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Is still an issue of free will. If you don't want them to touch it, move it five miles south (so someone else can touch it)?

Nay, why create it at all? If you don't have the tree, and there is no decision, everyone is happy, right? No one can disobey in the absence of options.

Yet, Lucifer didn't face such a choice, yet sin still occurred.

Also not a theologian but...

My mom (Jew) would say God also gives us the ability to murder with the expectation not to do so.
eg: Both are sins, but you have free will to engage if you really want to sin.

===insert devil's advocate part ===

Me (Converted): The specific passage in the bible is where the guy wastes his seed by spilling it at the side of the bed.

The scene suggests God doesn't want seed wasted. So we get the rules that you can't masturbate and you can't use contraception.

Why was the Lord displeased? Was it really because of the spilled seed? Or was it because Onan was sleeping with someone else's wife?

I don't recommend *overly* worrying about physics.

After all, if you can "see" a laser being fired, it's probably not a laser but rather something much slower.

It's probably also wasting energy into the visible spectrum in some direction other than it's going (eg has a moving point of emission (effusion?) or other)

If your ship's computers can "see" an attack before it strikes, the attack was already slower than light or there's handwavium.

If you can see a turret "warming up" (before shooting a light blast) you might ask how so much infrared energy escaped and how such radiation eclipsed higher energy signatures.

Well, yes, until you need magic to break it. Will you adhere to known rules or will you side-step when required?

These names really stick out to me, in a Starship Troopers way.

And I'm thinking back to Frank Herbert. How does one get "The Spice Must Flow" to sound cool? There is honestly nothing cool about "Make my Mustard Run" or "Let the Ketchup Drip". Yet somehow "The Spice Must Flow" works.

I think that's what's hitting me: Mustard, juice, ketchup, milk. Perhaps it needs to be more generic.

(Brainstorm Mode Enabled!)

Ok a neutrino-energy converter works on clusters of neutrinos so the energy pools internally until there's enough to make a controlled release. So "Drippers" informally for the engine and "percolate" for the process. "Dammit man, an energy converter isn't a coffee machine, we don't have all day to watch it percolate"

(Brainstorm Mode Off!)

That makes me think of coffee too much. Must continue to fire neurons at the problem

Indeed. I see by the long write-up that you understand the implications of the arrangement.

Along the lines of Rey Skywalker turning to the camera and says "Actually, I've been Anakin all along" this is going to be a big leap for your reader to manage. You'll need to do a long of prep-work to help them bridge it.

Yeh, ran some stats on it, and Amy thread, in the past five days, has picked up around a hundred views a day.
E. Free's thread served as my basis, pulling an average of 75 hits per night.

So probably just bot traffic looking for something titillating or AIs learning how to emulate us.
I'm pretty certain an AI considers a forum a treasure trove of non-copyrighted learning.

Four states. I said:

I didn't try to quantify energy. Not sure physics has fully defined it either.

For the states of matter we have four basic states (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_matter) and a few non-classical. Should we discover a new basic state, our understanding of the universe will have to change

Fun side story... I was at a funeral last year for a parent. The daughter I'd dated a bit 30 years ago but fell out of contact since we didn't exactly have facebook in those golden days.

Okay, so fast-forward. I reach the plot and there's all these people milling around. I quickly locate her in the crowd, except something's off. My mental software says this is her, but my logical brain says she couldn't still look the same.

She's obviously curious why I'm just standing there staring, so I venture "Are you (X)?"
She replies, "No, that's my mom."

Don't target hard sci-fi... this is not that story. Space opera is your market.

Hard sci-fi is 100% about the explainable. Everything else is magic. A story gets very little wriggle room outside the unexplainable.

Story: We change matter-energy to a previously unknown state
Hard-sci-fi: What's the name of the state?
Story: A new state. One that fits [X] requirement.
Hard-sci-fi: But [X] is impossible according to our current understanding of the universe
Story: Extrapolate: Some new rule current rules cannot explain
Hard-sci-fi: Well, current rules cannot explain it. It's magic

Given the massive headaches you already have to deal with, this one may be something you simply lean into / roll with.

Consider also the eyebrows-raises I got for having female angels

In one of her early battles Lenore used a speed potion (she got from another character) to beat up a bunch of enemy construction workers.

This caused me all sorts of grief because there were other instances where she could have used the potions, but did not. And I further had to use the potions among other characters since it wasn't believable one might sip some holy water and get sixty seconds of x100 speed and strength.

Getting rid of the potion-concept and having her simply shoot her enemies. So simple. Solved so much.

Most of that activity is likely webcrawlers. Especially so if Amy's thread consistently grows its view-count