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Ansible
An ansible is a category of fictional devices or technology capable of near-instantaneous or faster-than-light communication. It can send and receive messages to and from a corresponding device over any distance or obstacle whatsoever with no delay, even between star systems. As a name for such a device, the word "ansible" first appeared in a 1966 novel by Ursula K. Le Guin. Since that time, the term has been broadly used in the works of numerous science fiction authors, across a variety of settings and continuities. A related term is ultrawave. Coinage by Ursula Le Guin Ursula K. Le Guin coined the word "ansible" in her 1966 novel ''Rocannon's World''. The word was a contraction of "answerable", as the device would allow its users to receive answers to their messages in a reasonable amount of time, even over interstellar distances. The plot device of the ansible was the basis for creating a specific kind of interstellar civilizationone where communications between far-flu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ender's Game (film)
''Ender's Game'' is a 2013 American military science-fiction action film based on Orson Scott Card's 1985 novel of the same name. Written and directed by Gavin Hood, the film stars Asa Butterfield as Andrew "Ender" Wiggin, an unusually gifted child who is sent to an advanced military academy in space to prepare for a future alien invasion. The supporting cast includes Harrison Ford, Hailee Steinfeld, and Viola Davis, with Abigail Breslin and Ben Kingsley. The film was released in Germany on October 24, 2013, followed by a release in the UK one day later. It was released in the United States, Canada, and several other countries on November 1, 2013, and was released in other territories by January 2014. ''Ender's Game'' received mixed reviews from critics and was a box-office bomb, grossing only $125.5 million on a $110–115 million budget. Plot In the future, humanity is preparing to launch an attack on the homeworld of an alien race, called the Formics, that had attacked ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rocannon's World
''Rocannon's World'' is a science fiction novel by American writer Ursula K. Le Guin, her literary debut. It was published in 1966 as an Ace Double, along with Avram Davidson's ''The Kar-Chee Reign'', following the tête-bêche format. Though it is one of Le Guin's many works set in the universe of the technological Hainish Cycle, the story itself has many elements of heroic fantasy. The hero Gaveral Rocannon encounters lords who live in castles and wield swords, and other races much like fairies and gnomes, in his travels on a backward planet. The word "ansible" for a faster-than-light communicator, was coined in the novel. The term has since been widely used in science fiction. Plot summary Semley's story The novel begins with a prologue called "Semley's Necklace", which was first published as a stand-alone story titled "The Dowry of Angyar" in ''Amazing Stories'' (September 1964). A young woman named Semley takes a space voyage from her unnamed, technologically prim ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ender's Game (series)
The ''Ender's Game'' series (often referred to as the ''Ender'' saga and also the Enderverse) is a series of science fiction books written by American author Orson Scott Card. The series started with the novelette ''Ender's Game'', which was later expanded into the novel of the same title. It currently consists of sixteen novels, thirteen short stories, 47 comic issues, an audioplay, and a film. The first two novels in the series, ''Ender's Game'' and '' Speaker for the Dead'', each won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. The series is set in a future where mankind is facing annihilation by an aggressive alien society, an insect-like race known formally as " Formics", but more colloquially as "Buggers". The series protagonist, Andrew "Ender" Wiggin, is one of the child soldiers trained at Battle School (and eventually Command School) to be the future leaders for the protection of Earth. Enderverse Ender series Starting with '' Ender's Game'', five novels and one novella have ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Faster-than-light Communication
Superluminal communication is a hypothetical process in which information is sent at faster-than-light (FTL) speeds. The current scientific consensus is that faster-than-light communication is not possible, and to date it has not been achieved in any experiment. Superluminal communication other than possibly through wormholes is likely impossible because, in a Lorentz-invariant theory, it could be used to transmit information into the past. This complicates causality, but no theoretical arguments conclusively preclude this possibility. A number of theories and phenomena related to superluminal communication have been proposed or studied, including tachyons, neutrinos, quantum nonlocality, wormholes, and quantum tunneling. Proposed mechanisms Tachyons Tachyonic particles are hypothetical particles that travel faster than light. These would allow superluminal communication, and for this reason are widely believed not to exist. By contrast, tachyonic fields quantum fields with ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Encyclopedia Of Science Fiction
''The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction'' (SFE) is an English language reference work on science fiction, first published in 1979. It has won the Hugo, Locus and British SF Awards. Two print editions appeared in 1979 and 1993. A third, continuously revised, edition was published online from 2011; a change of web host was announced as the launch of a fourth edition in 2021. History The first edition, edited by Peter Nicholls with John Clute, was published by Granada in 1979. It was retitled ''The Science Fiction Encyclopedia'' when published by Doubleday in the United States. Accompanying its text were numerous black and white photographs illustrating authors, book and magazine covers, film and TV stills, and examples of artists' work. A second edition, jointly edited by Nicholls and Clute, was published in 1993 by Orbit in the UK and St. Martin's Press in the US. The second edition contained 1.3 million words, almost twice the 700,000 words of the 1979 edition. The 1995 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Neologism
A neologism Greek νέο- ''néo''(="new") and λόγος /''lógos'' meaning "speech, utterance"] is a relatively recent or isolated term, word, or phrase that may be in the process of entering common use, but that has not been fully accepted into mainstream language. Neologisms are often driven by changes in culture and technology. In the process of language formation, neologisms are more mature than '' protologisms''. A word whose development stage is between that of the protologism (freshly coined) and neologism (new word) is a ''prelogism''. Popular examples of neologisms can be found in science, fiction (notably science fiction), films and television, branding, literature, jargon, cant, linguistics, the visual arts, and popular culture. Former examples include '' laser'' (1960) from Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation; ''robot'' (1941) from Czech writer Karel Čapek's play '' R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots)''; and ''agitprop'' (1930) (a portmanteau ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Advent Rising
''Advent Rising'' is an action-adventure third-person shooter video game developed by GlyphX Games and published by Majesco Entertainment. The game was released on May 31, 2005, for Xbox and on August 9, 2005, for Microsoft Windows. Its story was created by Donald and Geremy Mustard and featured a script written by science fiction writers Orson Scott Card and Cameron Dayton; the full orchestral soundtrack was done by Tommy Tallarico and Emmanuel Fratianni. As of September 14, 2006, Steam began offering ''Advent Rising'' for download. Much-hyped ''Advent Rising'' was the first in a planned trilogy which also saw the development of a game that would take place alongside ''Advent Rising'', called ''Advent Shadow'' for the PSP. Despite a large advertising campaign including promotion in cinemas, the game's retail performance fell far short of expectations. By the end of 2005, Majesco had completely revised its business plan to focus towards handheld games and canceled plans for ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Quark Confinement
In quantum chromodynamics (QCD), color confinement, often simply called confinement, is the phenomenon that color-charged particles (such as quarks and gluons) cannot be isolated, and therefore cannot be directly observed in normal conditions below the Hagedorn temperature of approximately 2 terakelvin (corresponding to energies of approximately 130–140 MeV per particle). Quarks and gluons must clump together to form hadrons. The two main types of hadron are the mesons (one quark, one antiquark) and the baryons (three quarks). In addition, colorless glueballs formed only of gluons are also consistent with confinement, though difficult to identify experimentally. Quarks and gluons cannot be separated from their parent hadron without producing new hadrons. Origin There is not yet an analytic proof of color confinement in any non-abelian gauge theory. The phenomenon can be understood qualitatively by noting that the force-carrying gluons of QCD have color charge, unlike ... [...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] |
Pion
In particle physics, a pion (or a pi meson, denoted with the Greek letter pi: ) is any of three subatomic particles: , , and . Each pion consists of a quark and an antiquark and is therefore a meson. Pions are the lightest mesons and, more generally, the lightest hadrons. They are unstable, with the charged pions and decaying after a mean lifetime of 26.033 nanoseconds ( seconds), and the neutral pion decaying after a much shorter lifetime of 85 attoseconds ( seconds). Charged pions most often decay into muons and muon neutrinos, while neutral pions generally decay into gamma rays. The exchange of virtual pions, along with vector, rho and omega mesons, provides an explanation for the residual strong force between nucleons. Pions are not produced in radioactive decay, but commonly are in high-energy collisions between hadrons. Pions also result from some matter–antimatter annihilation events. All types of pions are also produced in natural processes ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Quark
A quark () is a type of elementary particle and a fundamental constituent of matter. Quarks combine to form composite particles called hadrons, the most stable of which are protons and neutrons, the components of atomic nuclei. All commonly observable matter is composed of up quarks, down quarks and electrons. Owing to a phenomenon known as '' color confinement'', quarks are never found in isolation; they can be found only within hadrons, which include baryons (such as protons and neutrons) and mesons, or in quark–gluon plasmas. There is also the theoretical possibility of more exotic phases of quark matter. For this reason, much of what is known about quarks has been drawn from observations of hadrons. Quarks have various intrinsic properties, including electric charge, mass, color charge, and spin. They are the only elementary particles in the Standard Model of particle physics to experience all four fundamental interactions, also known as ''fundamental forces'' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
