Things to notice
L2Fiction led physics on warp
Star Trek's warp drive sits on the fiction side from 1966 and nothing answers it from above for twenty-eight years. Then Alcubierre (1994) writes the metric and says in his abstract that it is reminiscent of the warp drive of science fiction. After that the arcs turn round: Elite Dangerous (2014), the Orville (2017) and Star Citizen (2019) all point back at the paper, and one of them names the physicist on a set visit.
L3Physics led fiction on wormholes
Morris and Thorne (1988) made a wormhole that stays open, and the word "stable" reached television within a few years: Stargate's vocabulary (1997), Farscape's opening line (1999) and Thor (2011), where a consultant offered "Einstein-Rosen bridge" because "wormhole" sounded dated. The one arc that runs the other way is Contact (1985), the novel that asked for the paper in the first place.
2021The positive-energy flurry
Four physics dots share 2021: Lentz's soliton, the Bobrick and Martire classification, Fell and Heisenberg's construction and White's Casimir plot, each reported as a positive-energy warp drive. The register answers in the years after: ENE-5 (2022) shows the claims checked one family of observers only, Fuchs (2024) keeps one subluminal shell, and WRP-3 sits at 2026 as the running score. Superluminal and positive-energy: none.
L5The ansible line
Le Guin coins the ansible in 1966, gives it a theory in 1974 and then lends it out: Card (1977 and 1985), Vinge (1988), Xenocide (1991). Physics closes the door in the same decade the borrowing starts. CAU-5, the no-communication theorem, is dated 1978, and every entanglement radio since has been a story about a box the theorem already forbids.
How to read it
Each item is placed at its defining year, not the year it was first imagined or last revised. Items in the same year stack upward or downward so that none of them hides another. Pick a loophole to see one move at a time; the register stays put, because every move has to answer it. The whole span puts the pulps and the early relativity papers on the strip; the 1985 to 2026 view spreads out the forty years where most of the physics sits. Switch the labels off if you want the shape without the names.
Data: tools/timeline.py writes data/timeline.json from the dossiers, the register and the nine lineage pages · the lineage pages · the atlas