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Dichronauts
''Dichronauts'' is a hard science-fiction novel by Australian author Greg Egan. The novel was published by Night Shade Books on 11 July 2017. It describes a universe with two time dimensions, one of which corresponds to the time perception of the characters while the other influences their spatial perception, which precludes rotations in the latter chronological direction. Hence a symbiosis of two life forms is necessary, so that they can even see in all directions. Furthermore, many fundamental laws of physics are altered crucially: Objects can roll uphill or not fall over any more when oriented suitably. There is negative kinetic energy and a fourth state of matter. Planets are no longer spherical, but hyperbolic and therefore have three separate surfaces. Egan describes these details on his website. Plot In the world of ''Dichronauts'', there are two types of beings living in symbiosis with each other: Walkers, who can only see to the west (or east when turning around), pro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Greg Egan
Greg Egan (born 20 August 1961) is an Australian science fiction writer and mathematician, best known for his works of hard science fiction. Egan has won multiple awards including the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the Hugo Award, and the Locus Award. Life and work Egan holds a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics from the University of Western Australia. He published his first work in 1983. He specialises in hard science fiction stories with mathematical and quantum ontology themes, including the nature of consciousness. Other themes include genetics, simulated reality, posthumanism, mind uploading, sexuality, artificial intelligence, and the superiority of rational naturalism to religion. He often deals with complex technical material, like new physics and epistemology. He is a Hugo Award winner (with eight other works shortlisted for the Hugos) and has also won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. His early stories feature strong ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Arrows Of Time
''The Arrows of Time'' is a hard science-fiction novel by Australian author Greg Egan and the third part of the ''Orthogonal'' trilogy. The novel was published by Gollancz on 21 November 2013 with a cover art by Greg Egan and by Night Shade Books on 5 August 2014 with a cover art by Cody Tilson. The novel describes the return journey of the generation ship ''Peerless,'' which has been launched in '' The Clockwork Rocket'' and traveled into the void in '' The Eternal Flame'',' and the reverse enabling the construction of a device to receive messages from the own future as well as the journey to a world where time runs in reverse. The universe of the novel is therefore based on a Riemannian instead of a Lorentzian manifold (which describes our own universe, where time only flows in one direction or the corresponding region being hidden behind an event horizon otherwise), changing the rules of physics. The details are described by Greg Egan on his website. Plot Valeria watches ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gravitational Field
In physics, a gravitational field or gravitational acceleration field is a vector field used to explain the influences that a body extends into the space around itself. A gravitational field is used to explain gravitational phenomena, such as the '' gravitational force field'' exerted on another massive body. It has dimension of acceleration (L/T2) and it is measured in units of newtons per kilogram (N/kg) or, equivalently, in meters per second squared (m/s2). In its original concept, gravity was a force between point masses. Following Isaac Newton, Pierre-Simon Laplace attempted to model gravity as some kind of radiation field or fluid, and since the 19th century, explanations for gravity in classical mechanics have usually been taught in terms of a field model, rather than a point attraction. It results from the spatial gradient of the gravitational potential field. In general relativity, rather than two particles attracting each other, the particles distort spa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Laplace Operator
In mathematics, the Laplace operator or Laplacian is a differential operator given by the divergence of the gradient of a Scalar field, scalar function on Euclidean space. It is usually denoted by the symbols \nabla\cdot\nabla, \nabla^2 (where \nabla is the Del, nabla operator), or \Delta. In a Cartesian coordinate system, the Laplacian is given by the sum of second partial derivatives of the function with respect to each independent variable. In other coordinate systems, such as cylindrical coordinates, cylindrical and spherical coordinates, the Laplacian also has a useful form. Informally, the Laplacian of a function at a point measures by how much the average value of over small spheres or balls centered at deviates from . The Laplace operator is named after the French mathematician Pierre-Simon de Laplace (1749–1827), who first applied the operator to the study of celestial mechanics: the Laplacian of the gravitational potential due to a given mass density distributio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gravity
In physics, gravity (), also known as gravitation or a gravitational interaction, is a fundamental interaction, a mutual attraction between all massive particles. On Earth, gravity takes a slightly different meaning: the observed force between objects and the Earth. This force is dominated by the combined gravitational interactions of particles but also includes effect of the Earth's rotation. Gravity gives weight to physical objects and is essential to understanding the mechanisms responsible for surface water waves and lunar tides. Gravity also has many important biological functions, helping to guide the growth of plants through the process of gravitropism and influencing the circulation of fluids in multicellular organisms. The gravitational attraction between primordial hydrogen and clumps of dark matter in the early universe caused the hydrogen gas to coalesce, eventually condensing and fusing to form stars. At larger scales this results in galaxies and clust ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Concave Function
In mathematics, a concave function is one for which the function value at any convex combination of elements in the domain is greater than or equal to that convex combination of those domain elements. Equivalently, a concave function is any function for which the hypograph is convex. The class of concave functions is in a sense the opposite of the class of convex functions. A concave function is also synonymously called concave downwards, concave down, convex upwards, convex cap, or upper convex. Definition A real-valued function f on an interval (or, more generally, a convex set in vector space) is said to be ''concave'' if, for any x and y in the interval and for any \alpha \in ,1/math>, :f((1-\alpha )x+\alpha y)\geq (1-\alpha ) f(x)+\alpha f(y) A function is called ''strictly concave'' if :f((1-\alpha )x+\alpha y) > (1-\alpha ) f(x)+\alpha f(y) for any \alpha \in (0,1) and x \neq y. For a function f: \mathbb \to \mathbb, this second definition merely states that for ev ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Connected Component (topology)
In topology and related branches of mathematics, a connected space is a topological space that cannot be represented as the union of two or more disjoint non-empty open subsets. Connectedness is one of the principal topological properties that distinguish topological spaces. A subset of a topological space X is a if it is a connected space when viewed as a subspace of X. Some related but stronger conditions are path connected, simply connected, and n-connected. Another related notion is locally connected, which neither implies nor follows from connectedness. Formal definition A topological space X is said to be if it is the union of two disjoint non-empty open sets. Otherwise, X is said to be connected. A subset of a topological space is said to be connected if it is connected under its subspace topology. Some authors exclude the empty set (with its unique topology) as a connected space, but this article does not follow that practice. For a topological space X the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bounded Set
In mathematical analysis and related areas of mathematics, a set is called bounded if all of its points are within a certain distance of each other. Conversely, a set which is not bounded is called unbounded. The word "bounded" makes no sense in a general topological space without a corresponding metric. '' Boundary'' is a distinct concept; for example, a circle (not to be confused with a disk) in isolation is a boundaryless bounded set, while the half plane is unbounded yet has a boundary. A bounded set is not necessarily a closed set and vice versa. For example, a subset of a 2-dimensional real space constrained by two parabolic curves and defined in a Cartesian coordinate system is closed by the curves but not bounded (so unbounded). Definition in the real numbers A set of real numbers is called ''bounded from above'' if there exists some real number (not necessarily in ) such that for all in . The number is called an upper bound of . The terms ''bounded from b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Convex Function
In mathematics, a real-valued function is called convex if the line segment between any two distinct points on the graph of a function, graph of the function lies above or on the graph between the two points. Equivalently, a function is convex if its epigraph (mathematics), ''epigraph'' (the set of points on or above the graph of the function) is a convex set. In simple terms, a convex function graph is shaped like a cup \cup (or a straight line like a linear function), while a concave function's graph is shaped like a cap \cap. A twice-differentiable function, differentiable function of a single variable is convex if and only if its second derivative is nonnegative on its entire domain of a function, domain. Well-known examples of convex functions of a single variable include a linear function f(x) = cx (where c is a real number), a quadratic function cx^2 (c as a nonnegative real number) and an exponential function ce^x (c as a nonnegative real number). Convex functions pl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mechanics
Mechanics () is the area of physics concerned with the relationships between force, matter, and motion among Physical object, physical objects. Forces applied to objects may result in Displacement (vector), displacements, which are changes of an object's position relative to its environment. Theoretical expositions of this branch of physics has its origins in Ancient Greece, for instance, in the writings of Aristotle and Archimedes (see History of classical mechanics and Timeline of classical mechanics). During the early modern period, scientists such as Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, Christiaan Huygens, and Isaac Newton laid the foundation for what is now known as classical mechanics. As a branch of classical physics, mechanics deals with bodies that are either at rest or are moving with velocities significantly less than the speed of light. It can also be defined as the physical science that deals with the motion of and forces on bodies not in the quantum realm. History ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Canonical Basis
In mathematics, a canonical basis is a basis of an algebraic structure that is canonical in a sense that depends on the precise context: * In a coordinate space, and more generally in a free module, it refers to the standard basis defined by the Kronecker delta. * In a polynomial ring, it refers to its standard basis given by the monomials, (X^i)_i. * For finite extension fields, it means the polynomial basis. * In linear algebra, it refers to a set of ''n'' linearly independent generalized eigenvectors of an ''n''×''n'' matrix A, if the set is composed entirely of Jordan chains. * In representation theory, it refers to the basis of the quantum groups introduced by Lusztig. Representation theory The canonical basis for the irreducible representations of a quantized enveloping algebra of type ADE and also for the plus part of that algebra was introduced by Lusztig by two methods: an algebraic one (using a braid group action and PBW bases) and a topological one (using intersecti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dot Product
In mathematics, the dot product or scalar productThe term ''scalar product'' means literally "product with a Scalar (mathematics), scalar as a result". It is also used for other symmetric bilinear forms, for example in a pseudo-Euclidean space. Not to be confused with scalar multiplication. is an algebraic operation that takes two equal-length sequences of numbers (usually coordinate vectors), and returns a single number. In Euclidean geometry, the dot product of the Cartesian coordinates of two Euclidean vector, vectors is widely used. It is often called the inner product (or rarely the projection product) of Euclidean space, even though it is not the only inner product that can be defined on Euclidean space (see ''Inner product space'' for more). It should not be confused with the cross product. Algebraically, the dot product is the sum of the Product (mathematics), products of the corresponding entries of the two sequences of numbers. Geometrically, it is the product of the Euc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
