecules, electromagnetic attractions and repulsions, chemical potential energy, potential energy surfaces, activation energies for chemical reactions, acidity and basicness as examples of how the weirdly-shaped electromagnetic energy fields that develop around weirdly-shaped molecules interact and do interesting things, photons as electromagnetic waves, photons have frequencies, photon frequencies get absorbed or emitted based on electron level transitions and that's why the same kind of material stuff usually ends up with the same color, your tongue contains tiny sensors that analyze the surface chemical properties of the stuff that comes into contact with them.

Everybody clear on that?

Great!

Those, to be clear, are just the normal Laws of physics.  All that is just the way things worked back in dath ilan.

The real trick is going to be figuring out how to use Prestidigitation - which can, apparently, change the color and taste and clinginess of things, and therefore, obviously, influence the surface shapes of electromagnetic potential enveloping molecules and materials - to take the inconvenient rules of normal dath ilani chemistry and snap them like twigs.

They, uh, might need him to repeat that chemistry stuff.

If they can’t understand it from hearing it once, people from Golarion are too stupid for this Project to work.  Dath ilani four-year-olds master all this stuff within minutes, the failures are never heard from again, and the next day there's meat for lunch in the dining hall.

Keltham isn’t expecting them to get all that from such an absurdly rapid summary, he’s trying to convey which subject matters exist to ask him questions about.  If he later starts in again on the Periodic Table, people may now have any vague idea that this matters because it’s about the elementary constituents of the molecules that make up everything else.  If he starts running experiments on vinegar, Prestidigitation, and stuff that makes vinegar foam up, they’ll know how that might relate to refining spellsilver from ores.

That makes sense. 

His students look thrilled and terrified. It feels like this is the bit that will prove to all of Cheliax that they're doing something different, something important, something that'll transform the world.

He's joking. About the dath ilani four year olds. These students are not that easy to troll. (Though it's not a bad way to run a country, if you're going for quality over quantity....)

Peranza wishes Keltham wouldn't make jokes like that.  She Messages Asmodia to ask if that's a sort of thing alterPeranza would say.

Return message:  You probably feel that way because you want Civilization to be different from Cheliax.  AlterPeranza doesn't have the same emotion at the same strength.  So no.

Acknowledged.

(That's okay.  This is okay.  RealPeranza just needs to never think anything ever again.)

Keltham will now explain the kinetic theory of heat, which he verified shortly after arriving in Golarion by testing if he could warm up his hands by rubbing them together.  Since different arrangements of the same elements are bound more tightly together and have lower chemical potential energies, transforming molecules in permitted ways means that those molecules end up moving faster.  Energy is conserved by the way, that's really understating a principle of vast power and beauty buuuut they're not gonna get that part for a while.  So if you transform things to be more tightly bound, they release energy.

If you increase the heat and the amount of random motion, more molecules break apart their current arrangements and get a chance to rearrange themselves into more tightly bound configurations, shifting more of the conserved energy from potential to kinetic, producing more heat.  This, obviously, can spark a chain reaction: heat produces chemical rearrangements produces more heat produces more chemical rearrangements.

Does anyone want to guess what people did with this terrifying principle, after it was discovered in dath ilan?

"...exploded some of their enemies?" Gregoria suggests.

Possibly!  It was long enough ago that nobody actually knows now.  Keltham is describing fire.

.....did dath ilan invent fire from first principles instead of by noticing it was just there in the world being useful?

He really, really, really super duper doubts it.

People don't always know what they've discovered.  But when somebody figured out how to make the Light cantrip work, they didn't need to know about photons to say that they'd discovered a Light cantrip.

Like, you could imagine a universe in which the very first person to start using fire was an incredible genius who thought to themselves, "Well, this requires fuel, that gets transformed, and in the process of being transformed gets used up which is why fires don't just go on burning forever, and you need to make things hotter before they start rearranging themselves in the way that produces heat, so if you get a hot-enough fire you can feed a bunch of things into it that get transformed and used as fuel and release a lot more heat."

But it's a publicly known fact that fire was invented by the ancestors of humanity before they started looking completely human, before continuing heritage-selection had transformed their shapes in a direction that ended up human.  So on the order of hundreds of thousands or millions of years ago.  People would have been actually genuinely legitimately stupider back then.

They might not have had language to describe the bright-pretty-hot-thing, only known that it was bright and pretty and hot.

That makes more sense. 

Golarion also does not know when fire was first invented; it was too long ago. In some stories the gods gave it to mortals but no god has specifically claimed credit so that might just be a story, or it might be that the god in question is now dead.

The humans here are sufficiently similar in appearance and behavior to dath ilani humans that the copying time of their ancestors couldn't have been more than a few tens of thousands of years ago, relative to Keltham's now-time out of dath ilan.  Those humans would have already been adapted to eat cooked meat, and brought fire with them.

It's probably been around in Golarion for as long as humans have been around in Golarion, which isn't actually very long.

That....doesn't sound right but no one knows enough to argue.

Where Keltham was actually going with this is that burning fuel does not raise the surrounding temperature by a constant amount.  Chemical reactions don't produce a particular temperature.  They produce heat...

...He should probably actually define those things.  Temperature is how hot or cold something is, the average speed of the randomly vibrating molecules inside it.  Heat is, abstractly, the energy you add to make molecules vibrate faster and the temperature go up.  Heat flows from hotter things to colder things because the molecules in contact bump into each other, and the slow molecules slow down the faster ones in the collision, and the fast molecules speed up the slower ones in the collision.

So if you put colder fuel into a fire, more of that heat gets used up to heat the materials of the fuel itself, and the resulting temperature is lower.

The same thing goes for blowing colder air onto the fire - oh, air carries Element-8, which is a constituent in most ways that fuels made from the remains of living things, like wood or coal, rearrange themselves tighter and release heat, because living things have a lot of Element-6 that binds tightly to Element-8, among other things - so you have to allow air into a fire to let it go on burning - but if it's colder air, the resulting fire will have a lower temperature.

Nobody has gotten Keltham any proper experts on metal forging to talk to, but the very preliminary glances he's had out of a couple of books, suggest that they are not trying to warm the air or fuel before burning it, which means that the reaction needs to use more fuel or more powerful fuel than is financially optimal.

One way to warm up the air and fuel is the reverse-flow method, where you take the exhausted air from the burning-chamber and run that past the incoming air, so heat gets transferred from the exhausted air to the fresh air.  You can also do that to warm up the fuel before burning.

The other method, this being Golarion, might be to 'bind' a 'fire elemental', the same thing that powered hot water in the villa and presumably powers it here in this fortress, and get it to heat the fuel and air separately before they combust.

Given that forges don't just run off fire elementals in the first place, Keltham is guessing that fire elementals have a temperature rather than a heat output, and that this maximum temperature is too low to melt metal.  When you burn coal or other fuel, that in principle can just keep adding more and more heat, because the molecules go on rearranging themselves tighter, and that energy is conserved and must go somewhere.  The limiting factors are the starting temperature of the fuel and air; and heat that gets lost into the environment, which gets lost faster the higher the temperature goes.

On the other hand, Keltham is guessing that, once a fire elemental gets up to a certain temperature, it doesn't add any more heat than that.

So you need to use coal or other fuel, not just a fire elemental, to get a temperature high enough to refine iron ore or forge steel.

But people may not have realized that a forge could use less fuel, and maybe less expensive fuel, if they used a fire elemental to first heat up the ores, fuels, and airs, as high as the fire elemental's temperature, and maybe then used some reverse-flow from the furnace exhausts to heat the inputs higher than that, before finally adding the fixed amount of heat from the fuel-burning reaction.

All of this does presume that fuel costs are significant at all in forged metal costs.  Which is an example of why Keltham needs to talk to some actual folks currently making and selling metal, at scale, in order to make any progress here.

Or if no single refinery or forge in Cheliax uses enough fuel to make it worth the cost of adding a fire elemental, Keltham is going to have to introduce the concept of "economies of scale", which is when you have a large-enough refinery or forge to make it worth adding a fire elemental.

Just to state the obvious out loud, all these ideas, should they not already be in circulation, are covered by the compact the Project has signed with Cheliax; and may not be used within Cheliax except by paying the Project enormous patentgratuities on them; and are to be held under lesser-but-real conditions of Security, so as to lengthen the amount of time they may be profited-from before Chaotic people start using them without paying patentgratuities and thus undercutting the market.

Understood. 

They should get him his metalworkers and figure out the logistics of building a very big on-site forge. Obviously.

To be clear, none of this stuff is going to work on the first try.  The Project is a research-and-prototyping facility.  It's the place which tries out ways of doing this stuff in practice, and gets it working well enough for a major refinery or forge to be built -

- presumably somewhere else, next to an iron-ore mine, or a coal mine for coal fuel, or a forest for wood fuel if adding fire elementals can make wood fires suitable for refining or forging.  Unless Teleport logistics are very different from what Keltham suspects they are; people talk about the Worldwound in a way that suggests Teleporting lots of stuff is a significant expense.

Project employees, Law-wielders, are not distinguished by their knowing about engineering tricks like reverse-flow or bright ideas like preheating fuel and air using a fire elemental.  The domain experts brought on-site can be told about that part simply enough and without a lot of prior background.  The tier-2s and tier-1s and Keltham himself, have the job of meta-learning how to try things, tweak things, observe things, and get them to actually work; and, to a lesser extent, understanding what is actually going on with heat and temperature and tiny vibrating molecules, and using that knowledge to organize their experiments.

Keltham thinks to check his watch and finds that dinnertime theoretically ended an hour ago.

Keltham is pretty sure he knows the answer to this question, but is there a reason why Ione didn't warn him he was going overtime?

Ione continues to be a Nethysian, yes.  She's pretty sure she doesn't get to go on being one, if an alien from outside known reality is talking about how the universe is secretly put together, and you interrupt him so that you can go eat food.

Ione Messaged Security to tell them to make sure food went on existing whenever Keltham got done, though.

...a belated dinner it is, then.

PL-timestamp:  Day 13 (10) / Evening

Dinnertime!  It's a time and they're having dinner during it, so it is, by definition, dinnertime.

Carissa has first claim on Keltham's attention if this is a time when cuddling is desirable; he will otherwise approach Ione to check in on his route progress there.