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Ask Larry Niven
If you read science fiction at all, you're familiar with Larry Niven. (If you don't, his work is a great place to start.) Anyway, this is a golden opportunity to learn more about a truly innovative author. (Thanks go to Chris DiBona for arranging this interview; he met Larry during one of his TechTV appearances.) One question per post, please. We'll post Larry's answers to 10 of the highest-moderated questions shortly after he gets them back to us.
I'll answer that for you; the Ringworld is both inherintly stable *and* inherintly unstable because of rotational inertia.
The Ringworld, by being spun around the center of mass of the solar system, was inherintly stable and would do its best to stay rotating around that center of mass. That's what Niven assumed when he first wrote Ringworld.
It is that very rotational inertia is what causes the wobble in Ringworld Engineers. Niven assumed (or at least I assume that he assumed) that the star the Ringworld was rotating around was stationary. Unfortunately, it is not. The star orbits the center of the galaxy, which in turn may orbit a center of a galactic cluster, which in turn is apparently continually expanding from the center of the universe.
The rotational inertia of the Ringworld simply makes it tough to stay in exactly the same path as the star.
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
Larry, I loved the book Ringworld, the whole idea of creating our own world always has appealed to me. I was wondering if you've ever seen the X-box game "Halo"? They obviously used your idea of a "ringworld" there, did the game designers ever talk with you and give you credit? I think your an amazing writer and to not give you credit is sad testimony to the plagerisms of our time.
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.