Much of the story line revolves around various parties attacking or repairing ansibles, and around the internal politics of ISC (InterStellar Communications), which holds a monopoly on the ansible technology. The ansible is also a major plot element, nearly a MacGuffin, in Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's War series. Like Blish's device it provided instantaneous communication, but without the inconvenient beep. Le Guin and used extensively in her Hainish cycle. As alluded to in the title, any active device received the sum of all transmitted messages in universal space-time, in a single pulse, so that demultiplexing yielded information about the past, present, and future.Ī later device was the ansible coined by Ursula K. The Dirac communicator features in several of the works of James Blish, notably his 1954 short story " Beep". Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs novels human colonies on distant planets maintain contact with earth and each other via hyperspatial needlecast, a technology which moves information ".so close to instantaneously that scientists are still arguing about the terminology". Unlike the hyperdrive that moved ships at a finite FTL speed, hyperwave was essentially instantaneous.
#SUPERLUMINAL SIGNALLING SERIES#
Quantum mechanics is non-local in the sense that distant systems can be entangled. However, such fields have luminal signal velocity and do not allow superluminal communication. By contrast, tachyonic fields – quantum fields with imaginary mass – certainly do exist and exhibit superluminal group velocity under some circumstances. These would allow superluminal communication, and for this reason are widely believed not to exist. Tachyonic particles are hypothetical particles that travel faster than light.