QUANTUM MECHANICS
This thought experiment involves a cat in a box that is simultaneously alive and dead until observed.
What is Schrödinger's cat?
According to Einstein, nothing can travel faster than this speed in a vacuum, approximately 3 × 10⁸ metres per second.
What is the speed of light (or c)?
In "Star Trek," this faster-than-light propulsion system works by creating a bubble that warps spacetime around the ship.
What is a warp drive?
These fundamental particles include the electron, muon, and tau, and they do not experience the strong nuclear force.
What are leptons?
In "Kerbal Space Program," players must account for this effect where gravity decreases with the square of distance, making it harder to escape larger planets.
What is the inverse square law (or gravitational inverse square law)?
This phenomenon occurs when two particles become connected such that measuring one instantly affects the other, regardless of distance, which Einstein called "spooky action at a distance."
What is quantum entanglement?
This effect causes moving clocks to tick slower relative to stationary observers, famously illustrated by the twin paradox.
What is time dilation?
In "The Expanse," the Epstein Drive revolutionised space travel by providing continuous thrust through this real propulsion method that expels reaction mass at high velocity.
What is a fusion drive (or nuclear fusion propulsion)?
Discovered at CERN in 2012, this particle gives other particles their mass through the Higgs field.
What is the Higgs boson?
In "Portal," the portal gun appears to violate this law of thermodynamics by creating infinite falling loops that could generate unlimited kinetic energy.
What is conservation of energy (or the first law of thermodynamics)?
In the double-slit experiment, this behaviour of particles acting as both particles and waves is demonstrated when observation changes the interference pattern.
What is wave-particle duality?
This is the name for the increase in mass that occurs as an object approaches the speed of light, making it impossible to reach c with finite energy.
What is relativistic mass increase?
In "Dune," these devices produce an impenetrable barrier by projecting a field that stops high-velocity objects but allows slow-moving matter to pass through.
What are Holtzman shields (or personal shields)?
These particles, which come in six "flavours" including up, down, strange, charm, top, and bottom, are the building blocks of protons and neutrons.
What are quarks?
In "Half-Life," the fictional "Anti-Mass Spectrometer" at Black Mesa was designed to study this exotic form of matter predicted to have opposite gravitational properties to normal matter.
What is exotic matter?
This theoretical process would allow quantum tunnelling to enable particles to pass through energy barriers they classically shouldn't be able to overcome, and it's how the Sun produces energy through nuclear fusion.
What is quantum tunnelling (or tunnelling effect)?
Light passing near massive objects bends due to this effect, which was first confirmed during a 1919 solar eclipse and proved Einstein's general relativity.
What is gravitational lensing?
In Arthur C. Clarke's work, this megastructure would surround the Sun to capture all its energy output, representing a Type II civilisation on the Kardashev scale.
What is a Dyson sphere?
This antimatter counterpart to the electron has the same mass but opposite charge, and when they meet, they annihilate producing gamma rays.
What is a positron?
In "Prey" (2017), the Typhon aliens use this real quantum phenomenon where particles can exist in multiple states simultaneously until observed, allowing them to mimic objects.
What is quantum superposition?
This interpretation of quantum mechanics, proposed by Hugh Everett III, suggests that all possible outcomes of quantum measurements actually occur in separate, branching universes.
What is the many-worlds interpretation?
These ripples in spacetime, predicted by Einstein in 1916 but not directly detected until 2015 by LIGO, are created by accelerating massive objects like merging black holes.
What are gravitational waves?
In "Foundation," this fictional science developed by Hari Seldon uses statistical mechanics and probability to predict the behaviour of large populations over time.
What is psychohistory?
These hypothetical particles, including axions and WIMPs, are candidates for this mysterious substance that makes up about 27% of the universe's mass-energy content but doesn't interact with light.
What is dark matter?
In "Death Stranding," the Beach exists in this theoretical higher-dimensional space from string theory, where our 3D universe is embedded as a lower-dimensional "brane."
What is the bulk