Concepts in The Ender's Game Series

Concepts In The Ender's Game Series

"The official name is Philotic Parallax Instantaneous Communicator," explains Colonel Graff in Ender's Game, "but somebody dredged the name ansible out of an old book somewhere". The ansible essentially functions as a faster-than-light e-mail system. Graff's description of ansible functions in Xenocide involve a fictional subatomic particle, the philote, and contradicts not only standard physical theory but the results of empirical particle accelerator experiments. In the "Enderverse", the two quarks inside a pi meson can be separated by an arbitrary distance while remaining connected by "philotic rays". This is similar in concept to quantum teleportation due to entanglement but would involve Qubits.

The novels' treatment of time dilation is also inconsistent with standard theory. In the novels, the passenger of a starship experiences time compression, resulting in slowed speech when communicating over the ansible. This contradicts the core concept of the theory of relativity by giving the planet a privileged frame of reference. It is no more correct to say that the planet is at rest and the ship moving than to say that the ship is at rest and the planet moving backwards. As such, we find a paradox in which the person at each end of an ansible expects the other person to be time dilated and speaking slowly. In light speed or slower communications, this paradox is avoided due to the expected message delays, as in the Twin paradox. Instantaneous communications, however, does result in a paradox, as each communicator expected the other to be slowed.