Sophons

Sophon is a term from Liu Cixin's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, which begins with The Three-Body Problem and continues through The Dark Forest and Death's End. The word is a coinage, joining the Greek root for wisdom to the suffix familiar from the vocabulary of physics, and it belongs to the trilogy's own scientific language, one of many concepts Liu builds from the raw material of real physical ideas. The novels open in the China of the Cultural Revolution, where the young astrophysicist Ye Wenjie watches her father persecuted, and move to a present in which scientists are dying mysteriously and the nanomaterials researcher Wang Miao is drawn into a virtual reality game called Three Body. The term sophon figures across all three volumes of the series.