Quote:Indeed. See, for example, the rec.a.sf.written threads about Stirling's 'Dies a fire', which usec a similiar idea.
Seriously, though, where are they getting the energy to support that total an alteration of the laws of physics, even over such a limited area?
Ja, -n
(*wonders how many people they lost trying to tune the electron flow trick so that it didn't also suppress chemical reactions - like the ones driving human biology*)
If metals stop conducting electricity, they stop being metals. They'll become some kind of covalent crystal/glass, which won't be as shiny or strong - so no unechanted steel swords or structural metal.
Transition to the new structure has to be exothermic inside the low-tech zone or you lose the second law, which takes god-tech - they'd have to suppress all microscopic randomness which means pretty much controlling the motion of every last electron and quark within the zone.
When the zone switches on, all metals will get hot, and many will burn. A firestorm won't help Tokyo much, but it won't help the invaders either.
Stopping radioactivity is worse. If tritium doesn't decay He-3, He-3 will decay to Tritium, unless the binding energies are exactly equal even after accounting for the miniscule differences in chemical binding energies, which means fiddling with the chemistry of every single hydrogen containing molecule (so goodbye life) and even if you manage that, tritium will now be He-3 50% of the time, in a quantum superposition, doing more messy things to chemistry.
However, you've got bigger problems than this. In relaxing to its new ground state, every single nucleus within the zone has just released an average of few MeV, sufficient to heat the entire zone to a few million degrees, and give everyone within a few hundred miles a fatal dose of radiation.
Naturally, all the energy for these pyrotechnics is coming from the invaders.
If they can impose the zone without these side effects, they must have god-like local omnipotence, and an energy budget sufficient to snuff out the sun like a candle in a hurricane. Mounting a conventional invasion would seem unnecessary
This may seem pedantic, but it was you who brought physics up. Describe the mechanism, or its results, in scientific terms, and you must expect people to assess it by scientific rules.
You might be better off either sweeping the entire issue under the carpet, hoping the readers will be too busy admiring the fancy fighting to consider technological countermeasures, or writing a fair fight between science and magic, one in which magic doesn't get to make up its own rules.