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Rush: For a polis citizen, to rush is to experience the passage of time between external events more rapidly, by ru
Sca
Scape: A simulation of some physical or mathematical space, not necessarily 3-dimensional.
Schwarzschild radius: If an object is compressed to a size less than its Schwarzschild radius, then it will undergo gravitational collapse to form a black hole. The Schwarzschild radius is directly proportional to the mass of the object; for the sun's mass it is about three kilometers.
Semi-Riema
Shaper: A programming language for building elaborate structures, such as conscious neural networks, by means of iterative methods abstracted from biological processes.
Shaper: A small subprogram within a Shaper program.
Signature: The unique identifying hit string of each citizen in the Coalition of Polises. The full signature consists of public and private segments; only the signature's owner knows the private segment. Any citizen can use the public segment to encode a message that only the owner can decode.
Snapshot: A file containing a complete description of a citizen, or a sca
Sphere: See N-sphere.
Standard fiber: See fiber bundle.
Static: A flesher with no modified genes.
Symbol: The representation within a mind of a complex concept or entity—such as a person, a class of objects, or an abstract idea.
Tag: A packet of gestalt data used to convey miscellaneous non-visual information.
Tau: A unit of internal time, applicable across the Coalition of Polises. The equivalent in real time initially declined as polis hardware was improved, but stabilized around 2750 when the technology hit fundamental physical constraints. The subjective duration varies from citizen to citizen, depending on details of their minds' architecture, but some rough citizen-flesher equivalents are given below. Plural: tau.
Internal time equivalent (after 2750)
Subjective
Real time
1 tau
1 second
1 millisecond
1 kilotau
15 minutes
1 second
100 kilotau
1 day
1 min 40 sec
1 megatau
10 days
16 min 40 sec
1 gigatau
27 years
11 days 14 hours
1 teratau
27,000 years
32 years
Tesseract: A four-dimensional version of a cube. A three-dimensional cube has six square faces, twelve edges, and eight vertices. A four-dimensional tesseract has eight cubic hyperfaces, twenty-four square faces, thirty-two edges, and sixteen vertices.
Topological space: An abstract set of points, plus the bare minimum of additional structure required to determine the way in which they're co
Trait field: In a mind seed, a field where a number of different instruction codes are known to produce safe variations of some trait.
UT: Universal Time. Conventional astronomical/political system of specifying physical date and time, equivalent to local mean time at the Greenwich meridian. Universal Time is extended across interstellar distances by use of a reference frame at rest with respect to the sun.
Wormhole: A wormhole is a "detour" in space-time, similar to the detour in the surface of the Earth created by an underground tu
REFERENCES
The broad principles of the Konishi citizens' mental architecture were inspired by the human cognitive models of Daniel C. De
Consciousness Explained by Daniel C. De
The Society of Mind by Marvin Minsky, Heinema
Kozuch Theory is fictitious. The idea of a correspondence between wormhole mouths and elementary particles is due to John Wheeler, while the possibility of accounting for particle symmetries through wormhole topology was inspired by the Dirac belt trick and Louis H. Kauffman's quaternion demonstrator. I encountered these ideas in:
Gauge Fields, Knots and Gravity by John Baez and Javier P Muniain, World Scientific, Singapore, 1994.
Knots and Physics by Louis H. Kauffman, World Scientific. Singapore, 1993.
Lacerta G-1 is fictitious, and its accelerated orbital decay only makes sense in terms of the novel's invented cosmology. The closest known binary neutron star consists of a pulsar, PSR B1 534+12, and its companion; this system is 1500 light years away, and is not expected to coalesce for about one billion years. Gamma-ray bursts are a real phenomenon, though it remains unclear whether or not they're produced by colliding neutron stars. Information on binary neutron stars, gamma-ray bursts, gravitational radiation, gravitational astronomy, and the behavior of wormholes in General Relativity was drawn from:
Black Holes, White Dwarfs and Neutron Stars by S. L. Shapiro and S. A. Teukolsky, Wiley, New York, 1983.
"Binary Neutron Stars" by Tsvi Piran, Scientific American, May 1995.
"Gamma Ray Bursts" by John G. Cramer, Analog, October 1995.