Construction Material
The Xeelee use an exotic form of matter for most of their construction. Known by the generic name of "construction material", the substance is very dense, though it shares virtually no similarities to expected properties of degenerate matter such as neutronium. Instead, it appears as if the material violates the Pauli exclusion principle, allowing electrons to simultaneously share quantum states.
Construction material has been observed to be synthesized or grown from a small flower-like object, known anecdotally as the Xeelee Flower (as seen in the short story The Xeelee Flower, found in Vacuum Diagrams). This device creates construction material when the control unit is removed in the presence of sunlight. It is unknown if the Xeelee have other methods of creating the substance. The only things known to be able to damage it are magnetic monopoles and gravitational singularities. During the third human/Xeelee war the Xeelee encased stars in this material, this prevented any radiation and heat escaping and so forcing humans to leave those systems or die.
Read more about this topic: Xeelee Technology
Famous quotes containing the words construction and/or material:
“No real “vital” character in fiction is altogether a conscious construction of the author. On the contrary, it may be a sort of parasitic growth upon the author’s personality, developing by internal necessity as much as by external addition.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“A material resurrection seems strange and even absurd except for purposes of punishment, and all punishment which is to revenge rather than correct must be morally wrong, and when the World is at an end, what moral or warning purpose can eternal tortures answer?”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)