This tension is a dynamic that Anderson explores with great success over the course of the novel as fifty crew-members settle in for the long journey together. In Tau Zero, these two often competing themes in the genre work together with a synergy that makes the novel much more than just another deep space adventure story.įrom practically the very first page, Tau Zero sets the scientific realities in dramatic tension with the very real emotional and psychological states of the travelers: you have the time factor and their emotional response to the consequence of traveling at this high rate of speed and the time that has passed. When light speed is reached, the deltas become infinitely thin, blue shifts beyond the visible through x-rays and gammas towards infinite energy, mass becomes infinite, and time freezes.Poul Anderson's book Tau Zero stands out in the genre in large part because it does precisely the thing that one so rarely sees in science fiction: it takes a keen interest in the emotional lives of the characters in the novel, which the novel combines this with a general fascination for all things scientific. The colors, changing from red to blue, show the sort of blue shift of the external universe as seen as one accelerates to light speed. The logo Rob designed plays on this visually the triangles are the physicist's symbol for change, here tilted on the side and forshortened from left to right, following the direction shown by the arrow below, indicating acceleration - in Special Relativity, as one goes faster and faster, one shortens in the direction of travel, as seen by an external observer.

The tau factor starts at zero at rest, and becomes Observer accelerates towards the speed of light Logarithm of the Lorenz-Fitzgerald contraction as an In relativity physics, the 'tau factor' is the inverse It is drawn from the title of the novel Tau Zero by Poul Andersen (with his approval) and the original Norwegian spelling of Rob's last name (Tau).

When he teamed up with Brenda Laurel it became their shared domain name. 'Tau Zero' was Rob Tow's nom-de-infosphere on the The Well back when it was a dialup BBS system.

Tau zero