An
ansible is a hypothetical machine capable of
superluminalSuperluminal communication is the term used to describe the hypothetical process by which one might send information at faster-than-light speeds...
(or faster than light) communication. Ansibles are used as
plot deviceA plot device is an object or character in a story whose sole purpose is to advance the plot of the story, or alternatively to overcome some difficulty in the plot....
s in
science fictionScience fiction is a genre of fiction. It differs from fantasy in that, within the context of the story, its imaginary elements are largely possible within scientifically-established or scientifically-postulated laws of nature...
literature.
Origin
The word
ansible was
coinedA neologism ; from Greek νές is a newly coined word that may be in the process of entering common use, but has not yet been accepted into mainstream language. Neologisms are often directly attributable to a specific person, publication, period, or event...
by
Ursula K. Le GuinUrsula Kroeber Le Guin is an American author. She has written novels, poetry, children's books, essays, and short stories, most notably in the genres of fantasy and science fiction...
in her 1966 novel,
Rocannon's WorldRocannon's World was Ursula K. Le Guin's first novel. It was published in 1966 as an Ace Double, along with Avram Davidson's The Kar-Chee Reign. 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...
. 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 DispossessedThe Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia is a 1974 utopian science fiction novel by Ursula K. Le Guin, set in the same fictional universe as that of The Left Hand of Darkness . The book won the Nebula Award in 1974, both the Hugo and Locus Awards in 1975, and received a nomination for the John W....
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 CardOrson Scott Card
is an American author, critic, public speaker and conservative political activist. He writes in several genres, but is primarily known for his science fiction...
,
Vernor VingeVernor Steffen Vinge is a retired San Diego State University Professor of Mathematics, computer scientist, and science fiction author...
,
Elizabeth MoonElizabeth Moon is an American science fiction and fantasy author.-Biography:Moon was born Susan Elizabeth Norris and grew up in McAllen, Texas. Moon started writing when she was a child and attempted her first book, which was about her dog, at age 6...
,
Jason JonesJason Jones co-founded, with Alex Seropian, the computer game company Bungie in 1991.-Video game work:He took part in the creation of video games including Marathon and the highly acclaimed Halo series in which he was project lead...
, L.A. Graf, and
Dan SimmonsDan Simmons is an American author most widely known for his Hugo Award-winning science fiction series, known as the Hyperion Cantos, and for his Locus-winning Ilium/Olympos cycle....
. Similarly functioning devices are present in the works of numerous others, such as
Frank HerbertFranklin Patrick Herbert, Jr. was a critically acclaimed and commercially successful American science fiction author. Although a short story author, he is best known for his novels, most notably Dune and its five sequels...
and
Philip PullmanPhilip Pullman CBE is an English writer. He is the best-selling author of His Dark Materials , and a number of other books.- Biography :...
, who called it a
lodestone resonator. Anne McCaffery's
Crystal SingerCrystal Singer is the first novel in the Crystal Singer series by Anne McCaffrey. The author's notes from Crystal Singer explain the story is based on four stories that were originally published in Roger Elwood's Continuum series. The 1982 version is expanded from these stories...
series posited an instantaneous communication device powered by rare 'Black Crystal' from the planet Ballybran. Black Crystals cut from the same mineral deposit could be "tuned" to sympathetically vibrate with each other instantly, even when separated by interstellar distances, allowing instantaneous telephone-like voice and data communication.
Stephen R. DonaldsonStephen Reeder Donaldson is an American fantasy, science fiction and mystery novelist, most famous for his Thomas Covenant series. His work has attracted critical attention for its "imagination, vivid characterizations, and fast pace." He earned his bachelor's degree from The College of Wooster...
, in his Gap Series, proposed a similar system,
Symbiotic Crystalline Resonance Transmission, clearly ansible-type technology, but was very difficult to produce and limited to text messages.
One ansible-like device which predates Le Guin's usage is the
Dirac communicator in
James BlishJames Benjamin Blish was an American author of fantasy and science fiction...
's 1954 short story "Beep".
Isaac AsimovIsaac Asimov , was an American author and professor of biochemistry, best known for his works of science fiction and for his popular science books...
solved the same communication problem with the
hyper-wave relay in
The Foundation SeriesThe Foundation Series is an epic science fiction series by Isaac Asimov which covers a span of about 500 years. It consists of seven volumes that are closely linked to each other, although they can be read separately...
. 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). The
subspace radio, best known today from
Star TrekStar Trek is an American science fiction entertainment series.The original Star Trek was an American television series, created by Gene Roddenberry, which debuted in 1966 and ran for three seasons, following the interstellar adventures of Captain James T. Kirk and the crew of the Federation...
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.
In Le Guin's work
In
The Word for World Is ForestThe Word for World Is Forest is a science fiction novel by Ursula K. Le Guin, published in 1976 and based on her 1972 novella. It is part of the 'Hainish Cycle'. -Setting:...
, 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 DarknessThe Left Hand of Darkness is a science fiction novel by Ursula K. Le Guin, first published in 1969.The book is one of the first major works of feminist science fiction and is one in a series of books by Le Guin all set in the fictional Hainish universe. It won the 1969 Nebula and 1970 Hugo awards...
, the ansible "doesn't involve
radioRadio is the transmission of signals by modulation of electromagnetic waves with frequencies below those of visible light. Electromagnetic radiation travels by means of oscillating electromagnetic fields that pass through the air and the vacuum of space...
waves, or any form of
energyIn physics, energy is a scalar physical quantity that describes the amount of work that can be performed by a force, an attribute of objects and systems that is subject to a conservation law...
. The principle it works on, the constant of
simultaneitySimultaneity is the property of two events happening at the same time in at least one reference frame.The noun Simult means a supernatural coincidence, two or more divinely inspired events that occur at or near the same period of time that are related to each other in both noticeable and...
, 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." Unlike McCaffrey's black crystal transceivers, Le Guin's ansibles are not mated pairs as it is 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
bandwidthIn computer networking and computer science, digital bandwidth, network bandwidth or just bandwidth is a measure of available or consumed data communication resources expressed in bit/s or multiples of it ....
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 messagingText messaging, or texting, is a colloquial term referring to the exchange of brief written messages between mobile phones, over cellular networks. While the term most often refers to messages sent using the Short Message Service , it has been extended to include messages containing image, video,...
.
In Card's work
Orson Scott CardOrson Scott Card
is an American author, critic, public speaker and conservative political activist. He writes in several genres, but is primarily known for his science fiction...
's
Ender's Game seriesThe Ender's Game series is a series of science fiction books by Orson Scott Card. The series started with the novelette "Ender's Game", which was later expanded into the novel Ender's Game. It currently consists of eleven novels and ten short stories...
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 GameEnder's Game is a science fiction novel by American author Orson Scott Card. The book originated as the novelette "Ender's Game", published in the August 1977 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact. Elaborating on characters and plot lines depicted in the novel, Card later wrote additional books...
, "but somebody dredged the name
ansible out of an old book somewhere"). His description of ansible functions in
XenocideXenocide is the third novel in the Ender's Game series of books by Orson Scott Card. It was nominated for both the Hugo and Locus Awards for Best Novel in 1992...
involve a fictional subatomic particle, the philote, and contradicts not only standard physical theory but the results of empirical
particle acceleratorA particle accelerator is a device that uses electric fields to propel ions or charged subatomic particles to high speeds and to contain them in well-defined beams. An ordinary CRT television set is a simple form of accelerator...
experiments. In the "Enderverse", the two
quarkA quark is an 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. Due to a phenomenon known as color confinement, quarks are never found in...
s inside a
pi mesonIn particle physics, a pion is any of three subatomic particles: , and . Pions are the lightest mesons and play an important role in explaining low-energy properties of the strong nuclear force.-Basic properties:...
can be separated by an arbitrary distance while remaining connected by "philotic rays". This is similar in concept to
quantum teleportationQuantum teleportation, or entanglement-assisted teleportation, is a technique used to transfer information on a quantum level, usually from one particle to another particle in another location via quantum entanglement...
due to
entanglementQuantum entanglement, also called the quantum non-local connection, is a property of a quantum mechanical state of a system of two or more objects in which the quantum states of the constituting objects are linked together so that one object can no longer be adequately described without full...
, although even that is not 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 relativitySpecial relativity is the physical theory of measurement in inertial frames of reference proposed in 1905 by Albert Einstein in the paper "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies"...
predicts that any such device would allow communication from the future to the past, which raises problems of
causalityCausality is the relationship between an event and a second event , where the second event is a direct consequence of the first....
. For this reason, most physicists believe that they will eventually be proven impossible. The quantum non-local connection is often proposed as a mechanism for superluminal communication (a 2008 quantum physics experiment performed in Geneva, Switzerland
has determined that the "speed" of the
quantum non-local connection
has a minimum lower bound
of 10,000 times the
speed of lightIn physics, the speed of light is a physical constant, the speed at which electromagnetic radiation, such as light, travels in free space . Its value is 299,792,458 metres per second...
), but current understanding of that phenomenon is that it cannot be used for
any sort of communication—superluminal or otherwise—because of the
no cloning theoremThe no cloning theorem is a result of quantum mechanics that forbids the creation of identical copies of an arbitrary unknown quantum state. It was stated by Wootters, Zurek, and Dieks in 1982, and has profound implications in quantum computing and related fields.The state of one system can be...
in
quantum mechanicsQuantum mechanics is a set of principles describing the physical reality at the atomic level of matter and the subatomic . These descriptions include the simultaneous wave-like and particle-like behavior of both matter and radiation...
. See
time travelTime travel is the concept of moving between different moments in time in a manner analogous to moving between different points in space, either sending objects backwards in time to a moment before the present, or sending objects forward from the present to the future without the need to...
and
faster-than-lightFaster-than-light communications and travel refer to the propagation of information or matter faster than the speed of light....
for more discussion of these issues.
External links