Red Queen's race
Encyclopedia
The Red Queen's race is an incident that appears in Lewis Carroll
's Through the Looking-Glass
and involves the Red Queen
, a representation of a Queen in chess
, and Alice constantly running but remaining in the same spot.
The Red Queen's race is often used to illustrate similar situations:
Lewis Carroll
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson , better known by the pseudonym Lewis Carroll , was an English author, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer. His most famous writings are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, as well as the poems "The Hunting of the...
's Through the Looking-Glass
Through the Looking-Glass
Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There is a work of literature by Lewis Carroll . It is the sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland...
and involves the Red Queen
Red Queen (Through the Looking Glass)
The Red Queen is a fictional character in Lewis Carroll's fantasy novella, Through the Looking-Glass.- Overview :With a motif of Through the Looking-Glass being representations of the game of chess, the Red Queen could be viewed as an antagonist in the story as she is the queen for the side...
, a representation of a Queen in chess
Queen (chess)
The queen is the most powerful piece in the game of chess, able to move any number of squares vertically, horizontally, or diagonally. Each player starts the game with one queen, placed in the middle of the first rank next to the king. With the chessboard oriented correctly, the white queen starts...
, and Alice constantly running but remaining in the same spot.
"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else — if you run very fast for a long time, as we've been doing."
"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!" http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=CarGlas.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=2&division=div1
The Red Queen's race is often used to illustrate similar situations:
- Isaac AsimovIsaac AsimovIsaac Asimov was an American author and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, best known for his works of science fiction and for his popular science books. Asimov was one of the most prolific writers of all time, having written or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 90,000...
used it in his short story "The Red Queen's RaceThe Red Queen's Race (Isaac Asimov)"The Red Queen's Race" is a science fiction short story by Isaac Asimov that uses the Red Queen's race from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass as a metaphor for the final plot twist. The story also makes reference to Asimov's psychohistory...
" to illustrate the concept of predestination paradoxPredestination paradoxA predestination paradox is a paradox of time travel that is often used as a convention in science fiction. It exists when a time traveller is caught in a loop of events that "predestines" or "predates" them to travel back in time...
. - Vernor VingeVernor VingeVernor Steffen Vinge is a retired San Diego State University Professor of Mathematics, computer scientist, and science fiction author. He is best known for his Hugo Award-winning novels and novellas A Fire Upon the Deep , A Deepness in the Sky , Rainbows End , Fast Times at Fairmont High ...
uses it in his novel Rainbows EndRainbows EndRainbows End is a 2006 science fiction novel by Vernor Vinge. It was awarded the 2007 Hugo Award for Best Novel. The book is set in San Diego, California, in 2025, in a variation of the fictional world Vinge explored in his 2002 Hugo-winning novella "Fast Times at Fairmont High" and 2004's...
to illustrate the struggle between encouraging technological advancement and protecting the world from new weapons technologies. - As an illustration of the relativisticSpecial relativitySpecial relativity is the physical theory of measurement in an inertial frame of reference proposed in 1905 by Albert Einstein in the paper "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies".It generalizes Galileo's...
effect that nothing can ever reach the speed of lightSpeed of lightThe speed of light in vacuum, usually denoted by c, is a physical constant important in many areas of physics. Its value is 299,792,458 metres per second, a figure that is exact since the length of the metre is defined from this constant and the international standard for time...
, or the invariant speedInvariant speedThe invariant speed or observer invariant speed is the speed an object or particle must be traveling at for its speed to have the same measure in all reference frames. The invariance of the speed of light is a consequence of the postulates of special relativity, and the terms speed of light and...
; in particular, with respect to relativistic effect on light from galaxies near the edge of the expanding observable universeObservable universeIn Big Bang cosmology, the observable universe consists of the galaxies and other matter that we can in principle observe from Earth in the present day, because light from those objects has had time to reach us since the beginning of the cosmological expansion...
, or at the event horizonEvent horizonIn general relativity, an event horizon is a boundary in spacetime beyond which events cannot affect an outside observer. In layman's terms it is defined as "the point of no return" i.e. the point at which the gravitational pull becomes so great as to make escape impossible. The most common case...
of a black holeBlack holeA black hole is a region of spacetime from which nothing, not even light, can escape. The theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass will deform spacetime to form a black hole. Around a black hole there is a mathematically defined surface called an event horizon that...
. - In evolutionary biology, to illustrate that sexual reproduction and the resulting genetic recombination may be just enough to allow individuals of a certain species to adapt to changes in the ecological niche they occupy - see Red Queen's HypothesisRed Queen's HypothesisThe Red Queen's Hypothesis, also referred to as Red Queen, Red Queen's race or Red Queen Effect, is an evolutionary hypothesis. The term is taken from the Red Queen's race in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass...
.