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The Way (Greg Bear)
''The Way'' series is a trilogy of science fiction novels and one short story by American author Greg Bear published from 1985 to 1999. The first novel was '' Eon'' ( 1985), followed by a sequel, ''Eternity'' and a prequel, ''Legacy''. It also includes '' The Way of All Ghosts'', a short story that falls between ''Legacy'' and ''Eon''. Novels ''Eon'' ''Eon'' chronicles the appearance and discovery of the ''Thistledown'', and its subsequent effect on humanity. In the early 21st century, the United States and Russia are on the verge of nuclear war. In that tense political climate, an asteroid appears out of near space after an unusual supernova and settles into an extremely elliptical orbit near Earth orbit. The two nations each try to claim this mysterious object, which appears to be a virtual duplicate of Juno. It is hollow and contains seven vast terraformed chambers. Two of the chambers contain cities long abandoned by human beings who seemed to come from Earth's future. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Eon (novel)
''Eon'' is a science fiction novel by American author Greg Bear published by Bluejay Books in 1985. ''Eon'' was nominated for an Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1987. It is the first novel in ''The Way'' series; followed by ''Eternity''. Story In the early 21st century, NATO and the Soviet Union are on the verge of a second nuclear war. Incidentally, a 290 km prolate spheroid has been detected following an anomalous energy burst just outside the solar system. It is an asteroid: Juno. It moves into an eccentric near-Earth orbit where the rival polities of Earth each try to claim this mysterious object. Juno has been hollowed out along its long axis, subdivided into seven cylindrical chambers, and rotates to provide artificial gravity. The chambers are terraformed, with the second and third containing cities that have been maintained by automatic systems for centuries. This small world is dubbed "the Stone" by the Americans, "the Potato" by the Soviets, “the Whale” ( 鲸) ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alternate Timeline
Alternate history (also alternative history, althist, AH) is a genre of speculative fiction of stories in which one or more historical events occur and are resolved differently than in real life. As conjecture based upon historical fact, alternative history stories propose ''What if?'' scenarios about crucial events in human history, and present outcomes very different from the historical record. Alternate history also is a subgenre of literary fiction, science fiction, and historical fiction; as literature, alternate history uses the tropes of the genre to answer the ''What if?'' speculations of the story. Since the 1950s, as a subgenre of science fiction, alternative history stories feature the tropes of time travel between histories, and the psychic awareness of the existence of an alternative universe, by the inhabitants of a given universe; and time travel that divides history into various timestreams. In the Spanish, French, German, and Portuguese, Italian, Catalan, an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Quantum Entanglement
Quantum entanglement is the phenomenon that occurs when a group of particles are generated, interact, or share spatial proximity in a way such that the quantum state of each particle of the group cannot be described independently of the state of the others, including when the particles are separated by a large distance. The topic of quantum entanglement is at the heart of the disparity between classical and quantum physics: entanglement is a primary feature of quantum mechanics not present in classical mechanics. Measurements of physical properties such as position, momentum, spin, and polarization performed on entangled particles can, in some cases, be found to be perfectly correlated. For example, if a pair of entangled particles is generated such that their total spin is known to be zero, and one particle is found to have clockwise spin on a first axis, then the spin of the other particle, measured on the same axis, is found to be anticlockwise. However, this behavior gives ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Heptagon
In geometry, a heptagon or septagon is a seven-sided polygon or 7-gon. The heptagon is sometimes referred to as the septagon, using "sept-" (an elision of ''septua-'', a Latin-derived numerical prefix, rather than '' hepta-'', a Greek-derived numerical prefix; both are cognate) together with the Greek suffix "-agon" meaning angle. Regular heptagon A regular heptagon, in which all sides and all angles are equal, has internal angles of 5π/7 radians (128 degrees). Its Schläfli symbol is . Area The area (''A'') of a regular heptagon of side length ''a'' is given by: :A = \fraca^2 \cot \frac \simeq 3.634 a^2. This can be seen by subdividing the unit-sided heptagon into seven triangular "pie slices" with vertices at the center and at the heptagon's vertices, and then halving each triangle using the apothem as the common side. The apothem is half the cotangent of \pi/7, and the area of each of the 14 small triangles is one-fourth of the apothem. The area of a regular heptago ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Inertia Damper
An inertia damper is a device that counters or damps the effects of inertia and other forces and motion. The damper does not negate the forces but either absorbs or redirects them by other means. For example, a large and heavy suspended body may be used to absorb several short-duration large forces, and to reapply those forces as a smaller force over a longer period. The phrase ''inertial damper'' is actually misused in science fiction to describe a device that negates inertia and removes it from surrounding mass. It is more properly described as inertia negation. Real-world applications and devices Inertial compensators are also used in simulators or rides, making them more realistic by creating artificial sensations of acceleration and other movement. The Disneyland ride “Star Tours: The Adventure Continues” is a fair example of this principle. There are many types of physical devices that can act as inertia dampers: * Ballast * Brakes - kinetic energy redirected as hea ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Speed Of Light
The speed of light in vacuum, commonly denoted , is a universal physical constant that is important in many areas of physics. The speed of light is exactly equal to ). According to the special theory of relativity, is the upper limit for the speed at which conventional matter or energy (and thus any signal carrying information) can travel through space. All forms of electromagnetic radiation, including visible light, travel at the speed of light. For many practical purposes, light and other electromagnetic waves will appear to propagate instantaneously, but for long distances and very sensitive measurements, their finite speed has noticeable effects. Starlight viewed on Earth left the stars many years ago, allowing humans to study the history of the universe by viewing distant objects. When communicating with distant space probes, it can take minutes to hours for signals to travel from Earth to the spacecraft and vice versa. In computing, the speed of light fixes ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Epsilon Eridani
Epsilon Eridani ( Latinized from ε Eridani), formally named Ran, is a star in the southern constellation of Eridanus, at a declination of 9.46° south of the celestial equator. This allows it to be visible from most of Earth's surface. At a distance of from the Sun, it has an apparent magnitude of 3.73. It is the third-closest individual star or star system visible to the unaided eye. The star is estimated to be less than a billion years old. Because of its relative youth, Epsilon Eridani has a higher level of magnetic activity than the present-day Sun, with a stellar wind 30 times as strong. Its rotation period is 11.2 days at the equator. Epsilon Eridani is smaller and less massive than the Sun, and has a comparatively lower level of elements heavier than helium. It is a main-sequence star of spectral class K2, which means that energy generated at the core through nuclear fusion of hydrogen is emitted from the surface at a temperature of about , giving ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Far Horizons
''Far Horizons: All New Tales from the Greatest Worlds of Science Fiction'' is an anthology of original science fiction stories edited by Robert Silverberg, first published in hardcover by Avon Eos in May 1999, with a book club edition following from Avon and the Science Fiction Book Club in July of the same year. Paperback and trade paperback editions were issued by Eos/HarperCollins in May 2000 and December 2005, respectively, and an ebook edition by HarperCollins e-books in March 2009. The first British edition was issued in hardcover and trade paperback by Orbit/Little Brown in June 1999, with a paperback edition following from Orbit in July 2000. The book has also been translated into Spanish. Summary The anthology contains eleven short works by various science fiction authors, including one by the editor himself, together with an introduction explaining the project by the editor and an introduction and occasionally an afterword to each story by its author. Each story was or ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lamarckism
Lamarckism, also known as Lamarckian inheritance or neo-Lamarckism, is the notion that an organism can pass on to its offspring physical characteristics that the parent organism acquired through use or disuse during its lifetime. It is also called the inheritance of acquired characteristics or more recently soft inheritance. The idea is named after the French zoologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829), who incorporated the classical era theory of soft inheritance into his theory of evolution as a supplement to his concept of orthogenesis, a drive towards complexity. Introductory textbooks contrast Lamarckism with Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. However, Darwin's book ''On the Origin of Species'' gave credence to the idea of heritable effects of use and disuse, as Lamarck had done, and his own concept of pangenesis similarly implied soft inheritance. Many researchers from the 1860s onwards attempted to find evidence for Lamarckian inheritance, but ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Prequel
A prequel is a literary, dramatic or cinematic work whose story precedes that of a previous work, by focusing on events that occur before the original narrative. A prequel is a work that forms part of a backstory to the preceding work. The term "prequel" is a 20th-century neologism from the prefix "pre-" (from Latin ''prae'', "before") and " sequel". Like sequels, prequels may or may not concern the same plot as the work from which they are derived. More often they explain the background that led to the events in the original, but sometimes the connections are not completely explicit. Sometimes prequels play on the audience's knowledge of what will happen next, using deliberate references to create dramatic irony. History Though the word "prequel" is of recent origin, works fitting this concept existed long before. The '' Cypria'', presupposing hearers' acquaintance with the events of the Homeric epic, confined itself to what preceded the ''Iliad'', and thus formed a kind of int ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Matter
In classical physics and general chemistry, matter is any substance that has mass and takes up space by having volume. All everyday objects that can be touched are ultimately composed of atoms, which are made up of interacting subatomic particles, and in everyday as well as scientific usage, "matter" generally includes atoms and anything made up of them, and any particles (or combination of particles) that act as if they have both rest mass and volume. However it does not include massless particles such as photons, or other energy phenomena or waves such as light or heat. Matter exists in various states (also known as phases). These include classical everyday phases such as solid, liquid, and gas – for example water exists as ice, liquid water, and gaseous steam – but other states are possible, including plasma, Bose–Einstein condensates, fermionic condensates, and quark–gluon plasma. Usually atoms can be imagined as a nucleus of protons and neutrons, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
