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"The germinal societies like Singapore and communist Hong Kong may give us a mutant capitalism that is both virulent and efficient. This is a significant cultural danger."
- Gregory Benford
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| Half-Sphere Force Field | ||
| A protective force field that can manifest even as a half-sphere. |
Anybody can make a spherical force field, but I enjoyed this brief excursion into solid geometry from Heinlein.
| There flickered into being over the bench, hanging in the air unsupported, a silvery ball some two feet across... it made Don think of a Christmas tree ornament. ...Conrad bent over the controls. "Act two," he announced. "We now cancel out half of the locus..." Another shape took being, a perfect half-sphere otherwise like the last. |
| Technovelgy from Between Planets,
by Robert Heinlein. Published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1951 Additional resources -
|
It is invulnerable to harm, and ordinary processes (like a burning cigarette) inside the sphere are uninterrupted. And how does it work?
"...There is no popular way to explain it. If you were willing to spend five hard years with me, working up through the math, I could probably bring you up to the same level of ignorance and confusion that I enjoy. Some of the tensor equations involved are, to put it mildly, unique..."
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and Technology from Between Planets
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Tech news articles related to Between Planets
Tech news articles related to works by Robert Heinlein
Half-Sphere Force Field-related
news articles:
- Trophy Active Defense System Not Quite A Force Field
| The Zapata Air Scooter Would Be Great In A Science Fiction Story |
| Could Crystal Batteries Generate Power For Centuries? |
| Replace The Smartphone With A Connected Edge Node For AI Inference |
| Sunday Robotics 'Memo' Bot Has Unique Training Glove |
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'Power could be compressed thus into an inch-square cube of what looked like blue-white ice'
'It's so light that you can set it up in five minutes by yourself...'
'Heavy penalties... were to be applied to any one found driving manually-controlled machines.'
'Buy a Little Dingbat... electropen, wrist watch, pocketphone, pocket radio, billfold ... all in one.'
'... an elastic, tinted material that had all the feel and appearance of human flesh and epidermis.'
'It is remarkable that the long leverages of their machines are in most cases actuated by a sort of sham musculature...'
