EVE Fiction

http://community.eveonline.com/background/communication/

I read through this and found it interesting. I know the site is still being edited, so here's a free edit of this. Spend some manpower on other things if you like it. For the most part it's just corrections. Some things were changed wholly.

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After mastering wormhole creation, it was thought that distance was no longer a variable in travel. It quickly became apparent, however, that although wormholes did allow instant travel across distant regions, communications were still transmitted in traditional lightspeed, and could not cross through the wormholes. At such incredible distances communication, key to information transfer and organization, was impractical.

The Amarrians were the first to master the jump gate technology and thus the first to face this problem. In the interest of faster-than-light communication systems, massive state-funded research initiatives were launched, radical solutions were proposed and tested, all to no avail. In the end, after costing the Empire tremendous resources, all research was abandoned. Faster than light communications were deemed impossible.

Centuries later, following the creation of the Sotiyo-Urbaata Drive, the Gallenteans and the Caldari faced the same issue. The Drive allowed FTL travel within the system the Gallenteans and Caldari called home but, of course, communication with ships using it was impossible. Both the Gallenteans and the Caldari promised substantial rewards for any feasible solution. The rewards were such that it led to one of the most frantic goose hunts in the history of science.

Like the Amarrians before them many solutions were tried, theories expounded. Entire mega-corporations were started on the basis of promising research, only to fizzle out when they had come up fruitless. Finally it was a young Gallentean woman, Li Azbel, who announced an incredibly simple solution that was, at first, dismissed as a fraud. It was, after all, based on arcane physics theory long considered impossible.

It wasn't until the famous Azbel-Wuthrich experiment that the functionality was demonstrated with success. Industrialization quickly followed, leading to one of the greatest stock market surges in history, as thousands of companies extended their reach to the limits of the known universe.

The roots of the solution lay in an ancient physics paradox, often called the EPR paradox, though no one truly remembers why. The EPR paradox was groundbreaking in that it challenged a principle that physicians had held true for centuries: the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. This principle, believed to be named for a historic person or place, asserted that the exact state of a quantum particle cannot be determined with 100% accuracy, no matter how refined the measurement equipment, the classic example being the measurement of the velocity and position of a free particle. The principle claimed that to be able to measure the position of a particle you must be able to 'see' it. To our forebears limited technological mindset, this meant that you had to illuminate it with at least one photon, but the collision between the photon and the particle would change the velocity of the particle, thus making it impossible to determine the pre-collision velocity.

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I'll edit the second page tomorrow if you like this one.