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"I can remember when the first pulsars were discovered. I was able to go and sit down and listen to graduate students talking about what their theories, to explain what pulsars really were."
- Vernor Vinge
 |
| Bobble (Confinement Sphere) | ||
| A sphere of force that entirely isolates the interior from the rest of the universe. |
| "Confinement spheres - bobbles - are not so much force fields as they are partitions, separating the in- and outside of their surfaces into distinct universes. Gravity alone can penetrate. The Tucson bobble was orginally generated around an ICBM over the artic. It fell to earth near its target, the missile fields at Tucson. The hell bomb inside exploded harmlessly, in the universe on the far side of the bobble's surface.
As you know, it takes the enormous energy output of the Authority's generator in Livermore to create even the samllest confinement sphere... But once established you know that a bobble is stable and requires no further inputs to maintain itself. "Lasting forever," put in old Schelling. It was not quite a question. "That's what we all thought, sir. But nothing lasts forever..." "So, gentlemen, it appears that - like all things - bobbles do decay. The time constant depends on the sphere's radius and the mass enclosed..." |
| Technovelgy from The Peace War,
by Vernor Vinge. Published by Bluejay Books in 1984 Additional resources -
|
Here's an excerpt that gives you some sense of the size that bobbles can be:
The silver arch of the force field that enclosed Vandenberg and Lompoc seemed to float halfway up the sky. No structure could possibly be so big. Even mountains had the decency to introduce themselves with foothills and highlands. The Vandenberg Bobble simply rose, sheer and in-substantial as a dream. So that glistening hemisphere contained much of her old world, her old friends. They were trapped in timelessness in there, just as she and Angus and Fred had been trapped in the bobble around the sortie craft. And one day the Vandenberg bobble would burst....
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I'm hoping that this procedure becomes a normal part of medical practice!
'... nothing was perfected until M. Pantalon announced the completion of his automatic valet.'
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'He carried on his person a triggering mechanism sensitive to his heartbeat.'
'...Anything was possible in my imaginary environment.'
'Somewhere in space, a chrome and blue automobile raced the green light of Earth.'
'That explains how it was so easy for me to remain motionless in midair...'
