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"You have to budget the number of fuzzy rules you use to control a system. It turns out, you can state the optimality principle in three words: 'patch the bumps.'"
- Bart Kosko
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| Gravograph | ||
| A graphical representation of gravitational fields. |
Approaching the Sargasso of space, an area of space where the gravitational influences of the planets cancel each other out, the ship's crew monitor the situation with their gravograph.
| On the third ship-day Kent and Captain Crain stood in the pilot-house behind Liggett, who sat at the now useless rocket-tube controls. Their eyes were on the big glass screen of the gravograph. The black dot on it that represented their ship was crawling steadily toward the bright red circle that stood for the dead-area....
They watched silently until the dot had crawled over the circle's red line, heading toward its center. "Well, we're in at last," Kent commented. "There seems to be no change in anything, either." Crain pointed to the instrument-panel. "Look at the gravitometers." Kent did. "All dead! No gravitational pull from any direction—no, that one shows a slight attraction from ahead!" "Then gravitational attraction of some sort does exist in the dead-area after all!" Liggett exclaimed. "You don't understand," said Crain. "That attraction from ahead is the pull of the wreck-pack at the dead-area's center." "And it's pulling the Pallas toward it?" Kent exclaimed. Crain nodded. "We'll probably reach the wreck-pack in two more ship-days." |
| Technovelgy from The Sargasso of Space,
by Edmond Hamilton. Published by Astounding Stories in 1931 Additional resources -
|
Read the discussion of weightlessness in Verne's From the Earth to the Moon, and see how he was the first to describe the idea of planetary gravities canceling each other out (in fiction, anyway).
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'He was in a high-ceilinged windowless cell with walls of glittering white porcelain.'
'I don't have to tell you about the seven two-mile-diameter orbital mirrors...'
'The robant and the tiny old woman entered the control room slowly...'
'Guy named Otto Octavius winds up with eight limbs... What are the odds?'
'It is as you thought when you constructed the time crystal, my master Vaylan.'
'This was their world, their planet — this swift-traveling, yet seemingly moveless vessel.'
