Glossary
Military terminology
AN/RBM-1: For the RBM part, please see Restricted Boltzmann Machine in Science Stuff. The AN is a designation for a part of the horribly complex overlapping system of radars and computers and stuff that makes up an AEGIS detection and shoot-everything-up protection system. I'm not using the nomenclature properly. The letters after AN are supposed to designate where the equipment is used (surface ship, aircraft etc), what type of equipment it is and for what purpose it is.
ECCM: What they use to unfool themselves, when the enemy uses Electronic Counter Measures to fool them.
Juliet: Local time.
SPS: A radar that looks at what's happening on the surface. Part of the AEGIS detection and destruction protective rig.
Science stuff
Calabi-Yau manifold: A horrible, Cyclopean distortion of shape beyond the walls of sanity. Physicists use these to make all those pesky extra dimensions string theory requires to go away. The Equestrians probably use them to describe hammer space.
CCD: Charge-coupled device. A type of image sensor with high quality and capture properties. Allows for extreme slow-motion capture and very high definition, though other devices are catching up to it.
Conservation of probability: Everybody knows conservation of mass-energy, right? Stuff doesn't just appear and disappear randomly into and out of existence, universe-wise. Well, conservation of probability says stuff doesn't pop around the universe either. Rather, it tends to stay local. More specifically, the probability of finding stuff in a given volume of space is a function of time, and the probability doesn't pop around the place willy-nilly. The particle, however, might.
Einstein-Rosen bridge: Your classic wormhole. Using such possibly non-existent things like negative mass, space-time, that is, the actual fabric of reality is made to bend in an unholy manner connecting two unimaginably distant points into a walking distance. The question with a gateway like this, along with all other faster-than-light travel is, how does one avoid temporal paradoxes? Oh, and the amount of negative mass required to form a traversable wormhole? Estimates go from 10 billion stars' worth to 10 billion universes.
EM: Short for electro-magnetic (radiation). From radio waves to high energy gamma, the rainbow is bigger and more magnificent than the eye can see.
Enthalpy: Equals the internal energy of a system, that is kinetic and potential energy including chemical bonds and temperature and stuff like that, plus pressure times volume of the system. Which probably doesn't say much. Basically, you measure the enthalpic change of a system; say, after hydrogen and oxygen react, how much does the volume change in the same pressure and how much heat was released.
Kardashev Scale: A nice little scale to determine how far along the path to omnipotence a civilization is. Kardashev I would be using the entire energy of their home planet, while Kardashev III would use the energy of their entire home galaxy and Kardashev V would control several universes. Humanity is at Kardashev 0,7 and a bit on a logarithmic scale. A Kardashev I civilization would be using about thousand times more energy than us. And surviving.
lambda calculus: A formal logic system, which reduces mathematics into computable functions. The kind of stuff you need to use when proving 1+1=2, or when you need to establish what a number is. Funny thing: as per Gödel's little bitch slap against mathematicians' hubris, unless you restrict lambda calculus severely, it's logically inconsistent.
Lincos: An artificial language designed for communication with extra-terrestrial intelligence. Starts with natural numbers and basic arithmetic expressed in binary, proceeds to propositional logic, and eventually to everything. It's like a tiny encyclopedia, dictionary, grammar, and the algorithm for unpacking all the information in it wrapped up in a single, sweet packet of pulses.
Logic Gate Matrices: Describe points in space that has as many spatial dimensions as you like. Describe simple logic operations that connect those points. Ta-dah: you have just made a universal computer. In my story, they use this system to describe an actual, specific computer.
Probability Current: Please see conservation of probability.
Restricted Boltzmann Machine: Is not a machine per se, but a description of a multi-layered neural network that can use a clever little learning algorithm to learn stuff, because it uses a probability function to establish networking between its neurons. In my story, the algorithm is some kind of evolutionary fast-learning general purpose algorithm that doesn't exist (as far as I know). The existing RBMs can do all kinds of uncannily clever stuff, though, like put new points of data into classes that they belong to without having to bother the lazy human behind the screen.
Magic thingies
SOON