HARD SF ESSENTIALS
Anthology: The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution Of Hard SF
Novels: Remembrance Of Earth’s Past trilogy smallest objects in the Universe, a proton, into a supercomputer as big as a planet—the sophon. They achieve this size by “unfolding” a three-dimensional proton into eleven-dimensions, allowing it to be embedded with computational circuitry. Then they use the principle of quantum entanglement to spy on humanity: one proton is sent to Earth, while one remains with the Trisolarians, separated by light years.
All this sounds pretty far-out, but then again physics is pretty far-put. According to quantum entanglement (roughly speaking of course, I’m no physicist), two subatomic particles can share the same information simultaneously, though separated by space and time, even to the tune of millions of light years. That’s just one aspect of the inherent weirdness of the quantum realm.
At a larger, more cosmic level, there is the central conceit of the books: The eponymous Three-Body Problem. This is actually a well-established concept in physics, which tries to understand how to predict the motion of three bodies—with their respective gravitational pulls—interacting with each other. As astrophysicist Charles J. Horowitz says in a recent interview with Vox magazine: “Conservation of energy implies that a planet will orbit a single star forever and can never escape to infinity. Two stars, on the other hand, can exchange energy and possibly eject an orbiting planet. This, then, is the threebody problem: How do we stabilize three gravitational objects or predict what their orbits might be?”
While quite a few hypotheses exist, the most likely outcome is chaos. And that is exactly what the Trisolarians want to escape by invading Earth: Their own planet is tied up in a turbulent relationship with a three-star system, which leads to civilisation—and life—on their planet evolving over and over again after being obliterated repeatedly.
You see why I love hard SF? It’s just brilliantly mind-blowing! Writers of this genre are doing something akin to the scientists Al-Khalili terms as “lamppost physicists” in his book: “…the searchers in the dark…who come up with highly original or speculative ideas that are not so easy to test”. However, the payoff of such an approach, he writes, is to “lead to paradigm shifts in our understanding”. What can be better than that, really?