When you're throwing around words like "murder," then what the law says about it is absolutely relevant. If the law says it's murder, it's murder. If the law says it's not murder, it's not murder. Now, if the question is whether Gawyn should feel guilty and lose sleep at night for having killed Hammar and Coulin, then of course he should, and I believe the books portray that he does. But he was personally, politically and professionally justified in having done it; that he could have been perhaps equally personally justified in not having done it is irrelevant. Was it the right thing to do? Well, it helped lead to the Tower split, and ultimately to Egwene as Amryllin. That's better than either Elaida or Suian continuing as Amryllin, and considering the other choices of Aes Sedai we have to possibly be the Amryllin, probably the best possible outcome, which doesn't say much for the Aes Sedai. If Hammar and Coulin and their allies had succeeded in rescuing Suian and Leane, they would have had little reason to choose other leaders, even if Suian and co. left Tar Valon to organize opposition elsewhere.

What I never understood about that whole rebellion thing was how Suian's supposed infractions were severe enough to warrant stilling and execution. Removal from office I can understand. She hid her knowledge of the identity of the Dragon Reborn and allowed him to walk free when she had him in her grasp. I'm sure the Hall was livid with her, and rightly so, but she didn't betray the Tower or any of the Sisters in it. She took a discretionary act that was arguably within her authority to make. This was a mere political disagreement, and the consequences of losing that argument should never have included stilling and execution. There wasn't even a trial, just a clandestine meeting of the Hall to pull her down. Still, none of this justifies Hammar and Coulin trying to rescue the former Amryllin and her Keeper through use of force, instead of taking their concerns to Sisters or through the Hall.

If murder is equal to unjustified killing then Gawyn killing Hammar and Coulin wasn't murder, because that act was justified. The Warders were traitors, and thus, under the Law of the Tower, deserved to die. Gawyn's motivations were complex, but as long as they include holding to the alliance between Tar Valon and Andor, then his actions were adequately justified on a personal level to not be murder. His other motivations are largely irrelevant.

Now, if you were to title this thread "Gawyn is a traitor!" you would be correct. Helping Suian, Leane and Min escape was certainly treasonous. Desertion is a form of treason, and Gawyn deserts the Younglings to join Gareth Byrne, and then deserts Egwene to go sulk in Andor. And his hatred of the Dragon Reborn and vow to kill him or see him killed, regardless of the outcome of the Last Battle, is treasonous to all mankind, or would be, if he ever managed to do anything about it other than pout, and if he hadn't eventually abandoned that hatred for reasons as spurious and irrelevant as the reasons he adopted that hatred in the first place.

Plus, I rather doubt they're housing the cooks and servants in the Tower proper. A small number of Aes Sedai would have private servants, or Warders, but they're likely housed in the Aes Sedai's apartments as well, or they have their own quarters with the rest of the servants and Gaidin. Plus, with a capacity of 3000 Aes Sedai, and closer to 1000 Aes Sedai actually in residence, it'd be pretty easy to find room for the few servants and Gaidin deemed important enough to need to be housed in the Tower itself. I assumed the average Aes Sedai's apartments were 10x30 with 10' high ceilings, and added about twice as much again for the rooms dedicated to the Hall, the Amrylin, and other public spaces like dining halls and kitchens. It's mentioned that the top half of the Tower is dedicated to living quarters while the bottom half is dedicated to the Hall, so if there's any kind of slope to the walls of the Tower, that seems to me like 2:1 ratio of public spaces (including the Hall stuff) to living spaces could be pretty close to right.

If I recall correctly, the Novices and Accepted are housed in a building attached to the main Tower itself. And as for the number of Aes Sedai it's supposed to be able to accomodate, you're right, it's not 1000, but 3000. Had it right in my calculations, reported it wrong.

Technically speaking, you should be able to build a masonry until it gets so high that the weight of the blocks above the base row exceed the compressive strength of the stone that forms the base row. Limestone has a maximum compressive strength of 42 thousand psi. A one cubic foot block of limestone weighs about 163 lbs. So, in a complete vacuum in an ideal environment, where there's no possibility for winds or sideways forces or earthquakes or settling of any kind happening to such a tower, you could stack cubic foot blocks of limestone on top of one another for 7 miles before you exceed that maximum compressive strength. Of course, the minimum compressive strength of limestone is only a little more than 2000 psi, which would limit the height of your tower to only about 1766 ft tall.

Now, neither we nor Rand live in such an ideal, airless and otherwise motionless environment. So you've got torsional and shearing stresses the stone and wooden reinforcing structures have to tolerate, among others. What we do know is that with some industrial age technology, but not yet using steel as a building material, we can build stone structures up to nearly 600 feet tall, and with more modern construction techniques, still without using steel, we could probably overtop 600 feet now, but there's really no point when steel structures are cheaper and easier to build. None of the purely masonry structures we've constructed in history have overtopped about 550 ft, none of them have been intended as living spaces within the tower structure, and all of them over about 400 ft, excepting the Great Pyramids, were built within the last 200 years, or firmly within the Industrial Period. Medieval and Renaissance buildings never really got much above 300 ft. So a 600 ft tall, usable, livable tower that wasn't just for show being built during an era of Medieval and Renaissance technology is incredibly impressive, and probably not possible without the magic of the Power and skill of the Ogier.

Just for fun, you could also estimate the amount of interior space the White Tower would require to house the 1000 Aes Sedai it's supposed to be able to house, accommodate hallways and meeting rooms and storage rooms and the Amrylin's level. Last time I did this I came up with a figure of around 25 million cubic feet. Assuming the Tower is a square building with roughly straight up-and-down walls and accounting for the thickness of those walls as support, at 600 feet tall, each face of the White Tower would have to be around 250 feet across, or around 33 spans. It could be bigger, of course, but it can't be too much smaller and accommodate all the things it's supposed to accommodate. And I kind of like the image of a Tower that's 3 times taller than it is wide.

Europeans used to average shorter median heights, and there are a lot of possible explanations for why, but their maximum heights have always been pretty constant. Same thing with other primitive peoples who, for whatever reason, evolved to be very tall compared to the rest of humanity. While most people averaged around 5'5", you'd still see a 6' man fairly regularly, and in tribes like the Masi or the Osage Indians, 6' was pretty close to the average height for males. In Randland, a 6' man would be described as almost 7 and a half feet tall. A 5' tall individual, a height that has almost always been below average for nearly any population of humans since at least the past 10,000 years, would be described as 6'. And since we're talking about a system of measurement here, that weird shortness would apply to nearly everything taller than about 5 feet tall, including horses and buildings. Is Loial described as being 10 feet tall? Well, then he's really only 8'4", which would make Rand only 5'7" since Loial is described as being half again as tall as Rand. That's not short, but it's not the sort of domineering tallness that would make people gape and take note, as Rand, having an Aielman's height, is described as being around wetlanders. And the taller something is, the bigger the discrepancy would be between how we would describe it in the real world versus how a Randlander would describe it. It just makes more sense to assume that our feet are the same but our inches are different. Then the only discrepancy would be in our measurements of things in inches, but it wouldn't be much of a discrepancy, only a difference of a bit less than a quarter of an inch per inch. Suttree's latest link also looks like a pretty good source. It basically makes the case that the Randland foot is pretty close to ours, maybe shorter by an inch, but that Jordan chose to make his feet pretty much equivalent to ours just so he didn't have to be so careful in reporting heights and lengths. So if the Randland foot is shorter than ours by an inch (a proposition that has less support than the notion that it is the same as ours), then the White Tower can't be less than 550 feet tall.

According to WoT measurements I've found online, 1 span=6 feet, 10"=1foot. So the WT would be about 500 feet tall in our world as stated above.

This depends on whether their feet are the same length as our feet, or their inches are the same length as our inches. If our feet are the same, then their inches are bigger than ours, and if our inches are the same, then their feet are smaller than ours. If their feet are smaller than ours, then either RJ wasn't consistently applying his made-up measurement system to people's heights when he describes characters, or people are much shorter in Randland, a whole foot shorter on average. For example, a 7 foot tall Aiel using Randland measures and assuming their inch equals our inch would really only be a slightly above-average 5 feet 10 inches in the real world (70 inches). Someone who was really 7 feet tall would be reported as a shocking 8 and a half feet (nearly), which heights are usually reserved for Ogiers and Trollocs. But if either of these possibilities are the case, the the White Tower is only 500 feet tall.

On the other hand, if their feet are the same as our feet, then the description of character heights is pretty much in line with what we expect from real humans, Their inch would only be one-fifth bigger than ours. So we have the advantage that we don't have to imagine RJ as being inconsistent in his application of his in-universe system of measurement, and we don't have to think that everybody was weirdly short. Our feet, and thus our paces and spans, are the same by definition and provided we agree to RJ's definitions of those terms respectively. Since a span is equal to 6 feet, then a building 100 spans tall, as the White Tower is canonically described as being, would be 600 feet.

will someone please answer this question.

its starting to bug me now.damn.

You have two options as an answer. If you believe either that RJ was a sloppy writer or everybody in Randland was weirdly short, then the Tower is 500 feet tall. If you don't want to believe RJ was a sloppy writer, or that everybody in Randland was weirdly short, then the Tower is 600 feet tall. Choose wisely.

We keep bringing up the topless towers as if that's the next tallest. But didn't Noal say (somewhere in KoD) that the 7 towers of Malkier were taller than the topless towers (which, btw, sounds like an establishment that could be found in Vegas)? Mat thinks Noal tends to exaggerate, but that's probably just because he's seen so many strange things.

 

I brought up the "topless towers" because in FoH when (i forget whose PoV it is) is describing them as "impossibly tall"

 

You have to keep the setting (time period and technology) in mind when you read those descriptions, though.

 

Also, in the 10 inches per foot, three feet per pace, two paces per span thing, what is the unit that matches up to our modern units of the same name? This topic used the inch, but for some reason I'm thinking it's the foot. Mat's described as being two inches under six feet, or maybe it was Perrin as being two inches over. If the inch was the common standard, then Mat would be four feet and ten inches tall in the real world, and Perrin would be five feet and two inches tall. That would mean that me, as short as I am (5'5" or 65 inches) would be three inches taller than Perrin and the same height as Rand. I don't think so.

 

That just doesn't seem right to me.

 

So, treating the foot as the common standard between our two measuring systems, the White Tower would be about six hundred feet tall.

 

Also, a lot of credit is being given to the use of the One Power in the construction, but we're leaving out Ogier masonry, which likely surpasses real world masonry skills.

That's a pretty good argument that it's the foot measurement and not the inch that's the closest between our world and Randland. I'd be willing to buy that the White Tower is about 50 feet taller than the tallest purely masonry load-bearing structure in the real world, and is able to attain that height in an era of low technology primarily through use of the Power, and ogier stonemasonry, of course, but I doubt even ogier craftsmanship can overcome the inherent compression strength of stone, brick, mortar and wood.

Well, see, that's the thing. I don't think there's any evidence to suppose that any part of the Topless Towers were constructed by the Power, and whatever construction technology survived the Breaking appears to be at roughly early Renaissance levels during Rand's time, so no steel beam and concrete reinforcing. Even with the White Tower, it appears that they used the Power in constructing it less to over-top some maximum practical height in a stone tower and more so they could use less materials in reaching that height. The walls of the Philadelphia City Hall, for example, already mentioned as the world's tallest purely masonry structure, are 22 feet thick at their base in order to support that height. I imagine using the Power allowed them to use walls at the base that were much less thick, not to mention hardening the surface to protect against erosion. A 3000 year old tower made of natural stone would look more like a pile of rocks after all that weathering than a man-made structure. They may have been able to build the White Tower higher, but at 500 feet, they're already nearly at the maximum of any normal stone tower anyway, pretty much ensuring that nobody could build a taller one, so no real sense in or need to build it any taller than that.

Considering the tallest masonry structure in the world today is only about 550 feet tall (the Philadelphia City Hall), it seems unlikely the Topless Towers are actually taller than the White Tower. Unless they're sneaking some steel and concrete into the construction. They may have been designed to be, but not by much, and they are unfinished, after all. It's probably more likely the Topless Towers are between 300 and 450 feet tall.

Think I remember reading it is 100 spans in height...

That wouldn't be very impressive since a span is only 8 inches. The White Tower would be only 75 feet tall. Maybe 1000 spans?

Nope, went and looked it up on the wiki. In the WoT universe, 10 inches is 1 foot. 3 feet is one pace and two paces is one span. So one span is 60 inches, 100 spans would be 6000 inches, or 500 feet in real-world feet. If it had 12 foot stories, it could only have 41, which I think makes it likely that it averaged 10 foot stories. To put that in some perspective, the Statue of Liberty is 305 feet, including the base, the UN Headquarters building in New York is 505 feet, the Saint Louis Arch is 630 feet, the Seattle Space Needle is 605 feet, and the Eiffel Tower is 1,056 feet if you count the TV tower on the top, 984 feet if you don't. So the White Tower is about half as tall as the Eiffel Tower, slightly shorter than the Arch or the Space Needle, and about the same size as the UN Headquarter's building. Whatever else you may find similar between the White Tower and the UN, I never expected their buildings to be the same size.

I wouldn't worry about cups for tea too much. Mat will probably trip over a cuendillar set left over from the AoL as he walks back to camp.