Everything about Ansible totally explained
An
ansible is a hypothetical machine capable of
superluminal communication and used as a
plot device in
science fiction literature.
Origin
The word
ansible was
coined by
Ursula K. Le Guin in her 1966 novel,
Rocannon's World. Le Guin states that she derived the name from "answerable," as the device would allow its users to receive answers to their messages in a reasonable amount of time, even over interstellar distances. Her award-winning 1974 novel
The Dispossessed tells of the invention of the ansible within her
Hainish Cycle.
Usage
The name of the device has since been borrowed by authors such as
Orson Scott Card,
Vernor Vinge,
Elizabeth Moon,,
Jason Jones,
L.A. Graf, and
Dan Simmons. Similarly functioning devices are present in the works of numerous others, such as
Frank Herbert and
Philip Pullman, who called it a
lodestone resonator. The
subspace radio, best known today from
Star Trek and named for the series' method of achieving faster-than-light travel, was the most commonly used name for such a faster-than-light (FTL) communicator in the science fiction of the
1930s to the
1950s. One ansible-like device which predates Le Guin's usage is the
Dirac communicator in
James Blish's
1954 short story "Beep".
Isaac Asimov solved the same communication problem with the
hyper-wave relay in
The Foundation Series.
Stephen R. Donaldson, in his Gap Series, introduces
Symbiotic Crystalline Resonance Transmission, clearly ansible-type technology which, unfortunately, is very difficult to produce and limited to text messages.
Le Guin's ansible was said to communicate "instantaneously"
, but other authors have adopted the name for devices explicitly only capable of finite-speed communication (though still faster than light).
In Le Guin's work
In
The Word for World Is Forest, Le Guin explains that in order for communication to work with any pair of ansibles at least one "must be on a large-mass body, the other can be anywhere in the cosmos." In
The Left Hand of Darkness, the ansible "doesn't involve
radio waves, or any form of
energy. The principle it works on, the constant of
simultaneity, is analogous in some ways to
gravity... One point has to be fixed, on a planet of certain mass, but the other end is portable." Le Guin's ansibles are not mated pairs as it's possible for an ansible's coordinates to be set to any known location of a receiving ansible. Moreover, the ansibles Le Guin uses in her stories apparently have a very limited
bandwidth which only allows for at most a few hundred characters of text to be communicated in any transaction of a dialog session. Instead of a microphone and speaker, Le Guin's ansibles are attached to a keyboard and small display to perform
text messaging.
In Card's work
Orson Scott Card's
Ender's Game series is a widely read series which uses the ansible as a plot device. ("The official name is Philotic Parallax Instantaneous Communicator," explains
Colonel Graff in
Ender's Game, "but somebody dredged the name
ansible out of an old book somewhere").
His description of ansible functions in
Xenocide involve a fictional subatomic particle, the
philote, and contradicts not only standard physical theory but the results of empirical
particle accelerator experiments. In the "Enderverse", the two
quarks inside a
pi meson can be separated by an arbitrary distance while remaining connected by "philotic rays". This is similar in concept to
quantum teleportation due to
entanglement, although even that isn't capable of faster-than-light communication. Also, in the real world,
quark confinement prevents one from separating quarks by more than microscopic distances.
In reality
There is no known way to build an ansible. The theory of
special relativity predicts that any such device would allow communication from the future to the past, which raises problems of
causality. For this reason, most physicists believe that that'll eventually be proven impossible.
Quantum entanglement is often proposed as a mechanism for superluminal communication,
but our current understanding of that phenomenon is that it can't be used for
any sort of communication—superluminal or otherwise—because of the
no cloning theorem in
quantum mechanics. See
time travel and
faster-than-light for more discussion of these issues.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Ansible'.
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