Is Ranmas world really weird/real life Ranma like stuff

[antimatterenergy]

Yes the super human abilities are fairly strange but there are a lot of super human abilities that occasionally show up in real life some as seemingly unrealistic as what is shown in Ranma. Ex. mothers lifting cars to save their child, people falling off high places and not being injured, car crashes where the car is totaled but the driver walks away without a scratch, men pulling trucks, remote viewing/astral projection (military and government agencies believe in it enough to spend millions of dollars on it), etc...
There are real life items and things that are some what like the magical items shown in the manga. Ex. anti-sleep drug that allows you to stay up safely for almost two days while remaining practically as focused, alert, and capable of dealing with complex problems as the well-rested. http://www.boingboing.net/2002/06/27/ne ... _drug.html another ex. invisibility cloak - Japanese built one of these, another ex. drugs that increase suggestibility and drugs that erase short term memory.
Actually some of the supposed weird things in Ranma aren't all that weird. There really are martial art schools that teach both martial arts and ballroom dancing so it's not a big stretch to combine them.
Martial arts tea ceremony has never existed as far as I know but several schools of martial arts do suggest that their students learn tea ceremony and flower arranging as a means of learning patience, control, and other stuff. Also like martial arts it usually takes years to become a master at tea ceremony.
Both Rhythmic gymnastics (similar to some Chinese martial art styles) and cheerleading (some places teach both so why not combine them) can be counted as martial art forms.
Almost every high-school in Japan does have martial art clubs and competitions involving martial arts.
Watermelon bashing races exist they just aren't like in the manga. Blind fold and hit with sticks whoever breaks the most melons in a set time period wins and eating contests.
There are whole communities revolving around martial arts.
There are also little known tribes in existence today for example the many small tribes in the amazon rain-forest.
The amazons laws aren't all that weird just way out dated. There are plenty of real world laws that brutal and a ton of much stranger laws.
ex.
-In 100 A.D., the Teutons, an Germanic tribe, would punish anyone caught as a prostitute by suffocating them in excrement.
-The vow of a Roman vestal virgin lasted 30 years. If she engaged in sex before then, she was punished by being buried alive.
Oh and I have no idea as to why I wrote this but it probably came about from seeing an artical about a woman lifting a car in the newspaper, discovery channel showing something about remote viewing, reading about weird laws on the internet, hearing about the no sleep drug on the radio, and other things I recently saw that make it seem like the real world and Ranma world aren't all that far apart.

[Eris]

I have to say that for the most part I disagree--the Ranmaverse is remarkably and fundamentally more strange than the actual one we live in. The Ranmaverse for starters has a lot more weirdness and inexplicable events than you're giving it credit for, and while the actual world is indeed quite remarkable, it's usually not in the sort of ways people think of. (e.g. superhuman abilities, mysterious happenings, etc.)
Starting with the Ranmaverse, the martial arts, obscure amazon laws and so forth are not in the least the strangest sorts of things you find on the show. In fact, they're downright mundane compared to some of the things that go on. Let's take the Jusenkyou curses for starters. By all appearances the curses are a violation of the first law of thermodynamics (conservation of energy).
This may not sound terribly impressive, but it means that the Ranmaverse is fundamentally a wildly different world than ours. If you can arbitrarily subract and add energy (or mass) to the universe you can start cheating reality in scary ways. Imagine a powerplant that could produce infinite energy without significant startup costs--it would cause a financial crisis of unprecidented scale in our world as all the energy companies started collapsing for lack of a market. And those are just the beginnings of the consequences.
Even if we say that the extra mass involved in the transformations is preserved, where does it come from and where does it go? It gets terminally weird no matter how you slice it. You might also point out that aerodynamically unsuitable bird people manage to fly, girls can turn into dolls, shampoo treatments can remove (or at least some how bottle up) memories, people throw around balls of spiritual energy and poking rocks can make them explode.
Now in the real world most of what is considered fantastic is actually quite easily explainable. Huge amounts of adrenaline and focus can lead to impressive feats of strength, but there are still limits that in the larger picture make us seem pretty unimpressive. Cars are relatively light (weighing rarely over a tonne or two) and even then they are never fully lifted as a dead weight, only shifted usually with the aid of moving parts (the axles were meant to move after all).
Science and technology I'll admit is tremendously impressive, but it is in such a way that I don't think it's at all out of the ordinary. The very way science and engineering work mandates that everything follows a strict set of rules and parameters that are applicable to absolutely everything else, no exceptions. What's more, there are always drawbacks and design issues that you don't hear about as much in the weird science columns. For instance, being inside an 'invisibility' cloak (actually it doesn't make you invisible, it just bends light around you--there's a slight difference) makes you blind for instance. Since intercepting any photons (allowing you to see) would change them, and allow things to see you in return.
I'm not even going to go into things like ghosts, psychics, astral projection or the like, since there has never yet been a reliable study done by a reputable source that affirms their existence. There's a reason why it's all on the fringe of mainstream scientific enquiry. And if you maintain the gov't or military as a reliable source I remind you these are the same people that claim that marijuana causes schizophrenia and that global warming doesn't exist. There was actually an interesting book entitled The Men Who Stare At Goats by Jon Ronson that documents a lot of the absurd excesses of governmental research of this kind.
In essence, as amazing and incredible as the world is, it seems to me that at the end of the day nothing is weird in the way Ranma's world is. It follows one set of laws which ensures that everything is consistent with everything else and are subject to strict limits. What makes Ranma's world so strange to my eyes is not the particular social of physical structures, but the fact that they don't seem to follow any sort of governing criteria like ours. Things "just work that way." (Limitations of storytelling I know, but so it goes.)

[Prometheus]

I refute these simple explanations and will show that with some unbiased thought, one can pierce that veil imposed on society which restricts it; what they think is possible.
To a partially educated observer the idea that the conservation of mass and energy would prevent these transformations seems reasonable enough, but you analyze on too small a level, Ex. when combustion takes place there appears to be a decrease in mass, but this mass is still present, only changed into a gas which, unless measured in a vacuum, will not register. This same idea could apply in this case, as the observed mass changes, though the mass is preserved in a form not registering when conventionally measured.
As to this thought that conservation of energy is defied... I am unsure where you see a difference in energy, but I will attempt to guess at what you refer: if one refers to the 'battle auras' one observes that in most cases it induces chills in those too weak to match them, even forcing some back. This would suggest that they draw on the energy around them, perhaps setting a temperature gradient to draw energy in from the environment(the air, soil, other people, and most likely the sun), while this may seem odd, considering these energy sources should not be usable by the human body, but we are dealing with people exposed to at least a highly potent mutagen here( the Jusenkyou springs). The hot water required to return a person to normal provides a powerful boost in energy due to its high heat capacity, and the fact that although pouring boiling water on themselves, no curse victim is ever damaged by this suggests that they absorb the water's energy. This in addition to the fact that at the most basic level the human body is a machine, and it only takes a difference in energy potential between two portions to drive a machine.
Poking rocks to make them explode is improbable, but not necessarily impossible. Consider when a singer breaks a glass with his/her voice: what is occuring? The answer to this is key. Every substance has a specific resonance frequency: the frequency at which it naturally vibrates, as all objects due, however minutely and imperceptibly to the average human. When a singer matches the glass' resonance frequency, the wave motion builds upon itself until the vibrations are past the materials strength to withstand, and it shatters; any frequency besides the resonance frequency would fail to accomplish this as the natural motion would be contrary to the new wave and cancel: thus requiring a vastly greater amount of energy to overcome. Now, back to the bakusai tenketsu, this technique would be reasonable if one learned how to gauge the weakest point on the rock(where it would be most easy to shatter); how to vibrate one's finger at a precise frequency(seemingly impossible, but with a martial artist's control, within reason); now comes the hardest part, learning how to judge a resonance frequency without an impressive array of sensitive instruments, this could only be accomplished by trial and error on a variety of substances in various configurations, from these baselines one could adapt to close enough to the resonance frequency to succeed if additional force is used to compensate for slight discrepancy.
As for the speed of the characters and the ability of the Phoenix to fly, this is dependent on a very plausible explanation: 1. That the extreme training and rare genetic makeup has resulting in the alteration of specific ligments and muscle groups, mainly that the muscle groups have been reconfigured into much denser groupings then normally present. As one may observe in those individuals who push world speed records, also ligments may be used to push a body beyond the speed limit normally imposed by the rate of muscle contraction(as ligments can act as springs in some instances and store energy in a volatile form. 2. In regards to the Phoenix one often forgets that in flying animals one must apply mathematics similar to those for helicopters, not airplanes. Think of the huge double-rotor transport helicopters, which appear aerodynamically infeasible, or the older varieties of helicopter which appear box-like in shape. Makes flying people seem aerodynamically feasible doesn't it?
Producing a KI blast is a little outlandish, but perhaps it is not so much so if one realizes that they are mostly spheres of extremely-pressurized air, and this could be accomplished by mechanics similar to a tornado's(though admittedly this is reminiscent more of the Hiryua Shoten Ha), by creating a pressure difference and swirling the mass one may create a central point with a swirling air mass around it, and though this would lose power quickly over the distance fired, this is concurrent with Ranma's world. It is the transfer of energy into the air to form a useful pressure difference which exhausts the user.
It is well known that brain trauma, and specific chemicals can cause a mind to have amnesia, and if one was to be capable of isolating the regions in which specific memories were stored and target them, perhaps made possible if a chemical marker was present in all the memories one wants to target, but no where else (for instance an already suggested Jusenkyou chemical) as if a person were exposed to that chemical by the object/person/place one wishes to have removed from memory.
Once again the idea of an invisibility cloak seems fairly impossible with the restriction of having to see through it from the inside, however the technology exhibited could be combined with the flexible screens being developed and display the view of the camerasalready present, giving an unobstructed view in all directions. Although I suppose power consumption might be prohibitive, I am not privy to the exact specifications of these two technologies.
That seems to be all the major points that were brought up, remind me if I missed any.
Please pardon my grammar, I tried my best, but I am afraid I have a tendency for sentences too long for their own good.

[Adyen]

Nice.
There was once a documentary on a Chinese martial artist who was able to to concentrate his ki in his hand and cause it to be much hotter than his body. I can't remember how long ago that was made, but I remember seeing it. I'm not sure if it proves good conscious body control or ki, but it does explain that training can make a difference between what's viewed as impossible and only improbable.

This may not sound terribly impressive, but it means that the Ranmaverse is fundamentally a wildly different world than ours. If you can arbitrarily subract and add energy (or mass) to the universe you can start cheating reality in scary ways. Imagine a powerplant that could produce infinite energy without significant startup costs--it would cause a financial crisis of unprecidented scale in our world as all the energy companies started collapsing for lack of a market. And those are just the beginnings of the consequences.

And thus we get to the worse point of Capitalism - companies hinder change if it does not provide a material benifit for themselves. It's entirely possible to ween our civilization off finite resources such as oils, but we don't because it would put oil companies out of business. Books can be in electric form now, but there isn't much non-public e-books because the paper industry is a large part of the economics (though I have to admit having a book in my hand is rather comforting). Coal is still used in parts of the developed world dispite having cleaner forms of power because it takes a large amount of resources to build new power plants...
Granted those things takes time, but most of the advances I've mentioned has been out for nearly a decade, and most countries don't even have plans to use those resources.
At the same time... I can see the concerns people would have. The chaos such things would cause could easily topple governments (Humans being the short-sighted creatures we are), but most certainly our children would benifit in the long run.

[Eris]

Ooh, fun. Substantive debate. I'm always for this. Beware of major snipping--I'm trying to keep down my overall post length.

[Bits on conservation of energy]

My point is exactly that all the energy involved, unless we want to discard our laws of physics (which might be necessary), must come from somewhere and must go somewhere, as you have apparently grasped. However, we don't see any evidence of this happening at all. Full stop. It just gets poofed away without the massive freezing and emission events that you'd expect if they were just absorbing ambient energy. You mention the heat of the water involved as potential sources of the energy balances required, but that's not even remotely close enough.
Ryouga for instance loses and gains tens of kilograms of mass (don't know the numbers, but piglet to exceedingly strong martial artist makes that one seem not unreasonable). If he just dumped his extra mass as energy Tokyo and the environs would be destroyed every time he changed. Now, we can posit some sort of aether where all this extra mass is poofed to and from to make up the energy balances, but my entire point is that this makes it considerably more peculiar than our world. We've already got a whole new set of mechanisms and spaces that are required to make the system work. The more metaphysical clutter required to make a world consistent the stranger it is, or so my hidden premise runs.
Basically, it works, we know this. We've seen evidence in the manga and anime that everything comes together--it's just a matter of how simply we can explain all the unusual happenings, and the more fictional forces and properties we have to invent, the farther away from reality it strays, and thus the weirder it is.

[Bits on resonance]

Well, you're certainly correct that materials have certain frequencies that they respond to. The problem here is that only certain things are vulnerable to catastrophic failure because of this. Glasses break when exposed to certain pitches because they are regular shapes made of homogenous materials. The more complex your structure is both in regard to its composition and shape, the less likely it is to have a resonant frequency.
In fact, irregular objects like, say, rocks don't have one at all. They're made up of too many substances in too irregular fashions for there to be any one pitch that can do anything to them. The reason certain pitches cause catastrophic damage is because they can cause uniform or regular objects to develop standing waves of increasing power--this isn't possible in complex objects.
So yes, you can destroy a glass by shouting in certain ways. Even rocks and the like can, but it's not because of resonance, but simply because the applied energy was greater than it's durability. And it still remains that the Bakusai Tenketsu blows up rocks by touching them. The idea that someone can conduct a material analysis just by looking at a rock and then vibrate one's finger at frequencies that are comparable to that sound or light seems just beyond me, that before the fact that most of the time there is no magic frequency to find. I'm much more inclined to bite the bullet and write it off to "ki" and simply define limits for it instead of trying to mutilate our science into explaining it.

[Bits on the Phoenix folk]

Actually, I think the comparison of all flighted creatures to helicopters instead of airplanes is a bit off target. Insects are more like helicopters true, but birds are like airplanes, with the exception of perhaps the hummingbird and a few other similar varieties. While it's possible to fly without being aerodynamic, you have to be designed in a proper manner. Insects have multiple wing pairs (4-6 usually) which they beat at rates of up to 15,000 times a minute to produce the necessary lift. Birds don't have to since they are designed to naturally produce lift through wing design that is startingly like plane wing design, but they can't hover like a helicopter or insect (the hummingbird being the obvious exception, but you'll notice it too has to beat its wings thousands of times a minute to produce the lift required--most birds get away with numbers of bpm lower by orders of magnitude because they're designed in a more aerodynamic fasion).
So unless it turns out that the bird people are actually more like insects and beat their wings thousands of times per minute, they need the sleek lift-producing methods of a bird to do it for them. They don't seem to be either insectile or avian, so, and here's my point, they must have some further mechanism complicating the matter that we don't have in our world.

[Bits on ki projection]

Hmm, actually I rather like the idea of pressurised air, and it not only explains why the blasts tend towards the non-lethal, but why they drop off in power and act like concussion bombs when they hit. That's really quite elegant. It still of course requires ki manifestion and projection to begin with, but it's a rather slick explanation all-around. Kudos.
In regards to the invisibility technology, I'm not quite sure what you're after, but it's not particularly important in any case. My point mainly was that it follows all our laws of physics, and comes with drawbacks. Mostly it was a throwaway point since it was mentioned earlier.
And no problem with the grammar. I found it to be quite understandable. You might want a few carriage returns between paragraphs (white space is your friend!), but I had no trouble picking out what I thought were your salient points.

[Knight of L-sama]

I'll add to the mass/energy conservation arguement with some rough figures.
(Remember E=mc^2 courtesy of Albert Einstein, all weights are guestimates and there are 2.2 pounds to the kilo if you want to convert out of metric)
Male Ranma = 70 kilos
Female Ranma = 50 kilos at most
Energy Difference = 1.8x 10^18 Joules
Equivalent to 440 Megaton explosion if released explosively. For comparison the combined yields of weapons detonating during nuclear testing it 510 Megatons.
Mousse, Shampoo and Ryoga are probably looking at three times that amount (or considerably more if all Mousse's weapons are included). If that energy is being supplied from the enviroment Taro is going to be soaking up even more energy, definitely enought to freeze some of the surrounding air and possibly (probably) reducing everything in a fair sized area to very close to absolute zero. Either way there would be a significant implosion from contracting air when he transformed.
Speaking of Mousse the insides of his robes must be a tessarect for him to carry everything in there that he does without it showing. On at least one occasion in the anime he is shown to be carrying half a dozen or more long swords in there which might be barely possible in the real world, but not without showing through the robes.
And hitting the harmonic frequency of an object wouldn't be enough to explain the Bakusai Tenketsu's inabiltiy to work against living flesh. Even given the disparate make up of various parts of the human body harmonic resonance should in theory be able to break the shallower bones (skull bones, sternum, scapula maybe).
Another example of how Ranma is so different from the real world is the Dragon's Whisker incident. If someone's hair grew that fast they would be suffering from severe vitamin A deficiency in very short order from growing so much hair.

[Cheb]

Speaking of Mousse the insides of his robes must be a tessarect for him to carry everything in there that he does without it showing.

Correction: he hides his weapons in an "object space", not in his robes. There were precedents when he launched a lot of chains while in duck form, and once when he was *naked*!

[WG_Writer]

who is to say that the magic doesn't store the energy to maintain the transformation.
Besides what most people over look is energy is matter, it is just broken matter.

[Eris]

who is to say that the magic doesn't store the energy to maintain the transformation.
Besides what most people over look is energy is matter, it is just broken matter.

Well, that's sort of the entire point of what's been said as far as I can tell. Energy is fundamentally matter in a different instantiation, therefore it has to go somewhere in accordance with the transformations. My thesis is that we have to invoke magic in order to explain this away, making Ranma's world stranger than ours, since we don't have to invoke magic as the cause of anything. It's like FTL travel in scifi--it's not possible so we have to invoke handwavium and hope people don't find the man behind the curtain.

[Cheb]

There are more elegant and simple solutions not involving energy at all, like split realities. The beauty of this approach is that in it the magic doesn't contradict the laws of physic as we know them.
One of the best systems is from "Hybrid Theory" where Washu explains it. There is an endless number of possible futures (note - according the teory of probability *everything* is possible - for example, the event where all the molecules of air gather in, say, the left half of the room isn't impossible, it's just very improbable).
So, ki-user is able to choose of these futures, bringing out the low-probability ones ones that benefit him. So super-jumps, compressed air projectiles, accelerated healing/durability, etc. are just bending probability laws.
Magic user is able to choose of alternate parallel realities, bringing out the ones that benefit him. For example, a love pill brings forth a reality where the pill swallower fell in love with the specific person.
So, for example, splashing Ryouga brings out a local chunk of reality where in his same place was a piglet with his personality. There's no matter/energy conversion because the pig "was already here" and "there was no Ryouga". Voila. All the physics law are intact.

[antimatterenergy]

There are ways to explain the magic of Ranma's world if you really wanted to but my point wasn't that Ranma's world doesn't have things impossible to our world as we know it (impossible may become possible with further knowledge and technological advances) only that it is not as strange as some people think.
Also not that it really matters Eris but it is theoretically possible to travel to a place faster than light. One way is as recent experiments have shown slow down a beam of light until you are moving faster than it so that you will technically going faster than a beam of light. Also you can theoretically move to a place faster than light by means of a wormhole or a Alcubierre drive. (neither of which are possible to create with current technology but both do not break the laws of physics.)
Though we have not seen the limits of the magic in the Ranma world it probably does have drawbacks, limitations, and rules. We were just never told them. Though it is fun to guess what they are.

[Forum Troll]

Just about every scientific fact will be shown to be wrong in some instance eventually as we find better ways to observe reality. In my opinion of course
Also the choosing of probability method sounds extremely like the rune magic found in the Death Gate Cycle by Weis and Hickman. Only difference is the people in those books had to use runes to choose and bring the chosen possibility into effect.
Troll

[Zwzn]

Speaking of Mousse the insides of his robes must be a tessarect for him to carry everything in there that he does without it showing.

Correction: he hides his weapons in an "object space", not in his robes. There were precedents when he launched a lot of chains while in duck form, and once when he was *naked*!

Aren't those ideas very similar? The only real difference is were it pocket of warped space time is?

[antimatterenergy]

I figure that I might as well give my theory for the breaking point technique. I don't think it is resonance my theory is much simplier Ryoga hits the rock with his finger really hard and the energy/force simply has nowhere to go but into the rock. The rock can not absorb or transfer the energy so the rock explodes if Ryoga is channeling his ki into the finger as well that would mean more energy and bigger explosion. Hitting a human or sand would not explode since the body/sand can absorb and spread the energy but hard things like rock and wood can't. It also matters on how tough the thing your hitting and the thickness becuase thin stuff would just have the finger push through. Why one finger not the whole fist simple to better focus the energy into one spot. In my theory if Ryoga did the breaking point on a regular persons head his fingers would punch right through the persons skull.Obsidion-fox did the calculation once and rated Ranma's bones at just below diamond if I remember right and Ranma's flesh stronger than rock. Which is why it didn't do anything to Ranma.
As for the curses it can work as a form of teleportation. Teleportation is theoretically possible see: http://www.research.ibm.com/quantuminfo/teleportation/ and then download all the memories into the new brain (brain is after all only a organic computer)

[Valkyrie Ice]

Humm. To explain how I see it I figured I would also submit this, a short brief on what my researches into various real world (i.e. our world, not Ranma's) majickal systems has led me to hypothesize, namely what is the origin of the force we term Majick? (Spelling denotes difference from stage magic, i.e. sleight of hand.)
Lately, theoretical physics has created a concept called Superstrings, (or hyperstrings). This concept is based on mathematical analysis of quantum physics and is currently being studied as a possible Grand Unified Theory of Everything. In it's simplest explanation, the Omniverse (not just the one we are living in, but all universes in all dimensions) is composed of just two things: superstrings, and vibrational energy.
I don't want to get into the quantum level explanations unless requested to, but the essential point is that, per so many various religions, is that Reality is indeed an illusion, and that the visible world is just the tip of the iceberg of the larger reality.
This means that your physical body is only the smallest part of you, and that your energy pattern exists in dimensions where the limits of our physical body do not exist. It spreads out from us through dimensions we cannot see and covers the entirety of the Omniverse.
It is this energy pattern self that is your presence in Hyperspace, the part of reality outside our 3 dimensions. You can term it spirit plane, astral plane, etc, but nearly every religion has a term for this place, and theoretical physics is now catching up to millennia old beliefs.
What this means is that part of your body exists that you have almost no conscious connection to, but that is still regulated by the subconscious as are the autonomic functions, like breathing and your heartbeat. But just as your conscious mind can learn to control these functions through various disciplines, so to can it learn to control your Hyperself.
It is this Hyperself that carries out the actions we call Majick. On the Hyperspatial plane, distance and time are meaningless. And every person everywhere overlaps. It is through this merger that the Collective Unconscious pools the knowledge of humanity, past present and future, and also where we influence each other spiritually. It is this Hyperself who, like a magnet, exerts its influence over the possible paths that we take through Consciousness, and therefore creates Majick.
Learning Majick is essentially physical therapy for the Hyperself. Like someone with a spinal injury, we have to train our mind how to communicate with a part of the body we have let atrophy, then slowly work ceaselessly to build up the strength of our spiritual muscles.
It doesn't matter what system of therapy we use, what path we go by to exercise our larger self, it matters only that we learn the discipline needed to move our long disconnected muscles in Hyperspace.
In the Ranmaverse, I see both the curses and the various martial arts effects as being very much connected. The Curse affects not Ranma's physical body, but the hyperspace one. When he changes, it's because his hyperspatial frequency has changed, and the mass conversions are executed on the hyperplane, so his body, being merely a reflection cast into the 3d world, changes too.
For the super strength, super speeds, things beyond what ordinary muscle can do, likewise, the extreme discipline of these martial artists has allowed them to manipulate their own realities to a small degree, allowing them to utilize their connection to their hyperspatial selves to perform feats that would otherwise be impossible.
While it's true that you cannot change the Laws of Physics, the simple truth is that we only know such a small part of those laws that saying something is impossible is ridiculous.
Val