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84-453: The Seetee series is a golden age science fiction series by the American writer Jack Williamson , under the pseudonym "Will Stewart." The narrative follows a small group of late-22nd century Asteroid Belt colonists who attempt to harness the titular seetee (a phonetic for " C ontra T errene ", an obsolete term for antimatter ), both for the advancement of humanity and to secure

168-671: A condomininum of the major powers of the Solar System: the (American-dominated) Earth-Moon Union, the Martian Reich, the Jovian Soviet, and the pan-Asian Venusian Empire. The powerful Earth-based Interplanet conglomerate, with a century-old Solar-System-wide monopoly on uranium, is a silent partner, and de facto controls the Earth-Moon Union. The Mandate, headquartered on the asteroid Pallas, dates from 2171,

252-464: A quantum algorithm that reverses a given quantum state through complex conjugation of the state. Note that quantum decoherence merely allows the process of quantum wave collapse; it is a matter of dispute whether the collapse itself actually takes place or is redundant and apparent only. However, since the theory of quantum decoherence is now widely accepted and has been supported experimentally, this dispute can no longer be considered as related to

336-527: A weekly newspaper comic , Beyond Mars , for which he reused much of the physical setting and technological base of the Seetee series, but not the books' continuity: the strip's lead character was a pastiche of several of the series' protagonists, and its versions of Mars and Venus were home to intelligent alien races. Plots tended toward generic adventures involving space pirates and mad scientists, with no greater-scope allusions to solar-system politics; notably,

420-523: A borehole, with the resultant matter-antimatter reaction functioning as an improvised rocket and propelling Freedonia into a safe orbit. The Mandate reluctantly recognizes Drake's claim, and his son Rick - angered and disillusioned by the Mandate's treatment of his father, and inspired by his success - returns to join the family business. " Minus Sign " begins in March 2191, immediately after the conclusion of

504-471: A celebrity spatial engineer and former acquaintance of Jim Drake, has salvaged the firm and renamed it "Seetee Inc." His nephew Nicol Jenkins has come from Earth to work on Seetee's great project,a copy of the alien power station known as the Brand Transmitter: an antimatter-powered broadcast-energy device that - Jenkins hopes - will usher in a post-scarcity era and decrease political tensions among

588-481: A consequence of the initial conditions in the early universe. Therefore, they ultimately result from the cosmological set-up. Waves, from radio waves to sound waves to those on a pond from throwing a stone, expand outward from their source, even though the wave equations accommodate solutions of convergent waves as well as radiative ones. This arrow has been reversed in carefully worked experiments that created convergent waves, so this arrow probably follows from

672-521: A cultural trend that affected the psyches of a great many adolescents during World War II and the ensuing Cold War , science fiction's Golden Age has left a lasting impression upon society. The beginning of the Golden Age coincided with the first Worldcon in 1939 and, especially for its most involved fans, science fiction became a social force. The genre, particularly during its Golden Age, had significant, if somewhat indirect, effects upon leaders in

756-470: A more cohesive novel was "an excellent job of unification." New York Times reviewer Villiers Gersen, however, commented that "it is a pity that the quality of Stewart's writing [...] ranks only slightly above that of a comic-strip adventure." The word " terraforming " was a neologism coined in Collision Orbit , although the concept itself had been suggested previously. Williamson's definition of

840-519: A region of the universe where the arrow of time is reversed, and that they are being carried into the past as long they remain within its proximity. Drake and McGee escape the asteroid just before its yet-to-happen collision with the antimatter body, salvaging a large amount of mined industrial diamonds and the survivors of the Mandate cruiser, which had been destroyed in a battle with its earlier self. " Opposites—React! " begins six months later, and again switches viewpoints - this time to Paul Anders, who

924-583: A scattering of antimatter ranging from dust to sizeable asteroids; it comprises twelve percent of the mass of the Belt, and represents the aftermath of an ancient collision between two Mars-size worlds, an extrasolar planet made of antimatter (nicknamed "the Invader") and the slightly-larger "Adonis", which had once orbited between Mars and Jupiter. The Belt is administered by the High Space Mandate,

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1008-407: A seetee collision. The voyage becomes a race against a Mandate science expedition commanded by the affable, coolly-superior Earthman Paul Anders, but upon arrival at the nameless asteroid the two ships experience strange phenomena, and an unidentified warship appears and exchanges fire with the Mandate cruiser. McGee eventually figures out that the asteroid - while composed of normal matter - hails from

1092-413: A single night a planet's civilization is overwhelmed by the revelation of the vastness of the universe. Robert A. Heinlein 's novels, such as The Puppet Masters (1951), Double Star (1956), and Starship Troopers (1959), express the libertarian ideology that runs through much of Golden Age science fiction. Algis Budrys in 1965 wrote of the "recurrent strain in 'Golden Age' science fiction of

1176-539: A sophisticated physical-contact interface - exactly what humans need to work with antimatter. They also find the bodies of a Jovian Soviet expedition, recently killed by the still-active station's dangerous unattended processes, and a live Rob McGee. Attempting to return to the ship, the three find themselves marooned by the Martian spy Falkenberg, who had been impersonating Anders' first officer and had suborned his crew. However, McGee had managed to hide his own spacecraft in

1260-464: A system and its surrounding are thought to increase with entropy, and have been shown to be equivalent to it in a simplified case of a finite system interacting with the environment. The assumption of low initial entropy is indeed equivalent to assuming no initial correlations in the system; thus correlations can only be created as we move forward in time, not backwards. Controlling the future , or causing something to happen, creates correlations between

1344-400: A team of Russian scientists reported the reversal of the quantum arrow of time on an IBM quantum computer , in an experiment supporting the understanding of the quantum arrow of time as emerging from the thermodynamic one. By observing the state of the quantum computer made of two and later three superconducting qubits , they found that in 85% of the cases, the two-qubit computer returned to

1428-437: Is not time-reversible . According to the statistical notion of increasing entropy, the "arrow" of time is identified with a decrease of free energy. In his book The Big Picture , physicist Sean M. Carroll compares the asymmetry of time to the asymmetry of space: While physical laws are in general isotropic , near Earth there is an obvious distinction between "up" and "down", due to proximity to this huge body, which breaks

1512-412: Is a time-reversible force. A ball that is tossed up, slows to a stop, and falls is a case where recordings would look equally realistic forwards and backwards. The system is T-symmetrical. However, the process of the ball bouncing and eventually coming to a stop is not time-reversible. While going forward, kinetic energy is dissipated and entropy is increased. Entropy may be one of the few processes that

1596-480: Is normally impossible, by the second law of thermodynamics. In the language of relational quantum mechanics, the observer becomes entangled with the measured state, where this entanglement increases entropy. As stated by Seth Lloyd , "the arrow of time is an arrow of increasing correlations". However, under special circumstances, one can prepare initial conditions that will cause a decrease in decoherence and in entropy. This has been shown experimentally in 2019, when

1680-466: Is returning to service after a period of convalescence, having lost much of his enthusiasm for the Mandate and for Interplanet. Earth's Commissioner in the Belt shows him evidence that the Martians have located a contraterrene alien artifact, and assigns him a cruiser crewed by dissidents from the Mandate powers that are loyal to Interplanet. Anders gives Ann O'Banion a lift to Freedonia, where he inspects

1764-465: The Anthropic bias ), with this arrow reversing as gravity pulls everything back into a Big Crunch . If this arrow of time is related to the other arrows of time, then the future is by definition the direction towards which the universe becomes bigger. Thus, the universe expands—rather than shrinks—by definition. The thermodynamic arrow of time and the second law of thermodynamics are thought to be

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1848-494: The ego to be in front of or behind the past. There are no languages that place the past and future on a left–right axis (e.g., there is no expression in English such as *the meeting was moved to the left ), although at least English speakers associate the past with the left and the future with the right, which seems to have its origin in the left-to-right writing system. The words "yesterday" and "tomorrow" both translate to

1932-415: The inorganic nature of the earth and its thermodynamic processes. The cosmological arrow of time points in the direction of the universe's expansion. It may be linked to the thermodynamic arrow , with the universe heading towards a heat death (Big Chill) as the amount of Thermodynamic free energy becomes negligible. Alternatively, it may be an artifact of our place in the universe's evolution (see

2016-407: The many-worlds interpretation and relational quantum mechanics interpretation). The theory of quantum decoherence explains why wave function collapse happens in a time-asymmetric fashion due to the second law of thermodynamics, thus deriving the quantum arrow of time from the thermodynamic arrow of time . In essence, following any particle scattering or interaction between two larger systems,

2100-399: The military , information technology , Hollywood and science itself, especially biotechnology and pharmaceuticals . Robert Silverberg , in a 2010 essay, argued that the true Golden Age was the 1950s, and that the "Golden Age" of the 1940s was a kind of "false dawn". "Until the decade of the fifties", Silverberg wrote, "there was essentially no market for science fiction books at all";

2184-400: The 1940s—the implication that sheer technological accomplishment would solve all the problems, hooray, and that all the problems were what they seemed to be on the surface". The Golden Age also saw the reemergence of the religious or spiritual themes—central to so much proto-science fiction prior to the pulp era—that Hugo Gernsback had tried to eliminate in his vision of "scientifiction". Among

2268-530: The Beach as example. Several factors changed the market for magazine science fiction in the mid- and late 1950s. Most important was the rapid contraction of the pulp market: Fantastic Adventures and Famous Fantastic Mysteries folded in 1953, Planet Stories , Startling Stories , Thrilling Wonder Stories and Beyond in 1955, Other Worlds and Science Fiction Quarterly in 1957, Imagination , Imaginative Tales , and Infinity in 1958. In October 1957,

2352-537: The Belt's independence from an authoritarian colonial administration. The series' constituent stories were originally published as seven installments in Astounding Science Fiction . Six years after the publication of the first three stories, Williamson revisited the setting with Seetee Shock , a novel serialized in Astounding in early 1949 and released in book form by Simon & Schuster

2436-545: The Big Bang and the special circumstances that existed then. (Strictly speaking, the weak interactions are asymmetric to both spatial reflection and to flipping of the time direction. However, they do obey a more complicated symmetry that includes both.) In the 1928 book The Nature of the Physical World , which helped to popularize the concept, Eddington stated: Let us draw an arrow arbitrarily. If as we follow

2520-408: The Golden Age of SF. No sf novel since published, it may be, has seemed so sure of the world it describes." Many scientists deeply involved in the exploration of the solar system (myself among them) were first turned in that direction by science fiction. And the fact that some of that science fiction was not of the highest quality is irrelevant. Ten year‐olds do not read the scientific literature. As

2604-458: The Guard approach Jenkins with offers of escape and employment if he will manufacture antimatter weapons for their respective governments, thereby ruling out all four as the perpetrators of the raid upon Freedonia. Pallas is consumed with rumors of a major war between the powers, an of a revolt of the asterites. Amid mounting social disintegration, Jenkins is bailed out by his uncle's former secretary,

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2688-399: The Mandate in order to counterbalance the hard-line Martian Reich. " Collision Orbit " begins in early 2191 on the sleepy asteroid Obania, which is suddenly endangered by a smaller asteroid after a random collision with an antimatter body alters its orbit. "Spatial engineer" Jim Drake, tugboat pilot Rob McGee, and young heiress Ann O'Banion (the daughter of Obania's founder) decide to divert

2772-491: The Mandate is to be dissolved, Interplanet has gone bankrupt, and Brand has been arrested. He is also informed that a revolutionary anti-radiation serum has been isolated from McGee's blood, and that he and the others irradiated at Freedonia will make a full recovery. The charismatic Brand is tried and acquitted, and immediately announces a plan to use the limitless power of the Transmitter to terraform Titan . Jenkins leaves

2856-838: The Second Law breaks down under any circumstances." However, there are a number of paradoxes regarding violation of the second law of thermodynamics , one of them due to the Poincaré recurrence theorem . This arrow of time seems to be related to all other arrows of time and arguably underlies some of them, with the exception of the weak arrow of time . Harold Blum 's 1951 book Time's Arrow and Evolution discusses "the relationship between time's arrow (the second law of thermodynamics) and organic evolution ." This influential text explores " irreversibility and direction in evolution and order, negentropy , and evolution ." Blum argues that evolution followed specific patterns predetermined by

2940-416: The amount of order in an isolated system: as a system advances through time, it becomes more statistically disordered. This asymmetry can be used empirically to distinguish between future and past, though measuring entropy does not accurately measure time. Also, in an open system, entropy can decrease with time. An interesting thought experiment would be to ask: "if entropy was increased in an open system, would

3024-633: The antimatter half of the artifact; Anders - who has fallen in love with O'Banion - renounces the Mandate, and the trio returns to the Belt with the secret of the interface. They learn that the hijacked cruiser had gone to Freedonia to destroy the Drakes' antimatter lab, but had fallen victim to a minefield around the asteroid, whose existence Anders had withheld from Falkenberg. Seetee Shock begins about four years later. Drake, McGee and Drake has been driven into bankruptcy by Mandate lawfare , but Martin Brand,

3108-417: The antimatter lab the Drakes have built, and learns that they have reached an impasse in their research, as they cannot damp the vibrations of the anti-iron they are attempting to work with. He reluctantly threatens his hosts with imprisonment unless they consent to an Interplanet buyout, but the situation changes when McGee calls to report that he has located an intact seetee artifact in an eccentric orbit above

3192-436: The arrow of time flip in polarity and point towards the past." [citation required] British physicist Sir Alfred Brian Pippard wrote: "There is thus no justification for the view, often glibly repeated, that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is only statistically true, in the sense that microscopic violations repeatedly occur, but never violations of any serious magnitude. On the contrary, no evidence has ever been presented that

3276-429: The arrow of time in how their eyes perceived different stimuli. The arrow of time is the "one-way direction" or "asymmetry" of time. The thermodynamic arrow of time is provided by the second law of thermodynamics , which says that in an isolated system, entropy tends to increase with time. Entropy can be thought of as a measure of microscopic disorder; thus the second law implies that time is asymmetrical with respect to

3360-448: The arrow of time question. Certain subatomic interactions involving the weak nuclear force violate the conservation of both parity and charge conjugation , but only very rarely. An example is the kaon decay . According to the CPT theorem , this means they should also be time-irreversible, and so establish an arrow of time. Such processes should be responsible for matter creation in

3444-606: The arrow we find more and more of the random element in the state of the world, then the arrow is pointing towards the future; if the random element decreases the arrow points towards the past. That is the only distinction known to physics . This follows at once if our fundamental contention is admitted that the introduction of randomness is the only thing which cannot be undone. I shall use the phrase 'time's arrow' to express this one-way property of time which has no analogue in space. Eddington then gives three points to note about this arrow: A related mental arrow arises because one has

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3528-420: The asteroid, which would enable them to claim it in recompense; their ultimate plan is to repurpose it as a laboratory for Drake's antimatter experimentation. However, an attempt to install a paragravity engine at the center of the asteroid (which they name "Freedonia") fails due to a combination of bad luck and economic sabotage by Mandate authorities. In the end, Drake succeeds by steering a mass of anti-iron into

3612-505: The atom bomb in 1945 made science fiction respectable" to the general public. He recalled in 1969 "I'll never forget the shock that rumbled through the entire world of science fiction fandom when ... Heinlein broke the 'slicks' barrier by having an undiluted science fiction story of his published in The Saturday Evening Post " . The large, mainstream companies' entry into the science fiction book market around 1950

3696-605: The audience supported only a few special interest small presses. The 1950s saw "a spectacular outpouring of stories and novels that quickly surpassed both in quantity and quality the considerable achievement of the Campbellian golden age", as mainstream companies like Simon & Schuster and Doubleday displaced specialty publishers like Arkham House and Gnome Press . The English novelist and critic Kingsley Amis endorsed that view when he compiled The Golden Age of Science Fiction: An Anthology (1981), with two thirds of

3780-553: The beautiful, mysterious Jane Hardin, with whom he visits his uncle and extorts the resources to complete the Transmitter. On their way to Freedonia, they are waylaid by a Free Space Republic warship and diverted to Obania, which has been taken over by the revolutionaries at great cost in lives. However the revolt is faltering, and the rebels attempt to detain Jenkins and trade him to the Mandate in exchange for an amnesty. He escapes and makes his way to Freedonia, where he - working through

3864-445: The causal relation per se cannot be perceived; one only perceives sequences of events. Furthermore, it is surprisingly difficult to provide a clear explanation of what the terms cause and effect really mean, or to define the events to which they refer. However, it does seem evident that dropping a cup of water is a cause while the cup subsequently shattering and spilling the water is the effect. Physically speaking, correlations between

3948-475: The conclusion of a decade-long war between Earth and its colonies in which all but the Moon gained independence. The asterites - despite having fought on the colonial side in the hope of establishing an independent High Space Union - had been reduced to a protectorate by their former allies, who wanted access to their reserves of uranium. However, the relatively moderate Venusians and Jovians had permitted Earth to join

4032-402: The creation of the Golden Age was John W. Campbell , who achieved status as the most prominent editor of the time. Isaac Asimov stated that "...in the 1940s, (Campbell) dominated the field to the point where to many seemed all of science fiction." Under Campbell's editorship at Astounding Science Fiction , the genre developed more realism and psychological depth to characterization than in

4116-526: The cup, as well as the spilled water, and the object that caused the cup to drop. Quantum evolution is governed by equations of motions that are time-symmetric (such as the Schrödinger equation in the non-relativistic approximation), and by wave function collapse , which is a time-irreversible process, and is either real (by the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics ) or apparent only (by

4200-453: The direction of time were to reverse, the theoretical statements that describe them would remain true. Yet at the macroscopic level it often appears that this is not the case: there is an obvious direction (or flow ) of time. The symmetry of time ( T-symmetry ) can be understood simply as the following: if time were perfectly symmetrical, a video of real events would seem realistic whether played forwards or backwards. Gravity , for example,

4284-476: The direction other writers would soon pursue. Women writers, such as Joanna Russ and Judith Merril , emerged. The leading Golden Age magazine, Astounding Stories , changed its title to Analog Science Fiction and Fact in 1960. John Clute , writing in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction , asserts that it was Frank Herbert 's wildly popular novel Dune (1965) that "arguably capped and put paid to

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4368-402: The doer and the effect, and therefore the relation between cause and effect is a result of the thermodynamic arrow of time, a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics. Indeed, in the above example of the cup dropping, the initial conditions have high order and low entropy, while the final state has high correlations between relatively distant parts of the system – the shattered pieces of

4452-470: The earlier Gernsbackian "super science" era. The focus shifted from the gizmo itself to the characters using the gizmo. By consensus, the Golden Age began c.  1938 –1939, slightly later than the Golden Age of Detective Fiction , another pulp-based genre. The July 1939 issue of Astounding Science Fiction is sometimes cited as the start of the Golden Age. It included " Black Destroyer ",

4536-426: The ecliptic, but is being menaced by a Martian Reich warship. With O'Banion aboard, Anders' cruiser travels to the artifact, which turns out to be an enormous ovoid space station built by the long-vanished inhabitants of the destroyed extrasolar antimatter world. Anders and O'Banion enter the artifact and learn it is a matter-antimatter annihilation power plant, consisting of matter and antimatter hemispheres separated by

4620-457: The first published story by A. E. van Vogt , as well as the first appearance by Isaac Asimov in the magazine with the story " Trends ". Later author-critic John C. Wright said of Van Vogt's story, "This one started it all." The August issue contained the first published story by Robert A. Heinlein , " Life-Line ". Many of the most enduring science fiction tropes were established in Golden Age literature. Space opera came to prominence with

4704-462: The following year. The second and third stories were subsequently combined into the fix-up Seetee Ship , released in 1951 by Gnome Press in an edition of 4,000 copies. Seetee Ship was reprinted by several publishers, including a Lancer omnibus edition in 1972. ("Collision Orbit" has not been collected in either the Gnome or in any later omnibus edition.) In 1952, Williamson was invited to create

4788-401: The hospital and is met by a contrite Hardin, who tells him she wants to apologize after having seen the positive changes he has wrought. They resolve to go see the new world together. Groff Conklin gave Seetee Ship a mixed review, finding it "a good story if you can bear ploughing through pages of literary corn starch." P. Schuyler Miller noted that Williamson's rewrite of the stories into

4872-465: The increasing need to talk about the AEC and to mold all the infinite scope of our thoughts to the small bit of them that had become real. He continued, "In fact, there was the birth of something I called 'tomorrow fiction'; the science fiction story that was no more new than tomorrow's headlines. Believe me, there can be nothing duller than tomorrow's headlines in science fiction", citing Nevil Shute 's On

4956-481: The increasingly debilitating symptoms of radiation poisoning - completes and activates the Transmitter. Severely ill, he allows Hardin - whom he discovers is an agent of Interplanet - to take him back to a hospital on Obania. Awakening there, he learns that the reality of the Transmitter has sent political shockwaves throughout the Solar System. A fleet sent to destroy it mutinied, planetary governments have fallen,

5040-411: The initial state. The state's reversal was made by a special program, similarly to the random microwave background fluctuation in the case of the electron . However, according to the estimations, throughout the age of the universe (13.7 billion years) such a reversal of the electron's state would only happen once, for 0.06  nanoseconds . The scientists' experiment led to the possibility of

5124-418: The latter contradictory to the second law of thermodynamics in usual circumstances. A cause precedes its effect: the causal event occurs before the event it causes or affects. Birth, for example, follows a successful conception and not vice versa. Thus causality is intimately bound up with time's arrow. An epistemological problem with using causality as an arrow of time is that, as David Hume maintained,

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5208-490: The most significant such Golden Age narratives are Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles (1950), Clarke's Childhood's End (1953), Blish's A Case of Conscience (1958), and Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959). A related concurrent (and perhaps ironic) development was the "psi-boom" of the 1950s in which, largely owing to the efforts of John W. Campbell, a variety paranormal phenomena were valorized and integrated into stories. Asimov said that "[t]he dropping of

5292-485: The organization of atoms , molecules , and bodies , and might be drawn upon a four-dimensional relativistic map of the world ("a solid block of paper"). The arrow of time paradox was originally recognized in the 1800s for gases (and other substances) as a discrepancy between microscopic and macroscopic description of thermodynamics / statistical Physics : at the microscopic level physical processes are believed to be either entirely or mostly time-symmetric : if

5376-517: The outer world and our brain (see correlations and the arrow of time ); and our present volitions and actions are causes of future events. This is because the increase of entropy is thought to be related to increase of both correlations between a system and its surroundings and of the overall complexity, under an appropriate definition; thus all increase together with time. Past and future are also psychologically associated with additional notions. English , along with other languages, tends to associate

5460-479: The past being observed and the future being unobserved. Similarly, the Chinese term for "the day after tomorrow" 後天 ("hòutiān") literally means "after (or behind) day", whereas "the day before yesterday" 前天 ("qiántiān") is literally "preceding (or in front) day", and Chinese speakers spontaneously gesture in front for the past and behind for the future, although there are conflicting findings on whether they perceive

5544-462: The past with "behind" and the future with "ahead", with expressions such as "to look forward to welcoming you", "to look back to the good old times", or "to be years ahead". However, this association of "behind ⇔ past" and "ahead ⇔ future" is culturally determined. For example, the Aymara language associates "ahead ⇔ past" and "behind ⇔ future" both in terms of terminology and gestures, corresponding to

5628-437: The preceding story, but switches viewpoints to Rick Drake, also a spatial engineer and a rising star with Interplanet who has just joined Drake, McGee and Drake as a partner. The venture is immediately in danger of losing Freedonia due to an inflated tax assessment, prompting the younger Drake and McGee to set out for a mysterious asteroid exhibiting anomalous properties which has just been accelerated by to solar escape velocity by

5712-550: The promise of antimatter, he is cynically attempting to monetize the disaster by orchestrating a merger of Seetee, Inc. and Interplanet. A mysterious enemy begins using the stolen missiles to destroy warships of the High Space Guard, causing widespread panic and civil unrest, with rumors of an anti-Mandate uprising by the Free Space Party. Jenkins and Brand are both arrested, and agents of all four powers within

5796-673: The realm of volition and action. We plan and often execute actions intended to affect the course of events in the future. From the Rubaiyat : The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,   Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit. Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,   Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it. — Omar Khayyam (translation by Edward Fitzgerald ). In June 2022, researchers reported in Physical Review Letters finding that salamanders were demonstrating counter-intuitive responses to

5880-437: The relative phases of the two systems are at first orderly related, but subsequent interactions (with additional particles or systems) make them less so, so that the two systems become decoherent. Thus decoherence is a form of increase in microscopic disorder – in short, decoherence increases entropy. Two decoherent systems can no longer interact via quantum superposition , unless they become coherent again, which

5964-453: The same word in Hindi : कल ("kal"), meaning "[one] day remote from today." The ambiguity is resolved by verb tense. परसों ("parson") is used for both "day before yesterday" and "day after tomorrow", or "two days from today". तरसों ("tarson") is used for "three days from today" and नरसों ("narson") is used for "four days from today". The other side of the psychological passage of time is in

6048-445: The sense that one's perception is a continuous movement from the known past to the unknown future. This phenomenon has two aspects: memory (we remember the past but not the future) and volition (we feel we can influence the future but not the past). The two aspects are a consequence of the causal arrow of time: past events (but not future events) are the cause of our present memories, as more and more correlations are formed between

6132-605: The stolen missiles is used against Freedonia, causing no direct casualties but lethally irradiating everyone present, including Anders, McGee, and both Drakes. After transporting his unconscious comrades to Obania, Jenkins learns they all have about a week to live; he resolves to use his remaining time to complete the Brand Transmitter. To that end, he hurries to Pallas, the Mandate capital, where his uncle Martin Brand heads Seetee Inc.'s main office. He finds Brand concerned only with financial matters; cheerfully indifferent to

6216-465: The stories from the 1950s and the remainder from the early 1960s. Arrow of time The arrow of time , also called time's arrow , is the concept positing the "one-way direction" or " asymmetry " of time . It was developed in 1927 by the British astrophysicist Arthur Eddington , and is an unsolved general physics question . This direction, according to Eddington, could be determined by studying

6300-476: The stories' repressive High Space Guard was transformed into a benign law-enforcement agency. The following is a list of all publications in the series: In the late 22nd century, the Asteroid Belt is home to human colonists known as "asterites", who have made many minor bodies habitable through "paragravity" technology. The Belt nonetheless remains a dangerous environment due to the "contraterrene drift",

6384-545: The successful launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik 1 narrowed the gap between the real world and the world of science fiction, as the space race began. Asimov shifted to writing nonfiction he hoped would attract young minds to science, while Heinlein became more dogmatic in expressing libertarian political and social views in his fiction. In the early 1960s, emerging British writers, such as Brian W. Aldiss and J. G. Ballard , cultivated New Wave science fiction , indicating

6468-497: The symmetry of space. Similarly, physical laws are in general symmetric to the flipping of time direction, but near the Big Bang (i.e., in the first many trillions of years following it ), there is an obvious distinction between "forward" and "backward" in time, due to relative proximity to this special event, which breaks the symmetry of time. Under this view, all the arrows of time are a result of our relative proximity in time to

6552-453: The term in the story differs significantly from the concept's later development; he applied it to a process for creating a shirt-sleeve environment on very small asteroids, by installing a fictional "paragravity" unit at their centers, thereby endowing them with Earth-level gravity and making them capable of retaining a breathable atmosphere. During the 1980s, American geographer Richard Cathcart successfully lobbied for formal recognition of

6636-421: The thermodynamic arrow in that meeting the conditions to produce a convergent wave requires more order than the conditions for a radiative wave. Put differently, the probability for initial conditions that produce a convergent wave is much lower than the probability for initial conditions that produce a radiative wave. In fact, normally a radiative wave increases entropy, while a convergent wave decreases it, making

6720-413: The uranium-dependent great powers. Plagued with anxiety in the hostile environment, Jenkins returns to Freedonia from a solo trip to collect antimatter only to find that the asteroid's complement has been gassed unconscious, and weapons engineer Jean Lazarene has gone AWOL with Seetee Inc.'s entire stockpile of recently-manufactured antimatter-warhead missiles. While Jenkins is investigating the theft, one of

6804-524: The verb "to terraform". The word was added to the fourth edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary in 1993. Golden Age of Science Fiction "Golden Age" science fiction is often termed Campbellian Science Fiction after editor John W. Campbell . According to Lester del Rey , "the result [of Campbell's editorship] was the so-called Golden Age of science fiction — the beginning of modern science fiction, which

6888-521: The works of E. E. "Doc" Smith ; Isaac Asimov established the canonical Three Laws of Robotics beginning with the 1941 short story " Runaround "; the same period saw the writing of genre classics such as the Asimov's Foundation and Smith's Lensman series. Another frequent characteristic of Golden Age science fiction is the celebration of scientific achievement and the sense of wonder ; Asimov's short story " Nightfall " (1941) exemplifies this, as in

6972-413: Was capable of reaching beyond a small readership of gadget-loving hobbyists and science buffs". Technology and optimism, however, continued to be foremost: In historian Adam Roberts 's words, "the phrase Golden Age valorises a particular sort of writing: ' Hard SF ', linear narratives, heroes solving problems or countering threats in a space-opera or technological-adventure idiom." An influence on

7056-451: Was similar to how they published crime fiction during World War II; authors no longer had to publish only through magazines. Asimov said, however, that I myself was ambivalent ... There was a tendency for the new reality to nail the science fiction writer to the ground. Prior to 1945, science fiction had been wild and free. All its motifs and plot varieties remained in the realm of fantasy and we could do as we pleased. After 1945, there came

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